Make sure your op-eds are nice and objective

The Stand News trial ends with sentences of 21 months for former senior editor Chung Pui-kuen and 10 months for former deputy Patrick Lam. Since both had been in jail for 10-11 months, Chung will serve only nine more months, and Lam was released on health grounds…

Outlining his reasons for sentencing, [judge Kwok Wai-kin] said the duo were “absolutely not simply journalists” during the period of the offence. “The three defendants were not conducting genuine media work, but participating in the so-called resistance then,” he said.

“Focusing on the 11 articles I ruled to be seditious, they were mostly published at a time over half of the Hong Kong society distrusted [Beijing] and [the local] government, the police, and the judiciary,” he continued.

“Such seditious articles had inevitably caused serious damage to [the authorities] and residents,” he said, adding that the news outlet had over 1.6 million followers on social media platforms.

From the Standard…

[Defender Audrey] Eu suggested that none of the 11 articles deemed to have seditious intention by the judge “were promoting any political viewpoints,” but only presenting the views of interviewees and bloggers.

Kwok responded by saying smearing and slandering without objectivity were “unacceptable.”

Eu argued that other newspapers like Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po also criticized the judiciary and other political figures.

She said no one had complained that Stand News had specifically reported seditious articles.

As the two were tried under the old colonial-era sedition law, the maximum sentence was two years. Under the Article 23 NatSec law, it could have been much higher.

The government rushes out a quick statement to pre-empt criticism…

Stand News had completely “disregarded objective facts” and violated journalistic principles set out in international human rights conventions, the government said on Thursday, hours after two former editors of the online news platform were given jail terms for publishing seditious content.

Some weekend reading and viewing…

The Michael Kovrig CBC interview on YouTube.

From Bloomberg, Minxin Pei on China’s anti-Japanese stance…

…[1980s] rapprochement ended after the Tiananmen crackdown in June 1989. In the 1990s, Chinese leaders began to promote an aggressive program of nationalism to bolster regime legitimacy. One of its core components was a concerted anti-Japanese propaganda campaign.

…A sense of economic superiority has made China arrogant and insensitive. Even worse, it has begun to resort to economic bullying to put Japan in its place.

…Foolishly, instead of setting a policy based solely on Japan’s importance to China, Beijing views the Sino-Japanese relationship almost exclusively through the lens of its rivalry with Washington. Xi has adopted a strategy of punishing America’s regional allies, such as Japan and the Philippines, mostly because China has no means of imposing costs on the US.

…Japan has upgraded its security ties with the US to previously unimaginable levels. Even the idea of Japanese forces fighting alongside the American military to defend Taiwan is no longer unthinkable.

It would clearly be in China’s self-interest to change course. A more promising strategy must address the sources of Japanese frustrations and fears.

The easiest and quickest step would be to tone down anti-Japanese propaganda…

China File interview with art historian and journalist Kejia Wu on the tension between Chinese leaders’ yearning for soft power and for cultural control, starting from her time with a property developer…

In the late 1990s to mid-2000s, artists like Zhang Xiaogang … became popular with foreign collectors. At that time, the Chinese contemporary market was starting to do very well, driven by new demand from international collectors…

Artists like that are often not part of the official state system. They make their living by having shows through their galleries, and galleries often bring the artists’ work to art fairs. The galleries help generate sales for them. Artists can survive outside of the state system by being represented by commercial galleries.

However, now the authorities review all their exhibitions (unless the Chinese artist creates their work outside of the country and it is exhibited overseas), including gallery shows, domestic public and private museum shows, and any artworks sent abroad. If these artists have shows in New York, all their paintings will have to be reviewed. And the review process can take three months, but it’s very hard to predict, it can take longer.

For fans of Sichuan peppers – or at least gloriously pretentious writing – an NYT article titled The Life-Affirming Properties of Sichuan Pepper by Ligaya Mishan…

This is not a simple arc of pain to pleasure. The chiles in Rozin’s example of benign masochism don’t just deliver a burn; the capsaicin prompts the release of endorphins. There’s a payoff. No such chemical U-turn is known to take place with hydroxy-alpha sanshool. The fizz merely fades. Perhaps we are newly drawn to Sichuan pepper, then, not because we just want to feel something (as the phrase goes in the meme of the past few years) but because we seek the opposite, the momentary suspension of feeling: an altered state that allows us, by losing sensation, to perceive it — and by extension the world — anew, an “enstrangement” akin to that described by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky in “Art, as Device” in 1917 as the technique of art. Perhaps “numbing” is entirely the wrong word. In Chinese, “ma” also refers to pins and needles, the discomfort of an awkwardly placed limb. Colloquially, we speak of this as “falling asleep,” but it’s actually a reawakening: The pain comes because the nerves, compressed, have been restored to function. Synapses flare; messages fly. It’s not the dying out of feeling but a return — a coming back to life.