A Hong Kong hedge fund manager who rallied support from bankers and brokers for the territory’s pro-democracy movement said on Tuesday that a leading business newspaper had dropped his long-running column.
The hedge fund manager, Edward C.K. Chin (錢志健), revealed the decision by the Hong Kong Economic Journal two days after the Chinese government roundly rejected the movement’s demands. He and his supporters said the action was the latest blow to Hong Kong’s beleaguered media freedoms, a criticism that the newspaper rejected. The dispute was another sign of raw tempers in Hong Kong, where politics, business and the news media have increasingly felt the gravitational pull of Beijing.
Chin has been one of the financial sector’s prominent supporters of the Occupy Central With Love and Peace movement. The group said on Sunday that it would stage peaceful protests in Central, the financial heart of Hong Kong, after China proposed electoral changes for the territory that would doom activists’ demands for democracy.
Chin had used his weekly column in the Economic Journal, a Chinese-language broadsheet read by bankers and investors, to push for full-fledged democracy and to criticize China’s handling of Hong Kong.
He said he was informed by e-mail over the weekend that the paper would stop using his column, which he wrote for more than eight years, as part of a redesign of the business section in which it appeared. He rejected that explanation and said that pressure from China, possibly indirect, appeared to lie behind his dismissal.
“It’s a political decision,” he said on Tuesday. “It’s highly political to axe my column right now. They know my pro-democracy stance.”
The Economic Journal denied that the move was politically motivated.
“We respect the columnist’s freedom of expression, but media also have room for editorial autonomy,” an Economic Journal spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.
The statement said the decision to remove Chin’s column was part of an editorial redesign planned over two months that also affected other columnists.
“This is something that papers do all the time,” it said.
The Economic Journal is owned by an offshore trust established by Richard Li (李澤楷), a Hong Kong businessman. Li is the son of the territory’s, and Asia’s, richest man, Li Ka-shing (李嘉誠), who has extensive investments in China.
The Independent Commentators Association, a Hong Kong group that advocates media freedom and diversity, said the Economic Journal could not escape suspicion that political pressure from mainland authorities and their Hong Kong allies had influenced its decision.
“We won’t speculate on the Economic Journal’s motives for its remake,” the association said in a statement. “But the objective fact is that the Economic Journal has, proportionally speaking, lost the columns of someone who supports the views of Occupy Central.”
Chin said he and other Occupy Central supporters from the financial sector would consider setting up an independent news outlet, perhaps a Web site, that would “make another Economic Journal.”
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was