Hong Kong

Watchdogs groups have accused Apple of censoring music that mentions the Tiananmen Square Massacre and democracy in China.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen made a stopover in Hawaii on Wednesday after visiting several of Taiwan’s Pacific allies. From there she held a teleconference with the Heritage Foundation in which she praised the Trump administration’s support for Taiwan and its positive response to a request for more advanced weapons to hold China at bay.

China’s creepy “social credit system,” a vast surveillance network that rates both companies and individual citizens for “good behavior” and has a variety of tools for punishing those who behave badly, is also proving useful for accumulating socioeconomic data. A report released this week by China’s National Public Credit Information Center used data from the social credit system to determine that a large percentage of “untrustworthy businesses” are operating in China’s wealthiest regions.

The Chinese government on Monday unveiled its “Greater Bay Area” project to unite the semi-autonomous cities of Hong Kong and Macau with nine mainland cities into a tech and financial hub on par with Silicon Valley, its collective economy worth over $1.5 trillion.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a think tank linked to the Communist government, issued a report this month declaring that many of the world’s largest companies are using “incorrect labels” for Taiwan and Hong Kong, by which CASS means describing them as anything but territories of China.

Taiwanese people who recognize the sovereignty of their nation “would be classified as war criminals that must be punished if the Chinese mainland is forced to deal with the Taiwan question by force,” Lieutenant General He Lei of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) told reporters on Wednesday.

The government of Hong Kong is considering a bill that would criminalize disrespect for the Chinese national anthem, reports revealed Wednesday.

New Year’s Day brought thousands of demonstrators to the streets of Hong Kong to denounce China’s oppressive policies and to demand respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Members of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China dressed in Santa Claus outfits spent the Christmas holiday mailing cards to political prisoners and the Chinese officials who imprisoned them.

Hundreds of Christians dressed completely in black for church services in Hong Kong Sunday to protest the intense crackdown on Christian churches by the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping.

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its battle group arrived in Hong Kong on Wednesday, a friendship visit widely interpreted as an easing of tensions between the U.S. and China just a few weeks after the Chinese refused to allow a U.S. warship to dock in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong authorities stepped up their war against Financial Times editor Victor Mallet on Thursday by refusing to allow him to enter the city as a visitor.

The Chinese Communist Party regulatory body that controls the nation’s karaoke venues announced a ban on 6,000 songs this week, claiming the Chinese businesses were not paying the original artists for their work.

Zheng Xiaosong, head of the Chinese liaison office in semi-autonomous Macau, fell to his death from his apartment building on Saturday. The Chinese government strongly implied he committed suicide because he “suffered from depression.”

Over a dozen Hong Kong lawmakers staged a protest in the legislature on Wednesday, chanting “Protect press freedom!” and holding up placards reading “Free Press, No Persecution,” until security guards escorted them from the chamber.

HONG KONG (AP) – Britain has expressed concern over freedom of speech in its former colony Hong Kong after authorities refused to renew the work visa of a senior editor of the Financial Times.

The Financial Times announced on Friday that the government of Hong Kong decided not to renew Asian news editor Victor Mallet’s work visa, effectively beginning the process of expelling him from the island. The decision stunned the international financial community and deeply alarmed press freedom advocates.

One of China’s many double standards involves the behavior of reporters. Foreign reporters are expected to conduct themselves with humility and exquisite good manners in China, while Chinese reporters abroad can become rather energetic at press conferences.

October 1 is National Day in China, kicking off a week-long holiday marking the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Facebook is seeking entry into China’s digital market — which will require compliance with dictates from China’s ruling Communist Party, as Google is doing in a censored search project with China — according to a Wednesday-published Bloomberg report.

The Hong Kong National Party (HKNP) was formally outlawed on Monday, marking the first time a political organization has been banned outright since Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997. The British Foreign Ministry pronounced itself “concerned by the decision,” while stressing the U.K. does not support the Hong Kong independence movement.

Once again, Chinese media and internet users are lashing out at a Western corporation for the unforgivable insult of listing Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate entities from Communist China. The latest company to trigger the Chinese is Apple, whose iPhone XS rollout event included a slide that listed China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan as three separate markets among the two dozen or so that would receive Apple’s new product on September 21.

The new West Kowloon railroad station in Hong Kong was the scene of a Monday night ceremony denounced as a “sneaky” compromise of Hong Kong’s autonomy, a “secret underground ritual” at which part of the rail station was ceded to Chinese control.

North Koreans are reportedly refusing to use Chinese medicine because they fear the products might be unsafe in light of a major scandal in China involving the manufacturing of faulty vaccines, a report revealed on Wednesday.

AFP — Britain expressed concern Wednesday after police in Hong Kong sought to ban a political party which promotes independence for the city as Beijing ups pressure on challenges to its territorial sovereignty. The bid to bar the Hong Kong

The Associated Press reports an official from the territorial security bureau wrote to 27-year-old Hong Kong National Party leader Andy Chan to inform him a decision has been made to dissolve his party as a threat to “public safety” and “public order” under a national security law that was last invoked against a political party in 1997. The HKNP has only been around since 2016, formed in protest of Beijing’s growing influence over semi-autonomous Hong Kong.

Passengers aboard Air China flight CA106 from Hong Kong on Tuesday night found themselves plunging 25,000 feet in ten minutes because their co-pilot was smoking an e-cigarette in the cockpit and hit the wrong switch when he attempted to keep the vapors from wafting into the passenger area.

The long-simmering controversy over West Kowloon railway terminus in Hong Kong boiled over on Thursday, as Hong Kong lawmakers voted to give China sovereign control over part of the train station, making it an enclave of pure Chinese law.

Hong Kong held a huge candlelight vigil in Victoria Park on Monday to mark the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The event displeases Beijing, which has done what it can to suppress attendance and warn participants away from incendiary criticism of the Communist government.

A group of animal rights activists staged a demonstration Saturday at Hong Kong’s Ocean Park to protest dolphin shows as part of their annual “Empty the Tanks’ campaign against holding marine animals in captivity.