Did ByteDance give the Chinese government access to Hong Kong data?

Here’s what else you need to know about China today:

ByteDance allegedly granted the Chinese government access to the data of TikTok users in Hong Kong in 2018, according to a legal filing from a former executive at the company. The unnamed ex-employee claimed that members of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee focused on civil rights activists and protesters in Hong Kong during that time, and accessed TikTok data — such as their network information, SIM card identifications, and IP addresses — to try and identify and locate the users. ByteDance has since vehemently denied the “baseless” accusations.

Readouts from meetings of China’s 24 most powerful men vanished for three separate months since October, according to Bloomberg, when Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 snagged his third term as the country’s leader. The Politburo is not obligated to meet each month, but it has done so for 90% of Xi’s decade-plus tenure. It is not clear if the powerful political body convened in November, January, and May, or if Beijing did not want to disclose the matters discussed at those meetings.

Fiji is reviewing a controversial police cooperation pact with China signed in 2011 that has allowed Chinese police officers to be stationed in the South Pacific nation. “We need to look at that again before we decide whether we go back to it, or if we continue the way that we have in the past by cooperating with those who have similar democratic values and systems,” Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said during his trip to Wellington, where he and his New Zealand counterpart Chris Hipkins took steps to finalize a defense agreement between their two countries.

Similar comments came from the island nation’s defense minister, Pio Tikoduadua, on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defense forum in Singapore over the weekend, who said that “termination [of the agreement with China] is one outcome that could be possible.”

More than 3,000 residents of high-rise buildings were evacuated in China’s northern Tianjin city, after multiple cracks roughly a fist wide began to form on nearby roads. As of June 3, 3,899 people residing in at least three 25-floor high-rises — part of a project from property development company Country Garden — were evacuated to hotels close by. The cracks were due to land subsidence after a loss of water beneath the ground, Country Garden told Bloomberg, citing preliminary results from an ongoing government investigation.

Hong Kong’s government moved to ban the 2019 protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” in order to “safeguard national security,” according to a writ from the Department of Justice released yesterday. The government filed for a legal injunction to bar the broadcast or distribution of the song, which became a popular unofficial anthem during the 2019 pro-democracy protests. It comes almost three years after the authorities were unable to determine if the song was illegal, despite an existing ban in schools and tense broadcasts that mistook the song as China’s national anthem at overseas sporting events.

State media: A report on a visit to Inner Mongolia by Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 occupies most of the front page of the Party paper the People’s Daily today; the focus is on ecological protection and agriculture. Xinhua News Agency continues its recent focus on Xi’s ideas for strengthening socialist Chinese culture, with top stories on both English and Chinese websites about Xi sending “a congratulatory letter to the first Forum on Building up China’s Cultural Strength.”