Jimmy Lai’s 1,500th day in prison (last Friday) gets attention from such bodies as Hong Kong Watch, CFHK and Independent Catholic News…
Lai, who is now 77 years old, a British citizen and a devout Catholic, is held in solitary confinement and reportedly only permitted 50 minutes of exercise per day. That means he spends over 23 hours daily without natural light, fresh air, or human contact except with prison guards. A diabetic, he has been denied independent medical care and concerns are growing about his failing health.
For over four years, since his arrest in December 2020, Lai has been imprisoned on multiple fabricated charges. These include a 13-month sentence for lighting a candle and saying a prayer at a vigil to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and a 14-month sentence for participating in a peaceful protest in 2019, sentences he has now served.
The latest on his trial from HKFP is here: prosecutors are focusing on how much he did or didn’t know about the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China in mid-2020. Last week, judges admonished him for being ‘riled, excited [and] emotional’ towards the prosecutors.
Foreign Affairs looks at how China hopes to manage the risks and opportunities posed by the incoming Trump administration. The conclusion is that Beijing will try to ‘weather the storm’.
Does China have much to worry about? Consider the following…
Despite tough talk, Donald Trump is clearly nervous about putting big tariffs on China, preferring to pick on the US’s own allies, including Taiwan. He is also protecting TikTok. Elon Musk, dismantling the federal bureaucracy as if it’s Twitter, owns a ‘Gigafactory’ in Shanghai making EVs for the local and export markets. Kash Patel, nominee for firing 1,000s of FBI agents, owns stock in the holding company of controversial Chinese clothing company Shein. Attorney General Pam Bondi will ignore foreign interference. The near-abolition of the US’s foreign aid system would be a godsend to China in terms of soft-power rivalry. Cuts in science funding could boost China’s relative technological competitiveness. Measures to reduce use of renewable energy sources would weaken US energy security. Added to that, intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard is blatantly pro-Putin, and health nominee RFK Jr is dedicated to spreading disease throughout the US. And there’s more.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but if you join all these dots you get an administration of people inclined to appease Beijing working to undermine the US as a society and a global power in ways that benefit China in its pursuit of global dominance.
And this is at a time when China is facing serious economic challenges. A time when targeted US measures to maintain its international credibility and force China to rebalance its economy could leave Beijing’s leadership having to reconsider their superpower ambitions.
As an aside, an NYT article describes how insiders – no prizes for guessing who they would be – made millions by pumping and dumping Trump’s cryptocurrency memecoin on cretins dumb enough to buy them…
In those first minutes, a crypto wallet with a unique identification code beginning 6QSc2Cx secured a giant load of these new tokens — 5,971,750 of them — at the opening sale price of just 18 cents each, starting a surge in the $Trump price that would soon reach $75 per token.
This early trader, whose identity is not known, walked away with a two-day profit of as much as $109 million, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times.
…Whether people made or lost money, it was stellar business for the Trumps. Nearly $100 million in trading fees have flowed to the family and its partners, although most of that has not yet been cashed out, the Chainalysis data shows.
President Trump set off this scramble three days before he was inaugurated, triggering a rapid boom-and-bust sequence that has now raised broader questions about the speculative dangers of so-called memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot.
He promoted the coin on his own social media platform, as well as Elon Musk’s X, saying: “Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
And purchases from China seem to have contributed to the token’s pump.
In the old days, launching your own cryptocurrency a few days before you took office with a promise to strengthen the crypto business would have been called blatant corruption. In Trumpland, it’s business as usual.
Re Trumpcoin:
This fella on substack posits that perhaps the $500m spent on Trumpcoin from Asia could be largely a massive bribe from Bytedance to Trump in exchange for keeping Tiktok running as is.
https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/the-trumpcoin-cometh
It sounds borderline outlandish, but Trump does has form in the “use crypto to receive obvious bribes” field:
Back in Sept/Nov 2024, Chinese cryptobro Justin Sun invested $75m in the Trump family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial, to become its largest token holder. In exchange, WLF bought into Sun’s Tron tokens (as used by Iran-backed groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah).
That would also be the Tron tokens for which the SEC charged Sun, as well as three of his companies, for marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a cryptocurrency token “through extensive wash trading.” Sun was also charged with “orchestrating a scheme to pay celebrities to tout” cryptocurrency “without disclosing their compensation” back in 2023.
What’s the betting Trump or DOGE will order the SEC to drop those cases “in the interests of efficiency”?
Extra tin foil: Sun recently tweeted in mid-January: “I could just offer to acquire TikTok, and everything would be resolved.”
Trump’s crypto scam (and the distraction of his wife pulling a matching, supposedly conflicting, stunt the next day) was, as Low Profile says, jaw-droppingly beyond all norms, whoever he was profiting off. Yet, amid the whirlwind of destruction, it caused barely a murmur.
In years gone by, some septic friends would crow that the British ‘unwritten’ constitution was somehow weak compared with the locked-down US version. So I should in theory be laughing heartily with schadenfreude. Actually it’s just scary.