All posts tagged: Chinese officials

Hong Kong Is Self-Destructing – The Atlantic

Hong Kong Is Self-Destructing – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Hong Kong is about to enact another security law on top of the draconian one Beijing imposed following prodemocracy protests in 2020. Known as Article 23, the new law includes a vague definition of state secrets, just like that under mainland Chinese law; the power to hold suspects without charges; and punishments for people who publish “false or misleading statements.” The city’s mini constitution, which came into effect with its handover to China in 1997, actually requires the passage of Article 23. But no previous Hong Kong leader has been willing to take it on for fear of a ferocious backlash. In fact, the city’s government introduced a version of the article in 2003 but wound up shelving it under widespread criticism that the law violated Hong Kong’s special status. John Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, will face no such dissension this time around. The 2020 national-security law, combined with British colonial regulations that the city has resuscitated to criminalize political speech, have obliterated civic space. The government has reengineered the electoral process to wipe …

The Hong Kong Activist Who Called Washington’s Bluff

The Hong Kong Activist Who Called Washington’s Bluff

Published by skeptic

On the morning of June 30, 2020, Joshua Wong walked into an office tower called the St. John’s Building, directly across the street from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. He carried nothing but his cellphone. The repressive machinery of mainland China was closing in on the city where he had spent almost half of his young life fighting for democracy, and though for six years he had curated an image as a fearless international icon, that morning, Wong felt panicked. He had decided to take his chances by appealing to the conscience of the most powerful democracy in the world. Wong was a skinny, toothy teen in 2014, when his student activism in the Umbrella Movement catapulted him to global renown: Time magazine dubbed him “The Face of Protest.” He served a short prison sentence and was released in June 2019, into the tear-gas-tinged humidity of Hong Kong’s summer of discontent. Again he took the democracy movement’s cause to the press, becoming its international advocate, urging European powers to take a harder line on …

Why China and Japan Are Still Fighting Over World War II

Why China and Japan Are Still Fighting Over World War II

Published by skeptic

When Chinese officials and elites berate Japan, as they frequently do these days, they often pointedly mention the atrocities that Imperial Japan committed after invading their country in the 1930s. In March, Qin Gang, then China’s foreign minister, warned the Japanese that forgetting their history meant denying crimes that they then might repeat. China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, uses the memory of World War II to justify the present-day bluster of a rising global power. “Chinese people who have made such a great sacrifice,” Xi said in 2014, “will not waver in protecting a history written in sacrifice and blood.” When nationalistic Japanese politicians such as Shinzo Abe and Junichiro Koizumi have paid their respects at a Tokyo shrine whose honorees include convicted war criminals, Chinese patriots have exploded with state-sanctioned rage. One reason that East Asia’s two greatest economic powers are still sparring about a bygone war is that the most important international attempt to confront that past—the Tokyo war-crimes trial after World War II—failed to promote a common understanding of who was guilty …

FTX’s Organizational Chaos – The Atlantic

FTX’s Organizational Chaos – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

In federal court this week, Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, testified against her former boss and boyfriend, Sam Bankman-Fried. His two fallen crypto enterprises offer an object lesson in how not to run a start-up. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Organizational Chaos “How would you describe the power dynamic of your personal relationship with the defendant?” a prosecutor asked Caroline Ellison in court on Tuesday. Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers immediately objected to the question, and the judge sustained the objection. But all of us watching Ellison’s testimony in the federal courthouse heard the question. It hung in the air even as the prosecutor rephrased the inquiry. At this point, FTX is many things: a company whose founder is on trial; a symbol for the rot underlying the crypto ecosystem; a target of schadenfreude. But before its dramatic implosion, it was also a workplace run by Millennials. And it seems, to hear Ellison describe it, to have been an absolute shitshow. In addition to the fraught power dynamics that came …