Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Desmond Shum tweet on Beijing’s tax clampdown on offshore wealth…

Article 11 states that even someone who has obtained foreign nationality or permanent or long-term residence overseas may still be deemed a Chinese domiciled tax resident if his or her “main economic interests” derive from China.

I suspect Beijing’s immediate target is mainland Chinese wealth owners—including those who have recently relocated to Hong Kong while retaining their businesses, assets and economic interests in mainland China.

Those cases are relatively straightforward.

The difficult question is: where do you draw the line?

And another…

For China’s wealthy, the implications extend well beyond paying more tax. Offshore trusts lose much of their value as asset-protection vehicles. Many families will now be looking to diversify not only their assets, but also their residency, citizenship and long-term wealth structures further away from China before additional restrictions emerge.

It is also difficult to see this as positive for China’s domestic investment environment. Private investment has already been in decline since 2023 as economic growth slows and business confidence deteriorates, reached minus 3.8% in 2025. Policies perceived as retrospective and highly discretionary will likely accelerate that trend.

Capital markets are also likely to feel the effects. Hong Kong’s, and to an extent Singapore’s, offshore wealth-management industry has been built in large part around mainland Chinese clients… 

China faces serious long-term fiscal challenges on the spending side as well. Dragonometry on Beijing’s drive to boost enforcement of social-security payments… 

China’s growth model systematically shifts income away from households and toward producers and the state. As a result, every attempt to patch a symptom without addressing that structure ends up reproducing it. Here is a clean illustration of it. Social security shortfalls are themselves a symptom of an economy that underpays labor relative to what it produces. The fix for that underpayment, as implemented, is to enforce accurate reporting of wages that are already too low, which raises the cost of employing people without raising what they take home. It is, in the plainest terms, private-sector Peter being robbed to pay private-sector Paul. Nothing about the aggregate flow of income between households and the state improves. The accounting gets tidier. The underlying problem does not move.

It would be a mistake to read this as mere incompetence, or a leadership that has failed to notice the contradiction. The more troubling reading is that they have noticed, and are choosing the option that does not require confronting vested interests among employers, local governments and the fiscal authorities who benefit from the current arrangement.

Attendees at a Guangzhou academic symposium in June argued that the Batanes Islands – part of the Philippines – are actually Chinese. China Global South Project on the ‘bizarre claim’…

The most immediate explanation for the surprise claim on the Batanes is that it was a reaction to a May 28 decision by Japan and the Philippines to open formal talks on their maritime boundary, a development that Beijing viewed through the lens of Taiwan and its broader maritime claims.

The Batanes argument also comes at a contentious time for Beijing’s maritime history: it is likely no coincidence that Chinese scholars made their dubious claim less than two weeks before Manila was set to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the ruling in its favor at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) on July 12^th.

After all, the PCA invalidated Beijing’s expansive sovereignty claims in the South China Sea under its “nine-dash line,” which encompasses roughly 85 percent of the sea based on historical rights and in contravention to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that China itself both signed and ratified.

The Court of Appeal allows 11 of the HK47 – convicted of ‘conspiracy to commit subversion’ over the 2020 pan-dem primary elections – to go to the Court of Final Appeal…

The defendants feature some of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy activists, namely Clarisse Yeung, Helena Wong, Owen Chow, Winnie Yu, Gwyneth Ho, Lam Cheuk-ting, Gordon Ng, Cheng Tat-hung, Kalvin Ho, Raymond Chan, and Leung Kwok-hung. 

What will happen? Two possible hints… The CFA has already upheld the law making it illegal to urge others to boycott elections, rejecting the notion that the law is a straightforward violation of freedom of expression. And under the NatSec Law, Beijing – through a NPC Standing Committee ‘interpretation’ – can override court decisions. 

Meanwhile, also from HKFP, the HK Bar Association…

…has asked a court to overturn its own disciplinary board’s decision clearing pro-democracy figure Margaret Ng of misconduct linked to her 2019 [unauthorized assembly] protest conviction. 

The legal challenge comes after the Barristers Disciplinary Tribunal decided in June that the complaint against Ng was unsubstantiated.

The complaint was linked to Ng’s conviction five years ago for taking part in an unauthorised assembly during the protests and unrest in 2019. She was cleared in 2023 of organising the demonstration.

Note the words “its own”. The Barristers Disciplinary Tribunal is part of the Bar Association. This is sort of like publicly slapping yourself on the face to show contrition. Maybe if the court fails to satisfy, the Bar Association will sue itself.

Stupidest AI rendition of Hong Kong I’ve seen for at least two days: landmark towers in the wrong places; a bay where there is no bay; a cruise liner where there are no cruise liners; a distant vast mountain range with ski resorts where there is no etc etc. Cobbled together to promote a ‘Wiki Finance Expo’, which sounds like it must be some sort of crypto, Web3, blockchain and AI bullshit-fest for ‘leaders, innovators and visionaries’. And indeed it is. (Speakers include Chivy Chan, a chief compliance officer.)

Lingnan University Students Union – founded in 1967 – decides to dissolve. The only student unions still active are at City U and HKUST, plus a couple of Chinese U’s colleges. 

One of the few remaining prominent and critical civil-society bodies that stubbornly refuses to go away is the HK Journalists Association. But the authorities are doubling down on the pressure, with the Security Secretary blasting the Association’s current leadership election…

Secretary for Security Chris Tang said on Friday that the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) had not publicised its list of candidates who are running in the election at Saturday’s AGM. 

He said it had been reported that all of the candidates were from foreign media outlets, “so-called free media,” or online outlets. 

“There’s not a single person from a mainstream Hong Kong outlet,” Tang said in Cantonese. “How can it be called the [Hong Kong] Journalists Association?”

“Not only is the HKJA hiding its candidate list, it also will not publicise its list of candidates after they are elected. With black-box operations like this, how can there be any credibility at all?” he added.

The HKJA says it keeps candidates’ names internal for fear that individuals will face harassment. But why should the Security Secretary – responsible for police, fire, prisons, immigration and customs services – be so concerned about it? (And are government officials in a position to criticize the credibility of elections now Hong Kong has barred all but approved ‘patriots’ from district and legislative bodies?)

After several years, the government gives up trying to find something incriminating about Next Digital, which a court ordered shut down in late 2021. CFHK notes…

Even the Hong Kong regime has finally admitted the Kafka-esque futility of investigating a company that no longer exists while its founder [Jimmy Lai] and senior executives sit behind bars…

…Mark Clifford, CFHK Foundation president and one of those questioned during the probe, summed it. up: “This entire exercise was an expensive, taxpayer-funded harassment operation. [The regime] tried to blame directors for the company’s shutdown and wouldn’t even look at government’s freezing of our bank accounts.”

The Hang Seng Index suffers a modest plunge as insurers, banks and property developers worry that Beijing’s new drive to tax decades of offshore income will dissuade wealthy Mainlanders from parking their money in Hong Kong. Some observers will wonder why China’s increasingly cash-strapped authorities took so long to sort out the loopholes that allow Hong Kong (and other jurisdictions) to benefit from Mainlanders dodging taxes and capital controls. The city’s officials, who love to push family offices, insurance products, etc, put a brave face on it. (And they have pro-democracy shops to deal with.)

In Asia Times, the boss of a financial advisory company points out that many countries will want to widen their tax nets in the coming years. The twist is that Beijing’s new measures are retroactive…

Wealthy families are being asked to settle gains from windows chosen with little public rationale, with their accounts based in China frozen until they pay. It’s the act of a government working backward from how much money it needs toward whoever still happens to have some.

What wealthy families fear in a moment like this is rarely the tax rate itself. Rates are negotiable and can be planned around years in advance. What can’t be planned around is a government reserving the right to rewrite the deal after the fact, which is why the response to that kind of risk is exit over negotiation.

An HKFP op-ed looks at overseas scholarships – the latest national-security threat to face Hong Kong. The author recalls his own experience of a study trip to Germany in 1969… 

The thing which most impressed the English contingent was the slot machine in the entrance hall of our castle, which dispensed cans of beer. As the sale of booze in England was still surrounded by restrictions on places, times and ages, this was a pleasant surprise, and the machine did a lot of business.  

That wasn’t the half of it. Truly enterprising British exchange students in Germany many decades ago discovered soon upon arrival that the local beer-vending machines accepted UK 5p (or shilling) coins as Deutschemarks, which were worth around five times as much. Underage drinkers got their booze – and at 20% of the actual price.

Some weekend reading and viewing…

A Taipei Times editorial on Beijing’s withdrawal of The Belief (澎湖海戰), a movie about the Qing Dynasty’s early moves to take control of Taiwan… 

In the past few months, there has been a noticeable increase among the Chinese public of interest in, and affiliation with, the Ming Dynasty, the last indigenous Han Chinese dynasty before the 1911 revolution. The sentiment, branded the “1644 historical perspective” (1644史觀), has become tied up with a trend called “Mourning the Ming” (悼明風). Both ideas take a nostalgic look at the supposed economic prosperity during the Ming Dynasty and place the blame for the decline in China’s fortunes at the feet of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which began in 1644.

The problem for the CCP is that it wanted a propaganda vehicle for advancing the idea of the historical inevitability of the defeat of “Taiwanese separatists”: What it got was public scrutiny of the historical facts.

Too Simple, Sometimes Naive (a Substack blog – and of course a Jiang Zemin quote about Hong Kong reporters) looks at the fate of one Edward Kuperman, an American ‘influencer’ churning out pro-China videos on the payroll of a Gansu state media operation… 

… former Global Times Editor, and infamous nationalist commentator, Hu Xijin felt compelled to weigh in.

‘Some netizens accuse Kuperman of being a spy… but they are just trying to sabotage his lucrative job‘, said Hu on Weibo, dismissing the rumours, but also repeating them.

He added: “In the media Lao Hu used to work, foreigners never received such a salary.” That’s true. Global Times are notorious in Beijing circles for their low salaries — perhaps explaining the tabloid’s often irritable tone.

…media centres are part-local state media, part-tourist boards, who often utilise foreign faces for international exposure, to mixed success. Ever wonder why cities like Chongqing or Zibo keep going viral? Or why YouTubers keep flocking to the same places in China? 

For those interested in the debate over whether Hong Kong cinema’s glory days are over, or who like seeing authentic stunts and effects rather than CGI/AI, or are just into mindless gore – if you don’t mind seeing the ending – the totally nuts final scene of 1992 Hong Kong movie Angel Terminators.

We don’t hear much about the Legislative Council these days. Although there are 90 of them, the all-patriots members are mostly low-profile. There’s the one who drove her car the wrong way down a street. And another who did something similar. Starry Lee is the chamber’s president? I guess I’d already heard – but it didn’t stick in my mind.

HKFP reports that the legislators are miffed after Ming Pao checked to see how much they spoke up during Council business…

The newspaper revealed last week that at least 17 lawmakers had never spoken at some committee meetings, with five having no speaking record for meetings of more than one committee.

The five include the New People’s Party’s Adrian Ho and Dominic Lee, and social welfare lawmaker Grace Chan.

Besides attending weekly, LegCo-wide general meetings on Wednesdays, all lawmakers are also members of smaller topic-based committees such as transport, education or security, which also hold regular meetings.

In response to Ming Pao’s findings, many of the lawmakers said that they did not want to repeat what had already been said by other legislators.

Who can argue with that? When all the members are picked to support whatever the executive branch says or does, you can’t have originality, alternative views or actual debate. What’s the point of 89 people taking it in turn to stand up and recite “what he said”? 

Former lawmaker Doreen Kong criticizes current members’ silence during a recent case of a sports coach allegedly abusing students…

“…regarding how society views the issue of the allegations … why won’t our representatives in the education and welfare sectors on the Legislative Council speak up in fairness to the students and athletes?” Kong asked.

She was one of the lawmakers who chose to stand down last year. Surely she realizes that, in an opposition-free chamber, no-one will express a view unless they know it agrees with the executive branch’s.

Actually, one did mention the issue. Junius Ho said…

“I love my father for teaching me, and I love my mother even more for beating me,” Ho said, suggesting an exemption for physical punishment under Hong Kong law. “If they didn’t beat me growing up, how would I have become [House Committee] deputy chair?”

I take back what I said about alternative views.

A commenter on Twitter…

The Legislative Council has lost all public credibility … They fail to scrutinize and check the government’s errors, denounce negligent officials, or align with the people’s will … and serve merely as a rubber stamp. We might as well do without it.

You certainly wonder why there are 90 of them.

From Flying Chopstick on Substack, a long, academic-type piece, partly critiquing a starry-eyed guy called Perez who thinks China has invented a space-age new form of governance, but mainly examining how Hong Kong fits into China’s system of government, with reference to last year’s Tai Po fire….

…After the Wang Fuk Court fire, a student who organized a petition for an independent inquiry was detained by national security police and later expelled from university. Other people were charged over comments about the fire, the inquiry committee declined to seek statutory powers, and the national-security office reportedly summoned foreign outlets and accused their coverage of distortion.

Hong Kong still formally protects speech, publication, assembly, and demonstration under Article 27 of the Basic Law, the constitutional document that came into force at the 1997 handover. In practice, the limits are learned through examples: an arrest, an expulsion, a prosecution, a lost job, a frightened institution. A writer learns the boundary by watching someone else cross it.

That is a poor environment for the criticism a government needs after a disaster. It is also an unusually clear environment for understanding a political system’s priorities. The central question here is whether China’s governing model stays responsive to reality when reality contradicts the Party’s preferred account of itself. Wang Fuk Court offers a grim answer.

What follows is a detailed explanation of…

…what the city lost when it dismantled the institutions that made official negligence expensive.

And the dismantling could not be selective. A councillor making a fuss about fire nets was not threatening Party rule, and neither was a toothless opposition that could not choose the Chief Executive or govern the city. The problem was precisely that it kept raising a fuss. It talked back. It made ministers answer questions they did not want asked, put evasions into the public record, and declined the performance of deference Beijing expects before official authority. The councillor making a fuss about fire nets was attached to the layer Beijing feared, and both came out together. What replaced the ecosystem was not silence in an empty space. It was a positive prohibition. Under the National Security Law and the sedition provisions, public criticism of the government and the police now carries legal risk, civil servants and district councillors swear loyalty oaths, and the student who asked for [an empowered] inquiry was expelled…

…Wang Fuk Court shows the limit of a system that constrained the public mechanisms most able to expose an institutional failure, then channeled public horror toward a safer story about [bamboo] scaffolding. 

(Perez’s piece is here, should you want it.)

HKFP reports criticism of the Hong Kong government’s clampdown on bookstores from a slightly unexpected source: a small conservative Christian group known mainly for its anti-gay views…

The Society for Truth and Light’s secretary general Choi Chi-sum said in a Friday statement that the bottom line of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” constitutional framework “is the freedom of speech.” 

“Citizens should not have to live in fear simply for expressing personal opinions or possessing publications that haven’t been ruled illegal by the courts,” he wrote in Chinese. 

…With most of the city’s outspoken civil society groups having disbanded in the wake of the Beijing-imposed national security law in 2020, the Christian group’s statement is a rare public rebuke of the government’s crackdown on independent bookstores. 

While authorities say police discovered books at the stores that contained content that could provoke hatred against the government, no official list of banned books has been made public. Secretary for Security Chris Tang has said authorities would not release such a list.

Choi said not publishing such a list is an “abuse of power and an act that undermines the spirit of the rule of law.”

Businesses should have legal frameworks to rely on, he added, “rather than having the legality of actions and speech decided solely by the subjective views of individual officials or law enforcement officers.”

Just visited a bookstore that the NatSec police haven’t raided yet – the Japanese books and magazines section at Sogo. Among possible seditious threats on the shelves: a lavishly illustrated tome on ideas for presenting toast; ditto for hotdogs; and Detective Bottom…

A new outlet for those with patriotic urges: CY Leung complains about property developers naming their residential projects in English only…

…the former chief executive argued that such a trend attempts to appear as high-end, criticizing that developments targeting Chinese buyers but lack a Chinese name are unacceptable. 

Surely, the names are so stupid they can’t even be translated. Or, they’re in French or Italian. Recent examples include La Mirabelle, Twin Victoria, Cloudview, Le Mont, The Pavilla Forest, Fleur Pavilia, Park Silicon, Grandview Oceania, Lime Spark, Mount Broadcast and the irresistible-sounding Nob Hill. And let’s not forget The Belchers.

The Economist tries to explain Hong Kong’s obsession with shutting down small bookstores…

Evidently the officers in charge of the raid had not expected such a big haul, or they would have brought more bins. The last of it had to be carried out in a suitcase. After the contraband came the suspect: a bespectacled woman, with a T-shirt printed “I am a bookstore employee”.

The raid on “Have a Nice Stay”, a bookstore in Hong Kong’s trendy Mong Kok district, on July 15th was part of the Hong Kong government’s campaign against retailers of the printed word. Since passing a draconian national-security law in 2020 authorities have gone after shops selling “seditious” texts. This was not even the day’s first operation. Outside the half-closed shutter of the nearby Greenfield bookstore, two plainclothes police officers brusquely told your correspondent to shove off. At least 11 booksellers have been arrested this year.

The government’s heavy-handed approach is puzzling. Any real danger from controversial texts is surely online, where they may be easily shared. And raiding bookshops looks patently repressive, especially to people in Taiwan who watch Hong Kong to see what Chinese rule might be like…

It is not to keep provocative titles out of eager readers’ hands. The government will not say what is forbidden, so booksellers cannot know what not to stock. The day before the raids “Have a Nice Stay” said it was closing, as it could not navigate the government’s “unclear red lines”. The police’s enormous haul suggests they might not know where the lines are either.

The article suggests three reasons for the crackdown: to eradicate spaces where a ‘collective memory’ of 2019 might survive; to display ‘hard power’ against resistance; and to please Beijing…

The police seem eager to justify the HK$18bn ($2.3bn) spent on national security since the law passed … Wang Zhenmin, the former legal chief of China’s Hong Kong liaison office and an influential voice, said on July 14th that national-security risks were “rising significantly” and urged stronger “enforcement mechanisms”.

The author also predicts more to come. After the bookshops, what next? Overseas scholarships, of course – but they’re hard to raid. Independent media, perhaps just a matter of time. Then… Hair salons? Pet shops? 7-Elevens?

For Hong Kong stats followers (or those who rely on stats followers) – Joel Chan has started a blog.

Yesterday’s on-line Standard carried an op-ed (or ‘news’ story) warning that overseas exchange and training opportunities, including the Fulbright and Chevening scholarships, are being used to groom agents for evil foreign forces…

…Some political figures have bluntly stated that such courses use all-inclusive flights and accommodation as a draw but are essentially carefully designed political schemes aimed at recruiting individuals from all walks of life to cultivate them into agents for external forces.

Looking comprehensively at the trajectories of numerous anti-China and Hong Kong-disrupting elements in recent years, it is not hard to discover that such courses are exactly the channels through which external forces identify and cultivate their agents.

From black-clad riot leaders Nathan Law and Joshua Wong, to Ronson Chan, former chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association—which has repeatedly been pointed out by the outside world as an anti-China and Hong Kong-disrupting organization—and Bao Choy, founder of an anti-government online media outlet, all have participated in similar programs.

Facing the deliberate infiltration of external forces, political figures remind all sectors of society not to let their guard down.

In particular, the vast number of youths and elites from all sectors must maintain a clear head at all times, reject these vain temptations that are actually sugar-coated traps, recognize the political schemes behind these so-called “exchanges” and “trainings,” and absolutely avoid being utilized by anti-China forces to become pawns or even betray their country.

…external forces will seize the opportunity to repeatedly instill hostile, anti-China, and Hong Kong-disrupting ideologies into the participants, distorting their perception of the country and the SAR government.

They imperceptibly implant stances and emotions of confronting the state, striving to completely transform the participants so that they willingly serve the external forces.

Haven’t checked, but (like most Standard content) it’s probably a translation from Sing Tao. Too repetitive and ideologically obsessive to be AI. Probably crafted by a full-time ranter at Beijing’s Ta Kung Wen Wei Po. A weird piece for something that’s not state media. But recall that Lingua Sinica story from Wednesday. Sing Tao group then: “We need a property-developer puff piece.” Sing Tao group now: “We need a NatSec scare piece.”

If you like AI-drafted editorials, enjoy today’s ‘Beyond headline rebound: converting Hong Kong’s macro momentum into enduring capital depth’.

Meanwhile, AP reports from Macau…

Au [Kam San] is the first publicly known arrest under Macao’s national security law since its 2009 enactment and critics say his case signals Beijing’s emphasis on security and intolerance of dissenting voices, even though Macao’s pro-democracy activism has never been as influential as the movement in neighboring Hong Kong.

Au is accused of providing false information to anti-China organizations overseas to incite hatred against Beijing and the government in Macao, which has become a Chinese casino hub.

He has faced several restrictions since his arrest including the choice of a lawyer, raising concerns over the fairness of a future trial.

…When he was arrested, police alleged Au had colluded with an unspecified anti-China group outside the city and provided false and seditious materials for public display online or abroad. He also was accused of maintaining long-term contact with multiple entities beyond Macao that oppose China and repeatedly providing false information to them or their media outlets.

A court upheld the indictment on July 2, ruling Au was the “perpetrator” in multiple offenses including subverting state power, breach of confidentiality and establishing contact with organizations, groups or people outside Macao to commit acts endangering national security.

Some weekend reading…

Animation Obsessive Substack piece on Studio Ghibli’s Michiyo Yasuda …

As Ghibli got established, its colors stood apart. They were more nuanced, more subdued, richer than the norm. That was Yasuda’s area. “The reason animation films suffer creatively has to do with the fact that they all use the same colors,” Miyazaki argued in the ‘80s. “It’s like, ‘Oh, the color of animation.’ … I believe that Ghibli is the only studio that has really managed to develop such unique colors.”

Yasuda didn’t brag about what she did. Her work was, she emphasized, just a step in the process. “I create colors to add life to the drawings and to communicate the director’s intentions as much as possible,” she once said.

…color puts across the tactile textures of the world, and the color of a single pond might change dramatically based on angle and time of day. Yasuda and Miyazaki invented whole new terms. “ ‘Underwater color’ is when an object submerged in water is seen from the outside. … ‘Glass-transparency color’ is when an object is seen through glass,” Miyazaki explained. 

For archaeology fans – Phys Org on an ancient Amazonian civilization.

Stephen Roach, former boss of Morgan Stanley Asia, writes a piece updating and defending his belief that ‘Hong Kong is over’…

This dramatic transformation into Xianggang is the real story. Hong Kong’s defenders are in denial about this new chameleon-like identity, instead viewing it as another example of the city’s inherent resilience. Nice try.

…Hong Kong is less a thriving global IPO market than a major platform for Chinese issuers.

The rule of law, long regarded as one of Hong Kong’s greatest institutional advantages, has been severely compromised. In 2020, China bypassed the Hong Kong legislature and imposed a sweeping national security law… These changes have stifled open debate, resulted in new arrests and harsh sentences for previously imprisoned activists, led to closures of independent bookstores, and destroyed any semblance of a free press.

…Jonathan Sumption, one of England’s most brilliant jurists … warned in the Financial Times that a Mainland strain of “judicial ‘patriotism'” was poisoning the city’s legal system.

…The Hong Kong government seems to think that Chinese-style central planning offers new hope for its economy and recently launched its first five-year plan. But, as China is painfully learning, such plans can often over-promise and under-deliver.

Nothing very new. The Acting Financial Secretary delivers a fairly mild rebuttal. He could have issued a witty parody: Yes – Stephen Roach, one-time superstar of the fund management gurus, is now an 80-year-old has-been. But no. 

Nor does the Acting Financial Secretary mention bookstores. HKFP reports that 50-year-old Greenfield Books is closing, after NatSec police arrested staff for allegedly selling volumes with ‘seditious intentions’…

Greenfield is the third bookstore this month to announce its closure. The raids came a day after Have a Nice Stay said it would shut down the following month, citing financial difficulties and “unclear red lines.”

Another independent bookstore, Elmbook, also announced a week before the raids that it will close its physical store. The announcement came after it and Luck Win Bookshop were reportedly banned from taking part in the annual Hong Kong Book Fair.

Closures of Hong Kong bookstores have received wide coverage in international media, such as the latest from the Japan Times…. 

Authorities have cracked down on bookshops over alleged “seditious” material under Hong Kong’s homegrown national security law passed in 2024, in addition to broader legislation imposed by Beijing after democracy protests seized the financial hub in 2019.

After this month’s raids, security chief Chris Tang said booksellers must ensure the items they sell “do not endanger national security.”

And when the NatSec police have eradicated the bookstore threat – what comes next? It doesn’t exactly help officials who want to push Hong Kong as a ‘free, open, efficient, secure  international financial center’.