Links for Tuesday, January 12, 2021

BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY:

• Bogotá, Colombia, buys 1,002 electric buses
  BYD wins the largest pure-electric bus order outside of China / Business Wire  

• Another massive fundraise in Hong Kong
  Chinese video platform Bilibili files for Hong Kong listing / CNBC
  “Bilibili has confidentially filed for a secondary listing in Hong Kong [that] could raise over $2 billion.”

• Nasdaq-listed Chinese luxury retailer Secoo may go private
  Luxury retailer Secoo looks to join exodus of Chinese companies from U.S. stock exchanges / Caixin

• Endocrine therapy
  Chinese biotech firm VISEN raises $150 million led by Sequoia Capital China / Caixin

• U.S. users sue Tencent for freezing WeChat accounts
  California WeChat users sue Tencent over fear of Chinese censors / Bloomberg (porous paywall)
  The suit was launched by “Citizen Power Initiatives for China, a group promoting transition to Democracy in China, and six anonymous WeChat users.” 

• Does HSBC have a future in China?
  HSBC grooms top bankers for make-or-break push into China / Bloomberg (porous paywall) 

SCIENCE, HEALTH, AND THE ENVIRONMENT: 

• COVID-19 — new outbreak in China
  China reimposes COVID-19 lockdowns as it battles worst outbreak in months / WSJ (paywall)

China is battling its biggest coronavirus outbreak in months, imposing lockdowns on hard-hit areas, quarantining more than 20 million people and urging citizens to forgo unnecessary travel as the Lunar New Year holiday approaches in February…

On Tuesday, China’s National Health Commission reported 42 new cases of locally transmitted symptomatic infection, a day after recording 85 such cases — its highest daily count in six months.

• COVID-19 vaccine
  How effective is China’s Sinovac shot? COVID vaccine data unclear / Bloomberg (porous paywall)
  “Uncertainty swirls over the efficacy of the leading Chinese shot, for which four different protection rate numbers have been released in recent weeks.”

• Wildlife at China’s largest freshwater lake in Jiangxi 
  Poyang Lake dam project threatens local ecology, experts say / Sixth Tone
  “Since being proposed in 2009 to control water levels, the plan has encountered multiple roadblocks over potential environmental damage.” 

POLITICS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS:

• Critic of internet censorship guilty of “picking quarrels,” etc.
  Chinese ‘Great Firewall’ critic Zhang Jialong ‘jailed for 18 months’ / SCMP
  Zhɑ̄ng Jiɑ̌lóng 张贾龙, a “former journalist who once urged the United States to help ‘tear down’ Beijing’s online censorship regime has been sentenced to a year and a half in jail, his wife said.”  The crime: “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” (寻衅滋事罪 xúnxìn zīshì zuì), a charge often used to punish dissent. 

• Another attack in Balochistan
  Deadly IS attack threatens China’s Belt and Road in Pakistan / Nikkei (porous paywall)
  “A deadly attack by the Islamic State group” killed 11 coal miners, and has, “according to experts…left Balochistan unsafe for Belt and Road projects in the future.”  

• Xinjiang diary
  ‘Our souls are dead’: How I survived a Chinese ‘re-education’ camp for Uyghurs / Guardian 
  “After 10 years living in France, I returned to China to sign some papers and I was locked up. For the next two years, I was systematically dehumanised, humiliated and brainwashed.” 

• Boris Johnson and the origins of COVID-19
  Johnson risks China spat with attack on ‘demented’ medicine / Bloomberg (porous paywall)
  U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson “at a meeting of world leaders focused on protecting nature on Monday”:

The coronavirus pandemic was the product of an imbalance in man’s relationship with the natural world. It originates from bats or pangolins, from the demented belief that if you grind up the scales of a pangolin you will somehow become more potent or whatever it is people believe.

• Evaluating Trump’s China policies
  How Trump lost his trade war with China / Bloomberg (porous paywall)
  “Chinese trade surplus, exports rose despite Trump’s rhetoric.” 

SOCIETY AND CULTURE:

• Sex ed and video apps in the countryside
  On a Guizhou mountainside, a lesson in the limits of sex ed / Sixth Tone
  “The author traveled to the province with visions of helping lead a rural ‘Spring Awakening.’ Once there, she found herself competing with a far more compelling teacher: Douyin.”
• Paralympic champion
  Prize-winning female bodybuilder with one leg wins hearts in China / SCMP (porous paywall)