Good evening. The National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong by the Chinese Communist Party in July 2020 changed the territory’s legal, political and social environment utterly. Among many other changes, people accused of NSL offenses have been denied the right to jury trials and the presumption for bail for non-violent offenses. Last month’s conviction of Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s best known dissident, was handed down more than five years after his bail was rescinded. In our cover story, Noah Berman examines how the Party got its man in Hong Kong. Lai’s conviction sparked a torrent of criticism from people who see it as further evidence of the “mainlandization” of the nominally autonomous territory, bringing its once-vaunted Common Law legal system much closer in line with China’s. The Hong Kong government rejects such views as “a direct affront to the rule of law in Hong Kong” by people “motivated by political considerations”.
Also in this week’s issue: The Big Picture and Victor Shih on China and Venezuela; the fusion race; and Jane Perlez talks about her new China project.
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Get Jimmy
Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai had it all: a textile and retailing fortune, a mansion on the Kowloon peninsula, a large pleasure yacht. All he had to do was avoid politics and an easy life awaited. Most of his tycoon peers were happy to make that bargain. But as Noah Berman writes, Lai was not. All he had, he believed, depended on a free Hong Kong that he was prepared to fight for, using his rapidly growing media empire. The passing of the National Security Law in July 2020 finally gave the Chinese Communist Party the tool it needed to silence Lai, who could easily have chosen to find refuge in Taiwan, the UK or the U.S. He chose not to, and now awaits a long prison sentence for alleged violations of the NSL.
China’s Venezuela Shock
When Xi Jinping met with Nicolas Maduro in Moscow last May, the Chinese president assured his Venezuelan counterpart that “China will, as always, firmly support Venezuela in safeguarding sovereignty, national dignity and social stability”. Ooops. The U.S. military’s daring raid on Caracas to seize Maduro has, China’s foreign ministry admitted, “shocked” Beijing. In The Big Picture, Savannah Billman looks at what China has at stake in its now humiliated ally.
The Fusion Race — An Update
The Sino-U.S. fusion race is hotting up, Eliot Chen reports. When China hosted an international conference in October on the potentially world-changing energy breakthrough, the Trump administration warned American scientists not to participate. It was yet more evidence of a geopolitical chill descending on a field where international collaboration had previously been the norm. The two countries’ are also pursuing different paths towards the same goal, with the U.S. heavily reliant on private enterprise and China on public funding.
A Q&A with Jane Perlez
You can leave China but escaping its gravitational pull is another matter, especially for journalists once based there. In our Q&A, Andrew Peaple speaks with UK born, Australia-raised and U.S.-based Jane Perlez, who visited China as a student during the Cultural Revolution and returned as a correspondent for the New York Times in the 2010s.
Perlez is now a co-host, with Rana Mitter of the Harvard Kennedy School, of the Face Off podcast, which focuses on the past, present and future of Sino-U.S. relations. She rues the Chinese Communist Party’s expulsion of many American journalists, which has decimated staffing at her former employer’s Beijing bureau and also those of its biggest rivals. “We can’t get a picture of what’s going on inside China because we don’t have the numbers of reporters we used to have,” Perlez says. “That’s a big problem.”
Jane Perlez
Illustration by Lauren Crow
Long-term Beats Short-term
Venezuela’s humbling this month by Donald Trump’s gunships looked like an embarrassment for China. Not so fast, writes Victor Shih, who explains how Xi Jinping could yet get the last laugh.
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