On Tuesday, the US President-elect surprised everyone with a new appointment: Donald Trump nominated Howard Lutnick as his Commerce Secretary – a choice that signals a tougher stance toward China for the upcoming administration. Lutnick edged out Robert Lighthizer and Linda McMahon for the position. As CEO of the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick had clearly advocated for a 60% tariff on Chinese goods during the campaign.
Hong Kong has changed, and that hurts residents and lovers of the city. Hong Kong once stood for growth, opportunity and, above all, freedom. But this freedom has been increasingly curtailed in recent years. While the National Security Law set the tone for the future, the fate of the city was finally cemented yesterday in the eyes of Marcel Grzanna.
His Analysis focuses on the sentences handed down to the Hong Kong 47 – those politicians and activists who only wanted to protect the freedom of their city. Many of them received long prison sentences. They are an “unprecedented blow to fundamental freedoms, democratic participation and pluralism in Hong Kong”, according to a statement from the EU’s External Action Service.
Killing sprees are always a shock, all over the world. In China, they have recently become more frequent. Yet the seamless surveillance of public spaces and numerous security checks, for example on public transport, suggest constant control – and therefore security.
However, when people repeatedly injure and kill innocents within a short space of time, the question arises as to what is behind this. While censorship is in full swing, China’s citizens are worried and looking for answers. Fabian Kretschmer and Manuel Liu put the recent massacres in context for you.
I wish you a good start to the day!
The history books of the future will attach special significance to Nov. 19, 2024 for the history of the city of Hong Kong. The day marks an anchor point in a creeping development in the course of which a largely liberal and constitutional form of society was replaced by an autocratic system of government.
The harsh sentences against opposition politicians and activists, the so-called Hong Kong 47, in the largest court case since the introduction of the National Security Law, document the de facto end of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the city’s constitution from 1997. With prison sentences ranging from just over four to ten years for 45 of the 47 defendants, the court punished the pro-democrats’ constitutional plan to block the city’s budget in 2020 by gaining a majority in parliament and to replace the head of government in new elections.
Specifically, the aim was to organize primaries to filter out the most promising candidates from the democratic camp for a seat in the city’s parliament. This was preceded by months of demonstrations and mass protests in 2019 against the growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party on the city. Beijing then hastily implemented a National Security Law for Hong Kong in order to be able to punish the primaries as a violation of the new law in time.
The calculation worked out. A good four years later, the court, which was personally appointed by Hong Kong’s head of government John Lee, has now found the lawyer and former university professor Benny Tai guilty of masterminding the pre-elections. He had attempted to plunge Hong Kong into a constitutional crisis and to “undermine and destroy” the existing political system.
According to the court, the activist and former student leader Joshua Wong, who met the then German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in Berlin in September 2019, was also part of the “conspiracy”. Wong received a sentence of just under five years. He was a person of “no good character”, the judges said, because he had already been convicted once before for his role in the rainbow protests in 2014.
Journalists such as author Gwyneth Ho from the now-defunct Stand News were also punished for exercising basic press freedom rights. Ho must serve seven years in prison. Only two of 47 defendants were acquitted. 31 had pleaded guilty at the beginning of the trial. Benny Tai and Joshua Wong also avoided significantly longer prison sentences by pleading guilty at an early stage. Most of the defendants had already been in custody since January 2021, which is why many of them will be released within the next one to two years.
Former parliamentarian Ted Hui would probably also have been convicted. However, he escaped prosecution because he and his family managed to flee abroad. From his exile in Australia, Hui describes the trial as a “historic turning point for the city’s justice system and democracy”. The regime had decided to dismiss the efforts of “millions of Hong Kongers” in the form of collective punishment. “This case also highlights a serious miscarriage of justice and marks the collapse of judicial independence in Hong Kong. The judiciary, now acting as an arm of the authoritarian regime, has abandoned the rule of law to suppress dissent and silence opposition,” Hui told Table.Briefings.
Hui is wanted by Hong Kong on an international arrest warrant. The Hong Kong government has put a bounty of one million Hong Kong dollars on him and several other exiles. There is also no going back for former student leader Ray Wong, who has been living in political asylum in Germany since 2018. “These sentences symbolize that the Chinese government’s promises to the people of Hong Kong are no longer valid,” Wong told Table.Briefings.
Both exiles urge the international community to keep a close eye on Hong Kong’s development. “Western leaders must also impose targeted individual sanctions on the officials and judges who orchestrated this case and other recent human rights abuses in Hong Kong,” Hui said. The trial is a warning to democracies worldwide against the spread of authoritarian ideologies, he added. “Silence and inaction will only embolden such regimes.”
The European Union announced that it would “continue to closely monitor the human rights situation and fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong in cooperation with its member states”. It was “deeply concerned about the politically motivated prosecution”. The sentences are an “unprecedented blow to fundamental freedoms, democratic participation and pluralism in Hong Kong”. “In addition to the lengthy pre-trial detention and the refusal to release on bail for the majority of the defendants, concerns about respect for fair trial undermine confidence in the rule of law as enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, and thus the international legal obligations of Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China,” reads a statement from the EU’s External Action Service.
Several EU diplomats had been waiting outside the court building in West Kowloon on Monday for the verdict to be announced. Only five seats were reserved for the public in the building itself. Dozens of interested parties had already gathered the evening before to gain admission.
When the Basic Law came into force in 1997 when Hong Kong was returned to China from Great Britain, the citizens of the city were granted autonomous self-determination, the rule of law and the right to freely elect their government for 50 years. Early on, Beijing began to undermine the rights of Hong Kongers by increasingly controlling the outcome of parliamentary elections. In the absence of resistance from abroad, Beijing accelerated the pace of de-democratization.
The rainbow protests in 2014 were the precursor to the mass demonstrations five years ago. In 2019, more than a million people marched through the city. The situation escalated when the local security authorities increasingly criminalized the protests and used massive violence. Radical groups among the protesters responded with violence. There were an unspecified number of deaths and injuries. Mysterious “suicides” of students and activists accompanied the clashes. Chinese military units on the other side of the border were put on alert.
Another suspected rampage has occurred in China. On Tuesday morning, a 39-year-old man drove his SUV into a crowd of people outside an elementary school in Changde, Hunan. According to state media, children were among the victims. It was not initially clear how many people were injured or killed and whether it was an accident or a rampage. It is the third serious incident in nine days to rock China.
On Saturday evening, a 21-year-old man killed at least eight people with a knife at a vocational school in the eastern Chinese city of Wuxi and injured a further 17 people. The perpetrator is said to be an ex-student who wanted to cause as much suffering as possible out of frustration over failing a diploma exam. On Nov. 11, a 62-year-old killed 35 people and seriously injured 43 when he drove his car into a crowd of people at a sports center in Zhuhai.
The information provided by the security authorities in such cases cannot be independently verified. It is clear that there has been a copycat effect: In the past six months, there have been nine such seemingly indiscriminate acts of violence in the People’s Republic of China. All of them were allegedly committed by men seeking revenge on society for personal misery.
The accumulation of incidents may explain why the authorities are willing to provide motives. This is surprising, as the modus operandi in such cases is usually to delete all information from social media and muzzle newspapers and TV stations.
However, the alleged motives often raise questions. In Zhuhai, it was the act of violence with the most fatalities in China for decades. However, the Chinese media were only able to report on it a day late – and only on the basis of the official police report. According to the authorities, the perpetrator allegedly acted out of frustration over the division of his divorce assets.
This is astonishing, as the authorities are reluctant to rush to conclusions and speculate in similar cases. In addition, the perpetrator himself could no longer be questioned as he was in a coma immediately after the rampage due to a suicide attempt.
There seems to be a deliberate focus on personal tragedies so as not to jeopardize social stability. This is because the structural connections between the seemingly arbitrary acts of violence are being debated within the population under the slogan: “taking revenge on society“. And these acts of revenge have recently increased significantly in the wake of a tense economic situation.
“When there is a lack of job security and enormous pressure to survive, society is full of problems, hostility and terror,” one comment on social media read. Another user explained the knife attack in Wuxi in a similar way: “Social tensions are intensifying and there is no outlet for pent-up discontent.”
The impact of such economic pressures on mental health is increasing, according to experts. George Magnus of Oxford University’s China Center told Reuters that the spate of mass casualties in China “points to a pattern rather than an anomaly”. There is a widespread perception in China that lack of success is due to injustice and systemic causes.
“I think this is an important explanation for the social and industrial malaise evident in the spate of incidents and is a warning sign of the state of society,” Magnus explains. Qin Xiaojie, a Beijing-based psychotherapist and director of the mental health non-profit organization CandleX, says that a pervasive sense of social injustice and inequality can lead to violence against random people in extreme cases.
Some of the arbitrary acts of revenge are also targeted at foreigners. In June, several lecturers at a US university in north-eastern China were injured with a stabbing weapon by a man in a park. In the same month, a Japanese woman and her child were attacked in Suzhou in eastern China. In September, a man killed a Japanese student with a knife in Shenzhen in southern China. The latest case in Changde prompted Tokyo to issue a warning to Japanese people who were in Xiamen for the World Cup qualifier between the two nations.
Even though these acts were allegedly committed out of xenophobia, the public security authorities have not commented on the motives of the perpetrators – instead referring for weeks to ongoing investigations. This handling of critical information by the authorities is deeply revealing: This is because it is only ever published quickly if it is politically acceptable.
Although there may be a personal motive behind each crime, the cases cannot be viewed in isolation from one another. If the information available is correct, then the common thread running through the motives for the crimes is the country’s poor economic situation. Last but not least, youth unemployment has risen to a record high. The psychological consequences of the tough coronavirus lockdown in China, during which millions of people were locked up at home for months and exposed to the constant fear of being taken to a hospital against their will, are also uncertain.
This can have a widespread impact on the mental health of a society. Taken together, this would suggest that something is simmering beneath the surface of Chinese society – more so than the censorship apparatus can keep under wraps. Fabian Kretschmer/Manuel Liu
Sinolytics is a European consulting and analysis company specializing in China. It advises European companies on their strategic orientation and specific business activities in the People’s Republic.
On the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. These topics were discussed:
Economic cooperation between the two countries was the main focus of the Chinese side’s communication after the meeting. The most important statements:
Wool hand crabs are a popular delicacy that can be found in many places in China at the moment – it’s the season. They are tied together and served either alive or already cooked. The females with their orange, buttery eggs are particularly popular with gourmets. When eating them, the rule is to break them apart skillfully and pick the last bit of meat out of the legs at the end.
On Tuesday, the US President-elect surprised everyone with a new appointment: Donald Trump nominated Howard Lutnick as his Commerce Secretary – a choice that signals a tougher stance toward China for the upcoming administration. Lutnick edged out Robert Lighthizer and Linda McMahon for the position. As CEO of the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick had clearly advocated for a 60% tariff on Chinese goods during the campaign.
Hong Kong has changed, and that hurts residents and lovers of the city. Hong Kong once stood for growth, opportunity and, above all, freedom. But this freedom has been increasingly curtailed in recent years. While the National Security Law set the tone for the future, the fate of the city was finally cemented yesterday in the eyes of Marcel Grzanna.
His Analysis focuses on the sentences handed down to the Hong Kong 47 – those politicians and activists who only wanted to protect the freedom of their city. Many of them received long prison sentences. They are an “unprecedented blow to fundamental freedoms, democratic participation and pluralism in Hong Kong”, according to a statement from the EU’s External Action Service.
Killing sprees are always a shock, all over the world. In China, they have recently become more frequent. Yet the seamless surveillance of public spaces and numerous security checks, for example on public transport, suggest constant control – and therefore security.
However, when people repeatedly injure and kill innocents within a short space of time, the question arises as to what is behind this. While censorship is in full swing, China’s citizens are worried and looking for answers. Fabian Kretschmer and Manuel Liu put the recent massacres in context for you.
I wish you a good start to the day!
The history books of the future will attach special significance to Nov. 19, 2024 for the history of the city of Hong Kong. The day marks an anchor point in a creeping development in the course of which a largely liberal and constitutional form of society was replaced by an autocratic system of government.
The harsh sentences against opposition politicians and activists, the so-called Hong Kong 47, in the largest court case since the introduction of the National Security Law, document the de facto end of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the city’s constitution from 1997. With prison sentences ranging from just over four to ten years for 45 of the 47 defendants, the court punished the pro-democrats’ constitutional plan to block the city’s budget in 2020 by gaining a majority in parliament and to replace the head of government in new elections.
Specifically, the aim was to organize primaries to filter out the most promising candidates from the democratic camp for a seat in the city’s parliament. This was preceded by months of demonstrations and mass protests in 2019 against the growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party on the city. Beijing then hastily implemented a National Security Law for Hong Kong in order to be able to punish the primaries as a violation of the new law in time.
The calculation worked out. A good four years later, the court, which was personally appointed by Hong Kong’s head of government John Lee, has now found the lawyer and former university professor Benny Tai guilty of masterminding the pre-elections. He had attempted to plunge Hong Kong into a constitutional crisis and to “undermine and destroy” the existing political system.
According to the court, the activist and former student leader Joshua Wong, who met the then German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in Berlin in September 2019, was also part of the “conspiracy”. Wong received a sentence of just under five years. He was a person of “no good character”, the judges said, because he had already been convicted once before for his role in the rainbow protests in 2014.
Journalists such as author Gwyneth Ho from the now-defunct Stand News were also punished for exercising basic press freedom rights. Ho must serve seven years in prison. Only two of 47 defendants were acquitted. 31 had pleaded guilty at the beginning of the trial. Benny Tai and Joshua Wong also avoided significantly longer prison sentences by pleading guilty at an early stage. Most of the defendants had already been in custody since January 2021, which is why many of them will be released within the next one to two years.
Former parliamentarian Ted Hui would probably also have been convicted. However, he escaped prosecution because he and his family managed to flee abroad. From his exile in Australia, Hui describes the trial as a “historic turning point for the city’s justice system and democracy”. The regime had decided to dismiss the efforts of “millions of Hong Kongers” in the form of collective punishment. “This case also highlights a serious miscarriage of justice and marks the collapse of judicial independence in Hong Kong. The judiciary, now acting as an arm of the authoritarian regime, has abandoned the rule of law to suppress dissent and silence opposition,” Hui told Table.Briefings.
Hui is wanted by Hong Kong on an international arrest warrant. The Hong Kong government has put a bounty of one million Hong Kong dollars on him and several other exiles. There is also no going back for former student leader Ray Wong, who has been living in political asylum in Germany since 2018. “These sentences symbolize that the Chinese government’s promises to the people of Hong Kong are no longer valid,” Wong told Table.Briefings.
Both exiles urge the international community to keep a close eye on Hong Kong’s development. “Western leaders must also impose targeted individual sanctions on the officials and judges who orchestrated this case and other recent human rights abuses in Hong Kong,” Hui said. The trial is a warning to democracies worldwide against the spread of authoritarian ideologies, he added. “Silence and inaction will only embolden such regimes.”
The European Union announced that it would “continue to closely monitor the human rights situation and fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong in cooperation with its member states”. It was “deeply concerned about the politically motivated prosecution”. The sentences are an “unprecedented blow to fundamental freedoms, democratic participation and pluralism in Hong Kong”. “In addition to the lengthy pre-trial detention and the refusal to release on bail for the majority of the defendants, concerns about respect for fair trial undermine confidence in the rule of law as enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, and thus the international legal obligations of Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China,” reads a statement from the EU’s External Action Service.
Several EU diplomats had been waiting outside the court building in West Kowloon on Monday for the verdict to be announced. Only five seats were reserved for the public in the building itself. Dozens of interested parties had already gathered the evening before to gain admission.
When the Basic Law came into force in 1997 when Hong Kong was returned to China from Great Britain, the citizens of the city were granted autonomous self-determination, the rule of law and the right to freely elect their government for 50 years. Early on, Beijing began to undermine the rights of Hong Kongers by increasingly controlling the outcome of parliamentary elections. In the absence of resistance from abroad, Beijing accelerated the pace of de-democratization.
The rainbow protests in 2014 were the precursor to the mass demonstrations five years ago. In 2019, more than a million people marched through the city. The situation escalated when the local security authorities increasingly criminalized the protests and used massive violence. Radical groups among the protesters responded with violence. There were an unspecified number of deaths and injuries. Mysterious “suicides” of students and activists accompanied the clashes. Chinese military units on the other side of the border were put on alert.
Another suspected rampage has occurred in China. On Tuesday morning, a 39-year-old man drove his SUV into a crowd of people outside an elementary school in Changde, Hunan. According to state media, children were among the victims. It was not initially clear how many people were injured or killed and whether it was an accident or a rampage. It is the third serious incident in nine days to rock China.
On Saturday evening, a 21-year-old man killed at least eight people with a knife at a vocational school in the eastern Chinese city of Wuxi and injured a further 17 people. The perpetrator is said to be an ex-student who wanted to cause as much suffering as possible out of frustration over failing a diploma exam. On Nov. 11, a 62-year-old killed 35 people and seriously injured 43 when he drove his car into a crowd of people at a sports center in Zhuhai.
The information provided by the security authorities in such cases cannot be independently verified. It is clear that there has been a copycat effect: In the past six months, there have been nine such seemingly indiscriminate acts of violence in the People’s Republic of China. All of them were allegedly committed by men seeking revenge on society for personal misery.
The accumulation of incidents may explain why the authorities are willing to provide motives. This is surprising, as the modus operandi in such cases is usually to delete all information from social media and muzzle newspapers and TV stations.
However, the alleged motives often raise questions. In Zhuhai, it was the act of violence with the most fatalities in China for decades. However, the Chinese media were only able to report on it a day late – and only on the basis of the official police report. According to the authorities, the perpetrator allegedly acted out of frustration over the division of his divorce assets.
This is astonishing, as the authorities are reluctant to rush to conclusions and speculate in similar cases. In addition, the perpetrator himself could no longer be questioned as he was in a coma immediately after the rampage due to a suicide attempt.
There seems to be a deliberate focus on personal tragedies so as not to jeopardize social stability. This is because the structural connections between the seemingly arbitrary acts of violence are being debated within the population under the slogan: “taking revenge on society“. And these acts of revenge have recently increased significantly in the wake of a tense economic situation.
“When there is a lack of job security and enormous pressure to survive, society is full of problems, hostility and terror,” one comment on social media read. Another user explained the knife attack in Wuxi in a similar way: “Social tensions are intensifying and there is no outlet for pent-up discontent.”
The impact of such economic pressures on mental health is increasing, according to experts. George Magnus of Oxford University’s China Center told Reuters that the spate of mass casualties in China “points to a pattern rather than an anomaly”. There is a widespread perception in China that lack of success is due to injustice and systemic causes.
“I think this is an important explanation for the social and industrial malaise evident in the spate of incidents and is a warning sign of the state of society,” Magnus explains. Qin Xiaojie, a Beijing-based psychotherapist and director of the mental health non-profit organization CandleX, says that a pervasive sense of social injustice and inequality can lead to violence against random people in extreme cases.
Some of the arbitrary acts of revenge are also targeted at foreigners. In June, several lecturers at a US university in north-eastern China were injured with a stabbing weapon by a man in a park. In the same month, a Japanese woman and her child were attacked in Suzhou in eastern China. In September, a man killed a Japanese student with a knife in Shenzhen in southern China. The latest case in Changde prompted Tokyo to issue a warning to Japanese people who were in Xiamen for the World Cup qualifier between the two nations.
Even though these acts were allegedly committed out of xenophobia, the public security authorities have not commented on the motives of the perpetrators – instead referring for weeks to ongoing investigations. This handling of critical information by the authorities is deeply revealing: This is because it is only ever published quickly if it is politically acceptable.
Although there may be a personal motive behind each crime, the cases cannot be viewed in isolation from one another. If the information available is correct, then the common thread running through the motives for the crimes is the country’s poor economic situation. Last but not least, youth unemployment has risen to a record high. The psychological consequences of the tough coronavirus lockdown in China, during which millions of people were locked up at home for months and exposed to the constant fear of being taken to a hospital against their will, are also uncertain.
This can have a widespread impact on the mental health of a society. Taken together, this would suggest that something is simmering beneath the surface of Chinese society – more so than the censorship apparatus can keep under wraps. Fabian Kretschmer/Manuel Liu
Sinolytics is a European consulting and analysis company specializing in China. It advises European companies on their strategic orientation and specific business activities in the People’s Republic.
On the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. These topics were discussed:
Economic cooperation between the two countries was the main focus of the Chinese side’s communication after the meeting. The most important statements:
Wool hand crabs are a popular delicacy that can be found in many places in China at the moment – it’s the season. They are tied together and served either alive or already cooked. The females with their orange, buttery eggs are particularly popular with gourmets. When eating them, the rule is to break them apart skillfully and pick the last bit of meat out of the legs at the end.
