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Beijing confirms detention of official from British consulate in Hong Kong 5%

An employee of Britain's consulate in Hong Kong who went missing earlier this month is being held in China, Beijing confirmed Wednesday, adding that the employee is from Hong Kong and therefore the issue was an internal matter.

Australia sees rush of Hong Kong millionaires as unrest rumbles on 17%

Australia is seeing an increase in interest in its millionaires-only visa programme from wealthy Hong Kong residents, who are eyeing a safety net amid political turmoil in the international financial centre, migration lawyers said.The New South Wales state migration department “has noticed a significant increase in applications” from Hong Kong in recent months, it said in a letter to agents this week.The interest has coincided with the “beginning of the current unrest in Hong Kong”, the…

Consulate Worker Accused of Visiting Prostitutes 40%

Simon Cheng, an employee of the U.K. consulate in Hong Kong, was yesterday confirmed to be held under “administrative detention” in Shenzhen after having not been heard

Blindsided: why does Beijing keep getting Hong Kong wrong? 10%

Hong Kong businessman Sam Tsang does not like to talk politics. As a senior business consultant who travels frequently to mainland China and Taiwan, he knows silence is often golden.He was in for a shock when, one night in mid-July, his boss introduced him to two “mainland researchers” who were visiting Hong Kong. That evening, all they talked about was politics.It was just two weeks after the storming of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council chamber by young protesters, angry at the government’s…

Hong Kong protests could hammer citys economy, Bank of East Asia warns, as its profit falls 75 per cent in first half -7%

The Bank of East Asia (BEA) warned on Wednesday that protests and civil unrest in Hong Kong over the past two months, combined with an escalation of the US-China trade war, could begin to weigh on the city’s economy as it reported a nearly 75 per cent drop in its first-half profit.The warning came days after Hong Kong’s government cut its forecast for economic growth to between zero and 1 per cent in 2019 and Morgan Stanley said it expected the city’s economy to contract this year.In June, Hong…

Why powerful China must pick its battles: boom-time Japan offers a cautionary tale -16%

Yes, I really am old enough to remember Japan’s economic boom of the 1980s, when the country boasted by far the second-largest economy in the world. When you couldn’t walk down the Ginza for people. When an apple cost US$40 at a street stall. When it was incredibly tough and fearfully expensive to do business, because of the non-tariff barriers and unwelcoming attitude. As a result, businesses worked remotely, doing as little as possible within Japan. Legal drafting was done in Hong Kong…

CNN10 - 8/20/19

Our topics this Tuesday include extensive protests in Hong Kong, a U.S. investigation into lung disease cases, and a CNN Hero who's helping former prisoners.

Hong Kongs Protests Have Cemented Its Identity 5%

HONG KONG—As political upheaval here rolls through the summer, the proposed legislation that set months of demonstrations into motion has faded considerably from the prominence and parlance of protesters.

Instead, disquiet over the now shelved bill, which would have allowed for case-by-case extraditions to mainland China, has morphed into something deeper, unearthing grievances and demands far beyond any single piece of legislation, and opening up a wide-ranging conversation over the fundamental question of what it means to be from Hong Kong. Protesters have laid out five demands for the government to bring their demonstrations to an end, but imbued in their fight is a sense that Hong Kong’s very existence and the identity of its people is being deliberately quashed by authorities who want to tie them closer to China.

For more than two months, huge numbers of Hong Kongers have taken to the streets in mostly peaceful rallies demanding that their freedoms be protected. Today, undeterred by a downpour and only limited permission from police, some 1.7 million people again flooded the city’s streets, according to the Civil Human Rights Front, which organized the demonstration.

And as those protests have continued, participants have taken particular aim at symbols of the mainland: When a group stormed Hong Kong’s legislative assembly last month, black spray paint was used to cross out references to the People’s Republic of China; a group of protesters was arrested this week for tossing a prominently displayed Chinese flag into the city’s main harbor. These efforts have also veered into acts of mob violence tinged with paranoia. Demonstrators at Hong Kong’s airport last week held captive two men—one, a suspected police officer from mainland China, was held for hours and mocked as he faded in and out of consciousness; the other (later revealed to be a reporter for the Chinese state-backed newspaper, Global Times) was zip-tied to a baggage cart.

“Hong Kong identity isn’t just based on the rejection of Chinese identity, but a collective sense of resilience and autonomy and saying no to oppression,” Johnson Yeung, a veteran activist and former student leader who was arrested during a protest last month, told me. “Hong Kong people are putting up a fight to save their unique status.”

Yeung’s sentiments are reflected across the territory, especially among the young. A University of Hong Kong poll in June, when these latest protests began, found that 75 percent of people ages 18 to 29 identified as “Hong Konger,” as opposed to “Chinese,” “Chinese in Hong Kong,” or “Hong Konger in China,” the highest proportion since the poll began tracking identity sentiment, in 1997. Overall, 52.9 percent of respondents across all age groups identified this way, according to the survey, up from 35.9 percent in 1997.

(The term Hongkonger was itself added to the Oxford English Dictionary only in 2014 and is defined as “a native or inhabitant of Hong Kong,” though a common spelling style has not yet been agreed on. Both Hong Konger and Hongkonger are prevalent. Shirts with the dictionary entry printed on them are sold in gift shops and have been a common sight at recent protests.)

Much of the organizing of demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience has taken place on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. In one of the many protest-related groups on the app, I put a question to users: “What does being a Hong Konger mean to you?”

The first responses came within a few minutes and continued for days. Nearly two dozen people—frontline protesters, Hong Kongers living abroad, students—sent back messages detailing their thoughts. Some were succinct (“We are not Chinese,” one 40-year-old man wrote), while others sent lengthy paragraphs. One related his sadness that his young son would grow up to see a city fundamentally different from the one that he experienced; another said she thought Hong Kong’s films, which blend humor and traditional Chinese themes, best represented the territory; a man in his 20s talked about recently becoming enraptured with Hong Kong history and digging through old maps of the territory; some poked fun at the stereotypes of Hong Kong people as buttoned-up workaholics focused on money.

All spoke with immense pride for Hong Kong and its community spirit—and nearly all told me that the recent protests had served to harden their position of being distinct from the mainland.

“This anti-extradition-bill movement enhanced my Hong Kong identity, where I saw Hong Kongers’ unity and how high quality Hong Kong people were,” said one protester, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the authorities (another by-product of the protests has been a growing unease among demonstrators with identifying themselves in articles or photographs, despite this city ostensibly having a free press and the right to protest). This demonstrator spoke of being deeply moved by protesters helping one another with supplies and organization over the past months: “How can you not love this place when you see people unselfishly helping each other?”

The genesis of the Hong Kong identity as separate from the mainland can be traced in part to China’s internal developments, said Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the author of several history books on Hong Kong. Before Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, the border between Hong Kong and China was essentially open, and there was a free flow of people between the southern mainland and Hong Kong, Tsang told me. But once Mao took over, a border was enforced between Chinese Communist Party–controlled territory and Hong Kong, which remained a British colony until 1997, thereby creating a population that, as Tsang told me, “would grow up and expect to die in Hong Kong, which was not what happened before 1950.”

The coming decades produced the first generation of Hong Kong residents largely cut off from the mainland. As the city developed and incomes rose, the mainland languished. When China began to open up, people in Hong Kong “had a chance to go and see China at the tail end of Maoism,” Tsang said. “They crossed the border and really didn’t like what they saw. They went back to Hong Kong, and they realized that ‘yeah, we are kind of Chinese, but we are not that type of Chinese—we are Hong Kong–Chinese.’”

In 1997, when Hong Kong was handed back to China, beginning a 50-year period when it would maintain its freedoms but be ruled by Beijing, there were high expectations among mainland authorities that “identification with the Chinese nation would slowly but surely strengthen among the local population,” Sebastian Veg, a historian at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, wrote in a 2013 piece.

But, Veg cautioned, “the end of the resistance to colonialism may have paradoxically weakened the feeling of cultural belonging to the Chinese nation. Simultaneously, a new resistance to Beijing’s fixation on patriotism emerged. Most importantly, however, the new generation may be growing more aware of a contradiction between patriotic and democratic values.”

In the six years that have passed, Veg’s observation, made before even the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong, looks prescient. Beijing has ramped up its efforts to pull Hong Kong more firmly into its control. Infrastructure projects linking the mainland to Hong Kong have sprung up, despite vocal opposition here. Residents, particularly those near the border, persistently complain about the influx of mainland residents and economic issues caused by small-scale traders who abuse the border-crossing system.

During recent protests, demonstrators have talked about their fears of Hong Kong disappearing, of it becoming just another mainland city. In June, when police fired tear gas at protesters, a now weekly occurrence that once seemed jarring, a foreign photographer was recorded yelling at police as they appeared to fire canisters at journalists. “It’s still Hong Kong, not China,” he bellowed. “Not yet.” In a movement devoid of public leadership, the moment briefly made him one of the faces of the rallies. His words—terse and livid—have been scrawled in graffiti and reprinted on posters since.

This openly expressed love of Hong Kong runs counter to the narrative of pro-establishment lawmakers here, as well as officials in Beijing and their nationalist supporters, who have painted protesters as a gang that is intent on tearing down Hong Kong. In this telling, the demonstrations have been an attempt at destruction backed by meddling foreign forces, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. They often chide protesters for disrespecting the notion of one China or one country, an idea that Beijing has been working hard to cement in Hong Kong.

During a recent interview, Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing lawmaker in Hong Kong’s legislature who staunchly defended the extradition bill, broke off from our discussion to offer a clarification. The bill, she told me, had been wrongly termed by the media and the public. “We call it ‘rendition,’” she said, “because we are not a country.”

Lawyer Chen Qiushis Video Diary of Hong Kong Visit 18%

Chinese human rights lawyer Chen Qiushi confirmed that he has returned safely to mainland China after visiting Hong Kong last week to observe the protests and broadcast video commentaries

Chaos, tear gas and violence return to streets of Hong Kong as protesters clash with police -1%

Tear gas and violence returned to the streets of Hong Kong on Saturday after a week’s respite as police and protesters battled each other district by district across eastern Kowloon.The skirmishes lasted from early afternoon well into the night, spreading from the streets of industrial heartland Kwun Tong to nearby commercial and residential areas. In a now familiar pattern, the protesters threw bricks, petrol bombs, corrosive liquid and other projectiles at the police, who responded with tear…

Hong Kong unions urge Cathay Pacific to end 'white terror'

Cathay Pacific Airways , which is caught in the crosswinds between authorities in Beijing and anti-government protesters in Hong Kong, must put an end to "all forms of white terror", Hong Kong trade unions said. The carrier has become the biggest corporate casualty of the protests after China demanded it suspend staff involved in, or who support, the demonstrations.

Lessons of Hong Kong: The West's Guiding Light Has Dimmed

In Hong Kong, protesters are courageously fighting for democracy, rule of law and human rights -- values that the West used to promote. But not anymore, showing just how dramatically the world order has changed.

A Defining Moment for Trumps Foreign Policy 9%

It seems about as black-and-white a situation as an American president can face in this messy world of ours: hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful protesters—at points as much as a quarter of Hong Kong’s entire population—spilling into the streets of the former British colony to demand greater democracy and resist China’s creeping control over the semiautonomous region.

All the more so for this particular American president, who for nearly a decade has styled himself as the man who will finally stand up to China. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, he looked toward the heavens and suggested he was put on this Earth to challenge Beijing’s economic dealings. “I am the chosen one,” he said. “Somebody had to do it. So I’m taking on China. I’m taking on China on trade.” His administration has identified the struggle between free societies and authoritarian powers like China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security.” This summer, that struggle has come right up to China’s southern coast, in the beating heart of Asia.

As a senior Trump-administration official, who, like some others contacted for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to candidly discuss the topic, told us this week, “Hong Kong is a bellwether for China’s ability and intention to color the world in a more authoritarian hue.”

Yet in the throes of this hugely consequential moment, Donald Trump, no stranger to sounding off on the issues of the day, has mostly been mute. At times he seemed to condemn the people in the streets clamoring for more self-government, suggesting the demonstrations amounted to a criminal act. At least one foreign diplomat told us he is confounded by the administration’s position, sifting through the various statements from Trump, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hoping to find clarity. A nation that itself broke free from colonial control has, under Trump, struggled to come up with a clear, consistent position on a massive demonstration from people chafing at Chinese rule.

[Read: Trump’s foreign-policy crisis arrives]

Trump has only become more vocal in recent days amid bouts of violence between protesters and police and an ominous buildup of Chinese security forces along the border with Hong Kong. (There’s already a Chinese military garrison in Hong Kong.) Even then, however, he’s spoken out with nowhere near the fervor he devotes to discussing Chinese trade practices or, for that matter, the size of the crowds showing up at his rallies.

The seismic developments in Hong Kong mark another instance in which Trump has had to reckon with competing imperatives that may be irreconcilable: pursuing his trade agenda, and playing the American president’s traditional role of promoting democratic ideals.

Trump confronted a similar dilemma with Saudi Arabia. Rather than punish the Saudi leadership over the kingdom’s role in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump said that arms sales were ultimately too important to jeopardize relations with a rich ally.

What his approach to Hong Kong has laid bare is the extent to which Trump diverges from his predecessors in modern American history, who tended to instinctively embrace the forces of freedom, so central to America’s own founding, even if they often failed to make good on their lofty rhetoric in practice.

That’s not the way Trump is wired. What moves him personally is America’s economic growth, which he sees as a zero-sum proposition: measured by trade deficits, GDP, jobs numbers, and, perhaps most important, the stock market. In 1990, he gave an interview that revealed his thinking about clashes between authoritarian leaders and protest movements looking for democratic freedoms. His admiration was for the crackdown. China’s massacre of civilians in Tiananmen Square the previous year was “vicious,” he declared at the time, but it showed “the power of strength,” which the United States needed more of.

Since the demonstrations erupted in Hong Kong several months ago, Trump has put forward a muddled message about the most overt challenge to Chinese authority since Tiananmen Square. For a spell, he and advisers such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross characterized the ferment in the territory as an internal Chinese matter and flirted with a pro-Beijing stance. Trump used the Chinese government’s preferred term of “riots,” and stated that China and Hong Kong would “have to deal with that themselves” and “don’t need advice.”

As the standoff grew graver in mid-August, the president described Hong Kongers’ quest for more political rights and better governance as a “problem” that China’s leader, Xi Jinping (a “good man in a ‘tough business’”), could “humanely solve.” He even proposed a way to solve it: for Xi to meet with the leaders of the protests, and “work it out in 15 minutes.”

On Sunday the president struck a substantially different tone. He warned that any violence against protesters by Chinese forces—“another Tiananmen Square,” as he put it—would undermine negotiations to resolve the escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing.

[Read: Trump’s trade war with China is already changing the world]

Still, the takeaway was more don’t kill them than long live democracy. He distanced himself a bit from concern about a Chinese crackdown. “I’m president,” he said, “but that’s a little beyond me because I think there’d be tremendous political sentiment not to do something” on a trade deal in the event the protests are crushed. He expressed “support [for] democracy,” but only after a reporter literally said the words for him: “Do you support the principles of the protestors—the pro-democracy movement?,” the journalist inquired. When he lingered on that movement, it was to marvel at the size of the crowds rather than the causes behind them: “Those are serious crowds—the Hong Kong crowds.”

The foreign diplomat interpreted Trump’s statements on Sunday as “the officials around him trying to get him back on script,” noting that the president’s tweets have “muddied the waters when it comes to figuring out what exactly is the U.S. position.”

The senior Trump-administration official offered a different reading of the president’s remarks. “These messages were a public, topmost amplification of things we’ve been telling the Chinese in private for many weeks now,” the official said. “We’ve been in regular contact with the Chinese about the fact that there would be consequences if China tried to use force and intervene directly in Hong Kong.”

Trump’s call for Xi to dispense with Communist Party convention and engage in direct dialogue with representatives of the demonstrators, the official added, is an inspired idea. Trump was, in effect, challenging Xi to take part in the sort of dialogue that happens routinely in democratic nations, the official suggested. Still, Trump’s plan is rife with obstacles: The protest movement in Hong Kong is largely leaderless, the disputes Trump claims could be sorted out in minutes have been brewing for decades, no Chinese leader has met with protesters since the “Butcher of Beijing” did so ahead of the Tiananmen crackdown 30 years ago, and Xi would probably view such a meeting as legitimizing protests he considers a threat. As Trump himself has acknowledged, “That’s not his deal, sitting down with people.”

The Chinese government, for its part, has reacted to Trump’s new bid to help end the crisis by hurling his prior statements back at him, with spokespeople questioning why the U.S. president would possibly proffer advice he said the parties didn’t need and suggest Xi meet with those whom Trump has recognized as rioters.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist and a prominent China hawk, maintains that the president has been “smart” to stay “above” the fray in Hong Kong and thus make it harder for the Chinese to try and discredit the demonstrations as a U.S.-orchestrated plot. “Xi has not made one comment on Hong Kong in the whole 12 weeks” of protests, he told us. “Donald Trump, through his Twitter feed, has put the international spotlight on where it should be: not on the streets of Hong Kong, but on Xi, and that Xi can resolve this.”

Voices in the Trump administration also caution that positioning the U.S. government squarely on the side of the demonstrators could backfire spectacularly, spurring the Chinese government to launch a violent strike aimed at forcing the demonstrators to disband.

A former Trump-administration official concurred that the dilemma for the president is that “the more vocal you are in favor of the opposition, the more you give the autocratic leadership the opportunity to cast it as an American-led protest.” And yet a number of the president’s current and former advisers, along with allies in Congress, recognize that the Hong Kong protests are a historic moment that no president should discount.

“Hong Kong is everything,” Bannon said. “As Berlin was to the Cold War, so Hong Kong is to the conflict we’re in with China. And we’re in a conflict.”

In an apparent jab at the Trump administration’s initial approach to the issue, Senator Marco Rubio told us that “Hong Kong is not China’s internal affair because Beijing promised the world it would protect Hong Kong’s autonomy” as part of its 1984 pact with Britain on transferring control of the territory. If the Chinese government “cannot honor a legally binding treaty,” he argued, then why should the United States “trust its word” on trade or “retain Hong Kong’s special status?” The Florida Republican has joined other U.S. lawmakers in threatening to revoke Hong Kong’s favored status as an economic partner under a 1992 U.S. law, and thereby eliminate a source of enrichment for mainland China, if the Chinese government quashes the protests.

Trump, too, has at times been outspoken on matters of democracy and human rights, perhaps most prominently in Venezuela. But a second former Trump-administration official told us that there’s actually a “deliberate” and “strategic” division of labor at play in the White House: Vice President Mike Pence tends to focus on delivering messages about liberty abroad, while Trump tends to focus on delivering messages about economic issues abroad. (Pence has been one of the administration’s foremost voices on these matters, but in recent days he has hewed to Trump’s talking points on Hong Kong. The vice president reportedly canceled a planned speech on Chinese human-rights abuses earlier this summer ahead of a meeting between Trump and Xi on trade.)

Pence “has been vocal on those issues his entire career, so he’s the obvious, natural delivery mechanism of that message for the administration,” whereas “Trump has a greater comfort in the economic message and knows that he has to navigate some pretty prickly waters with some pretty tough hombres that lead these different countries, whether it’s Kim Jong Un or Xi,” the former official said. With Trump attempting to personally connect with such leaders and Pence taking the lead on issues related to democracy and human rights, the president has “the buffer” necessary to cut economic deals with these countries, the ex-official explained.

Critics would likely counter that advancing America’s economic interests and championing its values don’t always have to be mutually exclusive, and that the natural point person for promoting freedom in the U.S. government is the president, traditionally also known as the leader of the free world. If nothing else, Trump’s delegation of that role to his vice president and others in the administration suggests that it’s not his top priority. (The strategy has yet to yield any blockbuster trade deal with China.)

[Read: Trump didn’t make the storm, but he’s making it worse]

Granted, when similar protests broke out in Hong Kong in 2014, Barack Obama also proceeded cautiously. Like Trump, he urged the parties to refrain from violence. Like Trump, he denied any U.S. involvement in the demonstrations, hesitating to take sides. Like Trump, he openly juggled American values and economic interests. As in Trump’s case, the president’s public utterances were only part of the story. “The Obama administration conducted the bulk of its communication privately,” for example pressing China’s foreign minister behind closed doors to maintain the territory’s open system, Ryan Hass, who oversaw China policy on Obama’s National Security Council, told us. (At the time, Trump urged Obama to “stay out of the Hong Kong protests” because “we have enough problems in our own country!”)

But there was one key distinction between then and now: the widespread assumption that the American president stood the same ground that his predecessors had for decades. So entrenched was this assumption that Joshua Wong, a young leader of the protests in Hong Kong, was disappointed when Obama merely endorsed the common human desire for the freedoms Americans hold dear and he and his fellow activists were seeking.

“Barack Obama’s administration gave obvious statements, as if they’re telling us, ‘Your mother is a woman,’” Wong told The Wall Street Journal. “Who wouldn’t know that they support Hong Kong’s democracy? Hong Kong needs more than a few words from Obama.”

Now, even that rhetorical support isn’t a given. “Under the current leadership of President Trump,” Wong told CNN earlier this month, “business interests or the daily life of Americans might be more important than human rights.”

Hong Kong airport operating normally despite planned stress test protest 10%

Hong Kong’s airport and the roads and railways leading to it were operating normally early on Saturday despite plans by protesters to implement a “stress test” of transport links to

Googles YouTube suspends 210 channels alleged to have ties to the Chinese government -1%

YouTube has suspended scores of accounts alleged to be part of a Chinese government-backed campaign to influence opinion about unrest in Hong Kong, the video-sharing platform’s owner Google announced on Thursday.The move follows similar measures announced by US social media platforms Facebook and Twitter earlier this week.“As part of our ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations, we disabled 210 channels on YouTube when we discovered channels in this network behaved in a…

Hong Kong protesters form 30-mile human chain across city video

Thousands of protesters have formed a human chain across Hong Kong on the 30th anniversary of the Baltic Way, when about 2 million people created a chain across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to protest against Soviet occupation. More than two months of protests began in June over a now-suspended extradition bill, but have and have since expanded into a wider movement against the erosion of liberties under Chinese rule

Hong Kong protesters join hands in 30-mile human chain

North Korea warns U.S. against new missiles in South Korea

U.S. ambassador uncertain of New START Treaty with Russia — Trump floats meeting with XI to resolve Hong Kong crisis

British government welcomes Chinas release of Hong Kong consulate employee

The British government on Saturday welcomed the release of an employee at its consulate in Hong Kong who had been detained in mainland China. Simon Cheng was held for 15 days for

Beijing unveils detailed reform plan to make Shenzhen model city for China and the world 20%

Shenzhen – China’s hi-tech capital just over the border from Hong Kong that was the original site for the country’s reform and opening-up experiment 40 years ago – will become a new special economic zone to carry out bolder reforms as a model for other Chinese cities.Beijing on Sunday unveiled a detailed plan for wide-ranging reforms to be implemented in Shenzhen, including in the legal, financial, medical and social sectors, according to a report by state broadcaster CCTV.Under the plan,…

YouTube axes anti-protest channels as US Ministry of Truth battles China over Hong Kong -7%

YouTube has disabled 210 channels for posting content related to the Hong Kong protests “in a coordinated manner,” following in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter in restricting its arbitrary censorship to pro-China accounts.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Hong Kong developer Wheelock cuts price of new project, sparks fears of faster-than-expected correction in property market 8%

Hong Kong developer Wheelock Properties has sparked fears of a faster-than-expected correction in the world’s most expensive property market by pricing a new project in Tseung Kwan O 8 per cent below properties sold in the area just two months ago.It has priced a first batch of 130 flats at the 674-unit Marini development, in Lohas Park, at an average of HK$14,997 (US$1,912.9) per square foot, after a 21.5 per cent discount.“The social unrest in the past two months has had a significant impact…

Chinese diplomats warn Beijing wont sit on its hands if Hong Kong spirals out of control -3%

Two of China’s leading diplomats in Europe have warned that Beijing will not stand idly by if the chaos in Hong Kong worsens.Liu Xiaoming, Chinese ambassador to Britain, and Wu Ken, ambassador to Germany, issued the warning after German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian pleaded for restraint and called for dialogue to defuse the crisis.The escalating diplomatic rhetoric came as the Chinese foreign ministry’s office in Hong Kong condemned US politicians…

Violence Returns To Hong Kong As Police Fire Tear Gas And Protesters Fight Back -80%

After a period of peace in Hong Kong, protests on Saturday turned violent. Police fired tear gas at pro-democracy demonstrators who barricaded roads with bamboo and hurled bricks at authorities.

China: British consulate worker Simon Cheng released

The 28-year-old had been in Chinese custody for more than two weeks. He had been accused of violating public security management regulations while in the city of Shenzhen, just across the bay from Hong Kong.

Trump praises Chinese leader, not Hong Kong protesters seeking democratic reforms

President Trump's reaction to the Hong Kong protests has ranged from muddled to indifferent, displaying his disinclination to use his office to promote democracy around the world — a task his predecessors considered a core part of the job — and his focus on trade over human rights.

Hong Kong protest: Another day on the front lines

Hong Kong’s summer has been defined by upheaval. Gigi, who is 16, has been a constant presence at anti-government demonstrations in the semiautonomous territory. She dons a helmet, goggles and respira...

Angry residents confront Hong Kongs MTR staff over closure of train services and stations on Kwun Tong line before protest march

Hong Kong’s embattled rail giant has come under fire from residents over its decision to suspend train services and close stations along the Kwun Tong line before a protest march in the area is set to kick off.The MTR Corporation said trains running between Choi Hung and Tiu Keng Leng stations would be suspended temporarily from noon on Saturday until further notice to ensure the safety of passengers and staff.The Kwun Tong march kicks off as about a thousand people show up for the approved…

Hong Kong is in India, Kashmir is in China. Right? 36%

Returning to Hong Kong this time held a special attraction. It may sound like an odd thing to say now, what with the eventual flight cancellations and the disruption, but before it all escalated, there was no denying the mild thrill of anticipation of being greeted by a swarm of protesters at the airport. That doesn’t happen every day, and who doesn’t like a spirited protest? So, it was slightly disappointing to be deprived of this novelty on landing in Hong Kong last week. It was early…

Carrie Lam can defuse the Hong Kong protests by taking on the property tycoons -8%

There is no question that Hong Kong has messed up big time. But a cloud of questions hangs over how to defuse the city’s biggest political crisis in decades.On Thursday, the Hong Kong government announced a basket of extra budget measures valued at HK$19.1 billion, spanning everything from relief for small businesses to more generous student subsidies and goodies for low-income households.Although Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po cited the gloomy economic outlook and downplayed the political…

Hong Kong police fire tear gas at demonstrators amid chaotic scenes 8%

Hong Kong protesters have hurled bricks and petrol bombs at police, who responded with tear gas as chaotic scenes returned to the streets of the former British colony for the first time in two weeks.

Anti-Government Protesters In Hong Kong Join Hands, Form Human Chains Across The City 3%

Thousands of protesters in Hong Kong formed human chains across the city, in a bid to drum up international support for anti-government protests that have continued for nearly three months.

Hong Kong protests met with tear gas; China frees UK mission staffer

Hong Kong police fired volleys of tear gas to break up anti-government protests in a gritty industrial suburb on Saturday after activists threw petrol bombs and bricks, as China freed a British consulate worker whose detention had fueled tensions.

What if China sends paramilitary forces to crush the Hong Kong protests?

Could Hong Kong face its own Tiananmen Square-type moment if China sends in forces to end protests?

Twitter bans state media from advertising and guess who decides how they are defined

As mainstream media outlets accused Twitter of allowing a Chinese news agency to advertise its reporting on the Hong Kong protests, the platform announced it would ban all “state-controlled” media advertising within a month.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Hong Kong protests: young, educated mainland Chinese are questioning their place in the city

When anti-government protesters held two men from mainland China virtual hostage at Hong Kong International Airport earlier this month, it was 33-year-old Leon Liang’s saddest and darkest day in the city since he arrived nine years ago.“What a shame for Hong Kong,” Liang, from Shanxi province in northern China, wrote in a social media post that night. “I never imagined that such a personal assault could have happened in a city that prides itself on upholding law and order.”Liang, a Hong Kong…

Hongkongers turn to Malaysias second home programme as protests persist 12%

A Malaysian programme to attract wealthy foreigners to live in the Southeast Asian nation has drawn 251 applications from Hong Kong residents so far this year, compared with 193 approved from the city last year, a government official said.Property consultants said interest in the “Malaysia My Second Home” (MM2H) initiative has surged among residents of the Asian financial hub, rattled by anti-government protests that began more than 11 weeks ago.Hongkongers scout properties in Malaysia as…