Category: China
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A question from a reader of this blog: What will happen to Hong Kong after 2047? Do you think it will still retain its capitalist system and unique way of life? What about the common law legal system which is arguably much more sound than the legal system in the mainland? I am hoping that…
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The China Life IPO has been quite entertaining. First we had the spectacle of grannies and taxi drivers queuing up to invest their life savings (or HK$1m borrowed from their broker), obviously unaware of the fact that they were very unlikely to get more than HK$10,000 worth of shares allocated to them. Then we had…
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I was watching the first part of the documentary series about Soong Mei-Ling (Madame Chiang Kai-Shek) on TVB Pearl. One of the talking heads was Hao Po-tsun, and the caption informed us that he was Premier of ##### 1990-93. Someone from TVB had diligently blocked out this politically incorrect description. Marvellous. The program also described…
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Today’s SCMP leads on Beijing’s rebuke to the US for meddling in Hong Kong affairs. This arises from the comments made by James Keith, the US Consul General for Hong Kong. His comments seemed relatively uncontroversial – you’d expect the US to be advocating greater democracy for Hong Kong: It is the US belief that…
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An interesting piece in The Guardian about what people in China will eat. Note that in Hong Kong it is illegal to eat cats, dogs and most wild animals, and there are still restrictions in force in the PRC from the SARS outbreak. I find it quite interesting what is deemed acceptable to eat in…
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It’s always amusing to read prospectuses with the warnings that they are obliged to include these days (“all our senior management might leave the company, and all our customers might suddenly die from a mysterious disease”) but this one seems to be self-inflicted. The New York Times reports that a Chinese company called Ctrip.com has…
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The SCMP had two opinion pieces on Taiwan today. One is quite a sensible piece entitled ‘Patience is a virtue’, which argues that the “Taiwan problem” will resolve itself over time as the economies of Taiwan and China become even more closely linked and the government of China becomes more liberal. The problem is keeping…
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An interesting piece in the comment section of yesterday’s SCMP (that’s not something I say very often) from Robert Keatley, one of many ex-editors of the paper who are knocking around. He contrasts the rather poor image that George Bush has around the world with the good impression that Wen Jiabao and other Chinese leaders…
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I happen to believe that the British government did a fairly poor job of negotiating the handover. Initially they thought that perhaps China might either forget about it (!!) and leave things unchanged, or allow the British to carry on running the place after the expiry of the lease.
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No time for anything else today due to work (boo) and still not being 100%, but I found another marvellously over-the-top letter in today’s South China Morning Post and I can’t resist: Taiwan freedom I note readers and columnists demanding greater freedoms and more democracy in Hong Kong while staying curiously silent on the same…
Ordinary Gweilo 