I’ve been listening to podcasts lately marking the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. One of the things I’ve learnt is how veneration for Queen Elizabeth I was an indirect method of condemning the policies of her Stuart successors — just like how mourning Elizabeth II was used in HK. History rhymes.

Chinese-language media would never

TBF, it’s very likely Tsang was using “grassroots” (基層) in its CCP sense: not bottom-up movements but low-level Party organs. That’s how you get campaigns for “grassroots autonomy” (基層自治) — they don’t mean local self-governance but empowering neighbourhood committees to enforce political discipline.

“[Perfecting the electoral system] will further increase the voices representing grassroots interests, better embodying [the Legislative Council’s] broadly representative nature and balanced participation [in the body].” - Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Erick Tsang Kwok-wai, 2021

Very proud to have contributed a few chapters to this book on the past, present, and future of neon in HK. The process showed me how it’s so much more than just sappy sentimentality to mourn HK’s lost lights — and that despite everything… neon’s not dead. Consider backing our Kickstarter campaign ⬇️

The Taiwanisation of New York’s election

The lack of action on poor road safety and political dysfunction it represents is one the most depressing parts about Taiwan. Deadlock caused by political polarization and dark money is a global issue, but Taiwan's lack of care and will around road safety feels particular. bsky.app/profile/ryan...

Last year, an unlicensed elderly driver killed two children in central Taiwan when he drove his SUV 77kph down a narrow side street outside their school. The tragedy and public outrage were an opportunity to finally improve Taiwan’s “pedestrian hell.” Instead, he’s been sentenced to just 14 months.

It gets even more dismal when you consider how the legislators who voted “no” only once did so to reject a same-sex equality bill.

In case this news was a bit too local to reach interested parties abroad, Senseito recently participated in a Charlie Kirk memorial on a Taiwanese campus where student protesters were jumped and then labelled “terrorists” by the organisers.

IG’s favourite new thing to advertise to me is apparently AI-generated cozy Ghibli zombie apocalypse van life games featuring vesicles with the most nonsensical layouts imaginable.

“Why is this place so ugly?” was not one of my first thoughts arriving in Taipei, when I was too grateful to have escaped political crackdowns and covid chaos to turn a critical eye to the city. But it is very much one of my parting thoughts, and one that immediately hits me every time I head back.

A common trajectory for law enforcement agencies that antagonise the people they’re meant to serve. Since 2019, Hong Kong police have lowered their weight and height thresholds, residency requirements, and expectations for eyesight, age, and exam results — yet still fail to hit recruitment targets.

An interesting report from Ming Pao which suggests that the Liberal Party is, in effect, Hong Kong’s new “opposition” in the patriots-only legislature. LP legislators dominate the rankings for most votes against the government and abstentions. 自由黨成新「反對派」 易志明邵家輝李鎮強頭三 news.mingpao.com/pns/%e6%b8%a...

Beware of how this language is used to excuse the failures of some and punish the successes of others. In HK, the gov’t has arrested people calling for boycotts and instructed all departments to make natsec their top concern, resulting in the harassment and intimidation of pro-democracy businesses.

“Apple made similar claims in 2019 when it removed HKMap, an app that allowed Hong Kong protesters to trace the movements of law enforcement … At the time, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle spoke out against ‘Apple’s censorship of apps.’”

Hongkongers did this in 2020 before the history museum’s permanent exhibition “Hong Kong Story” closed for an extensive revamp. Slated to take 2 years but still ongoing, many fear it will rewrite the city’s past through a “patriotic” lens — fears only deepened by the new “National Security Gallery.”

Don’t usually have a problem with “anti-government” but it could be misleading here. We don’t have to wonder what drove the protests — they had 5 clear demands. You could say HK’s housing is symptomatic of the system they opposed but this is just a wire piece. “Pro-democracy” might’ve been clearer.

Early in my career, I wrote a lot of “netizens say” stories. In my defence, the context was different. China’s internet was freer than it is now, and online comments were a windows on unofficial discourse. But with the state of the internet now, these stories should probably be consigned to history.

Treating the gov’t as a protected group and dissent as violence against it is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. In HK, criticism of Beijing has been recast as “inciting hatred against the central gov’t” under national security legislation introduced after the expulsion of the opposition.

Just realised allpoetry.com now has AI "analysis" at the bottom of every poem and the insights are mindblowing

The funny thing about the “yacht economy” is that pro-democracy DCs called for more berths for years — there are only enough for 1/3 of HK’s boats. Suddenly, CCP-aligned politicians are all on board now that it’s for foreign billionaires instead of locals’ access to water sports and boat ownership.

Prosecuting journalists for acquiring “unauthorised information” is common in China. Document No. 9 is a textbook example. Last year, Article 23 also made this all-encompassing definition of “state secrets” law in HK, giving the CE authority to certify whether any materials involve state secrets.

22yo student Zhang Yadi, an activist with 华语青年挺藏会 ChineseYouthStand4Tibet who's supposed to begin her MA study at SOAS, has been detained while visiting family in China & charged with "inciting separation" www.instagram.com/p/DOy4rwViEk...

Journalists covering the US are about to realise what those of us covering China have always known: for laws and campaigns in authoritarian society, the ambiguity is the point. That’s why authorities here target “spiritual pollution,” “historical nihilism,” “picking quarrels,” and “soft resistance.”

For Americans who want a play-by-play of what an authoritarian transition looks like in the 2020s, I strongly recommend catching up on what’s been happening in national security-era Hong Kong. One of the first shots fired in the ongoing crackdown was cancelling a comedy show for “insulting police.”

Sounds familiar

Cool.

By voting down a gov’t bill for the first time, LegCo has apparently shown it is “not a rubber stamp.” Seems more like an illustration of how pro-establishment and pro-Beijing are not interchangeable, and even the former are now sidelined in HK. Those who voted it down took their cue from Beijing.

So I'm protecting my peace and (mostly) ignoring politics to get back to my happy place: maritime history. In a new 3-part series for Zolima, I look at the incredible story of Seawise Giant, the Hong Kong-owned tanker that — even decades after she was scrapped — remains the largest ship ever built.

US-PRC convergence takes another step forward as Washington adopts the time-honoured practice of "One Institution with Two Names" (一個機構兩塊牌子).

A job advert for RTI that says a lot about the sorry state of journalism in Taiwan. Successful candidates are expected to do everything — planning, hosting, editing, promoting, socials, engagement reports, etc. — for just NT$48,000 a month. That's about what I was making as a newsroom intern in HK.

When I went freelance again recently, I checked LinkedIn for remote editorial positions and virtually all of them were seeking "Content Editors" or "Proofreaders" for AI. I'm lucky to have a big portfolio and existing relationships with publications. What a grim time to get started in the industry.

I was recently reminded of the backlash in early 2019 against the Foreign Correspondents’ Club introducing a long-overdue sexual harassment policy and wowsers — it was offensively stupid at the time but so much worse now after all the actual threats to free speech and journalists in Hong Kong since.

1/ #ProtectJournalistsInGaza: At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed. In nearly 23 months, at least 210 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in this territory, according to Reporters Without Borders.

A seriously uninformative “deep dive” that seems to invent its own narrow definition of “digital payment” — meaning mainland mobile wallets — in order to paint HK as backwards. As others have pointed out, daily life in HK is almost entirely cashless already. The only straggler is the taxi industry.

Wake up babe new reason to hate Jackie Chan just dropped

Strava now has a “made for you” feature that uses AI to generate “optimised routes” for running, hiking, etc. Without fail, it advises me to run highways with no pavement and onto private property. In Hualien, prone to frequent earthquakes and typhoons, it also points me to trails I know are closed.

An extremely familiar scene for anyone who was in Hong Kong in 2019.

Bipolarity minus the competing ideologies

Get a load of this POS

Another one for the very long and ever-growing list of beloved Hong Kong businesses that have closed down in recent years. This one’s not so likely to make the headlines but it’s a big loss for the local trail running community. Basecamp just recently featured in the hit, acclaimed film Four Trails.

I moved east to touch grass, not cover politics, but I’ll offer this one observation about 大罷免 campaigning in Hualien County: 不同意 billboards are huge and everywhere, taking up the best real estate; but when it comes to volunteers on the street and support from individuals/businesses, all I see is 同意

This year’s Hong Kong Book Fair saw a precipitous 100,000-person drop in visitors. It’s being blamed on the typhoon but visitor numbers have never recovered to their 2018 high, before post-pandemic fairs began to face heavy state censorship. 書展結束共吸89萬人次入場　較去年少十萬人次 news.mingpao.com/ins/%e6%b8%a...

Yes, air-conditioning shaming is somehow still with us in prominent spaces in 2025. And yes, reflexive “AC is a sin” thinking *contributes to getting people killed during heat waves* by means of dampening support for helping the vulnerable get access to life-saving cooling systems.

HK01 really sent out this push notification yesterday asking, “the July 5 earthquake prophecy comes true?” after a series of minor tremors off the Tokara Islands. A megaquake, as “predicted,” would have to be at least magnitude 8. Be so for real right now.

Relentless coverage in HK and Taiwan’s Chinese-language press lately on a rumoured 7/5 quake in Japan. A sad sign of public susceptibility to misinformation and media willingness to exploit that. Especially galling is SETN’s countdown clock: ghoulish if you take it seriously, imbecilic if you don’t

Hong Kong’s public-turned-state-broadcaster RTHK is promoting the new season of its nightly programme on Xi Jinping’s favourite stories. Unlike all their other posts, comments are turned off.

HKers know this well. A wave of resignations among university leadership followed the imposition of the national security law as pro-Beijing politicians and state media targeted administrators they accused of sympathising with pro-democracy student protestors or not dealing with them harshly enough.

Every masterpiece has its cheap copy