Nury Vittachi专集

indy

HONG KONG PEOPLE NOW KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN 2047
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IT IS BECOMING increasingly clear what will happen to Hong Kong’s economic and legal foundations at midnight on June 30th, 2047, when the transition period to being fully part of China comes to an end.
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Nothing.
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LITERALLY nothing.
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The calendar will flip over to July 1, but the private property-based capitalistic legal/ commercial model on which Hong Kong is founded won’t change.
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And though this is being billed as "the second handover", it will be less of a change than the transfer of sovereignty in 1997. Even the flag won't have to be switched. Indeed, business people see the end of a period of uncertainty as a highly positive indicator.
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ONE STEP BEYOND
What's the evidence for this? The bedrock of Hong Kong’s economy is private property. The government has been quietly renewing land leases to stretch beyond the period long seen as a deadline.
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In 2020, the Lands Department granted a 50-year lease on a piece of land in Tai Po, taking the development through to AD 2070. Eight companies bid for the lease, showing that Hongkongers are confident enough to bet literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the community’s post-2047 continuation.
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That property deal is now one of a great many which have stretched past that date.
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MINIMUM PERIOD
The 30 June 2047 date is clearly now being seen NOT as the end of the current incarnation of Hong Kong, but simply as the end of the guaranteed minimum period during which it will retain its present private-property based model.
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After that, it may, technically, move towards the mainland Chinese system - which is ALSO a private-property based system. The fundamentals are identical.
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Many smart ordinary Hong Kong people know this too, queuing to buy property despite the short time frame (just 26 years) before 2047.
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EXTENDING OWNERSHIP
What about the technicalities? How exactly will your apartment ownership be extended into the fully Chinese era?
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Hong Kong civil servants have been working on the issue. They realized some years ago that a large number of Hong Kong land leases were set to expire on or before June 30, 2047. The Lands Department has been collating the information on the number of lots involved, their user categorisation, and the number of owners with a financial interest in each lot. (Typically, a single land lot will have a building on top of it with multiple owners.) The data compilation exercise will be completed in phases from this year, 2021, onwards.
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Early estimates suggest that from 2025 to June 29, 2047, land leases of a total of about 2,400 land lots will be expiring, and may need extensions.
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IN LINE WITH THE LAW
How to handle this in line with the law? Civil servants realized that they had to look back to a policy statement promulgated by the Hong Kong government in July 1997. This said that leases not containing a right of renewal may be extended for a term of 50 years by the government.
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Note that the 1997 policy did NOT say "may be extended UNTIL 30 June, 2047", but "may be extended FOR A TERM OF 50 years".
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In other words, the period would MOVE FORWARDS WITH THE CALENDAR.
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(It also specified the specific terms of renewal. The extension would not require payment of an additional premium, but an annual rent would be charged equivalent to three per cent of the rateable value of the property.)
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After the British administrators left, the Hong Kong civil servants who took their place have done exactly this: they have continued to issue 50-year land leases. By this method, the leases have naturally extended beyond 2047. So the 2070 property deal mentioned above makes perfect sense.
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Still, many property-related contracts have been issued with 2047 treated as a deadline -- so they also needed to be taken into consideration. At the moment, the Hong Kong government has a team of people working on creating a stream-lined procedure to extend leases. Details will be announced once they have been checked by legal specialists.
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BETTING THEIR SAVINGS
How trustworthy is this conclusion? The best evidence that it is solid comes from the way relevant professional groups have moved together to support it.
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For some years, government experts have been meeting with sector representatives to discuss this. The civil service communicated with the banking sector via the Hong Kong Monetary Authority in October 2016, with the Hong Kong Institute of Surveyors in May 2017, and so on.
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In these and other meetings, the Hong Kong government reaffirmed its authority to grant land leases with terms extending beyond June 30, 2047. They also explained the specifics in the execution of land lease extension.
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Hong Kong watchers note that property ownership sailed smoothly through the 1997 handover, technically a much bigger change.
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OPPOSITE OF EXPECTATIONS
Observers also note that there's a strong piece of evidence which shows that the people who will make this happen have accepted the past-2047-policy. Since at least 2019, Hong Kong’s commercial banks have been arranging mortgage loans with terms longer than those of the leases of the relevant premises.
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When Hong Kong lenders and borrowers put their hard-earned cash on a promise, the indications are that they take it seriously.
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What’s interesting is that for financially aware Hong Kong people, 2047 is now not being seen as the end of a good thing but the precise opposite: the welcome end of a period of relative uncertainty.
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But this fact goes unnoticed and unreported, due to the negativity on Hong Kong and mainland China generated by the international media.  
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From www.fridayeveryday.com

indy

I’m happy for K (also known as “Lost Eye Woman”) that she didn’t lose her eye contrary to news reports—that’s the subject of an Oriental Daily “scoop” being hotly discussed in Hong Kong social media just now. But Hong Kong people who followed the story at the time it happened in 2019 have always known the real story. Here’s a three-minute catch-up video for anyone interested in what was globally reported to be a case in which a paramedic lost her eye to a police bullet.
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One sad note: at a different protest, a woman, a journalist from Indonesia, actually DID lose one eye to a police weapon. But that incident got a tiny, tiny fraction of the coverage of the earlier story, as it didn’t quite fit the The Narrative.


https://www.facebook.com/708946213/posts/10159470118226214/
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Conclusion: a false story that fits The Narrative will get infinitely more news coverage than a true story that doesn’t. Academic friends, please do some research on this….

indy

THANK YOU! Herman and the gang and myself want to say a huge thank you to everyone for their encouragement and contributions to the Friday project, a tiny new news magazine which is less CNN, more Confucius. In less than a week, we outgrew our original humble website and now have a bigger one that's scaleable upwards: www.fridayeveryday.com. Check it out when you have a moment. In the first comment below, I highlight a contribution from a reader -- others are coming in too!

indy

An observation

indy

POLARIZATION TEAM GOES WEST
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OOPS. Hong Kong’s independence activists are taking their tech habit, developed with US aid, to the western world.
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A pro-polarization program is focusing on the UK. Proponents aim to mark all businesses owned by Chinese people (mostly takeaways or small restaurants) with blue flags if they fail to support the anti-China movement, dominated by localists who want to “free Hong Kong” from China in a “revolution”. (Surveys show that more than 80 per cent of Hong Kong people oppose independence.)
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A woman who runs a tiny food outlet in the north of England found she was receiving large numbers of fake negative reviews from people who had clearly never tasted her food, badmouthing her cooking from literally 10,000 kilometers away. A reviewer criticized her “waitress service”, despite the restaurant being a takeaway. Her online rating plummeted.
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During the 2019 riots in Hong Kong, anti-government groups used location-based mapping technology to great effect. America’s Open Technology Fund later admitted supplying cash and manpower to develop technology for activists’ use. Some of the programming was done in Taiwan, according to several sources, although the polarization team is now using Google Maps tools so that members can easily label a Chinese-run business in the UK with a blue flag.
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It all sounds grim, but there are two glimmers of light. Some small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs in the UK say that they are getting good support from British customers, who are skilled at spotting fake reviews.
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Also, a similar attempt to increase polarization in Hong Kong, known as “the yellow economic circle” plan, was largely unsuccessful. The most prominent member, the Lung Mun Cafe chain of restaurants, dropped out.
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People on all sides of the political spectrum thought that campaigns to increase polarization were the exact opposite of what Hong Kong needed today. One young woman told this reporter that when she was shopping, she didn't want politics--she wanted discounts. Spoken like a true Hong Konger!

indy

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YXP-AfSyYo0


YAY! OSCAR-WINNING MOVIE DIRECTOR Malcolm Clarke will appear at our conference on the theme of communicating our story to the world.
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The British filmmaker, with two Academy Awards under his belt, is currently living in Shanghai because he believes the renaissance of the Chinese people is the biggest news story on the planet – and the one that has been most comprehensively missed by the global media.
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If you have any interest in the future of humanity, you need to be aware of the astonishingly fast and peaceful rise of the Chinese people, says Clarke.
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MOVERS AND SHAKERS
The event will be live-streamed on Monday afternoon on Facebook and elsewhere, but we’ll record the whole thing and make highlights available during the week. Links coming later.
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The team from Friday media has invited the movers and shakers in Hong Kong, plus all the government people – one kind of needs the presence of the city’s decisionmakers to be taken seriously these days.
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PRO-CHINA!
One very supportive group has been the Hong Kong Coalition. Now I know that Apple Daily paints them as evil pro-China puppets, but they label everyone like that except themselves.
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The Coalition is actually a group that includes virus-fighter Gabriel Leung and other doctors, Rocky Tuan and the other university heads, businessman Li Ka-shing and other massive employers, etc. Yes, the group does include Hong Kong’s representatives to China like Tam Yiu-chung and CY Leung, but their connections are important for Hong Kong. The group’s main focus is to rebuild Hong Kong’s economy and generate jobs for the young, and they have the power to do that.
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CY Leung is going to come to physically attend the event, which is great news, because the local press follows him – they think he is going to re-apply for his old job as Hong Kong leader, so they track his footsteps carefully.
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SPEAKING FREELY  
We’re also happy to note that Hong Kong government and the China Liaison Office are sending people along! Interesting! Now you may think that this means that no one is allowed to speak freely because freedom in this city is totally dead, as we keep reading.
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But that’s simply untrue. The city’s newspapers are alive and well. We’ve told all panellists they can say anything they like.
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Paul Chan has also agreed to come – he’s the Financial Secretary who has been steering Hong Kong’s economy (and dispensing chunks of it to every citizen). The world’s currency gamblers have been trying to smash the Hong Kong dollar but Paul Chan has not just kept it afloat, but strengthened it. And he’s a really nice guy too.
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ATTACK OF THE LABELLERS
These days all events that include business people and civil servants get labelled “pro-China” by the shallow labellers, but these days one just has to accept that and carry on. This is a hardworking business city: it would be insane to exclude entrepreneurs or employers or civil servants.
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The interesting thing is that even the Western media (see the BBC link in first comment) is reporting that there’s mounting evidence that capitalist liberal democracy has critical structural flaws, and we need to look for new answers.
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Fact is, we should all try to be open-minded and learn from each other about alleviating poverty and hunger, and enhancing the lives of people everywhere. Confucius said we were all siblings, and he’s right – humans are literally one family. Our race is “human” and our country is “the world”, right?
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Peace.
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indy

ZEN JOURNALISM: New Asian news group fights back by not fighting
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ENTREPRENEUR HERMAN HU Shao-ming looked up from his beer at a popular bar in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay one Friday night and noticed something that made his eyebrows rise.
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He knew that there was growing concern around the world about the bitter polarization of societies, including in his beloved home city.
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But right in front of him were happy clusters of people solving the world’s problems with cheery, good-natured conversations over drinks.
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What made the difference?
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Friday night: The setting, the time, the atmosphere, the mood.

Ding! And that gave him an idea.
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BERKELEY-EDUCATED
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Hu, a Berkeley-educated Hong Konger with a range of businesses (including the bar in which he sat) phoned friends around the city.
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The brainwave was to create a calm, good-natured news agency, which would be “chill”, Asian, and non-political—rather than taking the confrontational, over-politicized click-seeking stance of mainstream media. The alternative group could do calm events, too.
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It turned out that there were a lot of people in the city who disliked the polarization of society, including author Nury Vittachi. The friends soon had literally hundreds of offers of help and support, from people young and old, local and foreign, political and non-political, rich and poor.
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The result is Friday Culture, a group that will share stories and hold regular live events, aiming for a good-natured, co-operative, problem-solving mode of operation.
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DETACHED AND REFLECTIVE
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“Our media unit, Fridayeveryday, will be the first ‘zen’ news operation,” said Vittachi. “Instead of politicizing everything for clicks, we’re going to be good-humored, detached and reflective. Less Breitbart, more Buddha.”  
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The Friday participants know that people who don’t support the mainsteam media’s grimly negative official narrative on China will be labelled “communist puppets” but are unfazed. Vittachi says: “Haters gonna hate, labellers gonna label.”
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Herman Hu is entirely upfront about the fact that he has excellent relationships with movers and shakers in both the East and the West. “Confucius said two millennia ago that ‘all people are siblings’,” he pointed out. “We really are.”
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The Fridayeveryday website will be updated regularly with stories about China, Hong Kong and the region, and the Friday community will next week announce its first forum, a half-day conference on finding better ways to tell China’s story and Hong Kong’s story.
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The Friday group chose May 21, the United Nations World Day for Cultural Diversity, as the ideal launch date for the new project.
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"One of our members looked it up," Vittachi said. "And found it was a Friday."
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Story from www.fridayeveryday.com
Text by Friday writers
Picture by Satria Perkasa

indy

'HUMANITY'S BIGGEST STORY IS BEING MISSED'
A HONG KONG MAN visited a bustling Chinese trade zone and noticed several astonishing things, he said yesterday.
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First, there was its extraordinary size. It was massive. At 120 sq km, the Lingang hi-tech manufacturing zone was the size of a major US city (San Francisco, for example, is 120 sq km). And it was just one of many in Shanghai.
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Second, the scene was thrillingly free of the contentious politics one reads about every day. In front of him, Chinese and American workers successfully toiled together making Tesla cars. At one point, he passed a signing ceremony in which China and Japan were collaborating on hydrogen-powered vehicles, providing a glimpse of a cheap, clean energy future for the world.
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Third, he read in the Financial Times about a huge rush of entrepreneurs and business people pouring into China. "Some investors say the biggest risk is not getting into China quickly enough," the report said.
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HUMANITY'S ACHIEVEMENTS
The man was former Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, and he shared the anecdote at the International Communication in the New Era conference yesterday.
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The key point was this: Step away from the narrow confines of the politicized coverage of China and a world of positive stories about humanity’s joint achievements opens up.
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“So, to the international audience, the China story is not just about politics,” Leung said. “It shouldn’t be.”
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The story reinforced a point made by Hong Kong entrepreneur Herman Hu Shao-ming, who said that the narrative being loudly pushed “unfortunately tends to be more than a little negative about this region. In contrast, our side of the world has been relatively quiet in telling the other side of the story, although we have lots of good stories to tell.”
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A DIFFERENT STORY
That was the theme that ran through the conference, which included voices from around the world, and which was remotely viewed by more than 800,000 people, streamed through multiple channels, from Phoenix TV to RTHK TV to UNESCO HK Assocation to others.
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While news and opinion columns took a politicized and often hostile stance, business and cultural reports told a very different story. Speaker after speaker identified the need for genuinely Asian voices speaking from Asian point of view on the world stage.
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Oscar-winning film director Malcolm Clarke said that the rise of China was arguably the most important news story of the modern age, but a very different story was being told about the nation.
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Han Yong Hong, a journalist from Singapore, said that there was no easy answer to the problem, but people in Asia just had to keep their telling their stories.
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Friday media's first conference turned out to be a really interesting day. I met so many amazing people and they had some eye-opening stories to tell, on stage and off. Many of them definitely are worth sharing. Our little gang will pull them out of our notebooks and share them over the next few days. In the meantime, keep an eye on our website, www.fridayeveryday.com. Big thanks to everyone concerned!

indy

indy

HUGE NUMBERS VIEW CALL FOR DIVERSITY
MORE THAN A MILLION people tuned into Friday group's live-streamed conference calling for diverse views to be included in international media, new figures reveal.
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The failure to allow space for Asian ways of organizing society meant China was unfairly portrayed as a global supervillain, said speakers at the communications-themed conference, held in Hong Kong on May 31, attracting 1,020,468 viewers from around the world.
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Hong Kong’s story, too, was “wildly misrepresented” on the global stage, said speakers at the event streamed on multiple channels, from Phoenix TV to i-Cable to RTHK to UNESCO Hong Kong Association.
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RESPECTFUL AND DISCREET
International discourse, controlled by the West, tended to be adversarial and condemnatory, while Asian society tended to be more cohesive, respectful and discreet.
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To understand both, journalists needed to make significant extra effort. Most were not doing so, but should be encouraged to be more open-minded, speakers felt.
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“Life is not a zero sum game, where if one person wins, everyone else loses,” said Herman Hu Shao-ming, the main mover behind the conference. “No. We can all win. Indeed, that is how it should be.”
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'TERRIBLE PLACES'
Speakers from a range of sectors, from culture to business, lamented the fact that Hong Kong and Mainland China were presented as terrible places, and the time had come for a more truthful account of these societies to be told.
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“Hitler said that if you repeat a lie enough times it will become the truth,” warned outspoken local businessman Ronnie Chan.
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Moviemaker Malcolm Clarke said coverage of Hong Kong had been “appalling”, with big international media organizations refusing to dig under the surface to reveal the real story.
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REBUILDING AT SPEED
Asian media, meanwhile, tried to present an alternative view, but was generally shunned or ignored by the dominant international media, all of which were based in the US and Western Europe.
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But the ultimate message of the conference was one of hope. China was rebuilding at astonishing speed from the global pandemic, and Hong Kong too was in recovery mode.

“Hong Kong only gets stronger and stronger,” said Allan Zeman, best known as the "king of Lan Kwai Fong", one of Hong Kong's bar districts. “It is able to reinvent itself. That’s always been the beauty of Hong Kong.”
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FAIR AND BALANCED
Herman Hu said he was hopeful that one day there would be fair, balanced coverage of both east and west, leading to a more united human family.  
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“One day, I would like to click on the news section of Fridayeveryday. com, and read a headline,” he said.
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“Breaking news: Today, there is peace on Earth.”
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Picture shows Nury Vittachi, Kennedy Wong and Jenny Wong

indy

Think about it

indy

How NOT to talk to mainland Chinese friends about June 4
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DO NOT SAY: “So your government gunned down all these poor students who were in Tiananmen Square pleading for freedom and democracy; the young people were so brave, one guy stood in front of a tank, but tens of thousands were massacred.”
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Instead, if your Chinese friend is interested, you can suggest he or she read some books and papers on the subject: there are some good ones available, and there’s a list at the end of this piece.
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LAZY JOURNALISM
What happened in Beijing on June 4, 1989 is too important to mess up with half-truths and lazy journalism.
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As a Hong Konger, I strongly believe in the annual remembrance of the dead on the anniversary, but we are probably all aware that there have always been two starkly different versions of the story of what happened in the early hours of that day.
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In the Western version of events, the students were gunned down in a hail of machine gun fire (Wen Wei Po) leaving “tens of thousands” dead (NBC news).
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The official Chinese version of events (when they can be pushed to speak about it) says student protests triggered civil unrest in Beijing and elsewhere. Fighting broke out in the city and several hundred people did lose their lives, but no one died in Tiananmen Square.
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MOVING TOGETHER
Good news: For those of us who still read books and papers, we can see that today, 30 years later, the two versions have been moving steadily together, thanks to the work of writers and reporters who set their prejudices aside to review and compare eyewitness accounts.
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It is this writer’s hope that an issue that has divided east and west will one day be a shared story of lost people who can be commemorated by both sides.
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10 THINGS TO TALK THOUGHTFULLY ABOUT
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People who have studied what actually did happen have a more nuanced understanding of the events of that tragic night. Here are 10 suggestions about things to think about when talking about it.
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1) DON'T SAY that the student demonstrations were a call for freedom.
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You see that written everywhere, but scholars agree that the students were complaining about the widespread corruption that they saw as preventing the achievement of what they wanted: a fair and just communist society.  The students were fiercely patriotic and proud of China and its socialist stance. They wanted their protest to echo a historical event – the 1919 May 4 student protests against imperialism.
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2) DON’T SAY that the protests were a call for democracy.
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In truth, they were calling for reform within communism. It was only when students noticed that international reporters would race to photograph placards with English words such as “liberty” that democracy was elevated to a major theme. Work began on the “goddess of democracy” statue on May 27, just days before the end of the six-week protest. The sculptors modelled it on the work of Russian revolutionary communist sculptor Vera Mukhina.
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3) DON’T SAY that as armoured vehicles tried to get to the square to clear it on June 4, one brave man stood in front of them, temporarily blocking a line of tanks.
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The famous “tank man” video was filmed by AP’s Jeff Widener one day later, on June 5, and shows a line of vehicles leaving the square, not entering. These facts do not take anything away from the courage of his act—but it does remove it from the mythology of that night.
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4) DON’T SAY that soldiers arrived with machine guns and started firing indiscriminately, mowing down hundreds of students.
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The majority of soldiers who arrived to clear the square were unarmed. The story of “machine gunners” slaughtering students comes from an anonymous article printed in Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po—an account disavowed by all witnesses. Separately, the student leader who claimed to have seen 200 students mown down was Wu’er Kaixi. He was disgraced after his fellow student protesters jointly confirmed that he had left the square early, many hours before the events he claimed to have personally witnessed.
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5) DON’T SAY that Tiananmen Square was the site of the massacre.
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In 2011, Wikileaks revealed classified cables in which US diplomats recorded an interview with a Chilean eyewitness, and noted how it matched Chinese accounts, not Western journalistic ones, which tended to echo the Wen Wei Po and Wu’er Kaixi accounts.
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The US diplomat said: “He watched the military enter the square and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds, although sporadic gunfire was heard. He said that most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear – truncheons and wooden clubs; they were backed up by armed soldiers.” (Witnesses later said the gunshots heard were from soldiers shooting out the students’ speaker equipment.)
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A protest leader, Liu Xiaobo, urged the students to depart the square. The witness, a Chilean diplomat, said: “Once agreement was reached for the students to withdraw, linking hands to form a column, the students left the square through the south east corner.” They were gone by 5.45 am.
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6) DON’T FORGET that the real tragedy took place elsewhere in Beijing.  
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Where did the slaughter take place? The most violent fighting was between workers groups (adults, not students) and soldiers in the West of the city. (About two weeks earlier, Ni Zhifu, chairman of China's labour unions, had threatened to “cripple” China with a general workers’ strike.)
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Most of the photographs and footage of dead bodies and crushed bicycles were taken from a massive and bloody fight that took place in an area called Mixudi, several kilometers away from Tiananmen Square.
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In 2009, James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had "conveyed the wrong impression” and that “there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops… There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre.”
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7) DON’T MAKE the soldiers into the sole villains.
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Yes, soldiers slaughtered unarmed people. “And to find out why the soldiers did such an atrocious thing we do not have to look much beyond those widely publicized photos of military buses in rows being set on fire by those protesting crowds,” wrote Australian diplomat Gregory Clark.
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“To date the world seems to have assumed that those buses were fired by the crowds AFTER the soldiers had started shooting. In fact it was the reverse —the crowds attacked the buses as they entered Beijing, incinerating dozens of soldiers inside, and only then did the shooting begin. Here too we do need not go far to find the evidence — in the not publicized photos of soldiers with horrible burns seeking shelter in nearby houses, and reports of charred corpses being strung from overpasses.”
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8) DON’T SAY that the number of people who lost their lives in Beijing that night was “tens of thousands”.
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The “tens of thousands” quote came from Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, in a television interview. No respected source on either side of the discussion agrees with this figure. It was 100s or maybe a couple of thousand at most—still too many people, but a far cry from tens of thousands.
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9) DON’T SAY that anyone who doesn’t uncritically accept the Western popular media version of the event is doing something evil. The truth is important—for the sake of the many dead on all sides.
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“A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully,” said Jay Mathews, former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, and a critic of Western journalistic coverage.  
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“Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances,” he said.
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10) DO REMEMBER all the victims.
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UK Journalist Brendan O’Neill explained why we need to remember all three groups of victims: the students, the soldiers, and the main victims: the workers.
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“Where Chinese officials have reduced the brave uprising in Beijing to a mere ‘incident’, western observers have mythologised it as a peaceful student protest in a central square that was cut down by gun-wielding soldiers.
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“They have subtly, and unforgivably, written out of history the most numerous protesters of June 1989 and those who suffered the most: the workers in the suburbs of Beijing, miles from Tiananmen Square.”
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REMEMBER JUNE 4
So let’s remember the tragedy of Beijing on June 4, 1989. But let’s resist the temptation to turn it into a simple, political China-bashing fairy tale in which good guys (the students) were mercilessly slaughtered by bad guys (the soldiers). Instead, let’s recognize it as what it really was: a societal convulsion in which many people sadly lost their lives: students, workers and soldiers. I will be remembering them on June 4. Feel free to take a moment of silence and join me, wherever you are.
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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:
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BOOK: Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy Movement, by George Black and Robin Munro
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The Tiananmen Papers, a set of leaked documents that allegedly cover internal Communist Party meetings and reports.
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Wikileaks: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news ... e-cables-claim.html

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ARTICLE by Brendan O’Neill: https://www.theguardian.com/comm ... /china.olympics2008

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BOOK: Jay Mathews: One Billion: A China Chronicle
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Article: "The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press". by Jay Mathews
https://archives.cjr.org/behind_ ... th_of_tiananmen.php
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Article: Gregory Clark: The truth about tankman
http://www.fccj.or.jp/number-1-s ... -about-tankman.html
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Article: Jonathan Fenby: https://www.theguardian.com/comm ... etiananmensquarepeg

indy

THE NOTORIOUS MACHINE-GUNNING of students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 never happened, it was revealed yesterday.
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The atrocity tales from Beijing were fiction, said ABC News of Australia in a report on June 3, 2021.
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Diplomats knew at the time that the events were false.
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"Within a few days, certainly within a week, it was clear that the information about what happened in the square itself was incorrect," Professor Richard Rigby, a staff member at the Australian Embassy in 1989, told reporters at an ABC news show.
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TO THIS DAY
Western media accounts of the June 4 events to this day are centered on a document apparently composed as deliberate disinformation.
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"I cannot entirely rule out the possibility that we were being fed some sort of a 'line',” Professor Rigby said.
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The fake story was also spread by the British. “The British cable and Australian cable are strikingly similar,” the ABC reported. “They present similar information about the massacre in similar order.”
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POISONED A GENERATION
This single discredited report was the source of the key elements of the Tiananmen Square myth. It reported that students were machine-gunned indiscriminately in the Square.
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“When all those who had not managed to get away were either dead or wounded, foot soldiers went through the square bayoneting or shooting anybody who was still alive,” said the report, famously read out loud by then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
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“They had orders that nobody in the square be spared, and children and young girls were slaughtered, anti-personnel carriers and tanks then ran backwards and forwards over the bodies of the slain until they were reduced to pulp, after which, bulldozers moved in to push the remains into piles which were then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers."
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The document also included accounts of other atrocities, creating an image of the Chinese government as monstrously violent and inhuman, and poisoning the image of China globally for an entire generation at least.
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EYEWITNESSES TOLD A DIFFERENT STORY
But eyewitnesses and video records show that the vast majority of soldiers were unarmed and the students filed out peacefully.
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Deaths did occur, some outside the Square, but many in a bitter confrontation between workers and soldiers five km from Tiananmen near Mu Xi Di Station in Western Beijing.
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The British version of the disinformation document, quietly declassified in 2017, shows that British Ambassador Sir Alan Donald reported that that a “minimum” of 10,000 citizens died. (The real number is believed to be between 240 and 400.)
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Yesterday, 32 years after the event, the main reports from CNN and the vast majority of mainstream media outlets, continue to be based on the long-discredited disinformation document.
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The document also influenced government policies around the world, for example, leading Australia to give out 42,000 visas to people from China.
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SOURCE UNKNOWN
Who wrote it? ABC news speculates that it came from Chinese government sources.
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Separately, journalists who have followed the story for decades, say they have long been aware of CIA involvement. The US ambassador to China, Winston Lord, was mysteriously recalled in the spring of 1989, to be replaced as ambassador by James Lilly, who formerly worked as a CIA operative specializing in getting agents in and out of China.
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The students in Beijing were initially calling for purer communism, and continually singing the Chinese national anthem, The March of the Volunteers.
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But American agents told student leaders to call for “freedom, democracy and human rights”, and told them they had instant visas to the US and guaranteed CIA transport out of China.
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MASSACRE FORETOLD
Shortly before the discredited “Tiananmen massacre” report was disseminated to diplomats and journalists, student leader Chai Ling warned of a massacre “which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square”.
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She added that she expected to die shortly – but confusingly also said that she no longer intended to stay in China, but wanted to move to the United States.
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Journalists and diplomats who were physically present at Tiananmen Square at the time have long maintained that the Chinese government’s version of the story was accurate: no one died at Tiananmen Square, but several hundred people lost their lives elsewhere.
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Chai Ling is now a businesswoman in the United States, known for her right wing views.
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* * *
Links to the ABC reports are provided in the comments
Picture: Thoughtful young man in Shanghai, Lars Zhang/ Unsplash

indy

WHEN EUROPEAN LEADERS refused to back the US’s anti-China campaign, internet connections were shut down to ensure no outside heard the discussion, a report from the site said.
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It happened during the Saturday evening discussion at the G-7 meeting in Cornwall, UK.
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TOUGH LINE
The problem: All parties agreed that China (like France, Indonesia and others) was taking a tough line on violent Islamist radicalism.
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But America is using “Uyghur rights groups” financed by the CIA’s regime change unit to exaggerate the process into a horrific “worse than the Holocaust” narrative in a bid to get the world on its side in an economic war against the Chinese, who are working to rise above their “developing nation” status.
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As part of the strategy, US leader Joseph Biden wanted the G7’s joint communique to mention a recent chapter of the US-penned narrative, which is to paint entrepreneurs who employ Uyghur staff as monsters who run slave camps. The UK’s Boris Johnson and Canada’s Justin Trudeau said they would back it, but European countries declined, knowledgeable sources said.
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COINCIDENTAL TIMING
It is worth noting that Amnesty International and the New York Times both “coincidentally” released “unverified” reports of atrocities in Xinjiang, presented as fact, to bolster Biden’s claim.
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The NYT report repeated Adrian Zenz’s IUD statistics, omitting to note that they had long been debunked, and contained an absurd reference to “the destruction of Hong Kong”, despite the fact that Hong Kong is now statistically the world’s healthiest and one of the world’s wealthiest cities.
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SECRET CENSORS
After the meeting, a Biden spokesman tried to make the fight sound trivial. “There is a little differentiation, I think I would say, within—within, I think, the spectrum of how hard they would push on some of these issues,” reporters were told.
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But insiders told reporters that the quarrel over the US narrative got so heated that censors snapped into action.
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“The disagreements, aired during a session that at one point became so sensitive that all internet was shut off to the room, pitted European nations against the United States, Britain and Canada,” according to a CNN report.
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It was unthinkable that the people of the world should hear the discussion and be enlightened.
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VAGUE REFERENCES

And what happened in the end? The anti-China hawks lost, the Europeans won. The communique, when it was published, made only vague references to Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and no mention of slave labor.
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Even with Amnesty International and the NYT backing them up, the US State Department lost this round.
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NOT FOOLED
In related news, a classic idiom has been updated: “You can’t fool all the people all the time, even if you are richest country in the world spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to make people hate a developing country.”
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That’s good news for people everywhere, including Americans, many of whom are no fans of covert US activities overseas.
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Peace.

indy

Tough call

indy

BRIAN PATRICK KERN’s “yellowface” alter-ego is back. “Kong Tsung-gan”, the fake Hong Kong Chinese identity used by the discredited former human rights activist has suddenly come back to life on Twitter – and is urging local activists to get on the streets and “seize back Hong Kong”.
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As before, the account uses a Chinese name, has Chinese characters as a profile image, and gives no indication that it is written by a Caucasian from the United States.
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Hilariously, Mr “Kong” pours scorn on the description of the riots in 2019 as “'violent riots' stoked by 'foreign forces',” despite the fact that he himself was and is clearly a member of those “foreign forces”.
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FOOLED THE WORLD
For years, Kern, a white American former Amnesty International staff member, pretended to be a Hong Kong born local who grew up here and attended a government school.
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He fooled the world’s biggest media into quoting him as a local Hongkonger, with his messages consistently taking a stance which was pro-USA and anti-China. He was quoted as a local Chinese voice by the mainstream media, including CNN, Time magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, AFP, Guardian, Radio Free Asia, DW, France24, Voice of America, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Vice, and Nikkei Asian Review.
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His secret identity, “Kong Tsung-gan”, was also the dominant voice on the website of the Hong Kong Free Press, which took the same political position. The site promoted Kern’s self-published books and presented his columns as if he was a local Chinese.
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EXPOSED BY REAL HK CHINESE
Kern was exposed in December 2019 when outraged real Hong Kong Chinese people approached the present writer calling for an end to the hoax. The American’s real identity was printed in the Standard newspaper. The Hong Kong Free Press, unapologetic, demanded that the story be removed from the internet and made legal threats against us.
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However, the Standard stood by the story, and Kern was eventually widely denounced for use of “yellowface” – pretending to be Chinese. He claimed it was just “a pen name” but it was clearly unethical for a white American male to use a fake Chinese identity to speak to the world as the voice of the Hong Kong people.
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Kern left Hong Kong shortly before a US-style law preventing paid foreign interference in local politics was promulgated.
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RESISTANCE BASE
In his new batch of posts, starting June 9, “Kong Tsung-gan” is sending out texts, slogans, pictures and links, once more inciting radicals to take action.
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“Two year ago, we marched in white, a million strong. Two years on, our goal is the same: “Seize back Hong Kong” And our resolve is just as strong,” he writes.
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Mr “Kong” quotes slogans urging young people to “stay in Hong Kong” and “use HK as the base [of resistance]”.
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They may well end up in jail.

indy

WHAT WOULD YOU call a newspaper, run by a right-wing billionaire Trump fanatic, which fights against attempts to introduce universal suffrage?
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Clearly, the last thing you would call it is a “pro-democracy” newspaper.
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But that’s exactly what the international media are doing. In 2013, Hong Kong attempted to allow citizens to directly elect their leader. But the requirements for the involvement of an electoral committee led to a split in the so-called pro-democracy camp, with Apple Daily urging legislators to veto the entire process. They did so, a step which academics and journalists (including this writer) later said was a mistake.
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Some may quibble with that, so let’s set that aside. Even stepping away entirely from politics, it’s obvious to Hong Kong people (but puzzlingly not to the Western media) that summarizing Apple Daily as a “pro-democracy” newspaper creates an entirely wrong impression.
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SEX-OBSESSED
Apple Daily is like the UK’s News of the World, a brutal, sex-obsessed, sensationalist and deeply illiberal newspaper whose reporters are consistently in trouble for their methods. (Disclosure: this writer has worked for the News of the World.)
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On Apple Daily’s pages, Trump is God, and Covid-19 is “Wuhan flu”. Scantily-clad women have appeared for years. Violations of the privacy of celebrities is its stock in trade.
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Reporters are sued for defamation, and “chequebook journalism” is frequent.
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I WAS A FAN
Now some people will say that this article will be a “hatchet job” on the Apple Daily by someone who works for its rivals.
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But this is not the case. I’m not employed by rivals. In Apple Daily’s early days (it started in 1995), I was a big fan. I turned a blind eye to its lack of morals, because I’d met Jimmy Lai a few times socially, and I was friends with the paper’s deputy leader Mark Simon.
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Furthermore, as a journalist, I was intrigued by the question of how crude, Western-style sensationalism and hyper-sexuality would fare in front of Hong Kong’s rather conservative audience.
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BUSINESS DISASTER
The answer, in the long run, turned out to be “not well”.  
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Western media consistently presents Apple Daily as if it was the most popular and successful newspaper in Hong Kong, but that’s not remotely true. Its circulation has long lagged behind its more conservative rivals (Headline Daily, Oriental Daily, etc).
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In business terms, Apple is not a success, losing millions of Hong Kong dollars a week. The company has been trying to sell its Taiwan edition with no success, and is in trouble with Taipei politicians because of its plans for mass layoffs in apparent violation of employment law.
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BIGOTRY PROBLEM
But for many local Hong Kong people, the real problem is its undisguised bigotry. Apple popularized the term “locusts” for people from the mainland coming to Hong Kong.
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It isn't just mainlanders staff dislike. In September last year, Apple Daily columnist Chip Tsao complained about government staff he had to deal with in the UK, his newly adopted home country. They were often coloured people you can’t complain about because of political correctness, he moaned.
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“It has nothing to do with racial discrimination, because all you are fighting against are low-level civil servants of colour who immigrated from the Third World,” he said. “They are just extremely lazy and institutional bureaucrats. You shouldn’t yell at them, otherwise you are the one who commits racial discrimination.”
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HK PEOPLE GENEROUS
To combat its reputation for bigotry, Apple sometimes accuses others of the same thing. In 2013, Apple ran a front-page anti-government “scoop” saying that Executive Council member Franklin Lam, said: “I utterly discriminate against new immigrants."
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Unfortunately for Apple, the meeting had been recorded and the tape showed that what he actually said was: “I utterly do not discriminate against new immigrants. On arrival in Hong Kong, they are legally Hong Kong citizens. They are also first-class citizens."
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The truth is that Hong Kong people are generous, and the city has an extensive program to help mainland immigrants settle in.
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MAJOR TRAGEDIES
Perhaps the best evidence of how Apple’s supporters have views which are diametrically opposed to the majority of Hong Kong people can be seen in the newspaper's reactions to major tragedies in the mainland.
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When there was a horrific earthquake in Wenchuan in May of 2008, Apple Daily declared it “punishment by God”.
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After the Sichuan earthquake of 2013, Apple ran several articles alleging that money donated would be misused, causing many readers to stop donating.
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In both cases, the larger Hong Kong public, generous and caring about their mainland cousins, ignored the newspaper’s editorials and raised huge sums of cash to help relief work. People of all ages even travelled with NGOs to the earthquake sites to help with rebuilding projects.
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CRUELTY
This is not to say that it never does worthwhile journalism. Sometimes it does. Still, the paper’s illiberal cruelty eventually drove away many former fans, including me.
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In 1998, Apple Daily published a shocking picture story about a cruel man who sought out prostitutes soon after his wife had murdered their children and committed suicide. The paper later admitted paying the man to pose for the photographs.
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There’s a big chequebook journalism problem.  In 2000, an Apple reporter received a 10-month jail sentence for bribing police officers to reveal information. In 2019, the paper was widely reported to have given HK$1.5 million to a taxi driver for video footage of a married celebrity canoodling with a woman who wasn’t his wife.
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STUDENTS’ EFFORTS
Looking back, I think one of Apple Daily’s saddest “scoops” took place in 2012. A group of young Hong Kong people decided to improve their understanding of mainland China by organizing a tour. There was huge interest in the program, and eventually, 400 people, mostly young, joined the trip.
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On the road and in the train, open discussions took place about what China was really like, and the problems it was facing. Even the events of June 4, 1989, were discussed. It was exactly what Hong Kong young people needed.
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Unfortunately, Apple Daily sent an undercover reporter who presented himself as a secondary school student, and published a lengthy report describing the tour as a massive “brainwashing” effort.
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Organizers were disappointed, and expressed their sadness in a typically polite Hong Kong way. “I hope members of the public will reject attempts to politicize mainland tours aimed at enhancing mutual understanding and inclusion,” said Tse Siu-hung, chairperson of Friends of the Hong Kong Youth Exchange.
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BACKING AWAY
After learning about the astonishing scale of US interference in Hong Kong politics, I quietly backed away, and have not seen Jimmy Lai or Mark Simon for some years.
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I’m glad I did. Apple Daily’s active efforts  to work for the Trump administration against our own city and our own country were depressing.  
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Their repeated calls for the world to sanction and harm Hong Kong’s economy were outrageous, and were unspeakably cruel to a hardworking community whose members of all political leanings were already suffering.
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WORKING FOR TRUMP
Last year, shortly before the US election, the Apple Daily commissioned a report “revealing” that Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden had secret dealings with China. An academic with strongly anti-China views named Christopher Balding admitted co-writing it. Mark Simon of Apple Daily admitted commissioning it.
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Allegations from the Apple Daily document smearing Biden appeared in numerous media around the world including on the anti-China podcast China Unscripted (financed by The Epoch Times).
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CLEAR VIOLATION
To bring us right up to date, just last week, a Hong Kong court dealt with a case in which Apple reporters admitted that they pretended to be connected to celebrity Cecilia Cheung to obtain a birth certificate for her child.
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They did it to get a scoop on her private life, publishing the birth certificate, in clear violation of both privacy laws and natural morality.
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FULL PICTURE
There’s a great deal of interest in Apple Daily at the moment.
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Will the international media present a full picture of the newspaper in all its glory as an illiberal, scandal-loving, struggling business that hates China, loves the American right wing and wanted our own community hit by clearly harmful international sanctions?
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Or will it skip all that, and tell the world it is “a pro-democracy newspaper”? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
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Peace.

indy

I smile and shake my head. Most reporters still don’t understand that for more than 40 years, the CIA has been locating pro-USA groups around the world and re-branding them “pro-democracy”. The majority are far right, pro-US and anti-left. Apple Daily is a good example. There's just waaaay too much American stuff going on in the background. In Taiwan, fully 80 percent of supporters of the anti-China party presently in power are anti-China self-declared Trumpites. I actually don't blame reporters: I missed all this in my younger days: was friends/ fans of most of the folk mentioned in this graphic until their hostility level to the Chinese made me uncomfortable

indy

NEW OUTRAGE IN CHINA
News review: July 22, 2021
[Transcript: 2m26s]
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Companies in China have stopped employing Uyghur people from Xinjiang and they are refusing to hire any more of them (as I said ages ago). [image]
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That’s interesting. So:
If you provide employment to Uyghurs, you’ll get attacked for using “Muslim slaves”.
If you don’t provide employment to Ugyhurs, you’ll get attacked for refusing to hire them. You can't win.
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Anyway, the article is an exclusive from the Wall St journal.
I wonder who has been pushing the Muslim slaves angle?
Oh look, here’s a Wall Street Journal op-ed article.  [image]
Look at the headline: “Did a Muslim slave make your Chinese shirt?”
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Today's New York Times goes out of its way to associate the Pegasus spying expose with China – although China has literally nothing to do with it. As I said yesterday, clients for Pegasus were chosen by Beacon, a group run by ex-US intelligence operatives.
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South China Morning Post has a good piece in its opinion section:  Like it or not, the Chinese model will be exported. See that?  [image]
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“Countries looking to become prosperous will surely consider the mainland formula” writes s. George Marano, an Australian academic.
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He writes: “The Western consensus still appears to be that China adopting democracy is a question of not if, but when.”  He says that they “exhibit a form of denial”.
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Meanwhile, Badiuciao, the Chinese Australian cartoonist adored by the Hong Kong Free Press and other Western media, produced a cartoon about people drowning in China.   [image]
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You know, Badiuciao, that's not actually funny. The China demonizers really are their own worst enemies.
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Here’s something that IS funny. Remember Steve Bannon and Miles Guo, and their fake Chinese super-scientist Dr Li Meng-yan?  
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[image] Together, from America, they poisoned a million minds against China and Hong Kong.
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Well, the three seem to have had a big fight – and now are threatening to send Dr Li back to Hong Kong.
[image]
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Er, no thank you guys!
Why don't you keep her!
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Goodbye!

indy

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT was behind the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, a US group called the Chinese Democracy and Human Rights Alliance, revealed at the weekend. What else should China be blamed for? Only wrong answers please