Day: June 9, 2023

Opposition party activists staged a protest outside the iconic headquarters of HSBC in Hong Kong this week after the bank shut down their party’s accounts.

Five League of Social Democrats members gathered by the lion statues outside the bank’s headquarters in Hong Kong’s Central business district on Tuesday, holding up a banner that read: “Dollar signs in their eyes – aiding and abetting tyranny.”

“Cancellation of bank accounts is soft political persecution!” the protesters, who included party chairwoman Chan Po-ying, chanted. “Everyone is at risk in this international financial center!”

“Don’t trample on our rights of association!” they shouted, watched closely by around a dozen police officers.

The protest comes amid a citywide crackdown on public dissent and political opposition under the 2020 national security law, which has included the freezing of politicians’ assets by Hong Kong banks.

Party leader Chan Po-ying, who was arrested at the weekend on a downtown shopping street carrying an electric candle and a yellow paper mourning flower on the 34th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, said the move had stopped the party’s operations in their tracks.

“The closure of the League of Social Democrats’ bank accounts for no reason affects our day-to-day operations, but also our survival as a political organization,” Chan told journalists at the scene. “We were dependent on digital transfers from people’s bank accounts, because we’re not allowed to raise money on the street.”

“We may live in an international financial hub, but we lack access to even the most basic banking services,” she said.

Vice chairman Dickson Chau said he had received an initial notification from HSBC in February that the bank would be closing down the party’s three bank accounts, which were held at different branches of the bank, but without explaining why.

At least four other members of the party have had their personal accounts shut down, too.

“Based on our political stance, but without explaining the reason, HSBC unilaterally and recklessly canceled our accounts, affecting the day-to-day running of our organization,” Chau told journalists at the protest.

“We believe that this is part of the systematic suppression of Hong Kong people’s freedom of association and freedom of speech,” he said.

He said the bank’s actions had affected the party’s ability to raise funds of its jailed former chairman Leung Kwok-hung, who is one of 47 political activists and former lawmakers currently standing trial for “subversion” after they organized a democratic primary in the summer of 2020.

Chau said the League had been forced to return “thousands of Hong Kong dollars” in donations due to the move by HSBC, adding that he wasn’t optimistic that the party would be able to open new accounts anywhere in Hong Kong.

A security officer from HSBC received a letter from the protesters at the scene.

But requests for comment from the bank had met with no response by the time of writing.

The protest came after the London-based rights group Hong Kong Watch accused banks including HSBC of perpetrating a “brazen asset grab” by withholding up to U.S.$2.4 billion in the pension pots of Hong Kongers who have emigrated to the United Kingdom under its British National Overseas visa scheme.

The group called it a form of “punishment” for leaving amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent, and singled out HSBC for criticism, saying the bank had been supportive of a draconian national security law imposed on Hong Kong by the Communist Party from July 1, 2020.

In January 2021, HSBC came under fire for freezing the accounts of self-exiled former opposition lawmaker Ted Hui and his family after he said he was resettling in the U.K., as well as that of a Hong Kong church that had helped protesters during the 2019 pro-democracy movement.

Former finance channel chief at i-CABLE News Joseph Ngan said such actions damage Hong Kong’s image as an international financial center.

“Before, [this would only happen in the case of] illegal activities like money-laundering, which would have been explained and understood,” Ngan said.

“But this is purely a case of targeting a political party, an organization that is legally registered in Hong Kong, yet it is still being restricted.”

Ngan said it was unclear whether the political pressure on the bank was coming from the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, or the Hong Kong government.

He said HSBC had a responsibility to explain “in a clear and reasonable manner,” why it was restricting customers’ access to banking services.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Paul Eckert.

An early heatwave in southern and southwestern China, which saw electricity demand hitting peak levels in May, suggests that China may face another scorcher of a summer – even fiercer than last year’s record-breaking season, according to meteorological reports.

So far, the heat has reportedly been particularly punishing on animals, with hundreds of pigs perishing in Jiangsu, central China, fish dying in southwestern China’s Guangxi province and Chengdu suffering shortages of rabbit heads – a much-loved Sichuanese street snack.

Peak electricity demand was recorded in late May, a month earlier than last year, while in Beijing the temperature is expected to nudge at 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) next week and Shanghai recorded a 150-year-record-high temperature for the month on May 29 at 36.7 C (98 F), eclipsing the previous high of 35.7 C (96.3 F) recorded in May 1876.

Was last year a warm-up?

Last summer, RFA reported that industry in the Yangtze Region, including semiconductor manufacturer Foxconn, was forced to scale back on production amid a heatwave and drought, in which the authorities prioritized residential electricity supply so that people could run air-conditioning.

“The Yangtze River delta has never experienced such high temperatures since historical records began, and high temperatures like this are accompanied by drought,” Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator Zhang Jianping told Radio Free Asia at the time.

The unseasonably hot weather in China comes on the heels of record-breaking temperatures in Southeast Asia during April and May, as RFA reported.

In Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos, the heat led to deaths and hospitalizations, closed schools and caused losses to farmers and business-owners. 

The region saw the mercury reach record highs everywhere, with Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, experiencing its hottest day on record on April 6, 2023, when the city recorded a temperature of 40.2 C (104.4 F).

The heat index, which measures how hot it feels when humidity is factored in, reached a staggering 50.2 C (122 F) in some areas of Bangkok, according to local news reports.

The ‘worst heatwave in history’

Some experts are already calling it the “worst heatwave in history” and it is not just affecting Southeast Asia and China; records are even being broken in high-latitude Siberia, CNN reported.

Jalturovosk in Siberia had its hottest day in history on June 3 at 37.9 C (100.2 F), according to Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures across the globe.

Experts blame it on global warming, El Niño, atmospheric blocking patterns and urban heat island effects.

But a likely return of El Niño, a weather pattern caused by warming of sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, is of particular concern this year, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

In an update on May 3, the WMO warned that there is a 60% chance for a transition to El Niño during May-July 2023, increasing to about 70% in June-August and 80% between July and September.

The organization added that the development of an El Niño will most likely lead to a new spike in global heating and increase the chance of breaking temperature records. It advised the world to prepare for the impacts, such as increased rainfall, droughts, heat waves and storms.

China and beyond

Back in China, local reports are already warning of possible hardships to come, chiefly focusing on the possibility of a food security crisis involving essential crops such as wheat, which has already been affected by heavy May rain and high temperatures, and rice, which Chinese agricultural experts are warning will likely be affected by high temperatures and drought conditions.   

On June 2, China’s Meteorological Agency held a press conference, in which experts urged local governments to prepare for the coming heat, warning that densely urban areas are likely to be vulnerable to the so-called “urban heat island effect” and rural areas suffering from heatwaves will also likely experience droughts, the combination of which can devastating to crops.

Bloomberg reports that China has so far avoided any large-scale power cuts, but shoppers are spurning daytime shopping for night markets and beer and ice cream sales have risen.

Air conditioner sales are up 95% from last year, according to local Chinese-language news reports.

A UN report in March warned that “every increment” of global warming will escalate multiple and concurrent hazards.

According to scientists, the past eight years have been the eight warmest on record globally, with 2016 being the hottest on record. 

The World Meteorological Organization says that is primarily due to the “double whammy” of a powerful El Niño event and human-induced warming from greenhouse gasses.

Edited by Mike Firn and Malcolm Foster.

Before dawn a small crowd forms at a huddle of blue and green buildings beside the airport runway that dominates Tuvalu’s most populated coral island.

Sometimes people come as early as 4 a.m., hoping to be first in line for the precious supply of fresh fruit and vegetables.

As people arrive they cross the runway by car, motorbike or on foot. By opening time, an orderly queue has materialized. People sit on chairs or stand while they wait their turn.

Numbers are called and small groups eagerly converge on benches stacked with brightly colored crates. People haul out papaya, leafy greens and ample-sized cucumbers.

“It’s very hard to get fresh vegetables and fruit. This is the only place where we can get the fresh ones,” said grandmother Seleta Kapua Taupo as she waited her turn. “Most of the cabbages when they come [from overseas], most of the carrots, they are already in a stage of getting rotten and we don’t want to have that.”

People are grateful for the vegetables, grown in rows and rows of boxes raised off the porous atoll ground, but some also say it’s never enough. Because Tuvalu is so small – its islands spread over a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean comprise only 26 square kilometers (10 square miles) – there’s no space for the garden to expand despite its important role in countering an unbalanced diet.

Taiwan’s aid agency, which established the garden as a demonstration project last decade, estimates it now provides most of the fruit and vegetables consumed on Funafuti – Tuvalu’s principle coral atoll made up of islets of barely arable land and reefs encircling the sapphire waters of a lagoon. 

The constraints on the garden show the tradeoffs that low-lying micronations in the Pacific such as Tuvalu grapple with and which will only get more intractable as scarce land is lost to sea-level rise. Without building up and extending land that averages an arm’s length above the high-tide, half of Funafuti will be inundated by tidal waters by 2050 and 95% by the end of this century, based on one-meter of sea-level rise projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Aside from locally caught fish and shellfish, much of Tuvalu’s food is imported, expensive and low in nutrition.

Restaurant staples here are large plates overflowing with white rice and fried meat. Cans of Fanta and Coke cost less than bottled water.

“Before we had this market, most of us didn’t know how to use these vegetables,” Taupo said. 

“Before, my grandchildren didn’t like vegetables in their food. But I cut them very small and put them in the soup, so they have no choice,” she said, chuckling. “So now they are used to it and they start to love even the salad. Now they love the salad.” 

Funafuti at its widest is about 400 meters (1,312 feet), a parcel of land that packs together the airport runway, government buildings and infrastructure and homes. Between the two to three international flights a week, the runway is a lively town square where people flock to socialize or play football and volleyball in the evenings. 

At one of the atoll’s narrowest slivers, mere meters, the view takes in ocean waves crashing on one side of the road while lagoon waters lap placidly on the other.

“You don’t want to think about it, that it’s going to disappear,” said Suzanne Kofe, who has repurposed an old shipping container into Sue’s Cafe, serving burgers to locals and the weekly influx of U.N. and other advisers that make up most of Tuvalu’s foreign visitors.

“That’s what scientists say, that it will disappear,” she said. “But I believe it’s not in my lifetime.”

Tuvalu has become emblematic of the plight faced by low-lying islands from projected sea level rise over the coming century.

Its coral atolls, a two-and-a-half hour flight north of Fiji, are home to only 12,000 people, and most people couldn’t locate them on a world map. Yet with clever public relations, fronted by its Foreign Minister Simon Kofe, Tuvalu has called attention to its situation and helped galvanize calls for faster action to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

In October 2021, a video of Kofe standing knee-deep in the ocean while delivering Tuvalu’s message to the annual U.N. climate change conference went viral online and was reported by news organizations worldwide. 

The following year, Kofe was superimposed into a three-dimensional digital replica of Te Afualiku, an uninhabited filament of palms and pulverized coral that he predicted would be one of the first Tuvaluan islets to disappear. 

He gravely intoned that Tuvalu would upload a digital copy of itself to the metaverse, a purported virtual world accessed through bulky VR goggles, so there would be a record of Tuvaluan culture if its islands become submerged by rising seas.

Months after the idea of a virtual-reality Tuvalu briefly held the world’s attention, it remains more a macabre stunt than reality.

“We’ve been advocating for decades now on the international stage and this is probably the most effective we’ve been,” said Kofe, “in getting the world’s attention on issues of climate change.”

The tech industry’s brief but expensive infatuation with the still largely hypothetical metaverse – hyped up in 2021 by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as the future of the internet – is now ridiculed by technology commentators.

Facebook-owner Meta, which invested billions of dollars in its own video-game-like version of the metaverse only for it to flop, has laid off thousands of employees. It says it is now investing more in artificial intelligence. 

“The metaverse as Zuckerberg has defined it has been abandoned not just by originally supportive companies, like Disney, Microsoft and Tencent, but even by Meta itself,” said Jordan Guiao, a research fellow at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.

“There may be more practical and specific applications being trialed,” he said, “but the grandiose and much overhyped visions that we saw over the last 18 months have not come to fruition.”

Societies need to develop policy and initiatives grounded in reality, “as opposed to imagined reality, to solve our problems,” Guiao said.

Business services company Accenture, which rendered Te Afualiku digitally after proposing the idea to Tuvalu, said it’s currently not viewable in the metaverse. 

Even if it were, it would be near impossible to experience it in Tuvalu due to limited Internet bandwidth. 

Despite the attention it has garnered, a virtual Tuvalu is only a small part of the strategy to ensure the country remains recognized as a sovereign state in the “worst-case scenario” of being swallowed by the Pacific Ocean, according to Kofe.

He insists that digital Tuvalu will become a reality and points to Singapore, which uses an immersive digital twin of the city-state for urban and environmental planning. 

“We’re at the early stages of it but a time will come and people will be able to have the access to it,” Kofe said. 

“The challenge that many of the tech companies have now is to find a user case for that sort of platform,” he said. 

“There has been a lot of interest in what Tuvalu is doing because they [tech companies] see the value of it, there’s a sense of purpose in developing something that could actually help save and preserve a culture.” 

Reclaiming an island

Just a two-minute stroll from Kofe’s modest office in the low-rise government building, backhoes and trucks maneuver around giant earth-filled sacks as azure waters wash against an expanding palisade of sand dredged from the lagoon.

An Australian marine engineering company, Hall Pacific, is creating more than seven hectares of new land along a 780-meter (2,560-feet) stretch of lagoon waterfront.

At roughly 4% of the existing area of Funafuti’s largest island, it’s a significant addition to the atoll that would also bolster the ability to withstand king tides and tropical cyclones.

The cost, including coastal protection works for two outer islands Nanumaga and Nanumea to stop them being swamped by storm waves, is about U.S. $30 million.

The project has been several years in the making and is only the first steps in a much larger vision.

“A solution for us,” Kofe said, “is to reclaim land, build sea walls and even raise our islands in some parts – that’s a solution that we see that’s viable for the people of Tuvalu and to save our people.”

Unveiled in November by Tuvalu’s government and the U.N. Development Programme, the decades-long plan to survive higher sea levels envisages more than doubling the size of Tuvalu’s most populated island and linking it to two smaller islets by reclaiming 3.6 square kilometers (1.4 square miles) from the lagoon.

“All involved hope that work will begin very soon and that it will become reality before sea-level rise critically endangers people and property,” said UNDP coastal adaptation expert Arthur Webb.

He said up to U.S. $7 million was needed now for design and engineering studies. He declined to say how much the proposed reclamation works could cost in total.

“There is no conventional adaptation fund or facility that Tuvalu can apply to for assistance on this scale, at this time,” Webb said. “Thus we must now think creatively about how we achieve what needs to be done.”

The plan proposes relocating residents and infrastructure to the reclaimed area and later possibly raising the level of the original island before revegetating it. 

The airport would be moved to a finger of land at one end of the enlarged islet and also serve as a water catchment for the thirsty islands that depend on rainfall for their water. 

Tuvalu’s government and its international advisers now need to secure the support of Tuvaluans and the considerable funding to make the plan a reality. 

“Obviously we will continue to advocate on the international playing field for countries to take stronger climate action,” Kofe said. “But I think we also need to focus our energy on things that are within our control.”

BenarNews is an online news agency affiliated to Radio Free Asia.

First came the chengguan, or Urban Management Law Enforcement Force, which aimed to bring order to the city streets of China. Then came the nongguan, the Agricultural Comprehensive Administrative Law Enforcement Force, which ripped up unapproved crops and brought order to the countryside. 

Now China has the wenguan, or Cultural Management Law Enforcement Force.

Their purpose is to bring China’s cultural agencies and media into line with government policy and “Xi Jinping thought” – that of the country’s supreme leader.

In the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, the new cultural enforcers even have their own dark blue uniforms emblazoned with the Chinese characters for “cultural enforcement.” 

More than 500 people attended the “uniform dressing ceremony” in Jiamusi city on May 30. He Jing, director of the Heilongjiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, awarded flags to 13 municipal cultural market comprehensive enforcement teams in the province.

A Contentious Past

The nongguan have been a hot subject on Chinese social media due to videos of them attacking farming products as innocuous as ginger – a popular seasoning in Chinese cuisines – and other “non-essential” crops. 

As recently as April this year RFA reported on nongguan uprooting “forbidden crops” in backyards and in fields China-wide in a move allegedly aimed at securing China’s staple food supplies.  

As for the much feared chengguan, as early as 2012, a Human Rights Watch report was describing the urban enforcers as “thuggish” and arguing that their behavior was leading to public anger and undermining stability.

“Chengguan forces have earned a reputation for brutality and impunity,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at HRW, at the time.

The new Cultural Management Law Enforcement Force is responsible for cracking down on violations or frowned-upon, “uncivilized” behavior in the areas of culture, tourism, publishing, broadcasting, television and film. 

Among their many assigned responsibilities they might, for example, track down and allocate punishments for writers on online literature platforms that spread pornography, violence, “feudal superstition” and other harmful content, although their role is wide and ambiguous. 

Many netizens have taken to social media to challenge or mock the emergence of the “cultural enforcers” while also expressing fear they could create a cultural desert.

One netizen said in a video: “First it was urban management, then agricultural management, and now it’s cultural management. What even is cultural management? If they’re managing poisonous textbooks, OK, I applaud them, but … if it means my Internet company has to get in line for a chat …”

Managing culture

Cai Shengkun, a U.S.-based current affairs commentator, told RFA that China’s establishment of a cultural market comprehensive enforcement team is actually simply aimed at increasing political supervision.

“It’s mostly about political considerations,” he said. “They’re trying to comprehensively manage the cultural sphere – including cultural products … performing arts and entertainment.”

The plan to comprehensively manage the cultural sphere dates back to 2018, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued a plan to “integrate and form a comprehensive enforcement team for cultural markets,” including tourism market enforcement duties. The team is guided by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

A year later, cultural law enforcement teams were already at work, but they were far less active than their urban management and agricultural management equivalents.

“Someone from a news source told me that the Central Propaganda Department organized staff to go to North Korea to learn from its cultural management and maintain social stability,” said US-based Cai. 

RFA was unable to verify that the Central Propaganda Department was cooperating with North Korea.

Zhang Jianping, a current affairs commentator from Yixing City in Jiangsu Province, told RFA that the concern was that China would lose its vitality if it focused too much on cultural management. 

“There was no security problem or social stability problem in the past when culture was blooming,” Zhang said.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Than Myint, the elder brother of the shadow National Unity Government’s human rights advisor, has been stabbed to death in Myanmar’s commercial capital Yangon, according to his brother Aung Kyaw Moe.

He said a gang attacked his brother near the Nwe Aye Mosque on Wednesday and escaped before the police arrived.

“We are blood [relatives] and I am working on human rights,”Aung Kyaw Moe told RFA Friday.

“I sent facts about this to relevant colleagues and the international community. When the relatives of those involved in the revolution are targeted and killed we must bring justice to those cases.”

Pro-junta activists took to social media to claim responsibility but it is still not clear which group was behind the killing.

Than Myint was from a Rohingya family that used to live in Rakhine state. He and his family members fled Rakhine separately after the Muslim group suffered persecution in 2012 and 2017.

Of the 1 million Rohingya who lived in Rakhine state, three quarters have fled to Bangladesh, while many of the rest live in Internally Displaced Persons camps with inadequate food and shelter.

The National Unity Government’s human rights ministry released a message of condolence for Than Myint’s killing on Friday.

On Thursday, pro-junta Telegram channels called on supporters to release the names of people opposed to the February 2021 military coup and the names of family members of those who have gone into exile.

The killing of Than Myint follows the murder of the mother and sister of one of the men accused of killing pro-junta singer and actor Lily Naing Kyaw in Yangon.

Furious pro-junta groups called for revenge, identifying the alleged killer and giving his address on social media.

Kaung Zarni Hein’s family were shot dead in their home the same night.

More than 3,600 civilians, including pro-democracy activists, have been killed since the coup according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.