Smear-slamming season opens, with the Hong Kong government expressing anger over Jimmy Lai’s supporters appealing to the UN about his health in prison, and Beijing hitting back after Michael Kovig talks about being tortured during his detention in China.
National Post piece quoting Lai’s son Sebastien…
To make matters worse, said Sebastien, the 77-year-old is being kept in conditions that would seem more suited to the most dangerous of criminals — solitary confinement, sweltering temperatures, lack of daylight, no independent medical care for his diabetes. The devout Catholic has been denied the opportunity to take Communion, he says.
And there are signs Jimmy’s health has recently taken a turn for the worse, to the point he has been unable to attend some court appearances, said his son.
Sebastien is worried his father will not survive the ordeal, even if the court metes out less than the life sentence allowed under the NSL. He has been unable to talk to him in four years.
“He’s practically being baked alive. It breaks my heart,” said Sebastien. “He’s an elderly man now, but given the conditions, it wouldn’t be surprising if he just passed away in jail … It’s not easy to know that your father could die at any moment and that he would never get that time (in jail) back.”
…“They know that for a financial centre, that element of trust, of fairness is important,” said Sebastien. “And by highlighting what’s happened to my father, I’m also indirectly highlighting that Hong Kong is no longer a place where you could rely on that. It’s now a place where the government believes itself to be infallible … All they want to do is ‘security.’ And it’s a police state.”
Hong Kong’s NatSec Committee pre-empts a judge by ruling that Kinson Cheung is not eligible for early release from prison, where he is serving a sentence for the common-law offence of ‘incitement to wound with intent’ – praising a man who stabbed a policeman (and currently killed himself) in 2021. Normally, convicts would get released early for good conduct.
From the (paywalled) FT, Calvin Klein gets into NatSec trouble in the Mainland…
China has accused the parent company of Calvin Klein of boycotting cotton from its western Xinjiang region, threatening for the first time to put a US company with significant interests in the country on a national security blacklist.
Beijing’s threat to include PVH, a clothing maker whose brands include Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, on its “unreliables list” is likely to alarm international companies at a moment when China is struggling to attract foreign investors.
…the ministry [also] accused the group “of violating normal market trading principles and unreasonably boycotting Xinjiang cotton and other products without factual basis”.
….Beijing’s implementation of the blacklist followed tightening US restrictions and sanctions on Chinese technology and exports, particularly on its telecom equipment maker Huawei.
But foreign lawyers argue that provisions of China’s blacklist are too vague, targeting companies accused of “endangering national sovereignty, security or development interests of China”.
……Under the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the US bans goods made in Xinjiang unless importers can prove they were not made using forced labour.
In a company filing this year, PVH said it had made “efforts” to confirm that materials covered by measures such as the US act “are not present in our supply chain”.
“…solitary confinement, sweltering temperatures, lack of daylight, no independent medical care for his diabetes.”
Jimmy’s getting the Liu Xiaobo treatment. Classic CCP.
Chalk up yet another martyr in the pantheon of anti CCP activists.
It’s seriously embarrassing that they are doing this to a grandfather whose only crime is running a newspaper that would be perfectly legal in civilised jurisdictions. And our ever stupid HK officials think it is a smear to point out what is objectively an atrocity under UN approved international human rights law?
Did any of our idiot officials really think things would go any other way except getting the Apartheid South Africa treatment? SMH
If Jimmy Lai dies in prison, there is going to be “mayhem”.
Hannibal Lecter had better prison conditions than Jimmy Lai, it seems.
@Mark Bradley – they think that there’s so much goddamn money to be made in China that the multinational corporations – amoral entities bound to maximize shareholder returns – will come crawling back. Not without reason; they massacred people in 1989 and the Western countries normalized trade relations a year or two later. What’s an old man or two behind bars? The idea that this time might be different must be strenuously avoided.
Hong Kong officials are still hoping this is a garden variety economic slowdown, just hang on to the real estate until the property-construction complex picks up again. Meanwhile their bosses in Beijing are threatening corporations for not buying their products. Yeah, that’ll make them want to invest loads of money.
@Cassowary
Back then the world was less connected so the CCP could more easily get away with murdering their own citizens, and it was easy to sweep it all under the rug and silence families which is not the case when you throw a newspaper tycoon in prison. Indeed it creates a Nelson Mandela situation. An argument can also be made that baking inside a prison and slowly dying in solitary confinement is even worse than a quick death from a hail of bullets.
Also Deng Xiaoping was spearheading genuine economic reforms that gave massive opportunities to foreign corporations, and indeed as you noted the government didn’t threaten companies like they do now. There was more flexibility. Also some naively believed market reforms would kill off the regime due to a rising and more outspoken middle class because they can’t kill them all.
I think we both agree that these eunuchs in Tamar and the knuckle draggers up north have failed to have a deep think on the situation and how it is different than June 4th.