Brian Hioe in New Bloom Mag critiques a now-notorious Atlantic piece by yet another Western journalist who is clueless about Taiwan…
Fittingly, Shuster opens with two paragraphs of fawning awe over Chinese President Xi Jinping. From this, one generally has a sense that Shuster is simply taken in by the pomp and circumstance that China has sought to project with its state institutions. No surprise, then, that when Taiwan’s legislature appears in the piece, some three-quarters through the piece, as compared to the grandeur of a dictator, it is described only as a “drab building on a narrow street in the center of Taipei.”
…Shuster does not even seem to understand that the KMT is the Chinese Nationalist Party, referring to it early on in his article as Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, a basic factual error.
Seen on Twitter yesterday…
The Too Simple, Sometimes Naive substack story on Nury Vittachi’s Friday Everyday financing is now outside the paywall. A well-researched piece on someone apparently doing a 180-degree turn on core values, presumably for the money…
Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Hu Xiaoming is … explicit in tying Friday Culture to wider Party goals. Under a picture of him holding a work report, standing in front of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Hu states:
“The mission of Friday Culture is what the 20th CPC National Congress report calls “telling China’s story well, spreading China’s voice effectively, and showcasing a credible, lovable, and respectable image of China.”
… In 2014, [Nury] wrote for Asia Sentinel:
The “Tiananmen Square massacre” became “the incident”. In some references, “incident” was further diluted to “accident”. It was as if Chinese leaders had said, “Oops, ran over the protestors with tanks, silly us.”
Compare that to today. Since forming Friday Everyday, each June, Vittachi puts out content “correcting the facts about Tiananmen”. Last year’s entry, titled: “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern history” was reprinted in full by Pravda, Russia’s state newspaper.
Patrick Poon on Joshua Wong’s trial…
While waiting for the sentencing, we should ask whether the courts in Hong Kong will still consider a sentence reduction for a guilty plea, as has traditionally been the practice. I wonder whether the court will take this into account at all, or whether it could impose an excessively long sentence, or even life imprisonment, as some people have expressed concern. If the court no longer considers a guilty plea as a mitigating factor, I would ask what the rationale is for requiring defendants to make submissions in mitigation. I would also challenge the legal community to explain the purpose of the mitigation process if it no longer has any meaningful effect.
Brian Kern discusses the authorities’ view of Joshua Wong…
There are no Hong Kongers whom the Chinese Communist Party has invested more energy and propaganda into vilifying and maligning than Joshua and Jimmy Lai. According to the CCP world view, any time people rise up, it is because there are “black hands” manipulating them behind the scenes. In the case of Hong Kong, those black hands are Jimmy and Joshua—they duped the gullible citizens. The other secret ingredient in CCP paranoia is “foreign forces.” That is also present here: Jimmy and Joshua both “colluded with foreign forces” against the regime. And this ludicrously fantastic narrative is why, after they slapped Jimmy with his most recent sentence of 20 years, they’re going after Joshua. They want to make examples of them both, and they’re bending the courts of Hong Kong to conform with the regime’s false narrative.
In the case of Jimmy, 20 years for a 78-year-old man amounts to what many have pointed out is essentially a life sentence.
With Joshua, it’s a bit more complicated.
Desmond Shum details foreign analysts’ shifting view of China’s economy during the year…
I would summarize the progression like this:
January–March:
China is resilient, but increasingly unbalanced.April–June:
The imbalance is structural, and technological success does not solve it.July:
Failure to rebalance increasingly looks like long-term decline or economic decay rather than another cyclical downturn.August–September:
China’s domestic weakness and industrial overcapacity are becoming problems for the rest of the world.
Like a herd of sheep (though in fairness, some economists have been quite outspoken about the imbalances for several years).
Lingua Sinica looks at how Beijing handled news coverage of the flooding disaster on the Tibet-Nepal border…
Our findings show that Chinese authorities were essentially effective in ensuring that the source of information on the breaking story was contained to a small number of central-level Party-state media, including the government-run Xinhua News Agency and the various outlets — such as China Central Television (CCTV) and China Radio International (CRI) — under the powerful China Media Group (CMG), the conglomerate directly under the Central Propaganda Department.
I’d say one thing for Nury-diversity: two of my kids were in a class in which the appalling wordsmith read to them. I asked the cherubs how was it, hoping in part that they’d reflect my still-held opinion that he’s the most unfunny man in HK media. They said he was actually quite good. What a shame he now panders to such a sinister audience on high.
Sounds like daddy would be deeply ashamed of his boy Nury having ended up as a morally bankrupt paid shill for a repressive regime that is fundamentally committed to gagging intimidating and imprisoning journalists:
“HOW WOULD Tarzie Vittachi have wanted his obituary to be written? Surely, in a way that reflected the journalistic values that he lived by, passed on to others and fought for all his life, first as a newspaper editor in Sri Lanka, then as a great teacher of journalists in India and Asia, later as an effective columnist for Newsweek, and finally as a passionate publicist for Unicef and the cause of humanitarian action throughout the world.
Those values included clear and simple writing, intellectual honesty in argument, an absence of humbug or sanctimoniousness, and the use of the story to press home and to humanise the argument.
…
Vittachi knew of the dangers that went with fearless journalism especially in the Third World and he knew of them at first hand. As a result he fought privately and publicly for fellow journalists around the world who were gagged, intimidated or imprisoned.”
If we could wrap Tarzie’s body in wire and surround it by magnets, he’d probably power a good portion of Oxfordshire.
That Substack piece on Nury… none of that is bombshell or original. Everyone knows Herman Hu was the Friday financial backer, it was not a secret and you only had to talk to Nury for 2 minutes to find out.
The “Naive” Substacker has this annoying writing tic where they clearly think they are doing important long-form for Esquire… but their work really is empty of content– they don’t seem to know too much about why, how or for how long Hu agreed to fully back Friday, or its current status. Just one financial filing, a blip without context or insight.
Nor do they really ask why Nury changed his mind on certain things, important things like Tiananmen Square. The lazy (and wrong) answer is, he sold out. His 2019 book, The Other Side of the Story (which is not mentioned *at all* in this piece, a glaring and odd omission painting the whole piece as an amateur hit-job) gives quite a few answers.
Maybe Furry Hitachi got picked up on that 2014 thing and other stuff and was “encouraged” to see the error of his ways and follow a more righteous path, like a certain Mr R Tong.
It’s worse than we thought – forget mainland police on Hong Kong streets, the HKPF has been infiltrated by the Oompa-Loompas.
https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1869987-20260914.htm
@ Eggs’n’ham: Okay, so the the Popo have a Subaru Owner’s Club. Consider it a win for the the LGBTQ community in HK.
@ Horton… Hi Nury, is that you again?
@Chubby – He was looking for an axe to grind somewhere and had been banging on against Islamophobia on Facebook until he found salvation via the often uncivilised unrest. A similar route taken by Yonden on the post who wrote about the gals in Wan Chai favouring gweilos instead of him 2019 et al gave them purpose, and extended career and not fiscal gain