China Origin Virus ID-19

China Detains Activist Who Accused Xi Jinping of Chinese Coronavirus Cover-Up
Xu Zhiyong, a prominent Chinese legal activist, went silent over the weekend. His girlfriend, Li Qiaochu, a social activist, has gone missing.
Javier C. Hernández

Xu Zhiyong in Beijing in 2009.

He portrayed China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, as hungry for power.

He accused Xi of trying to cover up the Chinese coronavirus outbreak in central China. 

In one of his most daring writings, he urged Xi to resign, saying, “You’re just not smart enough.”
Then, over the weekend, Xu Zhiyong, a prominent Chinese legal activist, went silent. 

The authorities in the southern city of Guangzhou detained him on Saturday, according to Mr. Xu’s friends, after he spent nearly two months in hiding. 

His girlfriend, Li Qiaochu, a social activist, went missing on Sunday, Mr. Xu’s friends said.
The activist is the latest critic to be caught up in Xi’s far-reaching efforts to limit dissent in China. 

The crackdown, which has ensnared scores of activists, lawyers, journalists and intellectuals, is likely to intensify as the ruling Communist Party comes under broad attack for its handling of the Chinese coronavirus outbreak, one of its biggest political challenges in years.
Mr. Xu, a 46-year-old former university lecturer, has long railed against government corruption and social injustice in China. 

He went into hiding in December as the police began rounding up human rights activists who met with him in the eastern city of Xiamen.
While in hiding, Mr. Xu continued to publish blunt critiques of Xi on social media, accusing him of leading a dictatorship.

He also criticized Xi’s handling of the outbreak in the central province of Hubei that has killed at least 1,770 people in China and sickened more than 70,000. 

In one of his last writings before he was detained, Mr. Xu mourned the death of a doctor in Wuhan whom the police had silenced after he warned about the virus.

“In their hearts,” Mr. Xu said of party leaders, “there is no right and wrong, no conscience, no bottom line, no humanity.”
Mr. Xu, a firebrand who has spent decades pushing for political reforms, has long clashed with the Chinese government.
He was sentenced to four years in prison in 2014 for “gathering a crowd to disturb public order,” a charge that stemmed from his role organizing the New Citizens Movement, a grass-roots effort against corruption and social injustice in Chinese society.
It is unclear what charges the authorities might bring against Mr. Xu. 

The circumstances of the disappearance of his girlfriend, Ms. Li, were also ambiguous. 

The police in Guangzhou did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Xu’s friends defended his actions.
“It is within the scope of freedom of speech under the Chinese Constitution,” said Hua Ze, an activist based in New Jersey and a friend of Mr. Xu who confirmed his detention.
Faced with growing public anger over the Chinese coronavirus outbreak, China’s leader has cited a need to “strengthen the guidance of public opinion,” a term that often refers to blocking independent news reporting and censoring critical comments on Chinese social media.
Many free-speech activists worry that the party, which is concerned about maintaining its control, is tightening the reins of public discourse despite a growing perception that the silencing of doctors and others who tried to raise alarms has enabled the Chinese virus to spread more widely.
Two video bloggers who attracted wide attention for their dispatches from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, have gone missing.
Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, said the detention of Mr. Xu showed that the authorities had no intention of loosening restrictions on speech.
“The Chinese government persists in its old ways: silencing its critics rather than listening to people who promote rights-respecting policies that actually solve problems,” she said.

Facebook's Freudian Slip

Facebook Translation Bravely Calls Chinese Dictator ‘Mr Shithole’
“This issue is not a reflection of the way our products should work,” Facebook says in a statement
By Sean Burch

China's Shithole

Facebook apologized on Saturday after its translation repeatedly called Chinese dictator Xi Jinping “Mr. Shithole.”
The typo was featured in several Facebook posts that were translated from Burmese to English, including a post on Burma/Myanmar state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi’s Facebook page, Reuters reported. 

Several mentions of Xi, who is the head of China’s Communist government and has been visiting Burma in recent days, referred to him as “Mr. Shithole.”
Facebook does not know what led to the error, but said it has been fixed.
In addition, a headline in the local news journal Irrawaddy was published as “Dinner honors president Shithole.”
“This issue is not a reflection of the way our products should work and we sincerely apologize for the offense this has caused,” Facebook said in a statement.
Facebook has been blocked in China for several years. 

The country’s internet is censored by the “Great Firewall,” as it’s facetiously been dubbed, which has stifled free speech online for years through a network of "moderators", technical restraints and legislative regulations. 

The Chinese government blocks access to news stories that are overly critical of its Communist regime, as well as major sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
A parallel online universe exists in China, with popular social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo, a Twitter-esque communication app, filling the void of their blocked Western analogs.
You can read more about China’s internet censorship here.

President Tsai Stands Up to Xi Jinping

The Chinese dictator miscalculated, increasing the pressure he exerted, but driving more support to President Tsai Ing-wen.

By Thomas Wright

Taiwan can seem like the third rail of international diplomacy. 

If a country wants a good relationship with China, Beijing has effectively stated, it cannot have a meaningful relationship with Taiwan. 

Just this week, the city of Shanghai broke off official contacts with the city of Prague for signing a partnership treaty with Taipei. 

Beijing has long regarded Taiwan as nothing more than a renegade province. 

Under Xi Jinping, China has systematically tried to reduce Taiwan’s international space, forcing it out of global organizations and forums, as well as increasing military and economic coercion to force it into a process of reunification.

By this measure, Tsai Ing-wen’s landslide reelection on Saturday as president of Taiwan will come as a great disappointment to Beijing. 

President Tsai’s victory seemed very unlikely nine months ago. 

She was more than 20 points behind in the polls. 

Her party, the DPP, suffered a big defeat in midterm elections in 2018. 

But China’s actions in Hong Kong gave the Taiwanese a glimpse of their possible future. 

In his 2019 New Year’s Day message, Xi demanded that Taiwan look to the “one country, two systems” approach as a model for future relations. 

The Taiwanese had their worst fears about what that meant confirmed in Hong Kong and gave a resounding “No, thanks.”
Taiwan’s politics are complicated and defy the typical left-right divide. 

The DPP has traditionally favored formal independence, although President Tsai is cautious and has made it clear she will not take any steps in this direction that could give Beijing a pretext for an invasion. 

Her government is focused on preserving Taiwan’s practical autonomy and freedoms. 

The other party is the Kuomintang (KMT), which extended its rule over Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war to the Communists. 

The KMT favors closer ties with Beijing and eventual reunification, albeit on very different terms to those proposed by Xi. 

Young people in Taiwan have no emotional attachment to the past and want to preserve the only way of life they have known.
Beijing made its feelings known quickly. 

Commenting on the election, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said the “international consensus” on “the one-China principle,” which holds that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory … will not be affected in the least by a local election.” 

“Those who split the country will be doomed to leave a stink for 10,000 years,” he said. 

The Global Times, a newspaper operated under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party, called for “a plan to crack down on President Tsai’s new provocative actions, including imposing military pressure, which is an unbearable option for Taiwan authorities.”

The big question hanging over Taiwan now is how Beijing will react over the next four years. 

I spent the past five days in Taipei with a small group of Americans and Australians to observe the elections. 

We also had an opportunity to speak with President Tsai and other senior officials.

“We need to be candid,” President Tsai told us. 

“If we are vague, Beijing may misjudge the situation. In the past, people have gotten concerned when we are direct, but the situation has changed. We need to be direct to prevent misjudgment.” President Tsai reminded me of Angela Merkel. 

A 63-year-old academic, she is both principled and cautious. 

“We must be clear, but not provocative; loud, but careful,” she said.

Taiwan officials told me that more than 70 countries had sent messages of congratulations to President Tsai and the people of Taiwan on the election, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

They said the messages were longer and arrived faster than in previous years. 

This may seem like a small thing, but in a place where protocol is often seen as a matter of survival, it mattered. 

The officials pointed in particular to Europe, where they said they had witnessed a sea change in recent years. 

As European countries experienced direct pressure from China on a variety of fronts, they have seen Taiwan in a new light.

Taiwan officials believe that Xi miscalculated on Taiwan. 

He saw that President Tsai was politically vulnerable and sought to increase pressure, but it had the opposite effect. 

Xi has decades of experience in dealing with Taiwan and sees himself as the expert in chief. 

Now that his judgment has been revealed to be fallible, the question is whether he will be impatient and seek to achieve unification through coercive means, or whether he has enough on his plate. 

Taipei hopes that Xi will reach out to President Tsai to ease tensions. 

The officials pointed out that President Tsai is not an ideologue. 

If China does not deal with her now, it may have to deal with future leaders who they will perceive as more difficult. 

There is no prospect of leaders who will engage on the one country, two systems idea, even if the KMT were to make a comeback.

But Taipei is not counting on Xi having a change of heart. 

Instead, officials are preparing for a prolonged pressure campaign. 

Although the military threat grabs headlines, President Tsai’s government’s main foreign-policy goal is to halt and reverse its diplomatic isolation. 

Taiwan officials see the Trump administration as a stalwart ally in this regard. 

The U.S. has increased official engagement and approved the sale of fighter jets. 

Taipei hopes to move toward a free-trade agreement and is willing to offer good terms. 

However, Donald Trump remains a wild card. 

For instance, Trump complained bitterly after a mid-ranking State Department official, Alex Wong, visited Taipei to demonstrate U.S. solidarity, because he worried that it would infuriate Xi.

Always susceptible to direct requests from Xi, Trump reportedly considered firing him, but eventually demurred.
Support for Taiwan is likely to remain a bipartisan cause in the United States. 

Both Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg issued strong statements of congratulations and support after President Tsai’s election. 

In Washington, there is widespread recognition that President Tsai’s win was not a disruptive act; it was a vote for stability and the status quo. 

Isolating Taiwan is bad not just for Taiwan, but for the world. 

After President Tsai’s first election in 2016, China blocked Taiwan’s attendance as an observer at World Health Assembly meetings even though it had participated for the past eight years under a KMT government. 

Global pandemics know no boundaries, and tackling this threat ought not to be dependent on whether Beijing approves of Taiwan’s political choices.

The pressure Taiwan is experiencing is a more extreme case of the pressure many countries, companies, and people are under from Beijing, whether it is the Swedish government awarding a free-speech prize to a Swedish citizen born in Hong Kong; the mayor of Prague; a Turkish soccer player in England; or American technology companies. 

When I asked President Tsai what lessons the world should draw from Beijing’s global assertiveness, she told me, “We cannot afford to be romantic about the relationship with China.”

The question facing democracies is whether to accommodate Beijing’s attempt to silence all criticism and to ensure engagement occurs only on its terms, or to be candid and steadfast about defending and preserving the freedoms we have. 

The people of Taiwan chose to be candid not despite the fact that they are under pressure, but because of it. 

The rest of the world is moving in that direction, too.

How Hong Kong's greatest tycoon went from friend of China to punching bag

China's leaders once courted Li Ka-shing for his money and star power. But today, with protests engulfing Hong Kong, the billionaire is the target of public ridicule by Beijing as it tries to undercut the power of the city's tycoons.

By TOM LASSETER, FARAH MASTER, CLARE JIM and KEITH ZHAI

EVEN-HANDED PLEAS: Li Ka-shing's calls for both the authorities and the protesters to show restraint in Hong Kong did not go down well in Beijing. 

HONG KONG – In January of 1993, an ambitious Chinese Communist Party boss, a 39-year-old official with chubby cheeks and a mop of black hair, visited Hong Kong.

He was seeking out the city’s rich among the shimmering skyscrapers, hoping to secure investment in Fuzhou, the second-tier city he ran in mainland China. 

His name was Xi Jinping.
That August, Xi received a guest back home. 

Hong Kong’s most famous tycoon, Li Ka-shing, known locally as “superman” for his business acumen, had come to town. 

A photograph from the event shows Xi grinning as he walked beside Li, who held a bouquet of flowers in his hand. 

In the background, a long banner hung with the message to “warmly welcome” Li Ka-shing.
During those days, in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Beijing was desperate to fire up a languishing economy. 

National leaders and provincial potentates were courting Li for his cash and the star power his name brought to development projects on the mainland. 

That time has passed.
Xi is now the strongman leader of a rich and rising power that controls Hong Kong. 

Instead of feting the 91-year-old businessman, Beijing has harangued him for failing to deliver in the rebellious city. 

When the Party was looking for a chorus of influential voices to counter the protests that began this summer, Li offered only even-handed pleas for restraint. 

In an online video of comments he made at a monastery, Li called for “humanity” when dealing with young protesters.
The response was brutal. 

The Party’s central legal affairs commission in Beijing publicly accused Li of “harboring criminality” and “watching Hong Kong slip into the abyss.” 

A pro-Beijing trade union leader in Hong Kong posted a Facebook item mocking him as the “king of cockroaches” with an image that pasted Li’s head atop a picture of a fat insect.
“In the world of social media, some people are hard at work in sowing toxic doubts and disinformation to undermine trust,” Li said in a written response to questions from Reuters. 

“It is hard not to be drawn into controversies [in] these times.”
As the Beijing-backed government of Hong Kong cracks down on the demonstrators in the streets, there is another tightening of the leash happening, mostly behind the scenes: China’s efforts to throttle the power of Hong Kong’s tycoons.
Li and other tycoons have long held dominion over Hong Kong, tracing its post-World War II economic rise through manufacturing, real estate and finance. 

But the ascent of Xi Jinping, who became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, has fundamentally altered the status quo.
BILLIONAIRE RECEPTION: Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) greets Li Ka-shing (left) during a visit to the city in 2017. After Xi came to power, Beijing’s attitude toward the city hardened. 

Xi is a leader who “thinks that he is like the emperor,” said Willy Lam Wo-lap, a veteran observer of elite Beijing politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

“So, he thinks that Hong Kong business people should definitely profess undying loyalty to the emperor, to Xi Jinping.”
The vilification of the city’s preeminent capitalist was a rare public display of the new power dynamic, businessmen and analysts say. 

It sent a clear message that Li and his fellow Hong Kong tycoons must toe the line and unequivocally condemn the protests, which present the most serious challenge to Communist Party rule since Tiananmen.The now-scrapped legislation that sparked the recent unrest would have allowed for extraditions from Hong Kong to mainland China. 

It also provided an avenue for the seizure of assets, according to a statement by the Hong Kong Bar Association. 

That could have exposed the city’s tycoons to the same fate as wealthy mainlanders who have been stripped of assets in Xi’s anti-corruption drive.
Shortly after protests over the bill escalated in early June, some wealthy Hong Kongers began moving money outside of the region or setting up accounts that would allow them to do so, according to six private bankers whose institutions collectively handle hundreds of billions of dollars in assets.
Reuters spoke with half a dozen people, including current Li executives, who have had personal relationships with the property mogul or worked alongside him over his career. 

Li stepped down last year and was succeeded by his eldest son as chairman of his two main companies but remains the biggest shareholder.
China’s foreign ministry declined to answer questions from Reuters. 

The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office did not respond to a request for comment.
For all the vitriol aimed at Li in recent months, this was not a sudden split. 

Before protests convulsed Hong Kong, he was already loosening his economic ties to China.
At the start of this century, his flagship Hutchison Whampoa Ltd got much of its money from Hong Kong and the mainland: 56% of earnings before interest and taxes. 

Last year that figure at his current flagship firm was 14%. 

Since 2015, Li's corporate empire has been involved with more than $70 billion in acquisitions globally. 

Less than $1 billion of that was in Hong Kong and mainland China, according to a Reuters analysis of Li’s deals worth $500 million or more.
Asked about those numbers, a spokesperson for Li said that as Hutchison Whampoa sought large acquisitions overseas in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “the diversification changed the geographical proportions, but we are nevertheless growing in the mainland and in Hong Kong.” 

In addition, the spokesperson said, a 2015 reorganization of the group brought down the proportion of earnings from the region for the current flagship.
Shifting large business interests out of China’s immediate orbit carries the risk of offending mainland officials, especially as Beijing exerts greater control of Hong Kong, said Simon Murray, a former managing director at Li’s sprawling corporate operation who has known the billionaire for decades.
SHOWDOWN: Protesters clash with police earlier this month in Hong Kong’s Central district. The extradition bill, which triggered the protests, sparked anxiety among the city’s wealthy. 

“Everybody who is anybody at all in Hong Kong has got one eye on how the mainland sees that,” he said. 

“And you’ve got to build your bridges with them, otherwise they could confiscate.”
For Li, a billionaire in his autumnal years, the tensions with Beijing mark a dramatic turn. 

For decades, he enjoyed a position of eminence under Deng Xiaoping and then Jiang Zemin -- the two men who led China from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. 

Li was on committees that drafted Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the mini-constitution governing the city since it was handed to Beijing by the British, and on a body that selected its first government.
Li’s entire life has been framed by the swings of history in Hong Kong and, looming on its edge, mainland China. 

He was born in 1928 in the river city of Chaozhou, a place known for its local Chinese opera and embroidery work. 

When he was a child, the southern Chinese city was a target for Japanese bombing runs. 

He quit school as a 12-year-old boy and his family fled south down the coast to Hong Kong, then a British colony.
Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in 1941. 

During that occupation, there were food shortages, malnutrition and disease. 

Li’s father died from tuberculosis not long after they arrived. 

His company biography describes what came next: “Before he was 15, Mr. Li had to shoulder the responsibility of providing for his family and found a job in a plastics trading company where he labored 16 hours a day.”
During a 1998 interview with public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, Li spoke of his mixed feelings when he went back to the mainland in 1978 for the first time in decades. 

He’d made a fortune in Hong Kong building his way from manufacturing to real estate to finance. The next year, he became the first Hong Kong Chinese investor to take control of one of the British “hongs,” the great trading houses that accompanied colonial rule from the 19th century.
But looking at his motherland, newly emerged from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s rule, Li said he hesitated to invest. 

“I was afraid that people might say Li had come to exploit,” he said in the interview.
Li’s doubts about mainland control of Hong Kong appear to be longstanding. 

Britain’s conversation with China about the future handover of Hong Kong began heating up in the 1980s. 

Even back then, Murray said, Li discussed his anxiety about the financial future of his corporate empire.
Murray said that Li asked him to “go over to the UK and find a nice company for us to put some money in.”
That led to Li buying up a stake of more than 4% in Pearson Plc, a British conglomerate, in an early foray into Western markets that brought wider attention. 

Murray recalled: “It was on the front page of every bloody newspaper.”
Asked about the tycoon’s concerns at the time, Li’s spokesperson said: “Anyone, especially if one is leading a company with other shareholders, has to have a degree of paranoia as it is part of responsible leadership. The Chinese [have] a traditional saying: 生於憂患，死於安樂, ‘strive in hard times, perish in contentment.’ A certain degree of paranoia prevents the reverse case happening.”
After Xi Jinping's visit to Hong Kong in 1993, Li was given the celebrity welcome in Fuzhou, the provincial city Xi then oversaw. 

The billionaire, who was involved in a redevelopment project there, attended a groundbreaking ceremony with Xi where they laid a foundation stone, according to local media reports.
“It was like a Buddha came to town to build a temple,” said Ruan Yisan, an architecture professor in Shanghai acclaimed for his historical preservation projects who opposed the development. 

“Officials thought he could do magic here and change the city in a dramatic way.”
At the time, Li had outsized impact in China. 

In September of 1997, about two months after the handover of Hong Kong, China was on the verge of its largest-ever stock offering, a state-owned telecommunications company preparing to list on the Hong Kong and New York exchanges. 

At the last minute, a group of Hong Kong tycoons backing the listing of China Telecom got spooked by a financial crisis roiling the region. 

They said they wanted to renegotiate an agreement that required them to hold their stakes for a year, or drop out completely. 

It was just weeks before the listing went to market.
EARLY ANXIETY: Simon Murray, a former managing director at Li’s group of companies, seen here in this 2012 photo, was sent by the billionaire to the UK in the 1980s to look for investments as discussions about the handover of Hong Kong to China gained momentum. 

Li beckoned a group of Chinese bureaucrats and bankers to his Hong Kong office. 

He told them that he had signed a contract and would abide by it, according to a banker who was in the room. 

Then, the Chinese banker said, the billionaire went one step further: He offered to buy a larger stake if necessary. 

Li helped salvage the deal, which became a template for a flood of state-owned Chinese companies raising billions of dollars through public listings. 

It was the sort of moment that made Li, with his trademark large black-framed glasses, Hong Kong’s most fabled businessman.
“Mr Li is not a man to break an agreement easily,” the spokesperson for the billionaire said.
Inside China, though, even Li found that the opaque nature of doing business could mean problems, according to those who have worked with him and his own public remarks.
In the public broadcaster interview, Li detailed his frustrations with building Oriental Plaza. 

A sprawling development in the heart of Beijing, the project faced political wrangling and loud public disagreement about its size as it went up in the 1990s. 

His Chinese partners, he said, gained a 40% share of the project, up from an initial 10% or so. 

Li said he had learned a lesson.
“In a political and cultural center like Beijing, one has to put business and economics in a lesser position,” he said. 

“Although I’ve run into all sorts of trouble, I now have a better understanding of China.”
After Xi took power, Beijing adopted a harder line toward Hong Kong. 

In a 2014 white paper, Beijing said the autonomy the city enjoys was not a given but, instead, contingent on the permission of the central leadership. 

And Li himself began facing criticism from Chinese state media.

During late 2014 and early 2015, Li folded his Hong Kong-registered Hutchison Whampoa and another company into firms incorporated in the Cayman Islands. 

Li’s team says the changes were part of a “streamlining and succession plan.”
In September 2015, in the wake of reports of those moves, Li was excoriated by mainland media outlets as insufficiently patriotic. 

The People’s Daily, the main mouthpiece of the Communist Party, posted a commentary on social media saying that Li was happy to “enjoy the benefits when things are good” but couldn’t be counted on in tough times.
Li released a statement affirming his support of Beijing’s leadership, adding: “The Company, as always, will continue to look for investment opportunities around the world, including mainland China.”
In that period, though, companies under Li’s control were plowing billions of dollars into stakes of firms abroad while pulling back in Hong Kong and on the mainland. 

That trend hasn’t slowed.
Since 2015, Li’s companies have been involved in acquisitions abroad worth more than $70 billion, in places like Canada, Italy and Australia. 

In that same period, he participated in just one acquisition in mainland China and Hong Kong worth $500 million or more -- an $848 million stake in a Hong Kong-based shipping firm that he purchased with two other investors.
And in those same years, Li divested from four companies in Hong Kong and the mainland, totaling more than $11 billion. 

Reuters calculated these tallies using figures from Dealogic, a financial data provider, involving deals by Li’s companies worth $500 million or more, including debt.
“We have many projects in China,” Li’s spokesperson said, without disputing the deal figures. Among Hong Kong companies, he added, Li’s group “is the largest investor in the mainland and is thriving in numerous industries.”
Beyond investments, the Communist Party has other demands of Hong Kong’s tycoons. 

Xi Jinping’s directive was unambiguous at a 2017 meeting between the Chinese leader and the city’s elite, said a senior executive at a major Chinese state-owned enterprise in Hong Kong. 

Li was in attendance.
“Xi’s message was very clear -- that the business community and the tycoons need to uphold social responsibility, and to help the central government maintain the social stability of Hong Kong,” said the executive.
That expectation grew more urgent as the protests shook Hong Kong.
Chinese officials have come to think the city’s concentration of wealth is a major source of the discontent, said Allan Zeman, a prominent businessman and economic adviser to Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed leader, Carrie Lam. 

A system of land auctions, which extend back to British rule, allowed a small set of people to corner the market, Zeman said, pushing prices up to a point where no one else could bid. 

That dynamic leaves housing so expensive that families are crammed into tiny dwellings and upward mobility is limited.
UNCERTAIN TIMES: Li Ka-shing with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shortly before handover celebrations in Hong Kong’s Convention and Exhibition Center in 1997. 
CITY ELITE: Li shakes hands with Carrie Lam before voting during the election for the city’s chief executive in March 2017. 

“It made ‘five families’ very, very rich,” said Zeman, referring to the city’s biggest developers.
The developers, Zeman said, now understand. 

He noted that in September a Hong Kong company, New World Development Co Ltd, announced it was setting aside three million square feet of its land holdings for low-income housing. 

Asked whether the decision was the result of pressure from Beijing, New World said it hoped “to inspire more people to generate creative approaches to solve Hong Kong’s housing challenge.”
Meanwhile, in early September, China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) gathered executives from the nation’s largest state-owned firms in the nearby mainland city of Shenzhen. 

According to an executive familiar with the meeting, SASAC officials gave clear marching orders to the Chinese managers: take more control of Hong Kong firms and seek decision-making power within them. 

SASAC did not respond to questions from Reuters.
When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the two sides agreed the city would enjoy a high degree of autonomy under its own governing charter, for half a century. 

Businesspeople here say that until very recently, 2047 -- the date China is set to impose full control -- seemed distant.
To be sure, said the head of a private banking operation in the city, most of Hong Kong’s prominent families have been diversifying their personal wealth overseas for many years. 

The executive works at one of the five largest private banks in the Asia-Pacific region, which handles more than $200 billion in assets.
“For some of these tycoons, 2047 was not a very major consideration,” he said.
That changed as Beijing began to flex its muscles. 

One event that caught the tycoons’ attention, he said, was the 2017 disappearance of China-born billionaire Xiao Jianhua. 

Xiao was last seen leaving a luxury Hong Kong hotel in a wheelchair with his head covered, accompanied by unknown men. 

In its annual human rights report, the U.S. State Department said that “multiple press reports stated he was abducted by state security agents from the mainland.”
Xiao’s whereabouts are unknown. 

No Hong Kong billionaire has suffered a similar fate. 

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to answer questions about Xiao.
Private bankers say the extradition bill dealt a fresh shock. 

One financial adviser told Reuters he was involved in a transaction in which a Hong Kong tycoon shifted assets of more than $100 million, between June and August, from a local Citibank account to one in Singapore.
“The extradition bill was the spark, but the fears are much more deeper and broader than that,” the financial adviser said. 

“I think what we’ve seen is a structural shift away from Hong Kong as a place of relative safety.”
Today, interviews with people who know Li well point to a man anxious about Hong Kong’s future under tighter mainland Chinese rule.
“His attitude to China is one of fear: These guys can take everything I’ve got,” said Murray, his longtime corporate lieutenant, who left the Li group in 2017.
“Simon has his own interpretations but they are not necessarily Mr Li’s,” the billionaire’s spokesperson said, responding to Murray’s remarks. 

“The central government has reiterated many times that it is committed to openness and reforms.”
Still, as the pressure from Beijing mounts, Li has not humbled himself before the Communist Party.
“When you are my age, you will know how to cut through the noise,” Li said in his letter to Reuters. “I don’t know if it is a concerted effort, but I am getting used to all the unfounded verbal and text punches.”
LOCAL LANDMARK: Demonstrators attend a lunchtime protest in early October near the Cheung Kong Center building (right) where Li Ka-shing has his headquarters. 

As China’s Troubles Simmer, Xi Reinforces His Political Firewall

With China mired in a trade war, economic slowdown and Hong Kong unrest, Xi Jinping will use an elite meeting to focus more on increasing his control over the Communist Party.

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING — Slowing economic growth. 

A rancorous trade war. 

Recalcitrant protesters in Hong Kong. 

A mass die-off of pigs and surging food prices. 

The frustrations are piling up for Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
But a gathering of the Communist Party elite this week will grapple with lurking risks that worry him more: dysfunction, divisions and disloyalty in the party.
Communist Party rule could eventually crumble if the party fails to constantly reinforce its grip on China, Xi said in a recently published speech, citing ancient emperors whose dynasties rotted from corruption, lax discipline and infighting. 

The Central Committee, a party conclave of about 370 senior officials, began meeting in Beijing for four days on Monday to approve policies intended to ward off such dangers.
“From ancient times to the present, whenever great powers have collapsed or decayed, a common cause has been the loss of central authority,” Xi said in the speech, which was given early last year but not issued till this month in a leading party journal, Qiushi.
“As I see it, we can be defeated only by ourselves,” he said. 

“Prevent strife starting from inside the family home.”
Xi has warned this year that China must prepare for “struggle,” an ominous term for domestic and external challenges, and has described his goal as building an authoritarian fortress against any shocks. 

The meeting this week, also called the plenum, will push efforts to sharpen China’s political defenses, likely including greater use of advanced technology to monitor and manage officials and citizens.
Xi laid out his proposals on the first day, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency, but no details were released.
“He’s looking at this from the viewpoint of the next 30 years,” said Tian Feilong, a professor of law at Beihang University in Beijing. 

“The system still isn’t strong enough for this struggle against all kinds of external forces, because it still has many holes.”
To critics, Xi’s drive to centralize power is not a cure for China’s policy missteps, but rather one of their chief causes. 

The intense pressure on lower officials to conform with the top leader has robbed them of room to debate, spot missteps, and alter course, they say.
Some have pointed to Xi’s misreading earlier in the year of how far he could push the Trump administration in trade talks, and China’s impasse in Hong Kong, where demonstrators have taken to the streets for 21 weeks.
“The principal problem stems from the nature of the political system which increasingly permeates all sectors of activity,” said Jonathan Fenby, China chairman of TS Lombard, a firm that advises investors. 

“The political constraints sap initiative.”

The Yangshan Deep Water Port in Shanghai. Chinese and American negotiators agreed to a provisional pause in their trade dispute this month.

‘Rumors of Displeasure’
For Xi, there is no issue more vital to his political survival than command of the party, and he appears anxious to stop setbacks from festering into wider doubts about his and the party’s capacity to rule.
Since 2012, he has repeatedly introduced offensives intended to rid officialdom of graft, factionalism and bureaucratic fragmentation, failings that he suggested weakened his predecessors. 

Last year, he swept away a term limit on the presidency, opening the way to an indefinite stay as president, Communist Party general secretary and chairman of China’s military.
“The plenum will be the latest step in this campaign,” Mr. Fenby from TS Lombard said. 

“It may bring institutional changes aimed at streamlining the transmission of orders and achieving further centralization of authority. But the main element is likely to be an intensification of Xi’s personal leadership.”
Two retired officials in Beijing and a businessman who talks to senior officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, described jitters in the party elite about Xi’s policies. 

Even so, that sentiment was far from coalescing into concerted opposition to him, they said.
“Rumors of displeasure — even animosity — toward Xi’s rule are rampant, but his hold on power appears firm,” said Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
A deeper worry for Xi and other top leaders is improving the effectiveness and morale of hundreds of thousands of junior officials who enforce their policies.
Many midranking officials resent Xi’s anticorruption drive, which has shrunk their income and influence, Ke Huaqing, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing who studies the rules and workings of the party, said in an interview.
Cadres have also been punished for complaining about government policies, defying orders to move to other posts, or spreading rumors about leaders. 

When the party recently announced the punishment of Liu Shiyu, the former chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, it said his misdeeds included a “wavering” political stance and failure to rigorously enforce central leaders’ decisions.
“The Chinese Communist Party could get away without cleaning itself up,” Ke said, “but after a period of time it might collapse.”

A construction site in Beijing. The country has seen slowing economic growth.

‘Modernizing the System’
While the committee usually meets once a year at the walled Jingxi Hotel in western Beijing, this session has been unusually delayed — it has been 20 months since the last meeting.
That has led some to speculate that Xi feared rifts upsetting proceedings. 

Others have questioned why he has devoted the meeting to party organization issues when China faces many pressing problems.
“He would seek to delay a full gathering of the Central Committee until such time that he felt he had built a consensus,” said Mr. Blanchette from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who wrote an assessment of the speculation. 

“Xi can stand before his peers with some credible ‘wins.’”
He has had several of late. 

On Oct. 1, Xi presided over a military parade celebrating 70 years of Communist rule, basking in adulatory shouts of loyalty from 15,000 troops. 

Later in the month, Chinese and American negotiators agreed to a provisional pause in their trade dispute.
The group could discuss economic and foreign policy at the gathering. 

But often at this point in the leadership’s 5-year cycle of meetings, the Central Committee focuses on the party’s organizational and legal issues.
Some in Beijing have speculated that Xi could also use the meeting to elevate protégés as he lays the groundwork for a third term as party leader in 2022. 

Xi, though, was unlikely to signal a possible successor so soon, the three political insiders in Beijing said.
“Xi draws much of his strength from his careful cultivation of an air of implacable unassailability,” said Christopher K. Johnson, a former China analyst at the C.I.A. 

“Injecting that kind of uncertainty makes no political sense, particularly as his bid for a third term presumably is about to gear up.”

Soldiers during a parade in Beijing on Oct. 1 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of communist China.

The official announcements at the end of the meeting on Thursday will most likely to focus on the official theme of “modernizing the system of governance.”
According to experts, the steps announced could include:

• Fleshing out the powers of the new party policy commissions that Xi has created to steer policy.
• Honing a shake-up of government begun last year that Xi said in July remains incomplete, creating gaps and poor coordination.
• Expanding the presence of party committees in businesses, organizations and neighborhoods to enforce policy and monitor potential discontent.
• Using high-tech monitoring to detect and extinguish sources of public ire, such as official misconduct, pollution or land disputes, before they ignite protests. China already leads the way in using collection of personal data, surveillance technology and online monitoring to stifle social threats, most notably in East Turkestan, the ethnically divided colony in western China.

China: A New World Order review – are we conniving with a genocidal dictatorship?

This documentary dared to do what politicians the world over would not, asking tough questions of Xi Jinping’s totalitarian rule 

By Stuart Jeffries

Is Xi Jinping ... creating a personality cult? 

The drink Mihrigul Tursun’s captors offered her was strangely cloudy. 

It resembled, she said, water after washing rice. 

After drinking it, the young mother recalled in China: A New World Order (BBC Two), her period stopped. 

“It didn’t come back until five months after I left prison. So my period stopped seven months in total. Now it’s back, but it’s abnormal.”
We never learned why Tursun was detained – along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of East Turkestan colony, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. 

“They cut off my hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. 

“I couldn’t stand it any more. I can only say please just kill me.”
Instead of murdering one Uighur mother, China is attempting something worse – eliminating a people. 

“There’s a widely held misunderstanding that genocide is the scale of extermination of human beings,” said the former UN human rights envoy Ben Emmerson QC. 

“That’s not so. The question is: is there an intention to, if you like, wipe off the face of the Earth a distinct group, a nation, a people?” 

This, Emmerson and Barack Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta claimed, is what is happening to the Islamic people of East Turkestan. 

“This is a calculated social policy designed to eliminate the separate cultural, religious and ethnic identity of the Uighurs,” said Emmerson. 

“That’s a genocidal policy.”
Independently verifying Tursun’s treatment is scarcely possible, but this documentary heard claims of similar treatment in the colony.

A teacher and Communist party member told how she had been sent to teach Chinese at a detention camp for 2,500 Uighurs. 

She claimed not only to have heard detainees being tortured, but also to have learned from a nurse that women were given injections that had the same effect as the drink Tursun took. 

“They stop your periods and seriously affect reproductive organs,” she said.
What its critics call concentration camps, Beijing describes as “vocational education and training centres” resembling “boarding schools”. 

We cut to official footage of drawing, dancing and in one room a class singing in English “If you’re happy and you know it, shout ‘Yes sir!’” 

Which, while not proof of genocidal policy, was grim enough viewing.

But without doubt, since 2013 when Xi Jinping became president and there was an attack in Tiananmen Square in which Uighurs killed five people and injured 38, Beijing has cracked down on what it perceives as an Islamist threat from the province. 

That crackdown has included using smartphones and street cameras to create a surveillance state for Uighurs.
Should Britain roll out the red carpet to a country charged with crimes against humanity, of undermining freedom of speech and democracy in Hong Kong, of crushing freedom movements in Beijing, of – it was suggested here – creating a cult of personality around Xi the likes of which have not been seen since Chairman Mao? 

“Better we engage with them so we can influence them,” said the former chancellor George Osborne.
But does the UK have any influence? 

Certainly not as much as we did in in the 19th century when, instead of trying to charm them into trade deals, we militarily subdued the Chinese. 

“Very few countries have any leverage at all,” said Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign secretary. 

The rest of the world shrinks from criticising China’s human rights violations because we’re awed by its economic power and how we benefit from it, argued Panetta.
This first of a three-part series did what politicians dare not do, namely to raise hard questions, not just of Beijing, but of us. 

Are we so in thrall to consumerism, to buying cheap goods made by cheap labour in China, so intimidated by Chinese military and economic might, that we connive with what may well amount to a criminal dictatorship? 

The Chinese refer to the 19th century as the Century of Humiliation. 

Ours is becoming the Century of Moral Feebleness.
One day in 2015, while Xi was being charmed by the Queen and David Cameron, a bookseller from Hong Kong set off to see his girlfriend. 

Suddenly, Lam Wing-kee recalled, he was surrounded by 31 people. 

He spent the next five months in solitary confinement and was released only after he admitted to selling illegal books. 

“I am very remorseful,” he told his captors, clearly under duress. 

“I hope the Chinese government will be lenient to me.” 

The books he had mailed from his shop to customers in mainland China included those critical of the constitutional change that allows Xi to remain president for life.
Forget morality, it’s time for more cloudy drinks. 

While Lam Wing-kee sat in solitary, Cameron and Xi went to the pub for ye venerable nightmare of ye photo-op. 

Neither waited for their pints to settle, for clouds to resolve into clarity. 

Instead, both precipitately drank what, had the cameras not been there, I feel sure, neither would have touched. 

An emblem of Sino-British relations in the 21st century.

Paramount and paranoid: dictator Xi faces a crisis of confidence

By Anna Fifield

Members of a band from the People’s Liberation Army leave following a speech by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping after the closing session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing in 2018. 

SHANGHAI — Chinese scholars and Communist Party cadres have a succinct way of describing the tectonic shifts taking place here: Deng Xiaoping made us rich, now Xi Jinping is making us strong.
The phrase sums up China’s economic rise that began under Deng four decades ago, and the hopes for a similarly significant geopolitical realignment under the current president.
Xi has devoted his seven years in power to strengthening the ruling Communist Party.

He has relentlessly quashed dissent, sidelined rivals and demanded absolute loyalty.
After pledging to make the party “north, south, east and west,” he has ensured that it is paramount not just in policymaking but in the military, business, education and the law.
Now, Xi is facing challenges on multiple fronts, and the Communist Party, riven with paranoia at the best of times, is seeing threats at every turn.
He has to contend not just with a slowing economy but also a protracted trade war with the United States that has entered a new confrontational phase with President Trump’s decision to impose more tariffs next month.
He is facing escalating Western criticism of Chinese policies toward ethnic Uighurs in East Turkestan, where as many as 3 million people have been put into reeducation camps. 

He is dealing with an increasingly assertive Taiwan at the same time a pro-democracy movement swells in Hong Kong.
All of these loom as dangers to Xi’s authority as the party’s general secretary and are heightening a sense of alarm within a party long fearful of external threats.
“A strong party is the key to a successful China, in Xi’s eyes. It is also the only way to fend off enemies abroad, most notably the U.S.,” said Richard McGregor, an expert on the party and the author of a new book about Xi’s leadership.
Xi is trying to harden the party’s internal resolve to fend off these threats — most acutely, a United States that many observers say seems intent on containing China.
“Xi has a legion of internal critics, including over his handling of relations with Washington,” McGregor said. 

“One way to bring them to heel is by demanding fealty and loyalty to the party, and by extension, to himself.”
Since taking power, Xi has rewritten the party’s rules — including ending term limits, setting himself up to be leader indefinitely — and launched huge study campaigns to instill his personal ideology across society, starting with toddlers, through schools and universities and through the Central Committee Party School in Beijing. 

The party has developed an app through which Chinese can study “Xi Jinping Thought.”
The dictator this past week exhorted party members to “work hard to purify, perfect, reform and upgrade ourselves.”
“No exterior forces are able to take us down, as we are the world’s largest political party; the only one who can defeat us is ourselves,” Xi wrote in Qiushi, the influential publication of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
“We should stay alert to the ubiquitous factors that could weaken our Party’s pioneering nature and contaminate our Party’s purity,” he said. 

“If we don’t take strict precautions and correct them in time... small problems will grow into big ones, minor slips will escalate into an irreversible landslide, probably even leading to a broader and subversive catastrophe.”
Making the situation even more delicate, the party is now entering a sensitive period.
This month, party leaders both current and retired will repair to the beach resort of Beidaihe, about 200 miles east of Beijing, for their annual policy conclave. 

It was a ritual first begun by Mao Zedong in the 1950s.
The meeting is highly secretive — the state media don’t announce that it has begun or that it has ended, let alone what is discussed — and last summer, Beijing was awash with speculation that party elders had taken Xi to task for mismanaging the trade war.
This year, Trump’s threat to impose tariffs of 10 percent on the remaining $300 billion of untaxed Chinese exports to the U.S. could provide Xi with more cover, said Bill Bishop, publisher of the widely read Sinocism newsletter.
“It should be an easy argument to make that no one can manage Trump and so those trying to blame Xi have other, ulterior motives, and that even if China agrees to humiliating concessions there is no guarantee the U.S. side will keep its word,” Bishop wrote this week.
The other key event that is concerning party leaders is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which Xi plans to mark in October with a massive military parade.
With the anniversary drawing near, Chinese television regulators this past week ordered all soap operas and costume dramas off the air for the 100 days leading up to National Day on Oct. 3, replacing them instead with patriotic shows that engender love for the motherland.
The airwaves with be filled for the next two months with dramas like “Spy Hunter,” a thriller about young Communist agents sacrificing themselves to protect the motherland and fight for peace in 1931. 

Then there’s “Barley Fragrance,” set in a southern village in the decades after economic reforms began, which tells the story of a veteran soldier and his selfless wife leading villagers to cast off poverty and rejuvenate the local economy.

Xi Jinping, bottom, is applauded as he arrives at the closing session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing in 2018. 

The relevance of the Communist apparatus to modern Chinese life is not always readily apparent, even to the party faithful.
On a recent rainy Saturday, lines of them were queuing up to enter the site where the first National Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in 1921.
The birthplace of the Communist Party, a set of brick buildings in the financial capital of Shanghai, is now surrounded by glitzy malls and Lamborghini dealers. 

But school groups and work groups flock here by the busload to learn about the party’s history.
“Stay true to our founding mission and loyal to the party, lead the staff and workers to achieve [new] feats,” read a banner held up by the members of the Lujiazhen Workers Union, who had made the pilgrimage from the surrounding Jiangsu province.
Inside, groups of 20-somethings stood with their fists raised in front of the Communist Party flag, reciting the party admission oath. 

I will “strictly observe party discipline, guard party secrets, be loyal to the party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life, be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the party and the people,” they chanted.

Chinese tourists flocked to the birthplace of the Communist Party, a set of brick buildings in the financial capital of Shanghai that is now surrounded by glitzy malls and Lamborghini dealers.

Xi’s efforts to bolster the party and his leadership over it are rooted in a sense of insecurity, say longtime China scholars.
“The party system, after all, doesn’t just exist on its own. It operates in opposition to something else: the West and democracy,” McGregor writes in “Xi Jinping: The Backlash.” 

China’s leaders have intensively studied the collapse of the Soviet Union — Xi even had top officials watch a four-part documentary about it soon after he came into office — and concluded that Mikhail Gorbachev made a strategic error by opting to liberalize rather than tighten political controls.
The Arab Spring, in which popular revolts forced Middle Eastern dictators from power, added weight to the view in Beijing that it must clamp down and not loosen up. 

Chinese leaders have been watching events in Venezuela, where the United States has tried to help Juan Guaidó oust authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro.
Pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong this summer and Washington’s recent accommodation of Taiwan — notably through renewed arms sales and allowing the democratically ruled island’s president to visit the United States — have only heightened the party’s fears.
Meanwhile, the party’s increasingly repressive actions inside China, such as the crackdown in the East Turkestan colony and the growing use of surveillance technology, “reflect heightened fear and insecurity, not a self-confident China aspiring to enhanced leadership in global and regional affairs,” Jonathan D. Pollack and Jeffrey A. Bader of the Brookings Institution wrote in a recent paper.
“Beijing exhibits a narrowness of vision and self-protectiveness, at the same time warily eying America’s increasingly stark and threat-driven characterizations of relations with China,” they wrote.
Because of this sense of insecurity, party leaders view the Trump administration’s declaration of a trade war not as a purely economic matter but as a broader, strategic effort to contain China.

China’s economy registered its slowest annual growth in 27 years in the second quarter.

Delegates listen to a speech by Xi during the closing session of the National People's Congress in March 2018. 

This theory got a boost from none other than John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, late last year.
“This is not just an economic issue,” he told Fox Business.
“This is not just talking about tariffs and the terms of trade. This is a question of power.”

Hong Kong's protests are a personal challenge to Xi Jinping

The scale of unrest may force the Chinese dictator to get involved. How will he respond?

By Simon Tisdall

The escalating protests in Hong Kong pose a personal challenge to the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping, whose implacable domination of Chinese public life since 2012 has drawn comparisons with Mao Zedong.
Hong Kong protesters graffiti walls after storming government building – live
Xi has distanced himself from the turmoil so far. 

But the scale and persistence of the unrest, combined with growing street violence, may force him to get involved – or risk losing his “strongman” image.
Probably to Beijing’s surprise, the demonstrations over a proposed extradition law have continued despite an unusual, albeit partial government climbdown. 

That points to deeper grievances about Beijing’s slow-burn attempts to curb Hong Kong’s freedoms, the lack of full democratic rights and, more generally, the threatening atmosphere created by Xi’s aggressive authoritarianism.
This wider context, particularly unsettling for Hong Kong residents, encompasses Xi’s record of unbending hostility to political pluralism in mainland China, ever more pervasive internet and media censorship, increased social regimentation, and human rights abuses – notably the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities such as Xinjiang’s Muslim Uighur community.
In a keynote speech in December, Xi reasserted the leading role of the Communist party in uncompromising terms. 

“Whether it’s the government, the army, ordinary people or students, the east, the west, the south, the north or the middle, the party leads everything,” he said. 

This sort of language must appear oddly anachronistic to many in Hong Kong, a former British colony steeped in western liberal traditions.
Chinese officials are fond of saying Hong Kong benefits from China’s economic strength and “the affluence of the motherland”. 

But many in Hong Kong take the opposite view, noting that under Xi’s centralised, dirigiste policies, China’s economic growth has slowed significantly. 

Critics claim Xi has been blindsided by Donald Trump’s trade war and weakened by problems with his ambitious Belt and Road initiative.
Xi’s failure to set out a new direction in his December speech, and his insistence on doing things the party way (meaning his way), suggested a degree of stubborn inflexibility that could prove dangerous for Hong Kong. 

Xi must fear the dissatisfaction becoming contagious and rising unemployment caused by the slowdown increasing social unrest. 

In the past year there has been public protests and strikes over layoffs, faulty vaccines, air pollution, inadequate pensions and other issues.
In a candid speech to the National People’s Congress in March, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, warned of the dangers of rising discontent. 

“There is still public dissatisfaction in many areas, such as education, healthcare, elderly care, housing, food and drug safety, and income distribution. Last year saw a number of public safety incidents and major workplace incidents,” Li said.
Xi will also worry that the turbulence in Hong Kong could take on an insurrectionary nature, especially if – as state media have already claimed – it is fomented by "external" actors. 

One obvious scapegoat is Taiwan, with which tensions have been steadily rising due to Xi’s tough reunification stance.
The prosperous, democratic and independent island nation of Taiwan, supported by Washington, stands as a permanent rebuke to China’s autocratic ruler. 

Xi would do almost anything to prevent Hong Kong following its example. 

Another related concern is that Hong Kong could be caught up in escalating rivalry with the US and its allies over control of the South China and East China seas.
Yet Xi probably has little cause to worry about meddling by Trump. 

The US president rarely shows any interest in human rights or pro-democracy struggles.

Britain, too, has mostly kept its voice down. 

In need of China’s goodwill post-Brexit, it worries about upsetting a relationship already strained by the Huawei row. 

On Monday, Beijing bluntly told London to keep its nose out.
The greatest fear of all, if the Hong Kong crisis deepens, is that China’s leaders may resort to brute force, as happened in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago. 

One reason why Xi will want to avoid a repeat is the storm of international condemnation, and the damage to China’s expanding power, reputation and economy that could ensue.
The Tiananmen massacre took place under a virtual media blackout. 

Mass murder would be harder to hide this time around.

Xi Jinping misjudges depth of Hong Kong's fury

Residents say a resounding no to Beijing's tightening grip on the city
By TETSUSHI TAKAHASHI
Protesters demand that Hong Kong leaders withdraw the extradition bill at a demonstration on June 16.

BEIJING -- When Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping set forth a "one country, two systems" principle to govern Hong Kong starting with its July 1997 handover from the U.K., guaranteeing a high level of autonomy and freedom of expression for 50 years, people worried what would happen in 2047.
Instead, they now face that reality nearly 30 years ahead of schedule under a Chinese leader who seems to put more weight on "one country" than "two systems."
Among the signs hoisted during Sunday's mass protests in Hong Kong opposing the extradition bill were ones that said "Hong Kong is not China," and "We are not Chinese."
They represented a clear "no" from the people of Hong Kong to the seeming "Chinafication" of the territory that the regime of Xi Jinping has pursued.
Deng Xiaoping saw the city as a steppingstone to opening up the mainland economy. 

But Xi, who became leader of the Communist Party in 2012, has a different approach.
Xi refused to compromise during the Umbrella Movement of 2014, when students and other protesters demanded fully democratic elections for the city's chief executive. 

Several pro-democracy legislators elected to the Legislative Council in 2016 were also disqualified from serving. 

The message was clear: Beijing would brook no dissent from Hong Kong.
Freedom of expression appears under threat as well. 

In 2015, several Hong Kong residents were abducted and detained by Chinese authorities for selling books critical of the Communist Party. 

What many had feared about Chinese control is already coming true just two decades after the handover.
"Any attempt to endanger China's sovereignty and security, challenge the power of the central government and the authority of the Basic Law" -- Hong Kong's equivalent of a constitution -- "or use Hong Kong to carry out infiltration and sabotage activities against the mainland is an act that crosses the red line, and is absolutely impermissible," Xi said in July 2017 at a ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of the handover.
He called for stepping up "patriotic education" of young people, making clear an intention to integrate Hong Kong into the mainland.
Xi appeared confident that the mainland had solidified its grip on the city. 

Recent economic statistics would give him reason to think so.
Shanghai and Shenzhen have overtaken Hong Kong in gross domestic product since the handover. Hong Kong is now less than 3% of China's GDP, down from 18% back then. 

Xi also knew he could not give the city special treatment forever amid tightening controls on the mainland.
But he has underestimated locals' distrust in the mainland's one-party rule.
Beijing backed Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam when she announced Saturday that the extradition bill would be delayed indefinitely. 

For Xi, this marked an unprecedented compromise in the city, and he likely hoped that it would calm things down.
Yet a quarter of the city's residents again turned out Sunday to demand that the bill be scrapped altogether. 

Even those who had distanced themselves from politics after the Umbrella Movement failed joined in this time, worried that they would face the repercussions as well.
The political turmoil shows no signs of letting up. 

Years of discontent over Beijing's hard-line tactics in the city are reaching a boiling point.
The roots of the city's frustrations go much further than the controversial extradition bill, as Beijing has gradually chipped away at the autonomy promised to residents.
Now U.S. President Donald Trump looks ready to discuss the latest protests at the Group of 20 summit at the end of June in Osaka. 

This would be unacceptable to Xi, who considers the goings-on in the city a domestic Chinese issue. Hong Kong represents one of Beijing's "core" national interests. 

Mishandling it could undermine the foundation of the Xi administration.
Hong Kongers have already won the international community over. 

And independence-minded Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is gaining momentum in her reelection campaign ahead of the January vote.
They are all troubles of Beijing's own making.

Xi Jinping's outreach to Russia is a desperate cry for help

By Brett Velicovich

China’s economy is reeling from President Trump’s strategic tariffs, and Beijing is getting desperate.
In a futile effort to compensate for China’s losses by developing economic ties with new global partners, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping recently met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Both leaders touted the meeting in typically hyperbolic terms, presumably in the hope of deceiving American policymakers into believing that they had accomplished something significant.
Xi praised Putin with almost Trumpian exuberance, calling the Russian strongman “my best friend and colleague." 

Putin, who has encountered his own difficulties trying to stabilize the struggling Russian economy, boasted in turn that relations between the two countries had "reached an unprecedented level."
Putin and Xi negotiated numerous economic partnerships, such as agreeing to boost energy and technology cooperation in the coming years. 

Those agreements, however, are only papering over the cracks — China is facing monumental economic challenges, and is utterly unable to compete with the booming U.S. economy or cope with 25 percent tariffs on $250 billion worth of their exports into the vast consumer markets of America.
When President Trump first floated the idea of imposing tariffs on Chinese goods as retaliation for China’s long history of illegal trade practices, many so-called "experts" doubted that the president’s bold tactic would succeed. 

Skeptics in the mainstream media relentlessly warned that tariffs would only hurt the U.S. economy by stifling GDP growth and job creation, and the European Central Bank even predicted that China would emerge from the “trade war” unscathed.
The anti-Trump critics, as it turns out, vastly overestimated both the resilience of China’s economy and the vulnerability of America’s economy. 

Since President Trump first implemented the tariffs, the communist regime has been battered by economic uncertainty and faltering growth while the U.S. has enjoyed a level of prosperity not seen for a generation.
In 2018, for instance, China’s GDP grew at its slowest rate in 28 years, forcing Beijing to implement a massive stimulus to forestall economic collapse. 

While the stimulus appears to have succeeded in temporarily arresting the freefall, China’s authoritarian government has a habit of manipulating official economic data, and experts say there are signs that recent figures have been artificially inflated as companies “front-load” exports in anticipation of new tariffs.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also recently concluded that U.S. tariffs have had a “significant” impact on China, causing the IMF to lower its forecast for China’s future growth.
Unfortunately for Beijing, many of its domestic industries are beginning to crumble under the pressure of President Trump’s aggressive trade strategy, raising doubts about the country’s ability to endure a protracted stalemate in its ongoing trade negotiations with the U.S. 

Last month, for instance, the South China Morning Post reported that China’s dying Northeastern rust belt, once a main industrial hub, is “struggling to retain population as economic slowdown speeds up exodus.”
Tellingly, Xi refuses to acknowledge his country’s economic weakness, insisting that “China’s economy bears the supporting conditions for stable, healthy, and sustainable growth.” 

That heavily-qualified denial doesn’t convey much confidence, though, and the fact that Xi felt compelled to defend the strength of his country’s economy during an interview with Chinese and Russian media shortly before meeting with Putin only makes Xi’s braggadocio seem even more contrived.
In reality, China’s recent outreach to Russia is nothing but a desperate cry for help — the communist regime is incapable of keeping up with the booming U.S. economy or maintaining the sky-high GDP growth necessary to mollify its oppressed population while it struggles under American tariffs.
In the past, Russia’s relative economic impotence made it a relatively unattractive partner for Beijing — but today, the hard-pressed Chinese government simply has no other choice but to reach out for any lifeline it can find.
Nonetheless, Xi will find his next meeting with President Trump during the G20 summit in Japan later this month much more productive for his economy than his recent meeting with Putin — provided he’s ready to face reality and negotiate a new trade deal that’s finally fair for the United States.
Otherwise, Xi’s desperation will only increase as his economy continues to suffer.

Xi Jinping Wanted Global Dominance. He Overshot.

China wasn’t ready for the trade war with the United States.
By Yi-Zheng Lian

The endgame in the trade war between China and the United States seems near. 

President Trump, betting with real currency — American strength — apparently has the upper hand, and the concessions Xi Jinping is likely to make won’t be mere tokens. 

When — if? — an agreement is finally announced, President Trump will surely fire off bragging tweets, partly to shore up his credentials for a second term, amid personal and policy troubles. 

For Xi, any deal could mean a very serious loss of face.
Xi assumed power when China was still riding high on its so-called economic miracle (and the United States remained mired in the aftereffects of the 2008-9 recession). 

He became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) in late 2012 and president of the People’s Republic in early 2013. 

His anticorruption campaign was instantly popular. 

He championed the “Chinese Dream,” a vague vision of prosperity, strength and well-being for the country and its people, that seemed to fire up many citizens. 

His proposal to Barack Obama to establish a “New Model of Major Country Relations” could only please Han-majority Chinese with imperial yearnings.
But those were easy stunts, performed in a country with no audible opposition and that bans “reckless” talk about the government. 

The trade war, on the other hand, is the first real occasion to assess Xi’s leadership capabilities. 

And his performance might not look so good, even if one discounts the setbacks related to the trade war.
First and foremost, Xi has utterly failed to manage the United States–Chinese relationship. 

In contrast, every Chinese leader since the founding of the communist state in 1949 had recognized the paramount importance of those ties, worked hard to improve them — and reaped huge benefits.
Mao staged Ping-Pong diplomacy to break the ice in 1971, and President Nixon supported him in his standoff against the Soviet Union. 

Deng Xiaoping went all-out to woo the United States, and Jimmy Carter switched recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. 

During the 1980s, the C.C.P. leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang invited Milton Friedman and other American economists to visit and provide advice; after that, American capital and technology started flowing into China. 

In 1997, Jiang Zemin made an eight-day visit to the United States — at one point, while in Williamsburg, Va., putting on a three-cornered colonial hat. 

Bill Clinton then gave China a strong push to enter the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The Hu Jintao years, 2003–13, saw China’s most tactful exploitation of American openness (and naïveté). 

Cheap Chinese imports created runaway bilateral trade deficits for the United States. 

The Confucius Institutes, a network of language schools cum influence agencies, began to take root in American universities and high schools. (Today, there are more than 100 throughout the United States.) 

Chinese venture capitalists flooded Silicon Valley with money raised in American financial markets — then quietly siphoned off cutting-edge American expertise and injected it into China’s own high-tech hub.
But Xi has been aggressively hard-line. 

Under him, anti-American rhetoric has spread in official media. 

The Chinese government has been explicit about wanting to challenge the United States’s military presence in Asia. 

It has made aggressive moves toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea. 

It has sent Chinese battleships through American waters off the coast of Alaska. (It claimed to only be exercising the internationally recognized right of “innocent passage,” but the move clearly was a show of force.)
State authorities in Beijing try to co-opt members of China’s vast diaspora, hoping to develop a network that will facilitate political infiltration into other countries and high-tech transfers out of them. 

To this end, they resort to both overt schemes, like the Thousand Talents Plan, an official headhunting program, and covert tactics overseen by the C.C.P.’s influence machine, the United Front.
These efforts have set off alarms among some Americans. 

In 2017 and 2018, two groups of blue-ribbon scholars and ex-officials from previous United States administrations advocated a fundamental change in America’s view of China. 

Their members were moderates and mostly well-disposed toward China. 

Yet some of their recommendations dovetailed with the views of the Trump administration experts who consider China to be America’s number-one enemy and security threat. 

Xi, apparently oblivious to this sea change, was caught unprepared when President Trump hit China with a tariff war.
The dispute is having a knock-on effect elsewhere in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe. After a summit in Brussels last month, China "agreed" to grant European Union countries “improved” market access, stop the forced transfer of technology and discuss the possibility of curtailing state subsidies to Chinese companies, which gives them an unfair competitive advantage. 

Although these concessions were presented in the mild, mutual-promise language of a joint statement, they were a clear setback for China and will blunt its global ambitions.
Why is all of this happening under Xi? 

History suggests an answer.
In the late 1950s, Mao began to challenge the Soviet Union’s leadership of the international communist movement, then a potent force that hoped to overturn the United States-led world order. Mao was also seeking global dominance, in line with the traditional concept that the emperor of the Middle Kingdom was the rightful ruler of “tian xia” (天下), everything under the heavens. 

But Mao overreached; China wasn’t strong enough for that then. 

The Soviet Union’s decision to scrap aid programs to China and pull out its scientific and technological advisers there dealt a severe blow to China’s underperforming socialist economy.
Like Mao with the Soviets, Xi has challenged the global leadership of the United States too hard and too soon.
Xi’s second major shortcoming has been his failure to articulate a coherent set of policies to stop the Chinese economy’s long-term weakening, after many years of stellar performance. 

China’s gross-domestic-product growth in 2018 was the weakest in 28 years. 

The figure for the first quarter of this year was 6.4 percent, compared with the record high of 15.4 percent for the same period in 1993. 

Even that number would be the envy of many Western states, but the decline should concern China’s leadership because it underlines the country’s structural problems — notably, a rapidly graying population, a shrinking labor force and a total debt-to-G.D.P. ratio that neared 300 percent in the first quarter of 2018. 

The Japanese bank Nomura has estimated that defaults on bonds denominated in renminbi (also known as yuan) quadrupled between 2017 and 2018.
Weighed down by demographics and debt, China can hardly expand through more private investment and consumption. 

Worse, since its economy already has some huge excess capacities (think newly built ghost towns), government stimulus isn’t very effective. 

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2008, it took one trillion yuan of credit to generate one trillion yuan of economic output; by 2017, the ratio was 3.5-to-1.
Yet Xi has done little to address these structural issues.
Evidence of severe demographic problems had become apparent by the late 2000s, but in 2016 Xi merely replaced the one-child policy with a two-child policy. 

Too little, too late. 

China’s number of newborns per year has dropped since the changes. 

The 2018 total was the lowest since 1961, a year struck by a terrible famine. 

Xi signed off on an economic stimulus package in 2015 that was 25 percent larger than his predecessor’s emergency plan in 2009, which had been implemented as a response to the global financial crisis. 

And again, in January and February of this year alone, even while Xi has been paying lip service to the need to wean the economy off state support, the government offered new loans and financing exceeding the package for all of 2015, according to an article in Forbes.
A third criticism of Xi is that under him, China has sponsored or condoned actions by Chinese citizens and entities worldwide that have damaged the country’s international reputation while degrading its own moral fabric.
Take intellectual property, for example. 

The United States has hard evidence that it was the policy of Huawei, a flagship Chinese high-tech company, to reward employees for I.P. theft. 

And, as I have written before, such a policy is encouraged, arguably even mandatory, under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law.
Traditionally, the ideal Chinese state is a Confucian state that adheres to strict moral and behavioral norms. 

Yet for all his cracking down on corruption at home, Xi has encouraged moral turpitude abroad; his vision of China is a nation of patriotic thieves. 

All Chinese arguably have lost face as a result, and now innocent people overseas may be dismissed out of hand as guilty by association.
Xi is widely seen as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. 

After the Constitution was amended last year, he could be president for life — unless his serious failures of leadership give his opponents at home enough reason to cut him short.