Editor’s Note for Thursday, February 10, 2022

My thoughts today:

Is China preparing a campaign to promote trade with Xinjiang? That is one conclusion some commenters drew from the appointment of the Mă Xīngruì 马兴瑞 to the top job as Xinjiang’s Communist Party chief after his successful tenure as governor of the coastal economic powerhouse province, Guangdong.

Ma replaced Chén Quánguó 陈全国, who is widely believed to have designed, or at least implemented, the internment camp system in Xinjiang that may have ensnared more than a million Uyghurs.

It’s far from certain that the repression will end, but here is a sign that there may be a new focus on trade: a friend in Beijing in international business told me that he had been approached by the organizers of the Eurasia Expo, which was held in Xinjiang’s provincial capital Urumqi from 2011 to 2014: They are hosting the event again in Urumqi in 2022.

But in Xi’s China, security will always be the first concern, and developments in Afghanistan as described in today’s top story might derail any plans to loosen up on repression in Xinjiang.

I’m shocked! Shocked to find out that there has been some financial irregularity at the world’s most indebted real estate company, founded by the Hermès Belt Brother Xǔ Jiāyìn 许家印 a.k.a. Hui Ka Yan.

It’s not actually Belt Brother who is the subject of today’s story, though, it’s the current CEO of Evergande, Xià Hǎijūn 夏海钧, who, according to recent filings reported by the Wall Street Journal, “sold his holdings of company dollar bonds with a face value of $128 million last summer, stock exchange-filings showed, with the sales coming a few weeks before the property developer issued a profit warning.”

The WSJ dryly notes: “It couldn’t be determined why the disclosure was made several months after the sales,” even though the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission generally requires company directors to file such notices “within three business days.”

Our word of the day is: The withdrawal of foreign troops has created a vacuum in the security situation (外国部队撤出导致安全形势出现真空 wàiguó bùduì chèchū dǎozhì ānquán xíngshì chūxiàn zhēnkōng).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief