The Hong Kong government has been working with China to block Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the WTO, the US Department of State said in a report published on Thursday.
Even as the Chinese government took new measures to erode democracy in Hong Kong, representatives of the territory acted on behalf of Beijing to advance its objectives in the international arena, the report said.
The latest annual Hong Kong Policy Act report, published by the state department and mandated by the US Congress, assessed the state of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong from March last year to last month.
Photo: Reuters
During that period, Beijing moved to disable the role of pro-democracy legislators in Hong Kong’s government and effectively criminalize peaceful political expression critical of the central and local governments, the report said.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) National People’s Congress Standing Committee approved sweeping changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system, blocking the participation of political groups not favored by Beijing and greatly diminishing Hong Kong voters’ ability to elect representatives of their choice, the report said.
In international affairs, Hong Kong continued to vote separately from mainland China in a number of organizations and multilateral entities, but the extent of the PRC’s influence was unclear, it said.
In some organizations, there were reports that Hong Kong representatives were acting on behalf of China to advance the PRC’s political objectives, the state department said.
It cited reports that in the WTO, of which Taiwan is a member, Hong Kong had been working on Beijing’s behalf to prevent Taipei’s meaningful participation and block it from any leadership positions.
“This indicated that Hong Kong’s ability to participate autonomously in these organizations may be eroding,” the report said.
On the economic front, although Hong Kong’s economic and financial systems remain distinct in many respects from China’s, the differences have narrowed, and business and rule of law risks that were previously limited to mainland China are increasingly a concern in Hong Kong, the report said.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS