Editor’s note for Friday, May 14, 2021

My thoughts today:

Oatly, the plant-based dairy substitute drink, is going public. Its largest shareholder is a massive and well-run Chinese state-owned enterprise that sells the world’s biggest beer by volume, Snow. This might mean trouble ahead for the brand in America but it definitely means that Oatly will have great distribution in China.

Oatly is supposedly much better for the environment than cow’s milk, and Chinese people are drinking more and more milk, so this should be good news.

The online controversy over the apparent suicide of a Chengdu high-school student has quieted down, as you can read below (or on our website), but now China’s nationalist tabloid Global Times is using the affair to make a case that Chinese people are becoming “vigilant against ‘color revolution.’”

And so the death of a child, and his parents’ distress at how the news was communicated to them, is used to make a political point: Anyone who makes a fuss is suspect.

The name of the crime is picking quarrels and provoking trouble (寻衅滋事 xúnxìn zīshì). It’s in Article 293 of the People’s Republic of China’s Penal Code (in Chinese) and is frequently used to punish dissidents, troublemakers, pesky writers, and other riffraff who don’t feel that they’re living the China Dream.

Hong Kong is not subject to China’s Penal Code yet, but someone in the territory who is basically being punished for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” is billionaire and media mogul Jimmy Lai (黎智英 Lí Zhìyīng), currently serving a year in prison for his role in pro-democracy protests.

The authorities’ latest move: Freezing all of Lai’s assets, “including all shares in his company, Next Digital — the first time a listed firm has been targeted by national security laws in the financial hub,” according to Reuters.

This is the beginning of the end for Jimmy Lai’s media company and its flagship tabloid newspaper, the Apple Daily, in Hong Kong. But Next Media will survive: It has significant operations in Taiwan.

And Beijing is going to have to be persistent. Lai and his company won’t just roll over: A Next Media executive said Lai’s frozen assets would not affect the finances or operations of the company. Last year, I asked Jimmy Lai’s right-hand man at the time, Mark Simon, if he could “see a day when Next Digital has to exit Hong Kong.” His answer:

I don’t think we will ever exit. What’s the point of fighting for all this time and then walking away. The real question is will they shut us down, but I just don’t know.

Finally, there is a new study on coerced labor in Xinjiang in the solar panel supply chain published today by Britain’s Sheffield Hallam University (CNN summary here). As scholar Rian Thum said in a tweet: “The economic and political ramifications of this report are going to be discussed widely.”

Our word of the day is pull out in a responsible manner (以负责任的方式撤离 yǐ fù zérèn de fāngshì chèlí), from the Chinese Foreign Ministry statement earlier this week calling “on foreign troops in Afghanistan to take into full account the security of people in the country and the region, pull out in a responsible manner and avoid inflicting more turmoil and suffering on the Afghan people.”

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief