Tag: Hong Kong

Trump Pursues a Deeper Bond With China’s Leader, Despite Hostile Speech

Media Library

Just two months ago, President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, strolled together through a garden of the secretive leadership compound in the heart of Beijing, past rows of bright flowers and leafy plants. The U.S. president toasted Mr. Xi as “my friend” at a state banquet during his visit. He declared that he had received a “magnificent welcome like none other” that had helped smooth the way to “fantastic trade deals.” The stage was set, Mr. Trump said, for Mr. Xi to make a reciprocal state visit to Washington…

Lam Wing-Kee, Hong Kong Bookseller Who Defied Authorities, Dies at 70

Media Library

Lam Wing-kee, a bookseller in Hong Kong whose abduction and imprisonment by Chinese authorities, forced confession to selling forbidden books and subsequent public stand against his detention made him an international cause célèbre, died on July 2 in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. He was 70. Mr. Lam’s death in a hospital, from lung cancer, was announced by the ministry of culture in Taiwan, where Mr. Lam had been living in exile since 2019. For two decades, Mr. Lam’s celebrated Hong Kong storefront, Causeway Bay Bookstore, specialized in titles that…

Five booksellers arrested in Hong Kong police raids in latest crackdown on ‘seditious’ materials

Media Library

Hong Kong authorities have raided two bookstores and arrested five people on suspicion of selling allegedly seditious publications, according to local media reports, in the latest step targeting independent booksellers. Videos and photos from multiple media outlets on Wednesday showed officers wearing vests marked with “police” seizing boxes from the building that houses Have A Nice Stay, a bookshop founded by former journalists. AFP reporters saw officers also lead away a woman in handcuffs to a van. A few streets away a similar scene played out, with boxes taken from…

Girlfriends review – love and growing pains in queer coming-of-age tale that goes from Hong Kong to Taiwan

Media Library

It can stretch credibility a little when an actor plays the same character over a long time span in one film. Richard Linklater solved the problem in Boyhood by shooting scenes over succeeding years; AI and de-ageing effects are now an option. With this intimate queer coming-of-age drama, film-maker Tracy Choi instead casts a trio of actors to play one woman from high school to her mid-30s. The three don’t look particularly alike; their temperaments overlap but are by no means identical. The point is perhaps to show how intense…

Absent From the SpaceX and OpenAI I.P.O.s? Chinese Investors.

Media Library

When SpaceX starts trading this week, one group will be noticeably absent from the frenzy: investors from China and Hong Kong. They are also likely to miss out on the upcoming initial public offering for OpenAI. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker and artificial intelligence company, has excluded investors in China and Hong Kong from participating in its I.P.O., according to five people with knowledge of the decision, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. OpenAI, another leading A.I. company, is likely to impose…

Four New Zealand Lawmakers Banned From China After Taiwan Trip

Media Library

Four lawmakers from New Zealand have been barred from traveling to China for a year following a visit to Taiwan last month, government officials said on Thursday, the first time such a restriction has ever been imposed. The lawmakers, Maureen Pugh, Duncan Webb, Laura McClure and David Wilson, visited Taipei for five days in May as part of a cross-party group that was established in 2023 to maintain relations between Taiwan and New Zealand, the local media reported. The travel ban, which emerged on Thursday, was met with shock in…

Hong Kong artist who tried to mark Tiananmen massacre with red thread intercepted by police

Media Library

A performance artist in Hong Kong who tried on Wednesday to honour the victims of Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown was quickly stopped by plainclothes police, the latest sign of the city’s shrinking freedom of expression. Sanmu Chen tried to tie a symbolic red thread to a street signpost in Causeway Bay, a shopping district close to a park that had for decades hosted an annual candlelight vigil on 4 June to commemorate those who died in the 1989 student-led protests. Hong Kong was for decades the only place in…

‘The story of Hong Kong is the sound of it’: the cross-cultural joy of the city’s Cantopop music

Media Library

Emma-Lee Moss, a singer-songwriter who released four albums as Emmy the Great, was born in Hong Kong to an English father and Hongkonger mother. She lived there until she was 11, when her family moved to England, one of many who left Hong Kong before its transfer of sovereignty from the UK to China in 1997. Emma-Lee Moss. Photograph: Alex Lake Even as a child, Moss understood the significance of the handover, which returned Hong Kong to Chinese control after 156 years as a British colony. “Thanks to our British…

Donald Trump does ‘not feel optimistic’ for Jimmy Lai after speaking with Xi Jinping

Media Library

Donald Trump raised the case of jailed Hong Kong democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai in talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping but was told it “is a tough one”. Family and supporters of the 78-year-old British citizen had hoped the US president could help secure his release. Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February under a security law imposed by Beijing. The media tycoon, who was an influential figure in the former British territory’s pro-democracy movement, was arrested in 2020 in a crackdown after massive anti-government protests. Lai’s…

Linguistic workaround allows Marco Rubio, sanctioned by Beijing, to travel to China for the first time

Media Library

US secretary of state Marco Rubio is heading to Beijing with president Donald Trump despite being under Chinese sanctions – a breakthrough that might have been made possible after China changed his name’s transliteration. As a US senator, Rubio, who is visiting China for the first time, fiercely championed human rights in China, which retaliated by imposing sanctions on him twice – adopting a tactic more often used by the US against adversaries. But China appears to have found a diplomatic workaround after Trump named Rubio his secretary of state.…