Week in Review: Friday, June 5, 2020

Here are the stories that caught our eye this week:

• Thousands in Hong Kong attended the city’s annual vigil marking 31 years since the Tiananmen Square crackdown on Thursday. Police had earlier announced a ban on public gatherings due to COVID-19, but the ban was not enforced.
• Chinese state media and diplomats, including multiple foreign ministry spokespeople, publicly delighted over the weekend in the scenes of protest and violence on American streets following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a week ago. The Global Times lambasted the U.S. as a “failed state,” as a large number of social media users were quick to draw comparisons with U.S. support for the Hong Kong protesters and accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy.  
• China reportedly shared only “minimal information” with the World Health Organization in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a new report by the AP. The report alleges that WHO’s public praise of China’s COVID-19 response was really an attempt to coax further information out of its government.
• The entire Wuhan population over the age of six has been tested for COVID-19 as the city completed its mass testing campaign. Officials in the northeastern city of Mudanjiang in Heilongjiang Province now intend to do the same for their city’s 2.8 million residents as new COVID-19 clusters continue to emerge.
• Alicia García Herrero, the chief economist for Asia-Pacific at French investment bank Natixis, spoke to The China Project about the ramifications of Trump’s announcement that he is moving to revoke Hong Kong’s special status.
• Thirty-three Chinese companies with ties to Xinjiang, China’s military, and efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction have been hit with new restrictions by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The restrictions will come into effect on Friday. China’s Foreign Ministry has said it strongly opposes sanctions related to Xinjiang, and views them as an attempt to interfere in China’s internal affairs.
• Malaysian economist Yew-Kwang Ng (黄有光 Huáng Yǒuguāng) attracted a great deal of ire on Chinese social media after he published an article (in Chinese) suggesting that China legalize and promote polyandry (where women can marry multiple men) in an effort to solve the country’s surplus of bachelors.
• A proposed regulation that would see skeptics of traditional Chinese medicine punished and even criminally charged has drawn severe public backlash, with a large number of observers calling the regulation an aggressive move on the government’s part to make TCM “beyond criticism and speculation.”
• The Chinese Basketball Association team Beijing Royal Fighters, coached by Stephon Marbury, has become the first team in the league to announce that employees have volunteered to take a pay cut amid the coronavirus-induced suspension of the league and financial pressures.