After three months in jail, 27-year-old Chu Kai-pong is convicted of ‘doing acts with seditious intent’ – wearing a T-shirt…
Under the new security law, the maximum sentence for the offence has been increased from two years to seven years in prison and could even go up to 10 years if “collusion with foreign forces” is found to be involved.
Chu was arrested on 12 June at an MTR station for wearing a T-shirt with the slogan: “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” and a yellow mask printed with “FDNOL” – the shorthand of another slogan “five demands, not one less”.
…Chief magistrate Victor So, handpicked by the city’s leader, John Lee, to hear national security cases, adjourned the case to Thursday for sentencing.
From HKFP…
Chu … was arrested on June 12 this year after being intercepted by police near Shek Mun MTR station.
He was wearing a top and a mask printed with statements that police said could incite hatred, contempt or disaffection against the “fundamental system of the state established by the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China.”
The story has so far appeared in the Taipei Times via AP and Reuters, and Al Jazeera, with more international coverage sure to come. Especially if he gets a mere two-year prison term, as his lawyer requested.
The Chinese government will raise the country’s retirement age gradually in the coming years. The SCMP finds a Hong Kong owner of a Mainland business to comment…
Danny Lau Tat-pong, honorary chairman of the Hong Kong Small and Medium Enterprises Association, said he expected the change to have little impact on his building materials firm as more than a tenth of the 150-strong workforce were already over 60.
“Our operation does not require very sharp minds. Not only is it cheaper to hire older workers, they will also earn an income and have a pastime. It is good for them and good for us,” said Lau, who operates production facilities based in Dongguan, Guangdong.
(Echoes of Hong Kong’s introduction of a six-day working week back in the 1960s or so: factory owners accustomed to seven-day weeks lamented that their employees wouldn’t know what to do if they had Sundays off, as they were too poor to afford leisure activities.)
There’s always another silver lining…
With mainland workers set to have longer careers, [lawmaker Michael] Tien also anticipated more demand for office clothing, a boon for his G2000 chain, which has been serving the market since 1996.
Some interesting stats: according to this 3-minute video quickie from Bloomberg, Hong Kong has 15 million sq ft of vacant office space, with another 8.5 million due by end-2028. The bulbous Henderson – built on the Murray Rd Car Park site, for which Henderson paid a mere HK$23 billion in 2017 – is 40% empty. As it happens, Henderson (or a scummy surrogate) bought my apartment (and many others in the same and adjoining buildings) that year. These guys really get their timing wrong.
No chance the Worshipful Chief Magistrate So could possibly go easy on the young man as a misguided individual that made a poor choice with a slap-on-the-wrist fine and, say, 6 months or so of community service probation? Even if he could? It would sure go a long way in making Hong Kong look like an Asian World City.
Ha ha!!! Just fucking with you!! We know young Mr Chu will get the book thrown at him (resolutely) and serve many years in prison to reflect upon his vile and society destroying crime. Examples need to be made and the beatings will continue until the accepted behaviour line is toe’d!
@Chinese citizen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zeoDl1oDpg
A monument to the slow down in the office market is that the GPO, on another Henderson site, is still standing.
Hemlock’s building take over appears to have been a mutual arrangement. Pals of mine who lived in a building on Kimberley Road were harrassed by its Richfield heavies and ‘encouraged’ to move out pronto.
The developer applied for a residential development on the site, and it would have sold like hot cakes at that time. However it opted for a Ginza commercial building that has to date only attracted a handful of tenants.
Bad news is that Henderson off loaded the development to some sucker soon after completion.
in sum, you can time the market to a certain extent – just buy low and sell high
I have several “subversive” T-shirts and a yellow Apple Daily umbrella at home. I think the government should compensate me for making them unusable.