Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is buying the Hong Kong media group of the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the leading independent English-language newspaper in the former British colony where freedom of the press has resisted control by the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. Will Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, who has strong ties to mainland business interests and to the
A week ago today I sat together with you outside the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s library, a teacher among other teachers, a university member beside students, 13,000 strong. The weeks before had felt quiet: at the three previous all-student meetings around the Goddess of Democracy statue, you listened respectfully to guest speakers past student union presidents, a
A surge of emotion washed through me on Sunday night as I watched tens of thousands of protesters fill the streets of Hong Kong on television. It was the same feeling I had in Beijing on the nights leading up to the killings in Tiananmen Square on June 3 and 4, 1989. Once more we are seeing highly disciplined but angry young Chinese demanding an old-fashioned kind of
July 1 will mark 23 years since Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. Each of those years and many that preceded them has seen its share of disquiet over the future of the territory’s way of life and about the resilience of “one country, two systems,” Beijing’s shorthand for its professed acquiescence to keeping its hands off Hong Kong’s democratic political institutions.
There’s a bit of a nanny state in the city of Hong Kong. The government is quick to issue advice and admonitions about all matter of hazards high ocean waves, food waste, incense burning during the annual grave-sweeping festival. One night in late 2014, amid a standoff during the massive democracy protest that rocked the city, a police official squawked through a bullhorn: “Do