Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The Hong Kong government plans to allow the chief executive…

…to certify any criminal act as a national security case, in a legal update that would be binding on the courts. 

…The chief executive is already empowered to issue certificates to decide whether an act involves national security, but the new subsidiary legislation aims to “bring greater certainty” to the courts. There will no longer be room to debate whether an ordinary crime could face national security procedures when a certificate is issued. 

RTHK reports the official wording…

The Security Bureau and the Department of Justice have announced plans to introduce subsidiary legislation to clearly define the classification mechanism for “other offences endangering national security under the law of the HKSAR,” as stipulated under the Hong Kong National Security Law (HKNSL) and the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO).

…The move, they said, aims to strengthen legal clarity, enhance procedural efficiency, and enable timely prevention and response to national security risks.

…The proposed subsidiary legislation … will set out two key principles.

If the Chief Executive issues a certificate … confirming that a criminal act involves national security, the case shall be treated as one concerning an offence endangering national security…

…And, where a person is charged with — or convicted of — an alternative offence arising from the same act in a case involving a national security offence, that alternative offence shall also be classified as an offence endangering national security. 

Question: does this mean the government can put someone facing any criminal charge into the NatSec court system – where there’s no bail (probably), no jury, a hand-picked judge, and a 99% conviction rate? 

Via RTHK, a government clarification…

The government said on Monday that proposed subsidiary legislation to clearly define the classification mechanism for “other offences endangering national security under the law of the HKSAR” does not involve the introduction of any new offences.

But…

Under the proposal to be enacted under Section 110 of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO), if the chief executive issues a certificate under the law confirming that a criminal act involves national security, the case shall be treated as one.

Sounds like a ‘yes’. It doesn’t create new NatSec offences – it just makes all offences potentially NatSec ones.

And where a person is charged with – or convicted of – an alternative offence arising from the same act in a case involving a national security offence, that alternative offence shall also be classified as an offence endangering national security.

At a Legislative Council panel meeting, Secretary for Justice Paul Lam said there are no changes to the implementation details or scope of application of the SNSO and the Hong Kong National Security Law.

…“As for whether a defendant is guilty or not, that remains solely for the court to rule independently in accordance with the law, and the court will ensure that the defendant receives a fair trial.” 

With no jury, a hand-picked judge, etc.

AP adds…

Simon Young, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong … said there is the danger of the chief executive relying upon secret information to judge the case as involving national security, leaving the defendant no room to contest the decision.

“This is not new and something I had warned about from the beginning, the danger to the rule of law and fair trial from an unreviewable executive power to determine critical facts binding on the court,” he said.

Eric Lai, a fellow at Georgetown Center for Asian Law, said the will of the leader may “arbitrarily” turn criminal cases into national security matters under the proposed change, and such exercise of power comes without institutional safeguards to prevent abuse of it. That approach could further erode the city’s rule of law, he said. 

He added that the chief executive could also step into other criminal cases, such as commercial fraud and money laundering, under the pretext of safeguarding national security. These offenses are often being weaponized to suppress dissidents in authoritarian states, he said. 

As an example (Standard story page 3, June 9), the Security Secretary tells LegCo that someone helping a NatSec offender escape from prison might have his offence upgraded to NatSec status.

The government tries to overturn the acquittal of former ICAC investigator and Democratic Party lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting of ‘perverting the course of justice’ while asking someone to delete possibly incriminating photos of participants in a 2019 protest… 

[Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Ivan] Cheung presented to the court a video of the exchange, in which Lam said that “what matters now is to delete the photos with protesters’ faces.”

Although Lam verbally said that he wanted to help X leave the scene, he could also have harboured an intent to pervert the course of justice, Cheung told the three appeal judges.

X had previously testified that Lam did not force him to delete the photos and that he agreed the lawmaker was mediating the situation.

The prosecutor said the lower court erred in finding that Lam had no intent to pervert the course of justice.

However, Judge Derek Pang said on Thursday that it was impossible to conclude that Lam had that intent, while Judge Judianna Barnes said Lam’s actions did not necessarily suggest his intent.

The lower court was a regular, not National Security, sort. 

Lam has been charged several times in recent years, including for ‘rioting’ after trying to intervene in the Yuen Long Station attack on July 21 2019. And he is currently in prison for ‘subversion’ after taking part in the pan-dem primary elections in July 2020. You may think the authorities have a peculiar obsession with him; I couldn’t possibly comment. 

A thread from Desmond Shum on the US regulatory authorities’ bar against Mainland and Hong Kong investors buying shares in SpaceX (Reuters report here)…

As a Hong Kong passport holder, I’m fully aware of how its meaning has changed over the past decade.

It is no longer treated as the distinct identity it once was. Increasingly, it is viewed as simply another form of Chinese passport.

…for wealthy Hong Kongers, the SpaceX IPO exclusion will still come as a shock. The message is blunt: a Hong Kong identity can now be enough to exclude someone from parts of the global financial system, because that identity is increasingly synchronized with China. 

SpaceX is run by a drug-addled fantasist. Institutions are shamelessly forecasting revenues equivalent to 10% of US GDP in a decade and letting retail investors buy into the IPO with just a few thousand bucks. Not being allowed to buy such absurdly overvalued stock is like not being allowed to eat dog poo. But this is nonetheless a wake-up call to anyone who still needs it: Hong Kong and its people used to be on one side of a wall, and now they’re on the other.

HKFP op-ed on the case of a man arrested for sedition after scattering some home-made leaflets around his apartment block. He will not be beheaded by the Gestapo, like the Munich students who did something similar in 1943. But…

…it should not be a matter of rejoicing that we have joined the club of countries where the channels of public communication have been so choked by fear and restrictions that citizens who wish to express their views are reduced to scattering anonymous leaflets.

Our government seems to have inherited the thin skin of our notoriously sensitive police force. Now even legislators – carefully vetted patriots to a man or woman – are complaining that any comment on government policy which falls short of a rousing endorsement is branded as dishonesty or worse by official spokespersons.

The Atlantic on China’s unsustainable mercantilist economic model…

Chinese manufacturers would be competitive without Xi’s help. He provides massive aid anyway—directly, with handouts and tax breaks, and indirectly, by suppressing the wages of factory workers and the value of China’s currency to make the country’s exports artificially cheap. The result is an economic model that favors producers, restrains consumers, and floods international markets with supercheap exports, including steel, solar panels, and electric vehicles. Foreign companies simply can’t compete. Chinese competition is costing Germany 10,000 manufacturing jobs a month and could strip Indonesia of hundreds of thousands of garment-worker jobs. China’s trade surplus ballooned to a record $1.2 trillion last year. As a share of the global economy, China’s surplus in manufactured goods is the largest amassed by any country ever. 

…Xi’s policies are spurring “the forced deindustrialization” of advanced economies worldwide. 

…China’s economic policies aren’t great for China, either. Its economy has been floundering. Private investment and consumer spending remain weak, property values have been slumping, and the competition for jobs is fierce. Xi’s industrial programs encourage too much investment in factories, which often lose money and require yet more state aid to survive. Taxpayer funds that could be spent on social services and welfare programs are instead propping up a glut of assembly lines. 

As a result, Chinese families are essentially subsidizing shoppers around the world while their own quality of life suffers.  

…Xi could alleviate tensions with trading partners and pressures at home by reforming the economy to stimulate more domestic demand, so that Chinese households could buy more Chinese goods. But Xi has avoided these reforms, perhaps because they would compromise his grip on the country by forcing him to cede power to markets.  

Imagine that the latest fad ever lives up to its propaganda, and agentic/generative AI displaces millions of jobs in companies. Corporations ultimately rely on demand from consumers who also happen to be each other’s employees. With millions of laid-off people, that demand will diminish, leaving the AI-staffed companies with far fewer customers to produce goods and services for. 

Big tech is almost certainly exaggerating AI’s potential for emulating humans – they need to lure trillions in investment and scare businesses into adopting their products. Beijing’s mercantilism, on the other hand, genuinely kills manufacturing jobs in developed and developing countries. Even if leaders in the US/ EU remain too stupid/powerless to hit back effectively, at some point the numbers will cease to add up. You can’t have one country that makes everything but imports nothing: everyone will end up much poorer.

(Not an exact parallel, but when the emperor in Beijing followed a mercantilist policy 200 years ago, foreign merchants literally ran out of silver coins. So they started to use opium as a means of exchange instead.)

Some excitable types debate the extent to which Chinese leaders over several decades have deliberately planned to dominate global manufacturing as a way to accumulate surpluses and leverage over trade partners. 

Subscribers to the ‘oriental wisdom long-term thinking’ theory see a carefully crafted plot, while the more cynical assume the CCP mostly makes it up as it goes along. Certainly, Beijing has a deep-rooted obsession with self-sufficiency and pounces on opportunities to weaponize trade dependency, but not always in a subtle way that guarantees long-term international influence. And as we can see, the model itself is unsustainable and harms Chinese as well as foreign households. So on balance, it looks like they drifted into it and now don’t know how to stop.   

From HKFP, a fully illustrated account of how the HK Police spent June 4 in Causeway Bay, apparently setting up a roadblock on a pedestrian-only street…

Another woman was seen gesturing “six” and “four” with her hands at around 6pm on Great George Street in Causeway Bay, The Collective reported. Police officers at the scene warned her that her behaviour could be “seditious”. They pressed her hands down and took her away into a police vehicle.

At around 6.30pm, Chan Po-ying, chairperson of the now-defunct League of Social Democrats, a pro-democracy party, appeared in Causeway Bay with a yellow paper flower.

Police at the scene warned Chan that her behaviour might constitute “disorder in public places” and told her to put the flower in her bag. 

Officers then took her away in a police vehicle.

A man was surrounded by police officers on Paterson Street after being spotted holding a candle at around 7pm.

While being searched, he asked whether he was being arrested and said that he did not have to comply with their orders if he was not under arrest. “I know my rights,” he said.

After he asked again whether he was under arrest, an officer said, “Disorderly conduct,” and they escorted him into a police van.

A young man in a black T-shirt was intercepted by police after he put on a blindfold and used a red marker pen to write on his arm outside the Sogo department store at around 7.15pm.

…Before he got into the [police] van, he pulled out a small red book that appeared to be China’s constitution. 

Video of another incident here.

Some exquisitely curated weekend reading…

The Guardian on efforts to collect and preserve photos and accounts from Tiananmen in 1989…

The passage of time, with the world’s eyes soon drawn elsewhere, and suppression by authorities at home mean that the pivotal moment in Chinese history is at risk of fading into grey. 

…One aspect particular at risk is a detail less commonly associated with the massacre: the hope that blossomed in the days leading up to the killing of hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed protesters by the Chinese army as they demanded democratic reforms.

One collection encapsulating that sense is a set of photographs taken by Austrian sinologist Helmut Opletal who was posted to Beijing as a journalist in May 1989. His photographs show crowds of protesters holding up banners calling for freedom and democracy, many with smiles on their faces and thrusting peace signs into the air.

…The Opletal photographs are among the hundreds of items hosted by China Unofficial Archives (CUA), a grassroots project launched in 2023 as a US-registered non-profit that aims to protect “censored and suppressed Chinese history”. 

Is Beijing abolishing the hukou? A long read from ezine Positions…

The question of hukou’s demise, however, is as old as China’s capitalist reforms. In 1994, when mass rural-urban migration was only just beginning, South China Morning Post ran the headline “Registration System Set to Be Abolished” (Chan and Buckingham 2008, 583). It wasn’t, but six years later the State Development Planning Commission announced that, “…China aims to abolish the system over the next five years” (Xinhua 2001). Four years after that, The New York Times credulously reported, “China plans to abolish legal distinctions between urban residents and peasants in 11 provinces” (Kahn 2005). In response to this anthology of dashed hopes, misinterpretations, and some bad faith propaganda, Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham penned a landmark article in The China Quarterly in 2008 in which they answered definitively: no, the hukou may be changing but it is not going away. 

The Diplomat on the mixed messages in Chinese film The Belief. The movie is about the Battle of Peng Hu, a naval engagement in the 1680s (some 40 years after the Manchu conquest), in which a Qing fleet fought and defeated that of the Tungning Kingdom, a Ming-loyalist regime in Taiwan.

To the CCP, the storyline should be obvious: the Mainland seizes Taiwan. But to some nationalistic Chinese, the parallels are less straightforward. The Qing were Manchu invaders who oppressed the Han for centuries up to the 1911 revolution. (As it happens, most combatants on both sides in the Peng Hu battle were Fujianese.)…

The backlash to “The Belief” reflects a strong anti-Qing sentiment in contemporary Chinese society. Where is this mood coming from?

The Qing Dynasty ended over a century ago, making it unlikely that contemporary Chinese people possess a deep collective memory of living under Qing rule. Furthermore, the Manchus in China today have been highly assimilated by the Han Chinese, and their language has almost become extinct. This means that a serious cultural conflict between the Han Chinese and Manchus is also unlikely. These factors make this question particularly perplexing.

…contrast the reception of “The Belief” with the surge in popularity of palace dramas and romance dramas set in the Qing Dynasty in mainland China during the 2010s. Some of these dramas achieved extremely high ratings during this period. 

However, in recent years, films and television series set in this dynasty have faced more severe questioning and criticism regarding their political and nationalist implications. This represents a new wave of Han chauvinism, which has clashed with official discourse.

Under the Han chauvinistic narrative that has gained strength in recent years, the Qing Dynasty is often seen as a dark age for the Han people, bringing entirely negative consequences to Chinese history. This dynasty is frequently associated with massacres, national humiliation, monarchical autocracy, and cultural control. 

…the Manchus … did enjoy certain privileges during their rule. These privileges have led to a deliberate distinction between the Manchus and Han Chinese in today’s sentiment, equating the Manchus with the “ruling class” and portraying them as “oppressors” of the Han. This reminds people of the rigid class system in today’s Chinese society. Viewed through this lens, the rise in anti-Qing sentiment is essentially a collective historical imagination, used to provide catharsis for contemporary Chinese dissatisfaction with reality. 

From Semafor, a look at how Beijing has created the enemy it sees in Japan…

Japan-bashing has become the core of a strident Chinese nationalism, with disastrous consequences. Indeed, Beijing’s nonstop demonization, economic coercion, and regular harassment of Japan, its people, and its institutions have created the monster it most fears. 

More than you could possibly want to know about Beijing indie band (and today’s guest stars) Carsick Cars.

A break from the mundane usual, courtesy of the couple who have given birth to three children at home with no professional medical care. The first, born in Finland, died. The second, also born in Finland, was taken into care in Sweden. The latest was born in a Hong Kong apartment, with the father cutting the umbilical cord. Authorities are anxious because the parents haven’t registered the birth within the required six weeks. The parents were arrested for child neglect. (Out on bail, if you want an update.)

Various reports quote officials or others declaring that the child doesn’t legally exist. (It obviously does: you could gently prod it with your finger to prove it’s there; if it wasn’t, the government would have no grounds to arrest the couple.)

The parents believe – among other things – that invasive procedures like injections or DNA tests are against their religion.

What’s the Scandinavian connection? I’m also intrigued about their faith, which I haven’t seen reported. I’m betting Jehova’s Witnesses. They have that ‘look’.

Oz ABC News looks back at 1989 and its aftermath in today’s Hong Kong…

“…for Hong Kong, a society that functioned with these democratic rights and freedoms and free press for over a century, to have it taken away inexorably and quite quickly over the last 20 years, has been a bit of a blow to many, many people.” 

On which note: a performance artist – sorry, another performance artist – stopped by police in Causeway Bay.

Victoria Park is occupied around June 4 by a patriotic ‘hometown market’…

Kung Chun-lung, chairperson of the Hong Kong Guangdong Federation, said the carnival will introduce products of “rural rejuvenation,” such as sweet potato, corn, and peanut. The five-day event will also see performances by local celebrities, such as Maria Cordero, as well as a traditional Chinese war dance and a “robotic band”…

There was a time when government officials would dread having to answer questions in the Legislative Council. Pan-democrat lawmakers – and even the occasional ‘pro-business’ one – would maul them if the quality of governance was failing to match public expectations. Then LegCo became ‘all-patriot’, and the chamber’s members embraced a new role: universally supporting the executive branch, rather than holding it to account. At least, 99.9% of the time.

Yet ministers are still not happy. Perhaps, with opposition politicians, media and civic groups all pretty much vanished, top officials’ skins have become thinner and more sensitive. Indeed, the sharp words and pointed questions that were once a daily part of the job have become ‘incitement’ or at least ‘soft resistance’. Even the mildest suggestion that the executive branch is at fault might be met with shock and outrage. Some legislators are so upset that they complained to the chamber’s president…

Hong Kong Legislative Council president Starry Lee Wai-king has urged officials to respect lawmakers’ dissenting views amid a recent rise in government pushback, stressing that public policies “always have pros and cons”.

…Lee said she had relayed lawmakers’ concerns to the government regarding officials’ recent rebuttals. She described the relationship between the executive and legislative branches as an ongoing process requiring mutual respect from both sides…

Her remarks came after several recent incidents in which government officials publicly rebuked lawmakers. These included the Department of Health criticising legislator Chris Ip Ngo-tung, without naming him, for raising concerns about the ban on alternative smoking products, accusing him of “spreading false information and misleading the public and visitors” in April.

…“I call on different stakeholders, including government officials, to respect the diverse views of legislators. In fact, there is never a policy with only one voice,” Lee said, urging officials to engage lawmakers proactively when encountering opposing opinions.

When do you last remember a Hong Kong lawmaker being critical of the administration?

China Media Project on Beijing’s preparations ahead of June 4…

The deep sensitivity surrounding the juxtaposition of International Children’s Day and June Fourth means that for the Chinese Communist Party, this will be a week of profound and insistent amnesia. And part of that act of erasure is the noisy affirmation of the party’s power over the future of China’s youth.  

Millions of yacht owners dance in the streets upon hearing that they can now sail their boats between Hong Kong and half a dozen Pearl River Delta cities with less paperwork. Is weaving in and out of container ships the ideal way to go to Zhuhai or Dongguan? Though Zhongshan is worth a visit.

The Hong Kong government said on Saturday that it welcomed the new policy.

“Under the new policy, the exemption [from] the requirement for a guarantee will significantly reduce the financial burden” on yacht owners, it said in a statement.

It also praised the simplified registration scheme, which allows Hong Kong and Macau yachts to obtain temporary national ship registration from mainland China “without affecting their original ship registration.”

Owners of Hong Kong and Macau yachts previously had to pay hefty customs guarantees and undergo complex registration procedures before entering mainland ports.

This is all part of a push to develop the ‘yacht economy’. Presumably, a group of civil servants were locked into a room and told they would not be let out until they had identified a new economic activity for which Hong Kong could conceivably become a hub-zone. They eventually came up with yachting. Perhaps more a hobby than a sector. As with, say, stamp-collecting, the pastime surely accounts for a microscopic percentage of Hong Kong’s GDP, so it certainly has room to grow. ‘Room’, of course, is not the same as ‘potential’.

Speaking of ‘tremendous opportunities’, the CE and some old, long-forgotten faces like Jeffrey Lam and Fred Ma are on a delegation to Kazakhstan. (Did they go by yacht?)

The UK’s most prestigious paper picks up the story the Hong Kong Justice Dept wants the press to ignore. (Paywalled, ironically.)  

Chau led the prosecution team at Lai’s trial last year, telling the court that the state did not need to provide specific details around the publisher’s alleged “conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign forces” to prove that he was the “mastermind” behind a plot against the government. 

Instead, the prosecutor highlighted Lai’s trips to the US at the time of democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, which included a meeting with the then vice-president, Mike Pence.

AFP report via HKFP on the plight of Hong Kong people living in subdivided apartments following the government’s recent attempt to enforce minimum standards on landlords…

Subdivided flats like Lau’s three-square-metre (32-square-feet) home — made by splitting up an apartment into smaller units — are being phased out after a law to regulate them came into effect in March.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the wealthy finance hub to resolve housing woes that are the result of decades of pervasive inequality, an acute housing shortage and eye-watering rents.

The Hong Kong government has given owners who register under the new system until 2030 to renovate their subdivided flats, but some landlords have already issued eviction notices to their tenants.

More probably, the housing woes are the cause of pervasive inequality. But Xi Jinping is surely right in seeing housing as the number-one reason for the longstanding widespread discontent that came to a head in 2019. 

His predecessors must share some of the blame. In the 1960s-1990s, colonial Hong Kong governments built at least one New Town a decade to (barely) keep up with a fast-growing population. But after the Joint Declaration was signed in the 1980s, Beijing insisted on tight limits on land sales (for reasons that were never clear, though officially Chinese officials said the Brits might ‘run away’ with the money in 1997). Cue a massive housing bubble, and vast profit margins for the big developers.

After the bubble burst soon after the handover courtesy of the Asian financial crisis, Hong Kong’s leaders could have set about adjusting to a more normal system of land use and housing. Beijing mildly urged them to tackle ‘deep-rooted’ problems. Instead, they essentially engineered another artificial shortage of housing supply. At the same time, the number of Mainland immigrants coming into Hong Kong – many of them low-skilled – increased.

Since the ‘second handover’ of 2019-20, previously ‘unusable’ space in the New Territories has mysteriously been identified as suitable for residential use. But bureaucrats still seem to try hard to keep housing scarce. They allocate land for superfluous office blocks, malls, highways and arts centres. They rule out using thousands of mini-homes built as Covid isolation facilities. They rule out using the to-be-demolished Wang Fuk Court site for housing. They insist that the additional apartments in the New Territories must be small, so as not to upset existing property owners. And measures to improve conditions in shoe-box homes lead to tenants being evicted. 

If the authorities had treated housing in the past as seriously as they treat ‘national security’ today, there would have been far less reason/pretext to introduce the post-2019 new order.

Further to the leaked memo on leaks to Frances Hui about new DPP Anthony Chau and his junior Crystal Chan…

…Deputy Secretary for Justice Horace Cheung confirmed on Wednesday the existence of the internal memo sent by Secretary for Justice Paul Lam on Tuesday. 

Cheung also warned the media against asking about unsubstantiated claims, lest such questions fuel those accusations. Continuing to ask about the “unsubstantiated allegations… would only fuel those accusations,” he said, Ming Pao reported. 

Shut up about the whole thing?

…Neither Lam nor Cheung said whether the department would look into the misconduct allegations against Chau.

Cheung also told journalists on Wednesday that he would not comment further on the incident to avoid “encouraging unhealthy trends.”

The Justice Dept is implicitly confirming that its own staff passed (highly detailed) allegations against Chau to Frances Hui, and actually begging not to be asked questions about the issue. If the government wants to convince the public that the claims are ‘completely without factual basis and entirely fabricated’, it might be better not to fall into the infamous Streisand effect. 

Some weekend reading and viewing…

Historian Miles Yu on the Thucydides Trap…

…one of the most overhyped and intellectually lazy clichés in modern geopolitics. Recycled endlessly after every U.S.–China summit, it claims that war between the United States and China is inevitable because a “rising China” is displacing a “declining America.” The theory flatters Beijing, excites conference panels, and gives foreign-policy pundits the illusion of historical sophistication. In reality, it is little more than fatalistic pseudo-history wrapped in academic jargon. Worse, it reinforces one of the CCP’s most dangerous delusions: that communist China is historically destined to replace the United States as the dominant global power. That fantasy says far more about Marxist-Leninist ideology than it does about strategic reality.

Ed Elson on the SpaceX IPO…

To be blunt: It’s a trainwreck. Unserious, empty, hallucinatory, and borderline dishonest…

After eighteen images of rockets in space, we learn that the company’s mission is “to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” To accomplish this, the company plans to advance humanity “to Kardashev Type II status,” which is defined in the document as “a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of its local star.” Only a few pages in and it’s already starting to feel like an ayahuasca trip.

…AI gets a mind-boggling 1,251 mentions — more features than the word “Jesus” gets in the Bible.

Once you arrive at the financials you start to realize what the language is overcompensating for: awful numbers…

…I’d have no problem with SpaceX’s sh*tty financials if they were reflected in the valuation — but they’re not. The stock is set to be priced at 107 times sales, which would make it one of the most expensive stocks in history. (The most expensive stock in the S&P 500 is Palantir, which trades at 64 times sales). It will be twice as valuable than Walmart while generating less revenue than Macy’s.

A video on the same subject from analyst/satirist Patrick Boyle.

Aside from index-trackers (who get no choice), what kind of idiot is going to buy an AI/Mars-colonization stock valued at US$2 trillion?

From the CFHK…

Last weekend, #HongKong was rocked by the kind of scandal the city’s once-free tabloid press — namely the now-defunct Apple Daily — would’ve aggressively exposed: the misuse of public funds by one of Hong Kong’s top public prosecutors.

From Washington, D.C., our policy and advocacy manager @frances_hui publicly lodged serious allegations against Hong Kong’s newly appointed Director of Public Prosecutions Anthony Chau, a lead prosecutor in the Hong Kong 47 and #FreeJimmyLai national security cases.

Drawing on insider information, Hui alleged that Chau misused public funds to book luxury hotel stays with a female subordinate prosecutor under the guise of “national security casework” while granting her professional privileges — conduct raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns.

Chau’s predecessor, Maggie Yang, is also widely believed to have covered up the misconduct.

The government responded by claiming the matter had already been investigated, accusing Frances of “malicious smearing,” and reportedly attempting to identify whistleblowers.

Hong Kong’s national security system is increasingly structured to shield those in power from scrutiny. 

…It ultimately took a wanted activist — carrying a HK$1 million bounty and speaking from exile — to bring the allegations into public view. 

The Hong Kong Department of Justice’s immediate response was not to announce a transparent investigation into the allegations but to threaten Hui with criminal prosecution, vowing to “severely punish lawbreakers in accordance with the law.” 

Official propaganda about “foreign forces” and “soft resistance” serves to distract from the steady replacement of transparency with unaccountable power. 

The government can point to proof that it does ‘punish lawbreakers’ in its own ranks. From the last three days…

An off-duty police officer and his wife have been charged with two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm after their Filipino domestic helper reported being attacked, police said.

The 39-year-old helper reported to police around noon on Monday that she had been assaulted by her employers. She sustained injuries to her hand and head and was taken conscious to United Christian Hospital.

…Police said the force places great importance on officers’ conduct and will not tolerate or condone any illegal behavior.

And…

A police officer has been charged with eight counts of accessing a computer with criminal or dishonest intent and one count of criminal damage, following an investigation into a complaint, authorities said.

Investigations revealed the officer repeatedly accessed police system data without authorisation between April and May 2024. He also allegedly splashed red paint on a residential unit in Wong Tai Sin on May 4, 2024.

…Police said the force places great importance on officers’ conduct and will not tolerate or condone any illegal behaviour.

And…

A former senior police inspector has been jailed for 30 months over misconduct in public office and accepting HK$1.4 million in bribes in exchange for leaking case details and dropping an investigation into a suspect.

…In mitigation, the defence said that Ho faced mental and financial pressure from family issues and “fell into the abyss of selling his soul.” Considering Ho’s guilty plea and mitigation, Judge Wai handed down a 30-month prison sentence, down from a starting point of four years. 

An LGBTQ radio show previously scrapped by government-run RTHK is cancelled by another station…

Hong Kong’s Metro Radio has abruptly halted plans to relaunch radio programme We Are Family, an LGBTQ show axed by government-funded broadcaster RTHK three years ago, its host has said.

Brian Leung, the host of We Are Family, said on the show’s Facebook page on Wednesday that Metro Radio invited him in April to relaunch We Are Family on Metro Info Live, one of the radio’s channels. 

The invitation was made by Steven Ma, who was the CEO of Metro Radio at the time. It was decided that the show would start on May 29, Leung said. 

After Ma announced he was leaving Metro Radio in May, Leung said he sought clarification from the head of Metro Info Live about whether the show would go on. He was told it would launch as scheduled and that an advertisement for it had already aired on Monday.

However, Leung said he received a call from the head of Metro Info Live on Wednesday afternoon, saying Metro Radio’s new management had decided to halt the relaunch.

This is just after gay carnival Pink Dot gets cancelled for the second year in a row after failing to get official permits. And seven months after Hong Kong Pride’s Rainbow Festival was postponed after the government decided the venue area needed urgent construction work.

There are puritan nationalistic and fundamentalist Christian elements with longstanding hang-ups about gay rights, and they are no doubt happy to see these sorts of events being cancelled. But they are not the ones making the decisions. The intolerance is not simply for gay-themed events but for a whole range of civil society activity – independent unions, political parties, bookstore classes, protests about the Wang Fuk Court tragedy, Tiananmen vigils, etc. Such activities are not illegal, but so many bureaucratic or other hurdles mysteriously arise that they can’t happen. 

What they have in common is: they involve actual or possible gatherings of people; they have some sort of potential political angle; and they are not under any form of government/United Front oversight.

So – it’s nothing personal!

Via Samuel Bickett, the Justice Dept issues a memo to all staff threatening to discipline anyone found leaking information about the new Director of Public Prosecutions. A leaked memo.