Gung Hei etc…

The year ends with a strong smell of NatSec. A Twitter post…

Hong Kong pro-democracy politician / activist Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人) — who’s being jailed for organizing protests/ rallies in 2019 — was seen restrained in chains like a felon and boxed in by at least 6 correctional officers in Queen Mary Hospital…

What a performance. (How many feet of chain did they bring?) If he was really a dangerous criminal – a murderer, say – he would not be seated among the rest of the public in a hospital waiting area.

And PORI pollster Robert Chung is (reportedly) taken in for questioning again in connection with ‘absconder’ Chung Kim-wah …

…Chung Kim-wah’s wife and son, his three siblings, and at least two PORI staff members had also been questioned by national security police.

…Police have issued a HK$1 million bounty for information leading to the arrest of Chung Kim-wah, as well as [18] others on the wanted list.

Bloomberg reports that Hong Kong bans are feeling the effects of the fall in prices of commercial property…

Average prices of office buildings, shopping malls and other properties have fallen more than 40% from their highs in 2018, eroding the value of the collateral backing many bank loans. Defaults are also rising as more property owners and developers run into cash flow difficulties.

Banks with soured loans and mortgages have been reluctant to sell the underlying real estate assets at a loss — but that is changing…

“Banks are realizing that if they don’t sell their commercial properties, the values will go lower and lower,” said James Mak, chief sales director at Midland Commercial Realty Ltd., a property brokerage. 

…Close to 40% of the HK$34 billion in Hong Kong commercial real estate transactions in 2024 were distressed sales or capital loss deals, where owners — including banks — sold properties for less than what they originally paid, according to data from Colliers International.

…The November sale of Cheung Kei Center caused seven lenders, including two Chinese banks and Hang Seng Bank, to realize a total of HK$2 billion in losses on a HK$4.6 billion mortgage they made in 2019, according to land records. 

I remember three or four guys who were pooling their money to buy one floor of an office building in Central. They mentioned the sum of roughly HK$100 million. That was around, um, 2018. 

Some other reading for anyone at a loss for something to do as Snake Year slithers in…

HKFP op-ed on the Hong Kong government’s obsession with appealing against court decisions recognizing same-sex marriage in overseas jurisdictions.

Is this fundamentalist Christians in the bureaucracy at work, or Beijing loyalists guessing this is what pro-natalist Mainland policy requires?

From ChinaFile, why US law firms are leaving China…

A big [risk] is that of data security. Global law firms like to have their offices interconnected so that staff in one office can access digital records in another. What happens if the gentlemen from the Ministry of State Security come to your Beijing (or Hong Kong) office and demands access to your computers so he can access your files in New York? “No, thank you. We’d rather not” and “See you in court!” are not going to cut it. This concern led Latham & Watkins last February to cut its Hong Kong office off from unfettered data access—a measure it had already taken with its Beijing office. And concerns about data security were also a reason behind the Dentons-Dacheng breakup in 2023.

In addition, communications may not be secure. While firms may use VPNs, they must be from government-approved VPN providers, raising the very security concerns that VPNs are supposed to mitigate.

A second risk is that of attorney-client confidentiality. Chinese law does not recognize any attorney-client privilege. If an attorney possesses information about a client the state wishes to know about, they are under the same obligation as anyone else on Chinese territory—citizen or foreigner—to reveal it. The fact that doing so might violate a foreign attorney’s legal or ethical obligations in their home jurisdiction is irrelevant.

As are other firms – from the FT…

The annual survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China found 30 per cent of respondents were exploring alternative sources for goods and relocating manufacturing out of the country last year, or had already done so — double the percentage in 2020. 

Michael Hart, AmCham China president, said that while the majority of US companies were not moving, the trend towards relocation was unmistakable. 

“I don’t see any reason to think that bilateral investment will increase in the next couple of years,” said Hart. “Companies [are] pivoting or bolstering their supply chain by making investments somewhere else.

“Definitely . . . I would be concerned if I was in charge of Chinese investment policy,” he said.

On other matters, a great read (if you find this stuff interesting) on Donald Trump’s pre-inauguration venture into crypto scamming. Especially read the footnotes (scroll over the little number). EG…

If you put on your tinfoil hat though… it kinda looks like TikTok just paid Trump a massive bribe by buying up his memecoin in exchange for getting the ban lifted. It looks kind of a lot like that, actually.

Of the suckers who buy Trump, Melania etc memecoins and lost their savings, he says…

You should never feel bad for these people. What happened to them is exactly the thing they were hoping to do to someone else. Just laugh at them and move on with your day

Is it just me or is the world is going totally nuts. People are ‘investing’ real money in fake currencies, from Bitcoin to Melania-coin. People with no medical qualifications think they know better than experts and are avoiding vaccines and drinking unpasteurized milk. Leading figures in and around the US government are openly siding with Russia, the CCP and Nazis. Grifters, bots and cranks, egged on by algorithms, peddle deranged conspiracy theories on social media to millions of inadequate young men who believe it all. Communications cables around the Baltic and Taiwan are mysteriously being cut. I could go on, but Gung Hei Faat Choi!