Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) sacking on Thursday of two top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Hubei, as the province and nation struggle to come to grips with the COVID-19 outbreak, overshadowed another crucial personnel move, one that could have repercussions for Taiwan.
Xi replaced the party secretaries for Hubei and its capital, Wuhan, just one day after telling an emergency meeting of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee that “all regions and departments performed their duties actively and conscientiously” in the war against the outbreak.
With much less fanfare, Xi also demoted the director of the Cabinet-level Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office (HKMAO), Zhang Xiaoming (張曉明), by naming Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Vice Chairman Xia Baolong (夏寶龍) to the post.
While Zhang is to stay on as HKMAO vice director in charge of “routine work,” he is the most senior Beijing-appointed official in Hong Kong to lose his job since months of pro-democracy protests began in June last year.
All three men appointed on Thursday have two things in common besides their solid CCP resumes: They are all proteges of Xi and have backgrounds in public security.
Xia’s appointment came just six weeks after another Xi protege, Luo Huining (駱惠寧), known for carrying out Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, was named director of the Hong Kong Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government, who since the 1997 handover has been Beijing’s top official in the territory.
Some analysts say that Xia’s stature as a state-level leader means that the HKMAO has been promoted to a level above the two territories’ liaison offices, while others speculate that it could lead to changes in Beijing’s management of the territories.
In any case, Xia’s appointment is something of a hierarchical demotion for Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) and Macau Chief Executive Ho Iat Seng (賀一誠), as their jobs used to be ranked on the same level as the heads of the HKMAO and the two liaison offices.
More worrying for democracy advocates is that Xia is a hardliner known for demolishing thousands of crosses and scores of churches during a crackdown on Christian churches in Zhejiang Province in 2014 and 2015, while he was the province’s party secretary.
Xi has not only moved to strengthen Beijing’s direct supervision over the implementation of its policies in Hong Kong, but indicated that he is determined to crack down hard on any challenge to its control.
As we have seen on the mainland, that can only be bad news for Hong Kong’s civil society, which is likely to face more curbs as the CCP ignores its pre-handover promises of 50 years in which the territory could retain its own legal and economic systems and currency, and its people their rights and freedoms.
The CCP’s Fourth Plenum in November last year declared that national interest should take priority over the “one country, two systems” policy, and called on Hong Kong to improve its legal system to boost the powers of law enforcement and safeguard national security, as well as increase the “patriotic education” of young people and civil servants.
As Xia proved in Zhejiang and Luo with the anti-graft campaign, Xi now has men in place who are eager and willing to carry out his orders and support his efforts to extend his — and the CCP’s — ideological control.
This could be bad news for Taiwan, as Beijing’s efforts to take over the reins on Hong Kong could impact everything from the government’s efforts to maintain contact with its counterparts in the territory to more visa hassles for travelers and more pushback on Taiwanese support of the territory’s democracy movement.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS