As the world watches in amazement while the Asian financial centre is wracked by increasingly violent confrontations, and rocked by calls for greater democracy, it is clear that Beijing has been caught badly by surprise. Read Here – South China Morning Post
Using social media as a tool to galvanise support during a political movement isn’t new, but Hong Kong’s current protesters are using social media in a way demonstrating a heightened awareness of cybersecurity and an increased understanding of how to effectively communicate with the medium. Read Here – CNBC
In the early 1980s, there was, of course, no internet, no e-mail, no cell phones (much less smartphones), and not even many fax machines. Rebellions against dictatorship depended on age-old mechanisms to communicate the word of the opposition: leaflets, word of mouth, and secret meetings in cellars. Read Here – The Bulwark
When there are no good options, leaders must choose the least bad one. China’s government may loathe the idea of making concessions to the Hong Kong protesters, but considering the catastrophic consequences of a military crackdown, that is what it must do. Read Here – Project Syndicate Also Read:The World Turns, America Sleeps
Hong Kong faces its most serious threat since the city returned to Chinese sovereignty as the extradition bill saga intensifies, according to the head of China’s top government agency on Hong Kong affairs. Zhang Xiaoming, director of Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office under the State Council, warned a group of 500 political and business […]
…with the roar of their voices amplified and echoing in the cavern created by the surrounding buildings and overhead freeway bridges, the crowd has been chanting: “Reclaim Hong Kong! Revolution of our time!” That’s a frightening slogan for the city’s establishment, one that points to just how deeply Hong Kongers have turned against Beijing and […]
The biggest challenges to the brittle present system in China don’t come from outsiders concocting destabilizing plots in an imaginary, inimical West, but from Chinese people themselves, which is precisely what the people of Hong Kong are, as Beijing itself has always insisted. Once they get a whiff of them, people everywhere, it turns out, […]
A cluster of world-class cities for work, life and leisure forms the central vision of the “Greater Bay Area” finally unveiled by the Chinese government late on Monday, laying out a road map to what it hailed as the new era of opening up. Coming 40 years after the 1978 opening up of China, the State […]
Forty years ago Shenzhen was a rural backwater with a population of 20,000, boasting very little industry or agriculture. Communist Beijing was happy to keep it that way for fear its proximity to the freewheeling capitalist colony of Hong Kong made it a security threat. But after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms the town developed rapidly and […]
President Xi Jinping paid homage to the past when he returned to where China’s economic miracle was born and nurtured. But his eyes were firmly focused on the present and the future. With immaculate timing, his trip to Guangdong this week conjured memories and images of Deng Xiaoping’s historic 1992 ‘Southern Tour’ after he had stepped down […]
looking beyond borders 