Is Hong Kong US Or Chinese Territory?2020-05-252020-05-25https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2019/08/62-e1567359839783.jpg200px200px
Above photo: Protesters hold a placard featuring U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. flags as they take part in a march at Victoria Park in Hong Kong, July 21, 2019. Vincent Yu for AP.
Note: To help understand the recent protests in Hong Kong we recommend these two articles:
The New Security Law Is About Undue US Intervention.
Blatant interference by the US is prompting Beijing’s new legislation to protect national security.
So Beijing has decided enough is enough and is taking matters into its own hands to bulldoze ahead with a national security law tailor-made for Hong Kong, because the city is utterly incapable of fulfilling its constitutional duty to come up with the necessary legislation of its own, 23 years after its return to Chinese sovereignty.
And now, the very people who brought all this upon us are having conniptions over what it means for our basic freedoms and fundamentals, which the government is insisting will remain untouched.
Smelling blood in the water, certain Western media outlets are in a feeding frenzy of sensational reports and apocalyptic headlines chronicling the “end/death of Hong Kong”, reminiscent of their sanctimonious divinations about the demise of our city during the 1997 handover, which turned out to be greatly exaggerated.
To understand what has really happened here, you have to take a look back at last year’s social turmoil and anti-government protest violence in the context of Beijing’s complaints about the “black hand” of foreign interference in the city’s affairs, particularly with a hostile Washington using Hong Kong as a pawn in the wider Sino-US political game.
We’re not discussing conspiracy theories here, just the relentless, in-your-face provocativeness of protesters openly waving the star-spangled banner and singing the US national anthem on the streets while spitting at and stomping on their own national symbols, loud calls for President Donald Trump to “save” the city from its own sovereign, opposition politicians’ successful campaign to have the US Congress spite Beijing’s face by cutting off Hong Kong’s nose through punitive policy acts, American politicians coming here to preach – on Chinese soil – the anti-China gospel … the list goes on ad nauseam.
Top that with how belligerent US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has become these days, neck pouch inflating in self-righteous indignation as he effectively warns China “you dare not do this and you dare not say that” when it comes to Hong Kong. He’s now calling Beijing’s move a “death knell” for the city and threatening sanctions because only Washington, apparently, has the authority to decide which parts of China can be subject to national security laws, if at all.
When did this city become a major territory of the United States of America? Last I checked, Hong Kong used to be a colony of Britain, which, as a signatory to the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, arguably has the right to carry on flagging concerns about Beijing’s tightening grip over the city, but has curiously taken to letting the Americans do all the shouting nowadays.
The thing is, Beijing would have allowed the city to carry on burning like it did last year in the bonfires of the “revolution of our times” and sort out its own problems as long they remained internal. Because of the external element, the carrot makes way for the stick.
Hong Kong has long been the Achilles’ heel for China in its new Cold War with the US, which has been employing the city – citing American business interests here to claim a stake in its future – as a bargaining chip of sorts. Now that the gloves are off, with Washington’s rhetoric becoming increasingly bellicose over the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, Beijing feels it might as well bite the bullet to plug this particular leak.
The details of the new law are still to be spelled out and we don’t know what protections will be built into it to prevent abuse. If you believe the likes of cabinet-level government adviser Arthur Li Kwok-Cheung, “There is nothing for Hong Kong people to worry about … unless they are revolutionaries, terrorists or those colluding with foreign powers.”
I’m none of the above myself, but, until I see the fine print, I don’t know what it will mean when it comes to even what I say in this space someday.
Yonden Lhatoo is the chief news editor at the Post.
Demonstrators defied social distancing rules and thronged some of the busiest retail districts Sunday. China’s parliament is planning legislation to tighten its grip on the semi-autonomous territory.
(Image credit: Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
HONG KONG—In the Chinese Communist Party’s collective headspace, open dissent in Hong Kong is a problem to be solved. The city of 7.5 million people has been a thorn in the party’s side for many years and CCP chairman Xi Jinping wants to change that while he is still in command of China’s government.
“Chinese authorities utilize automation and a fleet of human censors to control the flow of information and, more importantly, its tone.”
On Thursday evening, the party said it will “improve” the way Hong Kong is governed—not by addressing the demands of the city’s denizens, but by implementing a vague security law that would bypass the local legislature’s law-making process, thus rendering moot Hong Kong’s status as an autonomous region.
Unlike mainland China, where the CCP has erected barriers on the internet that are called, inevitably, the Great Firewall, Hong Kong provides freedom of speech and expression, including in cyberspace—at least for now. But China’s pledge to “improve” Hong Kong’s governance, paired with its hallmark vagueness in the proposed security bill’s legal language, has people in the city concerned that this may soon be a thing of the past.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is using self-described human rights legislation to put pressure on the Hong Kong government and threaten China’s sovereignty, Beijing has claimed.
Pompeo is “blackmailing” the semi-autonomous city with the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Office of the Commissioner to Hong Kong said on Thursday. He added that China was not intimidated by Washington’s political maneuvering and that Beijing would protect its national interests from all foreign threats.
Signed into law in November 2019, the act requires the State Department to audit Hong Kong’s level of “autonomy” annually. The legislation calls for sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials if Washington determines that human rights are not being respected by the city.
The Secretary of State signaled on Wednesday that he was still assessing whether the situation in Hong Kong would warrant sanctions. Claiming that activists at the forefront of months-long anti-China demonstrations were being “hauled into court,” Pompeo said that it was “difficult to assess that Hong Kong remains highly autonomous from mainland China.”
Washington has shown vocal support for the violent protests that have rocked Hong Kong since March of last year. The issue has further exacerbated strained relations between the US and China, which have hit a new low amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Pulitzer Committee Favors False US Empire Stories On Hong Kong, Russia And China2020-05-182020-05-18https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/08/Nytimes_hq-300×199-150×99.jpg200px200px
Above photo: New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)
The New York Times has apparently stolen its Pulitzer Prize-winning stories from Russian journalists – the same liberal anti-Putin reporters its correspondents have lionized.
The New York Times has been accused for the second time of stealing major scoops from Russian journalists. One of those stories won the Times a Pulitzer Prize this May.
The journalists who have accused the Times of taking their work without credit also happen to be the same liberal media crusaders against Vladimir Putin that Western correspondents at the Times and other mainstream outlets have cast as persecuted heroes.
ThePulitzer Prize Boardis comprised of a who’s who of media aristocrats and Ivy League bigwigs. Given the elite backgrounds of the judges, it is hardly a surprise that they reward reporting that reinforces the narrative of the new US Cold War against official enemies like Russia and China.
Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times correspondent who has since become a critic of US foreign policy, noted that the three finalists in the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting “were one story about how evil Russia is and two about how evil China is. These choices encourage reporters to write stories that reinforce rather than question Washington’s foreign-policy narrative.”
The 3 finalists in the #PulitzerPrize2020 “international reporting” category were one story about how evil #Russia is and two about how evil #China is. These choices encourage reporters to write stories that reinforce rather than question Washington’s foreign-policy narative.
The finalists nominated in this category were Reuters and the New York Times for two separate sets of stories.
The US newspaper of record ended up winning the2020 award in international reporting, for what the Pulitzer jury described as “a set of enthralling stories, reported at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
The Times was nominated again as a finalist for what the jury called its “gripping accounts that disclosed China’s top-secret efforts to repress millions of Muslims through a system of labor camps, brutality and surveillance.”
The staff of Reuters was selected as the third finalist for its reporting in support ofanti-China protestersinHong Kong. (The photography staff of Reuters ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography for the same coverage.)
Among thefive members of the Pulitzer jurywho selected these finalists was Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the neoliberal magazine The Atlantic and a former volunteer in the Israeli army whoworked as a guard at a prison campwhere Palestinians who rose up in the First Intifada were interned.
Joining Goldberg on the jury was Susan Chira, a former New York Times editor.
While this elite Pulitzer jury praised the New York Times for “at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin’s regime,” it is not exactly clear what that “risk” is supposed to entail – because the major US newspaper appears to have stolen at least part of its reporting from Russian journalists.
On May 4, journalist Roman Badanin published aFacebook postaccusing the Times of ripping off a story he had released months before without credit.
Badanin is the founder and editor-in-chief of the liberal anti-Putin news websiteProekt, known as The Project in English.
“I have no illusions about the real role of Russian journalism in the world, but I have to note: the two The New York Times’s investigations, for which this honored newspaper won the Pulitzer prize yesterday, repeat the findings of The Project’s articles published a few months before,” Badanin wrote on Facebook.
“I would also like to note that the winners did not put a single link to the English version of our article, even when, for example, 8 months after The Project, they told about the activities of Eugene Prigozhin’s emissaries in Madagascar,” he added.
Badanin linked to an article he published, both in Russian and English, back in March 2019 titled “Master and Chef: How Evgeny Prigozhin led the Russian offensive in Africa.” The story details how the businessman Evgenу Prigozhin, who is sanctioned by the US government, has been promoting business opportunities in Africa. The piece focuses specifically on Madagascar, where Russia also has a military agreement.
This report is eerily similar to a report published by the New York Times eight months later, in November, titled “How Russia Meddles Abroad for Profit: Cash, Trolls and a Cult Leader.” This story, which was filed in Madagascar, does not once link to or credit Proekt’s original reporting.
Another anti-Putin Russian news website, Meduza, published an article on May 7 drawing attention to these allegations, titled “‘Fuck the Pulitzer — I just want a hyperlink’: Russian journalists say ‘The New York Times’ should have acknowledged their investigative work in the newspaper’s award-winning reports about the Putin regime’s ‘predations.’”
Meduza interviewed Badanin, who said the New York Times “report about Madagascar from November 2019 repeats all the main and even secondary conclusions from our reporting about Madagascar and Africa generally between March and April last year.”
While Badanin did not outright accuse the Times of plagiarism, he was frustrated that “nowhere in the story did they acknowledge that we’d already reported on this topic,” and said it was either a “professional issue” or an “ethical problem.”
A New York Times spokesperson denied that Proekt’s reporting was used in any way. And the Times reporter who authored this report from Madagascar,Michael Schwirtz, responded dismissively to the accusations in a Twitter thread full of sarcastic quips.
Another anti-Putin Russian activist accuses the New York Times of lifting his reporting
Michael Schwirtz authored another New York Times article in December that was cited by the Pulitzer jury for the 2020 prize. This piece, “How aPoisoning in BulgariaExposed Russian Assassins in Europe,” is also suspiciously similar to reporting published before by yet another anti-Putin website, called The Insider.
The Insider is edited by the Western-backed, diehard anti-Putin activist Roman Dobrokhotov. In response to Schwirtz’s Twitter thread, Dobrohotov angrily asked why The Insider’s reports were not credited as well. Schwirtz denied having used information from the previous stories.
Schwirtz’s Twitter thread tagged four Russian accounts: Proekt, The Insider, Dobrokhotov, and Yasha Levine, the last of whom is an occasional contributor toThe Grayzoneand the author of “Surveillance Valley.”
Levine reflected on the scandal writing, “Time to learn the hard truth: The New York Times — like the Empire it represents — doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’ll take whatever it wants, give nothing in return, and suffer no consequences. And who’ll believe you Russians anyway?”
Time to learn the hard truth: The New York Times — like the Empire it represents — doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’ll take whatever it wants, give nothing in return, and suffer no consequences. And who’ll believe you Russians anyway? https://t.co/V1YtZ7K6OB
“The reverence with which liberal Russian journalists have treated the New York Times has always been baffling to me,” Levine continued. “But that’s what you get when you’re a colonial subject like Russia. You fetishize the master. That reverence is starting to wear off, but it’s still there.”
The reverence with which liberal Russian journalists have treated the New York Times has always been baffling to me. But that’s what you get when you’re a colonial subject like Russia. You fetishize the master. That reverence is starting to wear off, but it’s still there.
New York Times was also accused of stealing Russian journalists’ reporting back in 2017
This is not even the first time that the US newspaper of record has been accused of stealing reporting from Russian journalists.
Back in 2017, the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for its reports on “Vladimir Putin’s efforts to project Russia’s power abroad.”
At the time, journalists from the anti-Putin website Meduza accused the Times of ripping off their reporting. The website Global Voices highlighted the controversy, in an article titled “Russian Journalists Say One ofNYT’s Pulitzer-Winning Stories Was Stolen.”
Meduza reported Daniil Turovsky accused New York Times Moscow correspondent Andrew E. Kramer of lifting his reporting. Kramer actually took the time to respond in a Facebook comment, acknowledging that his report was based on the Russian journalist’s.
“Daniil, I spoke with you while preparing this article and explained that I intended to follow in the footsteps of your fine work, that I would credit Meduza, as I did, and thanked you for your help,” Kramer said.
This did not satisfy Meduza, which also reminded readers in its latest 2020 article that the Times had ripped off its 2017 reporting.
The NYT times has been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for “exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin’s regime” in 2019, but several top investigative journalists in Russia say the U.S. newspaper ignored their groundbreaking work in this area — again. https://t.co/R4WZdqHDp4
The Grayzone has also experienced this kind of shameless journalistic pickpocketing. In March 2019, the New York Times released a report acknowledging that the so-called “humanitarian aid” convoy that the US government tried to ram across the Venezuelan border in a February coup attempt had been set on fire not by government forces, but rather Washington-backed right-wing opposition hooligans.
At the time of this February 23 putsch attempt, the Times had initially joined US politicians like Senator Marco Rubio and the majority of the corporate media in blaming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. But The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, who was reporting in Venezuela,published a report showingthat all of the available evidence pointed to the opposition being responsible.
When the Times finally admitted this fact weeks later, it made no mention whatsoever of Blumenthal’s reporting.Glenn Greenwaldwas the only high-profile journalist to credit Blumenthal and The Grayzone.
New York Times had ironically heroized these Russian journalists before stealing their reporting
Further compounding this staggering hypocrisy is the fact that the New York Times has in fact published numerous articles lionizing these anti-Putin Russian journalists, while simultaneously ripping off their work.
Proekt founder and editor Roman Badanin is not some kind of crypto pro-Kremlin activist – far from it. He has spent years working within mainstream outlets, and was previously the editor-in-chief of the decidedly anti-Putin Russian edition of Forbes magazine
Badanin does friendly interviews with US-based neoconservative think tanks like theFree Russia Foundation, a right-wing anti-Putin lobbying group that appointed regime-changer Michael Weiss as its director for special investigations.
In aninterviewconducted byValeria Jegisman, a neoconservative anti-Russian activist who worked as a spokesperson for the government of Estonia and now works at the US government’s propaganda arm Voice of America, group accused the Kremlin of spreading false information, claiming “Russia will continue its disinformation tactics.”
Badanin also called for “the West” to “support independent media projects with non-profit funding,” stating clearly: “I think that what the West can do is to continue to support independent media in the most transparent and clear way, and to stop being afraid of the million tricks that the Russian authorities come up with to force the West to abandon these investments.”
The Russian journalist’s pro-Western perspective has been rewarded. Badanin was honored by theEuropean Press Prize, a program backed by Western governments and the top corporate media outlets in Europe, particularly The Guardian and Reuters.
Badanin was also given a Stanford John S. Knight international fellowship in journalism. Stanford University has established itself as an outpost for Russian pro-Western liberals, and its journalist fellowship program provides institutional support for dissidents in countries targeted by Washington for regime change.
Badanin’s extensive links to Western regime-change institutions should not come as a surprise to the New York Times; it has in fact honored him in numerous articles.
In 2017, the Times published an entire article framed around Badanin. Reporter Jim Rutenberg explained, “I wanted to better understand President Trump’s America…So I went to Russia.”
In Moscow, Rutenberg met with Badanin at the headquarters of the anti-Putin station TV Rain, which he described as a “warehouse complex here, populated by young people with beards, tattoos, piercings and colored hair. (Brooklyn hipster imperialism knows no bounds.)”
While praising Badanin and TV Rain, the Times also noted that the channel published a poll suggesting that the Soviet Union “should have abandoned Leningrad to the Nazis to save lives.”
The Times even featured Badanin prominently in the header image of the story — just two years before the same newspaper would go on to rip off his reporting.
The New York Times also reported on Roman Badanin in2016and2011. It is abundantly clear the newspaper knew who he was.
The Gray Lady’s willingness to snatch Badanin’s reporting shows how little respect newspapers like the New York Times actually have for the anti-Putin journalists they claim to lionize. For the jet-setting correspondents of Western corporate media outlets, liberal Russian reporters are just tools to advance their own ambitions.
Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
HONG KONG—This city of 7.6 million, one of the most densely populated in the world, has recorded no local transmissions of the novel coronavirus for more than three weeks. Since the onset of the outbreak, Hong Kong has logged four deaths due to complications brought on by COVID-19; the last was in mid-March.
But as Hong Kong’s officials mull over easing border restrictions, governments in the region with much worse records are shaping post-COVID policies in technologically dystopian ways that may be here to stay in Asia and around the world.
Look no further than Singapore, where a yellow-and-black robot patrol dog now monitors human activity in a public park. It struts along jogging paths and issues recorded advisories to people who are not standing at least one meter apart from one another. “Spot,” as it was named by its developer Boston Dynamics, tells people “not to loiter” and breaks up gatherings in public places.
It’s beyond creepy, even if it’s a publicity stunt, and it’s difficult to shake the uncanny feeling that variants of this creature with artificial intelligence could someday soon be issuing orders to human beings.
Even without robots, there is going to be constant scrutiny of who you meet, where you are, and what you’re doing, not only in the street, but when you’re in the privacy of your own home. And on the other end of the spectrum, where ideas about “herd immunity” are embraced with oblivious, reckless abandon, COVID-19 is wreaking havoc.
DIGITAL DYSTOPIAS
Some tech companies would have you believe that we can innovate ourselves out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments all over the world have adopted tech-driven surveillance and policing measures to track and steer their citizens, hoping to contain a virus that we still know little about.
The Singaporean government launched the first smartphone app that uses constant Bluetooth pings to log encounters between people. It’s called TraceTogether, and its contact tracing methodology is characterized as less invasive than the location-based surveillance that is conducted in, say, South Korea and Israel. But a local coder found that TraceTogether’s early version was “sending more data than necessary” to a government platform, rendering useless the anonymization that originally was promised. (TraceTogether was updated to improve privacy measures after the coder contacted the app’s developers.)
At least Singapore’s tracing app is used on a voluntary basis. India’s contact tracing app, Aarogya Setu, is compulsory for government workers and private sector employees, as well as people who live in areas under lockdown. Delhi may make the app mandatory for all air passengers taking off or landing in India when flights resume. Aarogya Setu functions much like Singapore’s app, but also issues color-coded health status designations—a measure first rolled out by Alibaba and Tencent, two of the biggest tech companies in China.
“The mass deployment of health status QR codes in China is the first time algorithms determine where people can go and what they can access.”
Even before the outbreak, we grudgingly (or willingly) shared our private data with tech companies, but the mass deployment of health status QR codes in China is the first time algorithms determine where people can go and what they can access. And in technical terms, it hasn’t been a consistently smooth process. Last week, a glitch happened in Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered, causing clusters of healthy people to lose access to public transportation, public facilities, and even their workplaces.
Countries all over the world are designing their own COVID-19 apps or leaning on big tech to track, trace, and put up geofences. And those entanglements can be highly problematic—Alibaba’s health status app in China appears to share data with the police, according to analysis conducted by the New York Times. These programs take the erosion of privacy to whole new levels, and could easily be paired with robot and drone patrols in the future.
And this, even though they don’t work as well as promised.
Singapore and South Korea had previously claimed success flattening their curves, with both governments crediting their respective digital tracking tools. But renewed outbreaks—in Singapore’s migrant worker dormitories and Seoul’s gaudy night clubs—might even hasten the mandatory adoption of new-generation of COVID-tech.
APOCALYPSE OF THE OBLIVIOUS
On the other end of the scale are those who claim that the pandemic is all hype or hoax.
A religious gathering in Malaysia that ran from February 27 to March 1 had around 16,000 attendees, leading to spikes of infections across Southeast Asia. Sweden’s deliberately lax containment measures feel much like a deadly experiment. A nation of 10.3 million people, it has 26,670 confirmed cases with more than 3,250 deaths as of Tuesday morning—roughly 322 deaths per million—which is the highest rate among Nordic nations and considerably greater than in the United States (247 per million).
The Netherlands is doing something like Sweden, calling it “intelligent lockdown.” It has 318 deaths per million, and the head of one intensive care unit in Amsterdam, Armand Girbes, expects more patients to head his way, overloading an ICU that is already at high capacity.
In South America’s most populous nation, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has described COVID-19 as a “little flu,” and claimed that “Brazilians don’t catch anything. . . they already have the antibodies to keep it from spreading.” So far, more than 11,000 people have died, and the rate of infections appears to be rising astronomically, leading to predictions that Brazil could be the world’s next COVID-19 hotspot, with Rio soon to replace New York City as ground zero for the pandemic.
Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told The Atlantic that Brazil reported 3,700 new daily cases on April 23. Less than two weeks later, on May 6, new daily cases had more than tripled, to 11,896. The developments in Brazil “are really concerning,” Inglesby said.
“The pandemic has given cover to wingnuts around the globe.”
Letting the contagion run wild might make some sense, despite the enormous human cost, if we could be sure that populations will develop “herd immunity.” That would make it increasingly difficult for the virus to spread across a community because so few vulnerable hosts would be available.
But it is not clear whether we can develop herd immunity against COVID-19, because it did not exist in humans before last year. It has not been established that those who recover from the disease are then safe from reinfection. In fact, there are patients in South Korea and China whose health was restored after falling sick with COVID-19, but still tested positive for the virus, making the choices of the Dutch and Swedish governments seem all the more risky.
“India’s Hindu nationalists are fomenting Islamophobic hatred by making false claims that Muslims are waging ‘corona jihad.’”
Even if one bout with infection does confer some level of immunity, what that level is, how effective it might be, and how long it might last remain open questions.
The pandemic has also given cover to wingnuts around the globe to disseminate propaganda, perpetuate discriminatory ideas, or conflate inconvenience with oppression.
India’s Hindu nationalists are fomenting Islamophobic hatred by making false claims that Muslims are waging “corona jihad.” The term is attached to online videos allegedly showing Muslims spitting on fresh produce in markets and smearing their saliva on public surfaces, while blaming Muslims for bringing the pandemic to the subcontinent. Government officials called followers of the Islamic faith “human bombs,” and Muslims have been beaten up and barred from some towns and neighborhoods. This is happening in a country already suffering upheaval because of a citizenship law passed and ratified last December that discriminates against Muslims.
Over in Europe, conservatives within the Catholic church areinterpreting common sense limitations on the celebration of mass that have been approved by Pope Francis as a conspiracy to curtail religious freedoms. There are echoes in America, where conservative personalities have all but branded the pontiff a heretic for observing scientific guidance, and the saga of American evangelical churches that refuse to close is a staple of the evening news.
A GOLDEN MEAN?
This isn’t the first time in recent history that Hong Kong has had to contend with new viruses. In 1997, an avian flu outbreak originating in Guangdong killed six people in the city, leading to the culling of 1.6 million fowl. And then, from 2002 to 2004, the SARS outbreak, which again was traced back to Guangdong, killed nearly 800 people, 299 of whom were in Hong Kong. The entire city wore masks. People stayed away from each other, and constantly sanitized shared surfaces at home and in public.
When a new coronavirus began to infect clusters of people in Wuhan in late December, memories of the avian flu and SARS flooded forth in Hong Kong. People realized that there could be months of inconvenience and exasperation ahead of them, but acknowledged that it was necessary, because the alternative was for hundreds, at least, to fall ill and die.
“People in Hong Kong recognized a large-scale wind-down as a momentary inconvenience rather than an encroachment on their freedoms.”
As border restrictions and social distancing policies ease in places that have managed to bring down the rate of infection, the new normal, at least for the foreseeable future, is to be prepared for our homes to function as classrooms, workplaces, (telemedical) clinics, and even (virtual) therapists’ offices if—when—a second wave hits.
That attitude was present in Hong Kong, too, when bars reopened last Friday and many people—many of them expats—flocked toward them, sparking debate about whether it is safe to mingle in large crowds now that community transmissions seem to have been cleansed from the city.
In the past few months, Hong Kong was never officially locked down, but many businesses chose to shutter or reduce operations temporarily, and people made the decision to work from home if the nature of their jobs allowed it. A survey conducted in March by academics with the University of Hong Kong showed that 99 percent of local residents wear masks. The collective response—active, committed adherence to guidelines that were developed after seeing how quickly SARS can spread and kill—even led to an unexpected plummet in influenza cases, according to local government data.
As more and more people in Wuhan got sick in January, people in Hong Kong recognized a large-scale wind-down as a momentary inconvenience rather than an encroachment on their freedoms. There was little doubt that these months would involve economic pains—but this is the consequence of a deadly virus, not of a voluntary lockdown.
In Hong Kong, even though businesses are reopening and life seems to be approaching normality, there is no impression that COVID-19 is a thing of the past, however much one wishes it were. The pandemic is far from over, even in places that seem to have flatlined the curve.
Gold smuggling is a lucrative criminal enterprise throughout Asia and around the world, given the plentiful supply of investors ready to pay top dollar to find a recognized store of value that’s an attractive alternative to the greenback.
16 suspects have been arrested in the southeastern Chinese coastal province of Fujian in connection with a major suspected gold smuggling operation, Xinhua has reported, citing local customs authorities.
The suspects are accused of illegally smuggling roughly three tonnes of gold and gold-related products out of the country in an elaborate plot which took place over the space of over three years.
The plot is said to have involved the purchase of pure gold from local merchants, its soldering into electronics components, and transport to the Hong Kong Special administrative region, where the gold would be extracted and sold to bullion buyers in the financial hub.
Authorities suspect the smugglers of beginning their operation in February 2017, and of earning about 820 million yuan ($116 million US) from their illegal activities. In addition to the smuggling, the suspects are accused of illegally collecting export tax rebates worth some 120 million yuan ($16.9 million US).
China maintains strict regulations on the import and export of gold and gold products, with the People’s Bank of China maintaining a monopoly on the precious commodity’s export, as well as the right to examine and control the export of products containing a high percentage of gold according to strict limits. Breaking the rules can be punishable by serious administrative and criminal sanctions.
The illegal export and import of gold is a relatively commonly reported on occurrence throughout Asia, with some incidents leading to comical if grave predicaments. Late last year, a Chinese national was detained in Nepal after attempting to smuggle about a kilogram of gold packed in his rectum into the country. Earlier, another person was arrested in India after trying to smuggle gold worth over $8,900 from Hong Kong. Gold smuggling is a particularly lucrative enterprise in India, where the precious commodity is highly valued as jewelry. Last month, Indian media reported that cases of gold seizures by customs had reached an all-time high amid soaring bullion prices, with the Chennai International Airport in Tmil Nadu, India alone scoring some 375 kg of gold over the past year, up from 271 kg seized a year earlier.
Gold prices have been on a rollercoaster ride of sharp ups and downs over the past month amid the global economic turmoil over the coronavirus pandemic, with spot prices settling at $1,701 per ounce in early morning trading Monday.
