Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Some cynics among us might assume that Hong Kong’s first Five-Year Plan is mainly box-ticking symbolism – a big box of economic and patriotic buzzwords wrapped in a Mainland-sounding package. But a (paywalled) Bloomberg op-ed sees it as a decisive shift away from laissez-faire to the sort of industrial policy seen today in many economies (such the US’s push to encourage domestic chip production)…

Northern Metropolis is where Hong Kong aims to attract R&D investments and global talent. By tapping neighboring Shenzhen’s manufacturing powerhouse, Hong Kong can build competence in emerging technologies like quantum computing, allowing the city to diversify its economy toward tech services. 

It’s not as if Hong Kong was previously a libertarian paradise. The government owns all the land, and since the mid-80s – when Beijing for some reason demanded tight limits to land auctions – maintaining high land valuations has been a major government priority. This pushed up real-estate prices, and gave the government and developers easy revenues/profits. It seemed like a neat trick while the Mainland economy underwent its massive post-Mao boom and Hong Kong enjoyed a ‘gateway to China’ monopoly. Hong Kong officials didn’t mind that property speculation and landlordism wiped out genuine wealth-creating entrepreneurism so long as land revenues and property prices kept going up.

By the 2010s, this skim-hub game was getting past its sell-by date. Housing prices were a core reason for anger among the population – which boiled over in 2019. And Hong Kong found itself overpriced and uncompetitive for many economic activities. Unable to conceive of any alternative to the property scam, officials attempted to kick-start hubs and zones, most of which relied on granting privileged sectors access to relatively cheap space. It always has to be about real estate.

The Five-Year Plan expands on this approach, aiming – as the Bloomberg piece puts it…

…to make the private sector commit to long-gestation investments that it may otherwise avoid given the enormous uncertainties along the way.

Forty years after most factories relocated over the border, ‘manufacturing and new industrialization’ is supposed to grow by 10% a year and account for over 5% of GDP ‘after’ 2030. But where is Hong Kong’s comparative advantage? Why would you invest in bio-tech, robotics or quantum computing on this side of the border?

A more radical approach would be to admit that the city’s cost base is not a reflection of quality so much as a bad policy choice. Let it rip: replace up-front land premiums with a plain annual property tax, allow the market to build a few hundred thousand decent-sized affordable homes up in the New Territories, and see what enterprising Hong Kong people can do with the landlords off their backs.  

US lawmakers introduce a bill to ‘establish a deterrence and accountability framework for Hong Kong political prisoners’…

The legislation would require the State Department to determine within 30 days whether abuse, medical neglect, torture, detention conditions, or other actions contributed to a political prisoner’s death and identify those responsible. It would then mandate sanctions within 60 days against responsible or complicit PRC and Hong Kong officials, requiring international coordination, as well as requiring regular reporting to Congress on the health of, and access to, Jimmy Lai and other political prisoners. 

For nostalgic old folks: a UK 1986 news item on the Queen’s visit to Hong Kong. Old places and faces – and a ‘rather motley fly-by’…

The 2026 Policy Address is here, and the first Five-Year Plan is here. Or is it the other way round? One has a green cover, while the other is blue. The Policy Address starts by saying the Five-Year Plan is super-important. The Five-Year Plan agrees, and adds that it ‘leads’, while the Policy Address ‘implements’. (Also, the Budget ‘supports’, while the annual report ‘gives accounts’. All this is to ‘advance each task in an orderly manner’.) 

The Policy Address focuses on NatSec, integration, patriotism, hubs, promoting fertility, and supporting and enhancing everything. The Five-Year Plan is similar, but leans toward promoting and developing everything, plus some supporting and advancing. And lots of anti-terrorism exercises.

HKFP reports on the AI City Brain and other stuff. CK Asset, CUHK, Swire, the Airport Authority, HKTDC and Henderson Land all issue statements welcoming everything.

I feel sorry for the bureaucrat-scribes who had to ensure that all the right buzzwords appeared in both documents, while trying to avoid too much obvious and tedious overlap.

Enjoy!

A CFHK report on abuse in Hong Kong prisons says that correctional staff in Hong Kong are rehearsing procedures for the death of Jimmy Lai. Good luck accessing this from inside Hong Kong, where CFHK’s website is blocked. I have been able to find the key points…

Targeting of political prisoners. Political detainees are singled out for round-the-clock monitoring, extra searches, screening and seizure of their letters, and separation from the wider population. Guards have imposed both collective punishment and solitary confinement for those who voice dissent or communicate with supporters outside prison.

Compulsory political indoctrination through “Project PATH.” The Correctional Services Department (CSD)—with direction from the Beijing controlled Committee for Safeguarding National Security—uses political “rehabilitation” programs to indoctrinate prisoners with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) views and dissuade them from pro-democracy advocacy. Since 2021, the “Project PATH” program has forced inmates to attend pro-CCP classes, watch propaganda films, and sit through confessional counseling sessions. Allegedly 99 percent of protester prisoners participated willingly, but refusal can lead to loss of privileges as well as solitary confinement.

Systemic physical and sexual abuse by “B-boys” in juvenile prisons. A CSD-imposed hierarchy among inmates in juvenile prisons allows “B-boy” orderlies to beat, extort, and sexually assault others. “Sexual violence happens all the time” in juvenile prisons, sums up one victim. Juvenile prisoners feared B-boys more than staff, underscoring an entrenched culture of delegated brutality.

Assaults by CSD staff. Prisoners described specific locations in the prison system where CSD staff regularly take prisoners to beat or pepper spray them.

Solitary confinement as a routine form of punishment and control. CSD relies on both formal solitary confinement and supposedly non-punitive “removal from association” authority to isolate political prisoners for weeks, months, or even years. In 2024 the number of inmates in solitary units reached 879 cases, the highest level measured over the past three years. The practice regularly exceeds the 15-day limit for solitary confinement set by international law. Remarkably, the authorities maintain that in every case that lasted more than four months, the inmates themselves requested to be placed in solitary. This includes high-profile political prisoners, like Jimmy Lai and “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung, who were subject to even harsher isolation.

Chronic medical neglect. Former inmates report widespread difficulties obtaining proper medical care, including untreated seizures, broken bones, and full-body rashes. We document the case of a prisoner who died due to official neglect after showing severe signs of psychological distress. CSD staff often dismiss injuries as feigned, refusing requests for treatment. Extraordinary hurdles to receiving specialized care deter most prisoners from even attempting to obtain it, and inmates are often denied their ongoing prescription medication upon entering prison.

Squalid infrastructure and hygiene. Many prison cells leak during rain, toilets stay broken for weeks, insects infest bedding, rats crawl out of toilets, and prisoners are denied air conditioning despite temperatures regularly topping 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) confined with heat-absorbing concrete amid sweltering humidity.

Restrictions on visits and communication. Political inmates report confiscation of books, intense surveillance or abrupt cancellations of visits, letters that disappear without reaching their intended recipient, threats to cut outside contact unless they remain silent, and being denied funeral leave due to their status as political detainees.

Psychiatric detention weaponized for silence and coercion. Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre is used to punish “troublesome” prisoners; some spend days in isolation there without seeing a doctor, while high-profile detainees can disappear there for months under claims of medical confidentiality.

Retaliation against complaints. There is no genuine independent grievance system; CSD ultimately holds authority over resolution of complaints and systematically protects its own. Guards regularly dissuade prisoners from filing complaints and retaliate against complainants through sudden disciplinary charges, transfer to solitary confinement, or assignment to mental health treatment at Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre.

Vulnerable groups suffer compounded harm. Transgender inmates are misgendered and denied hormones while being relegated to Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre; gay and lesbian prisoners are placed in “protective” but restrictive segregation; and elderly or infirm detainees struggle to secure basic aids such as extra blankets and specialized care.

Behind a plain old-fashioned paywall – Bloomberg op-ed on Joshua Wong…

Wong, who has been behind bars for six years, is the only person to be prosecuted twice under the [NatSec] law. A four-year delay in bringing the second case looked calculated to prolong his sentence and keep him in prison beyond his expected 2027 release date. 

…to a security-focused, one-party state, any autonomous organized network capable of mobilizing large crowds is likely to look more like an attempted color revolution, probably instigated or fomented by foreign actors. This is exactly the party’s view of the 2019 protests, which is a calumny on the intelligence and independent-mindedness of Hong Kong’s young people. Chinese state media has for years branded Wong as an anti-China separatist, traitor and pawn of hostile foreign forces.

The twain will probably never meet. It only remains for us to decide how to respond. The liberal-democratic world has lost confidence in itself in recent years, assailed by the rise of authoritarian populists, perturbed by weak economic growth and intimidated by the growing power of China. That’s no excuse for fatalism. Are we willing to sell our principles for some cheap cars when braver people who were taught our values and acted to defend them languish in prison? I hope not.

Wen Wei Po is apparently upset about this being freely available.

An all-patriots district council member is convicted of sex with a minor. (HKFP reports that the court heard evidence from a tree expert.)

We now await the sentence. The girl was 13. Shall we take Chow Hang-tung’s seven years – for saying China should end its one-party system – as a starting point?

Forgot to save the link, but I read that 37% of Americans think vaccines (eg for rabies) could give their dogs autism.

A neat summary of why AI is 90% hype…

AI uses a probability-based approach to knowledge and is largely imitative. It can process data and make predictions, but human cognition relies on theory-based causal reasoning. 

The only uses I have found for things categorized as ‘AI’ are: enhancements to search engines and word-processing; optical character recognition (for translating/transcribing text in images); and bots that serve as user-interfaces (giving or searching info, such as booking a doctor’s appointment). In other words, not the generative AI that does kids’ homework, churns out visual and other slop, produces hallucinations, and in other ways fails to replicate actual human creativity and the intelligence that only a sentient being with its own memories, experiences and emotions can have. Some people have found productive uses for it – collating research, or whatever – but it’s not going to bring about a second Industrial Revolution.

The visionary geniuses putting US$1 trillion into this white elephant now desperately need to find an excuse to postpone IPOs that would expose their companies’ rotten fundamentals. So they contrive anthropomorphist ‘rogue agent’ scare stories about their own products – computer programs that can be unplugged in a second – destroying humanity.

Brian Hioe in New Bloom Mag critiques a now-notorious Atlantic piece by yet another Western journalist who is clueless about Taiwan…

Fittingly, Shuster opens with two paragraphs of fawning awe over Chinese President Xi Jinping. From this, one generally has a sense that Shuster is simply taken in by the pomp and circumstance that China has sought to project with its state institutions. No surprise, then, that when Taiwan’s legislature appears in the piece, some three-quarters through the piece, as compared to the grandeur of a dictator, it is described only as a “drab building on a narrow street in the center of Taipei.” 

…Shuster does not even seem to understand that the KMT is the Chinese Nationalist Party, referring to it early on in his article as Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, a basic factual error.  

Seen on Twitter yesterday…

The Too Simple, Sometimes Naive substack story on Nury Vittachi’s Friday Everyday financing is now outside the paywall. A well-researched piece on someone apparently doing a 180-degree turn on core values, presumably for the money…

Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference  member Hu Xiaoming is … explicit in tying Friday Culture to wider Party goals. Under a picture of him holding a work report, standing in front of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Hu states:

“The mission of Friday Culture is what the 20th CPC National Congress report calls “telling China’s story well, spreading China’s voice effectively, and showcasing a credible, lovable, and respectable image of China.”

… In 2014, [Nury] wrote for Asia Sentinel:

The “Tiananmen Square massacre” became “the incident”. In some references, “incident” was further diluted to “accident”. It was as if Chinese leaders had said, “Oops, ran over the protestors with tanks, silly us.”

Compare that to today. Since forming Friday Everyday, each June, Vittachi puts out content “correcting the facts about Tiananmen”. Last year’s entry, titled: “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern history” was reprinted in full by Pravda, Russia’s state newspaper.

Patrick Poon on Joshua Wong’s trial…

While waiting for the sentencing, we should ask whether the courts in Hong Kong will still consider a sentence reduction for a guilty plea, as has traditionally been the practice. I wonder whether the court will take this into account at all, or whether it could impose an excessively long sentence, or even life imprisonment, as some people have expressed concern. If the court no longer considers a guilty plea as a mitigating factor, I would ask what the rationale is for requiring defendants to make submissions in mitigation. I would also challenge the legal community to explain the purpose of the mitigation process if it no longer has any meaningful effect. 

Brian Kern discusses the authorities’ view of Joshua Wong…

There are no Hong Kongers whom the Chinese Communist Party has invested more energy and propaganda into vilifying and maligning than Joshua and Jimmy Lai. According to the CCP world view, any time people rise up, it is because there are “black hands” manipulating them behind the scenes. In the case of Hong Kong, those black hands are Jimmy and Joshua—they duped the gullible citizens. The other secret ingredient in CCP paranoia is “foreign forces.” That is also present here: Jimmy and Joshua both “colluded with foreign forces” against the regime. And this ludicrously fantastic narrative is why, after they slapped Jimmy with his most recent sentence of 20 years, they’re going after Joshua. They want to make examples of them both, and they’re bending the courts of Hong Kong to conform with the regime’s false narrative.

In the case of Jimmy, 20 years for a 78-year-old man amounts to what many have pointed out is essentially a life sentence.

With Joshua, it’s a bit more complicated.

Desmond Shum details foreign analysts’ shifting view of China’s economy during the year…

I would summarize the progression like this:

January–March:
China is resilient, but increasingly unbalanced.

April–June:
The imbalance is structural, and technological success does not solve it.

July:
Failure to rebalance increasingly looks like long-term decline or economic decay rather than another cyclical downturn.

August–September:
China’s domestic weakness and industrial overcapacity are becoming problems for the rest of the world.

Like a herd of sheep (though in fairness, some economists have been quite outspoken about the imbalances for several years).

Lingua Sinica looks at how Beijing handled news coverage of the flooding disaster on the Tibet-Nepal border…

Our findings show that Chinese authorities were essentially effective in ensuring that the source of information on the breaking story was contained to a small number of central-level Party-state media, including the government-run Xinhua News Agency and the various outlets — such as China Central Television (CCTV) and China Radio International (CRI) — under the powerful China Media Group (CMG), the conglomerate directly under the Central Propaganda Department. 

Tung Chee-hwa dies. The Economist says…

He had an impossible job, and did it badly.

Although mercilessly mocked while in office, old ‘Tofu-for-Brains’ will probably be remembered by Hong Kong’s handover-straddling generation as the least bad of post-1997 chief executives – so far. He wasn’t an arrogant civil servant devoid of policy ideas (though he was pushed around by them, and stumbled in implementing new ideas in housing and education). He wasn’t an ideologue or a chip-on-shoulder nationalist. He didn’t hate anyone, and (to the delight of tycoons) was something of a soft touch. 

During the tough times of the Asian financial crisis and SARS, he fell into the trap of eagerly agreeing with detractors that Hong Kong was in a far greater mess than it really was. A skilled political player would have shown concern for citizens in genuine hardship, but mostly exhibited a relaxed confidence – which the fundamentals at the time warranted. 

In this respect, Tung personified the most obvious shift in Hong Kong’s governance style post-97. The pre-handover leaders of the 80s and 90s (think Youde, Wilson, Patton and officials like Piers Jacobs or Libby Wong) looked at ease in trying to keep up with fast-growing public expectations of government, and displayed pride in the city and its people. From Tung onwards, it was constant panic and defensiveness – and ultimately closure of newspapers and jailing of critics. 

HKFP on the HK Alliance sentencing…

Friday’s ruling said that the present case did not involve violence or the threat of violence, “nor had the defendant put forward any specific means of implementation or timetable” to end one-party rule in mainland China – one of the Alliance’s central tenets. Nevertheless, the court still found that the offence was “of a serious nature.” 

From the Guardian…

The court found they had “incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power”. 

…The case had centred on a slogan that was used for decades by the Alliance: “end one-party dictatorship”. The court ruled that the defendants “intended to cause others to lose confidence in the Chinese Communist party by stirring up hostility and causing division”. The defence said that the Alliance was simply exercising its right to freedom of speech.

One supporter who attended the sentencing told the Guardian: “A demonstration that lasted for more than 35 years without any problem is suddenly being seen as subversion.”

They organized an annual gathering that was held for 30 years – after obtaining necessary police permission – expressing the opinion that China would be better off without a one-party system. Interesting that the most damning condemnation the NatSec judges could manage was to say the three intended to blah blah blah. The vigils and slogans had no impact on the CCP’s hold on power.

HKFP reports reactions of friends and foes of the Alliance. NatSec Police boss Steve Li believes the sentences prove the seriousness of the crime and rightly punish ‘obstinacy’… 

“From the sentences handed down to the three, it can be seen that they are responsible for extremely serious offences,” Li said. “It was to be expected that Chow Hang-tung, who showed no remorse and was obstinate to the end, received the heaviest sentence.”

I’m off to Hokkaido. In a tragic case of mis-timing, I will be back before the Five Year Plan-cum-Policy Address on September 16. Indeed, I will barely miss the 11th Belt-cum-Road Summit.

Some stuff…

Joshua Wong will be in court today, facing a possible life sentence for ‘collusion with foreign forces’.

From Brian Kern’s substack – more translations of Chow Hang-tung’s writings from jail.

A Hong Kong academic studying in Europe explores the Hong Kong diaspora in Taiwan. (Tells you rather more about social sciences research than Hong Kong emigres – but still interesting.)

The Guardian looks at Western social-media influencers fetishizing China…

“The younger generation feel like there is no meaningful method to change society. They feel defeated when they see what’s happening in Gaza – there’s been protests but the government doesn’t care and is collaborating with atrocities in wars. There’s also the Epstein files in America, which show how the elite is corrupt,” says Badiucao, who, along with Chan, is in Sydney to promote their new book, You Must Take Part in Revolution.

“When you want to see change, there is the hard way, which is being innovative and finding a solution. And there is the lazy way, which is finding a cheap alternative and fantasising about a faraway, oriental, communist country that might be your future,” he says.

Jimmy Lai biographer Mark Clifford op-ed in Japan Times on the HK Alliance convictions…

Chow Hang-tung first went to jail for lighting a candle… 

…Defendants in Hong Kong supposedly have a constitutional right to trial by jury, part of the package of guarantees that ended 156 years of British colonial rule.

But the courts toss out that constitutional protection when it suits them. In National Security Law cases — and now virtually any charge can be defined as a security case — the government tries cases before hand-picked judges drawn from a secret list … Little surprise that authorities have an almost unbroken string of convictions since the National Security Law was imposed on Hong Kong six years ago.

With the local media muzzled, Hong Kongers find themselves living in something of an Alice-in-Wonderland world. Contrary to the facts, the government and its judges even claim that there aren’t any political trials at all.

In Chow’s case, according to the court’s summary of the verdict, judges “emphasized that the defendants were put on trial not because of their political views or beliefs…

Few people could believe such an obvious lie.

The real reason Chow and her fellow Hong Kong Alliance members face a 10-year prison charge is because they dare to publicly oppose the Chinese Communist Party by uttering the words “end one-party dictatorship.” Four words. Ten years. But “not because of their political views or beliefs.”

…[Chow Hang-tung] told the court…

“Telling the truth is recast as inciting hatred, seeking justice as exploiting suffering, limiting power as violating the Constitution, and returning power to the people as subverting the state.” She accused the prosecution of “slander[ing] the Constitution.” By ending one-party dictatorship, she “seeks to end a state in which the Party stands above the law.” What could be illegal about that, asked Chow?

…She was being held without bail at Tai Lam prison while awaiting the verdict. Yet the treatment she described hardly reflected a presumption of innocence:

“It’s no longer just simple handcuffs; now they use a full set of handcuffs, leg irons, waist chains, and ankle chains, and then lead the prisoners like dogs on a chain.” Chow concedes that the written description makes the treatment sound “just more inconvenient and somewhat humiliating, nothing like torture. But it’s only when you actually put on those shackles that you realize the devil is in the details.”

From HKFP – pictures of the Have a Nice Stay bookshop’s last day. Emily Lau was among the hundreds who turned up.

And some pix from last night – 831 – near Prince Edward MTR station.

Enforcement agencies arrest 50 people for bid-rigging in building maintenance projects. If only they had done this a year ago, before over 160 people died at Wang Fuk Court.

In HKFP – Chow Hang-tung’s mitigation…

Believing that dictatorship is wrong and democracy is right – if that isn’t a belief, then what is? Even if the courts and the government attempt to claim, like a chanted mantra, that they are not judging beliefs, they cannot change the reality: under this judgment, anyone who believes in the principle of ‘ending one-party dictatorship’ has nowhere left to stand. In the eyes of this brand of ‘law’, holding such a thought inherently contravenes the Constitution – rendering it unlawful, an original sin. Even when we engage in entirely legitimate acts, such as commemorating June 4th, it becomes a crime simply because of the perceived ‘impropriety’ of our thoughts.

Yet the law cannot govern what a person thinks. Not only is it incapable of doing so, but when it openly defies the human conscience, it is the law itself that ultimately suffers – forfeiting its very legitimacy.

Via Brian Kerner, a description of what happened in court…

When she actually gave her mitigation statement in court, she was repeatedly interrupted by the judges who clearly felt uncomfortable with someone speaking like this in their courtroom. At first, one judge said that her words might be more appropriate for another setting. Apparently the judges thought she was attempting to relitigate the case. It got to the point where one judge asked directly, “So, you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, right?” Hang-tung replied, “I don’t think so.”…

…Hang-tung: “The trial has spread the message of ‘ending one-party rule’ in Hong Kong to the whole world. Originally, our voices weren’t so loud.’“

Judge, with a smile: “Then you should thank us, right?”

Hang-tung, also with a smile: “Yes, that’s right, thank you very much to the court.”

Judge: “Just kidding. We have handled the matter seriously.”

Hang-tung: “I said I shouldn’t sit in jail for even a day.”

It was then noted that Chow Hang-tung has already been remanded in custody for 1,404 days.

SBS on the fate of one activist after 2019…

At 21, Sam Chan Chi-sum was preparing to leave Hong Kong to continue his studies overseas.

Instead, he went to prison for nearly two years.

He’d been involved with a student activist group that collected sweets and toiletries to send to people jailed after Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-government protests.

Authorities accused the group of using the supplies to build support among prisoners and incite opposition to the government.

In September 2021, Sam was arrested under Hong Kong’s sweeping National Security Law, which had been passed a year earlier, and was convicted of “subversion with the intent of overthrowing the government”.

“Prison was awful. I shared a cell with around twenty people. At its most crowded, there could be forty of us,” he said.

“The pillows stank and the blankets were infested with cockroaches.”

Quoting ex-CFA judge Jonathan Sumption…

“I resigned early in June 2024 … because I felt that the outcome of that [HK 47] case showed that the judiciary in Hong Kong was not prepared to stand up to China,” he said.

“Hong Kong is becoming a totalitarian state because political dissent is no longer tolerated.”

The Too Simple, Sometimes Naive blog on how Nury Vittachi is funded…

Launched in 2021, [Friday Everyday] describes itself as an “independent” outlet and “not financed by Beijing”. It says it eschews “politically divisive issues” and instead wants: “zen journalism”.

Yet, if you’ve stumbled on them, it was probably through social media of … Nury Vittachi. Popular posts include: Tiananmen Square (“hoax”), the ‘Xinjiang genocide’ (“hoax”), and Iranian supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei (“cool”).

Most of the article is paywalled, so I’m not sure exactly who the ‘United Front cadres’ are – but hardly a shock to find out that such sources back Hong Kong’s contribution to the Anglosphere’s pro-Beijing/tanky grift ecosystem. Could they spare a few bucks to teach the guy how to pronounce Pinyin?

Reuters on Hong Kong’s latest book closure…

People queued on Sunday to chat, browse and bid farewell to an independent Hong Kong bookstore before it shut, following a July police raid over alleged seditious ​books and what the store owners said was a “poor business performance”.

Snaking lines formed outside ‌the bookstore, Have a Nice Stay, stretching down the staircase in Hong Kong’s Kowloon district. Only 20 people at a time were allowed to enter the roughly 600 square-foot space.

The city’s once-flourishing independent bookstore industry has rapidly dwindled since ​Beijing imposed sweeping national security legislation on the city in 2020.

Many offered a broader range ​of political and social titles than mainstream retailers and became important spaces for ⁠civil society through book talks and workshops.

In China File, Jeremy Goldkorn goes back to China for the first time in years… 

It may be hard to make money in China in 2026, but it is very pleasant to spend it. A major element of involution is the brutal competition in every market that puts downward pressure on prices as consumers, spoiled for choice, demand higher and higher quality. Hotels, trains, flights, food, clothes, cars, phones, electronics, massages, mountaineering gear, Labubus: all are cheap compared to the United States.

But first you have to figure out how to pay for stuff. The country has gone cashless, and you need a mobile phone tied to a verified identity to use Alipay and WeChat Wallet, and these are the only digital wallets that work. 

…Aside from the ubiquitous cameras, it is not possible to move around a city on any form of transport or pay for anything without the apps, and they always know who and where you are. In Yangzhou’s Geyuan … you need to watch a video advertisement and scan your face to get toilet paper. Once only: the dispenser remembers who you are and won’t give you seconds. Some parts of Beijing look like a spoof science fiction film about a surveillance state: we visited a friend in a part of Haidian District where there are a lot of government buildings and housing compounds. There are horizontal bars above the street every 50 meters, each bar holding more than a dozen different cameras—we counted them. Our friend pointed out the different types: that one reads license plates, this one is for facial recognition of pedestrians, this one scans the faces of people inside cars, that one is used for gait recognition…

Semafor compares two Chinese tycoons…

…both share one thing in common: They are products of a system that concentrates massive resources at the command of the state, in the process generating colossal waste and leaving a trail of debt and industrial overcapacity. In sum, the pair represent how the business cycle in China plays out. 

…Hui [Ka Yan, ex-Evergrand boss now serving life in prison] is the fall guy for China’s real estate meltdown. No doubt his crimes are real, but he was also only playing his part in what was essentially a Ponzi scheme that everybody — from village committees to the Politburo — relied upon to drive growth and generate employment. Real estate speculation wasn’t a flaw in the system; it was for a time China’s primary development model. Developers like Hui came to see the market as a one-way bet — why would the government spoil its own party? — and in a sense, loading up on risky debt was a rational strategy.  

Michael Pettis asks who pays for the clearing of Chinese state banks’ bad debts. Another way of putting it: why is household consumption so weak?

…when the owners or creditors are politically powerful—or when imposing losses on them threatens broader financial stability—governments often intervene to socialize the losses instead. There are many ways to do this, but in almost every case the losses are ultimately transferred, often indirectly, to the household sector. This can occur through explicit fiscal bailouts financed by taxes, through inflation, or through financial repression that transfers income from depositors and other holders of monetary assets to borrowers. 

This leads to two fundamental points that are essential for understanding China’s banking cleanup. First, losses never disappear, even when they appear to. They are always absorbed by some sector of the economy. Second, loans that finance projects whose economic value ultimately proves to be less than their cost represent real economic losses, whether or not those losses are immediately recognized. Moving bad loans from one balance sheet to another does not eliminate them. It merely changes the way in which the losses will be allocated. 

The Jamestown Foundation on the growing alliance between China and Russia…

While Beijing is in control, and there is real and growing asymmetry between the two countries, excessive focus on Moscow as a weakened “junior partner” that fights costly wars, supplies discounted energy, and repeatedly seeks concessions from Beijing misses both the integration now taking place and the strategic assets Russia still contributes.

Asian Review of Books looks at Entangled Empires: Four Centuries of China-Russia Relations…

Putin and Xi indeed look rather chummy. But how broad, deep and lasting are the ties that bind their two nations? According to Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner, two historians of Eastern Europe, the answer is not as much as many might think. To their mind, “florid proclamations of friendship are undoubtedly a façade behind which historic rivalries persist.” 

While Hong Kong pays lip-service to TCM for patriotic reasons, the city’s government is otherwise sensible about serious public-health measures like vaccinations. In the US, top health officials are pretty much denying that measles can be deadly; RFK Jr – when he’s not swimming in sewage and promoting unpasteurized milk – says chicken soup can cure it. From Science-Based Medicine. 

Prospect Magazine on Chow Hang-tung…

…she advocated for labourers in mainland China and built connections with Chinese dissidents. During frequent visits to friends there, Chow gained a reputation for her bravery, as well as her capacity to drink large quantities of Chinese white wine.

She was sometimes criticised by fellow activists in the Hong Kong democracy movement for focusing on the rights of mainland dissidents over issues closer to home. But according to her friend, the activist Patrick Poon, Chow was “prophetic” in seeing how the experience of dissidents in China foreshadowed what was to happen in Hong Kong. While many of the movement’s leaders had fled abroad, he says Chow was determined to remain inside the region. 

“What she saw and heard in mainland China made her realise more deeply that whether a society has freedom, rule of law and civil rights is not an abstract political concept, but directly affects the lives of every ordinary person,” her fiancé Ye Du tells me. He is barred from leaving China and has been placed under strict surveillance. The couple have not been able to communicate with each other since February last year.

One early morning in June 2021, police smashed down the door to her barrister’s chambers…

HKFP on Hong Kong’s first Chinese medicine hospital…

In addition to launching inpatient services, the hospital will expand existing outpatient services, including those offered in its radiological diagnostic and pathology departments. 

The hospital will also introduce 10 new special disease programmes in September and November, covering conditions such as eczema, Parkinson’s disease, and functional gastrointestinal disorders. 

Never knew that Chinese folk medicine uses scientific equipment like X-rays, ultrasound, etc. Do these procedures detect qi? For political reasons, Hong Kong must devote resources to what the Skeptic’s Dictionary defines as…

…a hodgepodge of diagnostic and healing practices developed over many centuries across a vast expanse of land that roughly corresponds to what today we call China. 

…these practices evolved long before the development of science and science-based medicine. What is called Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a label that mischaracterizes two millennia of various healing traditions as if they comprised a monolithic brand. 

…Underlying every aspect of TCM is a metaphysical system that has little, if any, correlation to science-based medicine. This is not surprising since the many practices of TCM developed before science as we know it began evolving in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It is also not surprising that the many attempts to confirm the scientific validity of TCM practices have largely failed since there is no plausible “mechanism of action for most of its therapies.”*

(Back in the late 1990s – the early days of the Internet – I emailed skepdic.com author Robert Todd Carroll and mentioned that his tone towards defenders of quack science and conspiracy theories was refreshingly rude. He replied: “It’s the only language they understand.”)