Last week, the Financial Times reported that Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam is on her way out, with Beijing seeking to replace her by March next year with a candidate who doesn’t have any connections with the extradition law mess. The Chinese foreign ministry initially dismissed this reporting as "political rumors with ulterior motives," but has since scrubbed that denial from the official transcript of its press briefing.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech last Thursday in Washington, D.C., on U.S.-China relations, following up on his China bash-fest from October 2018. His remarks this time were notably less a litany of complaints about China than the speech a year ago, and focused more on Trump love than China hate. In fact, some of Pence’s harshest words were reserved for the NBA and affiliated brands.
Like the U.S., European countries are getting louder on human rights in China after several years of relative silence. This month, jailed Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti received two human rights awards from Europe, including the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
This week’s Sinica Podcast is now live. This week on Sinica, Neil Thomas of MacroPolo sits down with Kaiser to talk about what we know...
The five key demands of Hong Kong protesters are: to withdraw the extradition bill; to stop labeling protesters as “rioters”; to drop charges against protesters; to conduct an independent inquiry into police behavior; to implement free elections for a chief executive.
With the NBA-China controversy becoming so hot, it can be easy to forget that, when it comes down to it, most Chinese people genuinely love NBA basketball. So it’s worth reading this essay to understand a view in China that is contrarian to the government narrative — and unsurprisingly, also censored. It’s called “The NBA incident has the entire nation acting crazy,” and Pieter Velghe and Jordan Schneider have translated it in full for The China Project.
Xi Jinping became the first Chinese president to visit Nepal in 22 years this month, and big fanfare was made of a deal to build a rail link with Tibet. However, Nepal refused China on an extradition treaty that Beijing was reported by local media to be pursuing with the Himalayan country. The move will protect some 20,000 Tibetan exiles in Nepal.
On August 5, India unilaterally revoked the autonomy of Kashmir, and integrated it into India proper. Since then, Kashmir has been effectively shut down, with no internet, little mobile phone functionality, and a widespread police presence. India’s treatment of Kashmir shares more than a few similarities with how China has treated Xinjiang in the past decade, according to an article by Nithin Coca in The Nation.
China's first court ruling punishing sexual harassment on public transport was decided in Shanghai. A man was sentenced to six months in jail for groping an adult woman and an underage girl on a subway train. However, sexual assault on public transit is alarmingly common in China, and the crime of forcible touching is still only classified as a misdemeanor by Chinese laws.