Asia Sentinel
‘Strategic refreshment in the cards, whatever that means
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HSBC, aka the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, is due to announce a “strategic refreshment” next month, according to Bloomberg.
“Not again,” critics might mutter as the London-based bank whose major profits center is Hong Kong, struggles to define itself. Once the very model of a conservative bank run more to oil the wheels of commerce and sustain financial stability than please investment funds, its very diversity is now a threat.
Last year it announced a shift of resources away from Europe and the US back towards Asia. The pandemic and what it has revealed has apparently further sharpened this focus. But Asia is a big place, so what exactly does this Asia mean? And what sort of banking? Commercial and retail – its traditional base and prime source of profits even today? Or investment banking, in which it has long had a presence but never progressed to the big leagues? Or private
17 01 2021
Asia Sentinel has a story about NUS Press being ordered – that’s the implication – to bin a book after taking through a production process to printing. Of course, the book is about the Thai monarchy, the dead king, and King Vajiralongkorn, and it is edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun. This censorship would be remarkable for a proper university press, but that is not what NUS Press is. It is a press run by a state-dominated university in an authoritarian state. Academic freedom is not something that the university or the press uphold.
Because Asia Sentinel is often blocked in Thailand, here’s the full story, with just a couple of edits, by John Berthelsen:
Asia Sentinel
Wildly disparate test results raise wider fears
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The Chinese government’s all-out effort to develop a vaccine to quell the coronavirus that has devastated the world economy after it sprang from a Wuhan wet market 14 months ago, is being met with widespread distrust and refusal of people to line up for a shot, playing into rising concerns over Chinese President Xi Jinping’s wider ambitions at Asian political and economic domination.
Given the black eye from the onset of Covid-19 – and reports of three vaccine scandals in China since 2010 – Chinese authorities had hoped to regain the diplomatic initiative by rushing the vaccine into production even amid considerable confusion over its efficacy. But I won’t take it,” Farman Ali Shah, a motorcycle driver in Karachi for local ride-hailing app Bykea, told Bloomberg News. I don’t trust it.” Farman’s mistrust is echoed across Asia, from Malaysia to the Philippines, where others have exhibited enou
Asia Sentinel
Move seen as ploy to avoid parliamentary defeat
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Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, his razor-thin majority collapsing, today (Jan. 12) introduced a state of emergency in parliament ostensibly to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, delaying parliamentary sittings and elections until August 1 and forestalling efforts by the opposition to remove him from power.
The emergency decree was agreed by the Yang d-Pertuan Agong, or king, Sultan Abdullah Shah of Pahang, on Monday evening, sources in Kuala Lumpur said, to be delivered the next day.
The crisis appears to have been precipitated as much by expectations of a coming collapse of support within Muhyiddin’s Perikatan Nasional coalition as by the pandemic. Indeed, three members of parliament from the United Malays National Organization later announced after the emergency ruling that they had withdrawn their support, leaving him with only 109 votes. He needs 112 to stay in power.