Big Lychee, Various Sectors

An interesting scoop from Transit Jam on lousy security measures at the HK-Zhuhai bridge border crossing…

Contractors at the “restricted area” bridging the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao use an elaborate system of discarded or outdated passes and messaging codewords to move dozens of people invisibly around the border zones every day, according to a whistleblower who worked at the border.

Globe and Mail (paywalled) editorial titled ‘Hong Kong has courts, but no justice’…

In explaining his decision to resign, Mr. Sumption wrote that Hong Kong is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state” and that the rule of law in the territory has been “profoundly compromised” under the security law.

That was nine weeks ago. This week, Hong Kong took yet another step toward the totalitarian, with the territory’s Court of Final Appeal unanimously upholding the conviction of billionaire Jimmy Lai on organizing and participating in an unauthorized assembly, when pro-democracy protests roiled Hong Kong in the summer of 2019.

…seven foreign judges still sit on the Court of Final Appeal, including David Neuberger, the former president of Britain’s Supreme Court. He was part of the unanimous ruling against Mr. Lai.

And, in a you-can’t-make-this-up touch, Mr. Neuberger is also the chair of a panel of legal experts on media freedom for the Media Freedom Coalition, made up of 51 countries, including Canada.

One immediate consequence of the Court of Final Appeal’s decision on Mr. Lai should be for Canada and the other member countries of the Media Freedom Coalition to present Mr. Neuberger with a choice. He can either continue to be a fig leaf for Beijing’s repression, or he can be an adviser on media freedom. The two are fundamentally at odds.

More broadly, the other foreign non-permanent judges on the Court of Final Appeal need to follow Mr. Sumption’s example and resign. A resignation en masse would tell the world that Beijing has co-opted the legal system in Hong Kong and that courts in the territory are, for any politically tinged matter, an extension of the Communist Party.

Thanks to Mainland immigration, Hong Kong is barely keeping its population up, with a 0.1% year-on-year fall just reported, A Twitter thread looks at some underlying demographics…

By ‘international’ media – as in coverage of Hong Kong – we tend to mean ‘Anglo’. For a change, here’s a story on the ‘silent invasion’ of the city – in Basque…

Hori hala, Patrick Kar-wai Poon akademiko eta kazetaria bat dator Hong Kongeko hainbat bizilagunen ustearekin; hau da, uste du agintariak eginahalean ari direla biztanle liberalagoak kontinentetik etorritakoekin ordezkatzeko: «Txinako Gobernuak Hong Kongeko kultura urardotu gogo du, Txinako gero eta jende gehiago bulkatuz…

Spot the non-Indo-European language. Google translate does a pretty good job, it seems…

However, the academic and journalist Patrick Kar-wai Poon agrees with the belief of many residents of Hong Kong; in other words, he believes that the authorities are trying to replace the more liberal population with those from the mainland: “The Chinese government wants to destroy the culture of Hong Kong, pushing more and more Chinese people to take over Hong Kong”, he said. “In exchange for attracting people, the Hong Kong Government itself implements policies that make it increasingly dependent on the mainland economy…

How well would the wolf-warrior tone of Hong Kong’s press releases translate into Basque? Here’s a milder one on National Ecology Day 2024 Launching Ceremony cum Symposium.

If officials put together an ‘ejaculate and festive citrus fruit’ themed event, they could call it the ‘Cum cum Cumquat Symposium’.

Owen Chow gets a three-day sentence for unauthorized removal of a complaint form – to the Ombudsman about prison officers’ interception of books – from the jail in which he is currently held. His lawyer gets a small fine. Magistrate Ivy Chui… 

…cited Chow’s mitigation letter, saying that she had taken into consideration his “loss of faith” in the prison system after repeated incidents, and said she had found no illegal or improper content in the books that were intercepted.

Doesn’t look like the magistrate was hugely impressed with the prosecution. Which makes you wonder whether the government will appeal for a tougher penalty – say 10 days. Chow is serving five years for a riot charge, and faces up to life for participation in the pan-dems’ 2020 primary election.

Non-permanent CFA judge Lord Neuberger considers standing down – from his role at the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute…

Neuberger told the group: “In view of my continuing role as an Overseas Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, I am in the process of considering my position as Chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, in consultation with my Deputy Chairs. I will issue a statement with my decision as soon as practicable…”

Article 19 on the case…

ARTICLE 19 is alarmed at Lord Neuberger’s ongoing presence on the Hong Kong court, which lends credibility to a system actively dismantling the rule of law. We reiterate our call for him to resign. Jimmy Lai, and other pro-democracy campaigners must be immediately and unconditionally released. Hong Kong must protect the freedoms of expression and peaceful protest.

The HK government condemns Chris Patten’s comments about the CFA ruling on Jimmy Lai et al…

The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) today (August 14) strongly condemned and vehemently opposed Chris Patten’s malicious slandering against the judgment of the Court of Final Appeal (CFA) in the case of Lai Chee Ying and others participating in an unauthorised assembly, and his wanton personal vilifications against Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, an overseas Non-Permanent Judge (NPJ) involved in the adjudication of the relevant appeal.

The HKSAR Government spokesperson said, “Patten’s slandering remarks were made in blatant disregard of the detailed legal analysis by the CFA in its 76-page judgment and the factual background of the relevant case. Such remarks were made for the sole purpose of exerting political pressure on the judges of the CFA who adjudicated the case independently in strict accordance with the law, in an attempt to influence the judicial system of the HKSAR, and were nothing but a despicable political manoeuvre.

“Patten’s criticisms against Lord Neuberger NPJ who handled the relevant case were completely groundless and unjustified personal attacks aiming to smear and slander the NPJ’s reputation, which fully exposed Patten’s malicious attempt to undermine the system of NPJ…

…etc. 

Statement by UK charity Prisoners Abroad on Lord Neuberger (subject of above headline). The group seems surprisingly (charitably?) supportive of his role on Hong Kong’s CFA.

David Webb looks at the ever-rising proportion of unconvicted people in Hong Kong jails…

…the number and percentage of people on remand (presumed innocent) in HK jails reached new highs of 3700 and 38.6% at 30-Jun-2024. 

If we exclude immigration detainees, the percentage is 40.0%.

The Standard reports that it’s not just up-market F&B outlets – the junk-hire trade is losing out to trips to Shenzhen.

Foreign Affairs on the lessons China is learning from the war in Ukraine…

…Chinese analysts were especially startled by the West’s coordinated push to sanction the Russian economy. That effort offered a “vivid demonstration of the tools of economic power” that the United States could muster, Li wrote. Not all Chinese experts agreed on the sanctions’ likely efficacy. Some, such as Huang Jing, argued that the West’s “world war without gunpowder” would fail because sanctions on the energy and financial sectors are notoriously “leaky” and because, he contended, disagreements would emerge between the United States and Europe.

…others concluded that the United States still wields unrivaled power over the international financial system. Zhang Bei, an analyst at the People’s Bank of China, predicted that the United States’ leverage over key payment and settlement mechanisms, including the SWIFT system, which handles interbank messaging, would allow it to threaten Russia’s “national financial security.” The economist Wang Da went further, likening the expulsion of Russia from SWIFT to a nuclear attack. The United States’ capacity to devastate a rival financially would have stark implications for China: in October 2022, one researcher at China’s central bank warned that China must be ready to defend against a U.S. effort “replicating this financial sanction model against China” in the “context of the intensified Sino-U.S. strategic game and the Taiwan Strait conflict.”

…missing from the public-facing discussion in China is a true recognition of the costs Beijing has assumed as a result of its support for Putin’s war. Experts’ early assessments lingered on dramatic potential damage to China; now, they tend to ignore or underappreciate the serious costs Beijing has incurred. China’s relations with most European countries have degenerated, probably irrevocably. In the declaration following its July summit, NATO included an unprecedentedly sharp denunciation of Beijing’s behavior, calling China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war effort—language that would have been unthinkable prior to February 2022.

Frustration with China is not limited to European policymakers. Europeans who were recently very bullish on Chinese-European relations—especially those with business interests in China—now hold a much dimmer view. A May survey of European CEOs by the European Round Table for Industry found that only seven percent believed that Europe’s relations with China would improve in the next three years. More than 50 percent saw future deterioration. In a July survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that polled nearly 20,000 people, 65 percent of respondents in 15 European countries agreed that China has played a “rather negative” or “very negative” role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Also in FA – why post-Covid China’s economy is struggling. It’s more than demographics, a property correction or growing friction with the West…

…there is a more enduring driver of the present stasis, one that runs deeper than Xi’s growing authoritarianism or the effects of a crashing property market: a decades-old economic strategy that privileges industrial production over all else, an approach that, over time, has resulted in enormous structural overcapacity. For years, Beijing’s industrial policies have led to overinvestment in production facilities in sectors from raw materials to emerging technologies such as batteries and robots, often saddling Chinese cities and firms with huge debt burdens in the process.

Simply put, in many crucial economic sectors, China is producing far more output than it, or foreign markets, can sustainably absorb. As a result, the Chinese economy runs the risk of getting caught in a doom loop of falling prices, insolvency, factory closures, and, ultimately, job losses. Shrinking profits have forced producers to further increase output and more heavily discount their wares in order to generate cash to service their debts.

…As the party sees it, consumption is an individualistic distraction that threatens to divert resources away from China’s core economic strength: its industrial base. According to party orthodoxy, China’s economic advantage derives from its low consumption and high savings rates, which generate capital that the state-controlled banking system can funnel into industrial enterprises. This system also reinforces political stability by embedding the party hierarchy into every economic sector. Because China’s bloated industrial base is dependent on cheap financing to survive—financing that the Chinese leadership can restrict at any time—the business elite is tightly bound, and even subservient, to the interests of the party. 

…The Chinese economy clearly needs to strike a new balance between investment and consumption, but Beijing is unlikely to make this shift because it depends on the political control it gets from production-intensive economic policy.

A Twitter thread on the same subject…

China’s state-directed investment in ‘high-quality, productive’ forces is leading to massive overproduction that will reverberate in global markets for manufactured goods.

As China’s manufacturing exports exploded in the 2000s (to 19% of world total by 2013), aided by protectionism/subsidies, the US lost one million manufacturing jobs.

A second China shock is rapidly unfolding, this time in the EU’s key sectors. And the shock is much larger. 

After China’s property bubble burst in late 2023, China directed the country’s savings toward making cars, chemicals, machinery, and chips (hi Germany).

And China has been selling the resulting overproduction on global markets to avoid unemployment at home.

The EU is poised to potentially lose many more jobs than the U.S. did during the first shock.

For one, the bloc currently has around 30 million manufacturing jobs compared to the 17 million the U.S. had in 2000.

India and Vietnam have been the new China for 10 years now. MSCI pulls more China companies from its indexes…

The index provider said it will remove 60 stocks from the MSCI China Index this month, following 56 deletions in May and 66 in February, the highest tally in at least two years. At the end of July, China represented 22.33% of the Emerging Markets gauge.

The changes, effective after the close on Aug. 30, will also apply to the MSCI All Country World Index. Stocks slated for removal include airline operator Air China Ltd., Sany Heavy Equipment International Holding Co. and Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group.

MSCI’s changes underscore the increasingly grim prospects for the world’s second-largest economy, as Chinese shares risk losing their outsized presence in emerging market portfolios to peers such as India and Taiwan. The deletions may further increase the downside for China’s already battered market, with index-tracking funds forced to sell these shares.

The Court of Final Appeal denies an appeal by pan-dems Martin Lee, Margaret Ng, Jimmy Lai, Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan, “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung and Cyd Ho to overturn their convictions for unauthorized assembly on August 19, 2019 – when 1.7 million people turned up at Victoria Park…

…A panel of judges unanimously rejected the democrats’ argument that their conviction was disproportionate to the protection of their basic human rights.

“The defendants’ proposition is unsustainable. It is contrary to all established principles governing constitutional challenges in Hong Kong and especially contrary to accepted principles for assessing proportionality,” the judgement read.

The defence had submitted that prosecution or conviction over an unauthorised assembly that did not lead to serious public disorder or violence would be a disproportionate restriction of the freedom of assembly.

Two UK Supreme Court decisions were cited in the bid to argue that the lower courts had failed to verify whether the democrats’ conviction would be a proportionate restriction of their fundamental rights.

Chief Justice Andrew Cheung and Permanent Judge Roberto Ribeiro held that the two Supreme Court decisions should not be followed in Hong Kong.

“Their Lordships noted that those decisions were made in contexts which do not arise in Hong Kong and incorporate features of no local relevance,” a summary of the judgement read.

The panel included non-permanent overseas judge David Neuberger. The Guardian quotes Chris Patten as saying the verdict,,,

…“reveals the rapidly deteriorating state of the rule of law in Hong Kong”.

He said: “This unjust verdict is made worse by the fact that Lord Neuberger, a former head of Britain’s supreme court, was a party to this decision. This is particularly surprising since when he was a member of the judiciary in Britain, Lord Neuberger was keen to establish that the English common law could accommodate fundamental aspects of human rights protection.

“He was also always keen that judges should be keen to explain their reasoning. In this case, perhaps some of his views on the law changed between the first-class waiting room at Heathrow and the arrival terminal of Hong Kong international airport.”

…Mark Sabah, the director of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, said it was “shameful and disgraceful” that Neuberger still sat in the court.

The government is further expanding one of its overseas talent schemes.

These schemes have, in practice, topped up Hong Kong’s population following an exodus of several hundred thousand middle-class local and expatriate residents prompted by Covid restrictions and the NatSec clampdown. Most beneficiaries are Mainlanders, and one encountered over the weekend explained that he and several others were working – a bit, to satisfy ‘talent’ visa conditions – as insurance agents selling products mostly to clients over the border. He said their plan was twofold: get their kids access to Hong Kong schools, and later use the city as a stepping stone to emigration to the West.

The Diplomat reports that some Hongkongers without BNO passports are being denied access to their MPF savings. This is the first coverage of the issue I’ve seen that labels it as ‘transnational repression’… 

After Bloomberg published a piece on how Hong Kongers with BNO passports were being denied access to their savings, Hong Kong Watch and The Guardian identified two cases in which exiled Hong Kong pro-democracy activists were denied access to their savings due to their MPF accounts being “under investigation.” These Hong Kongers’ accounts are most likely being investigated following the Hong Kong government issuing HK$1 million (US$128,250) bounties for their arrest for peacefully advocating for democracy in Hong Kong and around the world. 

Yet, neither of these individuals has a BNO passport, clearly demonstrating that the withholding of savings is not just an issue for Hong Kongers with BNO passports…

…representatives from HSBC and Standard Chartered will be invited to discuss the [BNO-related] topic in the British Parliament this autumn. In the meantime, parliamentarians old and new must continue to place pressure on the U.K. government to issue guidance to HSBC and Standard Chartered regarding the use of BNO passports as valid documents.

Again – if the authorities feel entitled to do it to BNO holders and overseas dissidents, who else in future might find access to their MPF funds denied?

In the SCMP, Mike Rowse looks at the Hong Kong government’s recent decision to allow the formation of new taxi fleets offering on-line hailing, electronic payments, some more modern vehicles and other supposed attractions…

…not a single new taxi licence is being issued as part of the exercise. The current number of 18,163 taxis is being maintained… All 3,500 vehicles covered by the new fleet licences will come from cannibalising existing taxi licences.

So this is not provision of additional resources. It is a reshuffle of those we already have. Taking into account also that all selected five fleet operators are players in the existing market, it is plain to see that for all the talk of a new era in taxi matters, this is largely a case of old wine in new bottles.

…if this is just a device to prolong the privileged position of vested interests [eg legacy investors in tradable taxi licences] and delay regularisation of Uber and similar services, then the public will not easily forgive them.

If this is just a device? And does the government care whether people ‘forgive them’?

In the SCMP – China gets angry again about the NED… 

China has accused a US-based group of “ideological infiltration”, including funding anti-Beijing forces in Hong Kong and supporting separatist forces in Taiwan, in a lengthy report aimed at “unmasking” its operations.

In the report published by China’s foreign ministry on Friday, Washington was accused of “subverting state power in other countries” and “conducting ideological infiltration” through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

…“The NED has long been colluding with those who attempt to destabilise Hong Kong by providing funds and public support,” the report said, naming organisations including Hong Kong Watch and Amnesty International, as well as “anti-China lawmakers” in the US, UK and Germany.

…The latest report also accused the NED of working with Taipei’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party “to mobilise ‘democratic forces’ to open up the ‘front line of democratic struggle in the East’ and hype up the false narrative of ‘Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow’.”

Mehdi Hasan interview with former Chinese diplomat Victor Gao on, among other things, Xinjiang, Tibet and dictatorship. Gets quite brutal. Gao perhaps deserves some credit for getting into the ring with a more-than-averagely hard-hitting journalist…

Hasan: How many [Uighurs] are in detention?

Gao: Let me be philosophical…

Hasan: No, don’t be philosophical. Be numerical. How many people are in detention?

Secretary for Security Chris Tang turns alliterative – in translation via the Standard, at least – in identifying a new enemy of NatSec-era Hong Kong: Vivian maligners. Never be a Vivian maligner. We are all Vivian maligners now.

He denounces as ‘villains and morons’ people who mock the city’s Olympic fencing medalist Vivian Kong for her 2021 Renmin University thesis pushing the government line on ‘patriots-only’ elections.

An SCMP report a few days ago says…

Kong also argued that some “anti-China disrupters” had misinterpreted the concept of “one country” and exploited the city’s elections to enter the political system, resulting in a possible constitutional crisis.

…She wrote that the protests revealed misconceptions about the constitutional order among some Hongkongers who prioritised “two systems” over “one country” in the “one country, two systems” governing principle.

…Other misconceptions included Hongkongers’ tendency to place international human rights covenants and laws above the Basic Law, the fencer said.

…She dismissed the notion of “genuine universal suffrage” – as demanded by activists in the Occupy movement and the 2019 protests – as a “pseudo-proposition”.

…“Hong Kong’s chaos and illegal acts in recent years to pursue so-called genuine universal suffrage had already posed a threat to national security,” she wrote.

This was followed by Regina Ip…

…who condemned “rabid attacks” on the gold medallist as the work of “fawning puppets” of external powers.

Does anyone mention that the épéeist (SCMP’s word) seems to have drawn rather heavily on official press and other statements in her academic work? 

Will the authorities launch a ‘Vivian Maligner Reporting Hotline’? Vivid motto: Virulently mistrust vaguely muttering vapid malcontents maliciously vexing various miffed ministers.

Chief Executive John Lee asks everyone to visit a new National Security exhibition at the HK Museum of History, promising an enhancement of their ‘sense of safeguarding national security and a boost to patriotism’…

“We must strengthen our crisis awareness… in the face of fast-changing international situations, constant geographical conflicts and collective suppression by foreign forces,” Lee said.

RTHK adds…

“Safeguarding national security is always a work in progress. There is no completion. Given the ever-changing international situation, it is necessary to maintain a sense of crisis,” he said.

David Webb comments…

“It is necessary to maintain a sense of crisis” – CE Lee. Maybe not if there isn’t actually a crisis? How can we promote trade and tourism while simultaneously pretending that there’s a crisis? 

A subsequent RTHK story reports ‘dozens’ of visitors…

A woman at the front of the queue said that as a Chinese person, she should know more about national security legislation.

She expressed concern about the limited sense of national identity among Hong Kong’s youth compared with their mainland counterparts, and stressed the need for more education.

The Standard says ‘hundreds’…

A 27-year-old woman from Foshan, Au, visited the gallery with her mother and found the section explaining different perspectives of national security to be particularly enriching.”I learned that food and outer space security can also contribute to national security,” she said.

However, an Italian tourist in his 40s, Homel, who came with his wife and two children, found the exhibition to be overly patriotic and not particularly interesting.

Hey – there’s always the inflatable Leaning Tower of Pisa just across the harbour.

HKFP mentions…

…installations dedicated to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ideas of governance, and a lunar soil sample collected during a China National Space Administration mission.

And the Standard finds

…a replica of the oil painting “The Founding Ceremony of the People’s Republic of China,” which is being displayed outside the mainland for the first time … and a six-meter-tall, 1:9 scale model of the Long March 5B carrier rocket.

But apparently nothing about any actual ‘crisis’.

(For a real national security story, the SCMP looks at corruption in the PLA.)

If you want to escape the NatSec panic and go somewhere relaxed, more Shenzhen border checkpoints are on the way. (Didn’t the Standard get the ‘call it the boundary’ memo?)

…Governor of Minnesota, Warren Zevon fan, mocker of Trump’s people as ‘weird’, and possible next Vice President of the US…

Thread by Jeffrey Ngo on Walz’s connections with China and Hong Kong. China Talk on his China experiences, including his pick of the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre for his wedding…

“He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” said his wife.

The SCMP manages to find quotes claiming he is pro-Beijing…

Numerous social media posts, including those from accounts followed by members of Trump’s inner circle, with some suggesting he could be a Communist Party agent.

“Communist China is very happy with @GovTimWalz as Kamala’s VP pick. No one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz,” Richard Grenell, a former acting director of National Intelligence in the previous Trump administration, posted on X, the social platform owned by Trump supporter Elon Musk.

Jimmy Lai’s trial is postponed yet again, to November 20. The WSJ says…

…Delay is beginning to look like a feature and not a bug—especially given that Mr. Lai is being kept in solitary confinement.

Mr. Lai was arrested in 2020, and his trial was set to begin in 2022 but started a year late largely because of the government’s repeated challenges to Mr. Lai’s attempt to choose his own lawyer. He’s been charged with colluding with foreign forces and conspiring to publish seditious materials.

But the head of Mr. Lai’s international legal team, King’s Counsel Caoilfhionn Gallagher, says that after seven months of trial all the prosecution has done is reveal how flimsy its case against Mr. Lai is.

“Basic actions which are essential for any successful newspaper owner,” she says, “are described as criminal, such as asking respected public figures to write op-eds on newsworthy topics, widening the pool of readers, securing advertisers.” Ms. Gallagher adds that raising concerns about Hong Kong’s freedoms under the national security law has now become criminal. And a trial that should have been over by Easter may not be done by Christmas.

Some more on the forthcoming Taiwan TV series Zero Day, from CNN…

The 17-minute trailer hit close to home in Taiwan, making headlines in local media and garnering more than a million views on YouTube.

“As a 21-year-old, I almost burst into tears when I watched it. Every scene in those 17 minutes felt so close to us. Maybe one day in the future, these scenarios will become the reality around us,” said a top comment with more than a thousand upvotes.

…and the Guardian…

“The feeling that war is imminent is something that most people in peaceful countries find hard to relate to. In Taiwan, everyone thinks about it, but hardly ever talks about it,” the director, Lo Ging-zim, tells the Guardian in his Taipei studio. “But if we don’t make that fear tangible, if we don’t turn it into drama, we’re going to have a hard time getting people to start a dialogue quickly.”

The plot begins with a Chinese warplane disappearing in the Taiwan Strait, and China using the search as a pretext for enacting a military blockade. Over the course of seven days it chips away further. The financial system crashes, communications are cut, foreigners and dual nationals flee. Fake news and fifth column sabotage spreads, and Beijing hacks public screens with a smiling, pink-jacketed Chinese news anchor urging Taiwanese to accept the “peaceful reunification of the motherland”.

A couple of items that may or may not warrant forthright responses from the government press-release writers…

Washington Post op-ed co-authored by Samuel Bickett calls for sanctions to cut off banks and other companies involved in illicit trade off from the US financial system…

Once a trusted global financial center aligned with Western democracies and governed by the rule of law, our new report with the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation details how Hong Kong has become the world’s leader in such practices as importing and re-exporting banned Western technology to Russia, forming untraceable front companies for the purchase and sale of barred Iranian oil, and managing “ghost ships” that illegally trade natural resources with North Korea.

Hong Kong’s business-friendly policies, which make it easy to conceal corporate ownership and quickly create and dissolve companies, allow illicit actors to make a mockery of U.S. and Western sanctions. At the same time, slow and inconsistent enforcement by Western governments has allowed those actors to continue their operations with relative impunity. The United States can and should address this situation without delay.

…Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee’s statement in October 2022 confirming that the territory would not enforce U.S. sanctions offered a green light to illicit operators who had set up shop in the city. Since then, many more have done so, from Russian tanker owners to Iranian exporters of drone technology. 

…other jurisdictions in places such as Central Asia and the Middle East play a significant role in sanctions evasion. Yet Hong Kong stands out for the sheer volume and breadth of its involvement with rogue nations. In 2022, only mainland China shipped more integrated circuits and semiconductors to Russia than Hong Kong did — and the difference between them was small. 

BBC radio documentary – Erasing Hong Kong…

Authorities are attempting to erase and rewrite history – both the recent history of pro-democracy protests, as well as Hong Kong’s 180-year history as a British colony … and how ordinary people are trying to resist.

Includes the disappearance of Luisa Lim’s Indelible City from public libraries and the wiping of RTHK’s archives.

An obituary of barrister Alvin Cheung, who spotted what was happening 10 years before everyone else…

A Canadian citizen of Hong Kong descent, Mr. Cheung, 38, was a Hong Kong barrister in 2009 when he noted the insistent and steady encroachments by Beijing on the former British colony, especially through the city’s supposedly independent common law courts. As he studied how authoritarian governments manipulate law to seize and retain power, Mr. Cheung wrote tirelessly about the coming downfall of legal and civil rights in his hometown years before Beijing seized control.

Mr. Cheung was not satisfied just with sharing his concerns among fellow lawyers and academics. With his characteristic, even caustic wit — he once described Beijing’s intervention in a Hong Kong decree as a political “temper tantrum” — Mr. Cheung told journalists and his social media followers that the Chinese and Hong Kong governments had weaponized law to undermine the city’s autonomy and degrade civil rights.

The Hong Kong government reports that the number of registered voters in the city has fallen for the third year running… 

…around 18,900 new registration applications were received for the geographical constituencies in the 2024 voter cycle… A total of 142,400 voters were provisionally removed from the electoral register [about 29,900 due to death and about 112,500 as a result of other inquiry processes].

The number of deaths in Hong Kong in 2023 was 54,400, so about 54% of them were registered to vote (presumably, their names are automatically taken off the voters’ register). But what about the other 112,500 missing voters?.

If my experience is anything to go by, the ‘other inquiry processes’ include attempts to update addresses when people move to a new home and don’t update their particulars with the Registration and Electoral Office. When a voting card or other communication is returned as undelivered, the authorities can send an email or SMS, if they have those contact details. And you get a stream of reminders (see right).

It’s not especially onerous to update your details, so if you don’t do it, it either means you’ve emigrated, or you’re making a conscious decision not to be on the electoral roll any more. Why would you decide not to vote in future? Perhaps because you don’t see any point. For example, maybe the candidates you used to support are now in jail, and today’s ballots have only a handful of unknown names with similar platforms. 

The Education Bureau releases curriculum guidelines for a new Citizenship, Economics and Society subject in Hong Kong secondary schools…

“[Patriotic Education] helps students understand the development of our country and the importance of the close relationship between the Mainland and Hong Kong to the development of our society, thereby cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity,” the document reads.

…Xi Jinping Thought is recommended for third-year secondary students as part of a module called “Our Country’s Political Structure and Its Participation in International Affairs.”

When asked how much students should learn about Xi Jinping Thought, Ranny Yau, the principle of TWGHs Kap Yan Directors’ College and chairman of a committee responsible for reviewing the new subject, told Ming Pao on Thursday that junior secondary school students were expected to know more about China.

“It is unnecessary to single out and highlight some content that may worry teachers,” Yau said in Cantonese.

What exactly is ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’? Some observers see its aim as the ‘great rejuvenation of China’, or to enable the CCP to avoid the fate of the USSR. A recent ASPI Strategist article says…

It is a totalising ideology that enshrines the absolute leadership of the party over the state constitution. There is no state separate from the party. The decisive function of the market, a key aspect of the reform era, is now subservient to XJT and the party cells that are embedded in businesses and required to guide them.

In the Mainland, it is taught in primary schools – and many adults are expected to attend workplace seminars on the subject.

Some reading from the weekend…

Oz ABC on the remaking of Hong Kong…

In the past couple of years, more than 100,000 people have moved to Hong Kong, and the majority have come from mainland China. It’s not by accident. Hong Kong’s Beijing-controlled government is offering a raft of incentives to lure people to the city, after an exodus of skilled workers in the wake of the COVID pandemic and China’s ruthless crackdown on political dissent following the 2019 pro-democracy protests. 

PBS interview with the co-owners of Bleak House Books, formerly of San Po Kong, now in a village near Rochester, NY.

If you’re on Twitter: illustrated thread by @bauhiniacapital who’s renovating a smallish Hong Kong fishing boat as a leisure craft (presumably – though he also gets a gill-net commercial fishing permit as part of the deal)…

Decent-sized cabin. Sits 8-10 pretty easily. Not what one would call callipygian, but she’s got good bones.

Michael Pettis on Beijing’s difficulties in stimulating consumption…

Beijing’s reluctance to support consumer demand might not be as bizarre as it seems. Other countries in similar positions—most famously Japan in the 1980s—also said they wanted to boost the consumption shares of their economies but struggled to do so. Raising the consumption share of the economy is much more difficult than it may at first seem.

…direct and implicit transfers meant that China’s global competitiveness in manufacturing was the other side of the coin of China’s very weak consumption … China’s extremely competitive manufacturing—and the world’s best transportation and logistical infrastructure—should not be thought of as separate from the country’s extraordinary low domestic consumption. The former exists because of the latter, and one requires the other. 

Taipei Times op-ed on one way President William Lai is different from his predecessor… 

Lai’s speech touched on issues of Taiwanese nationality and identity, and vision for the future that he expects the (DPP) to take the lead. Meanwhile, at around the same time, his administration announced plans for a change in national linguistic self-identity.

The two moves are almost certainly connected. One is the Ministry of Education (MOE) announcing plans to change the labelling on language teaching materials from “Southern Min” (閩南語) to “Taiwan Taiwanese” (台灣台語). The other is Lai’s decision to give his entire speech at the DPP National Congress in “Taiwan Taiwanese.”

Lai was taking some political risks in his language choice. On one hand, it is quite likely that younger audience members and some older ones couldn’t understand his speech. The other is that traditionally the party has been dominated by Taiwanese speakers and distrusted by those who came to Taiwan from China after the Chinese Civil War, Hakka and indigenous peoples.

Mainlanders traditionally distrusted the DPP because they identified as Chinese, while Hakka and indigenous peoples had historically suffered at the hands of the numerically superior Taiwanese-speaking peoples who originated in Fujian. Tsai had actively tried to court those groups and de-emphasize any link to any specific group, with some success. For example, the DPP went from zero indigenous legislative seats to two out of six now.