Some Mid-Week Links

Hitherto Unheard-of Organization of the Week Award goes to the ‘Institute of Dining Professionals’, mentioned in this story on continued Night Vibes debate, also featuring a Wanchai District Council guy pointing out that the Mainland has more/better/cheaper night markets than Hong Kong (as does every country in Asia).

RFA reports that Chinese propaganda officials tried to get DJ Edmund ‘Giggs’ Wan to set up a pro-Beijing YouTube channel after his release from jail. He’s now in Canada. 

From the Standard, patriots-only lawmakers struggle to get the hang of their generous allowances, sneaking off from meals with journos without paying the bill. (Should LegCo be renamed the Institute of Dining Unprofessionals?)

Michael Pettis quoting a NYT article… 

“This past week, the company said it still owed $82 billion to suppliers of construction materials alone. At a time when China is slumping, Evergrande’s unpaid bills are a weight rippling across the economy.”

By my calculation $82 billion is equal to roughly 15% of the annual revenues of the construction materials sector in China, or roughly 0.4% of China’s expected GDP in 2023.

Fascinating article at Project Syndicate tracing the origins of China’s property glut to the one-child policy, which in turn rose from a misplaced emphasis on food security and a flawed reading of the amount of and need for arable land in the country…

Owing to the one-child policy and the legacies of other less-appreciated Chinese development measures over the years, the stage has long been set for today’s property bubble. But even more tragically, much of China’s economic growth over the past decade has been an overdraft on future growth that now may never materialize.

From China File, a look at the United Front Work Dept’s activities within China…

Yet despite its insidious cloak-and-dagger image in U.S. political debate, the United Front’s mission is neither particularly covert nor aimed solely at people outside China’s borders. “There’s no clear distinction between domestic and overseas united front work,” writes China researcher Alex Joske. “This is because the key distinction underlying the United Front is not between domestic and overseas groups, but between the CCP and everyone else.”

Oz ABC visits Xinjiang, sees lots of happy smiling dancers, isn’t convinced.

VoA on the closure of obstetrics departments – owing to lack of business – in China.

At last – something interesting from the Asian Games.

Yarraji was seen throwing her arms up as if to say, ‘What on earth is going on? Why am I now being accused of this?’ But at some point Yarraji, too, was given a red card, which was patently ridiculous on the evidence of the replay. [UPDATE: At the stadium, the red card to Wu was shown on the big screen, but the red card to Yarraji was not. However, on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, millions watching at home were only shown the second red card to Yarraji, not the one to Wu.]

It was about this point that it first occurred to me that Yarraji was deliberately being made a scapegoat, and that after a little bit more discussion, the officials would say something along the lines of, ‘Well, it was both of you who false started, but we’ll be magnanimous and let you both back in,’ ostensibly in a way to get Wu back into the race.