Three journalists told CPJ that investigative reporting on major economic events, a cornerstone of Hong Kong’s financial transparency, has nearly disappeared amid government pressure and the departure of major outlets. 

The sharp decline in press freedom, the journalists said, is a direct result of the National Security Law. This law, enacted on June 30, 2020, was imposed directly by Beijing, bypassing Hong Kong’s local legislature, and included offenses for secession, subversion, terrorist activities, and collusion with foreign forces, with penalties ranging from a three years to life imprisonment.  

In the five years since it was enacted, authorities have shut down media outlets and arrested several journalists, including Jimmy Lai, the founder of one of Hong Kong’s largest newspapers, the pro-democracy Apple Daily. Several major international news organizations have either relocated or downsized their operations in Hong Kong, leading to a decline in reporting on the city and its financial hub.

“Hong Kong’s economic boom happened because journalists could work without interference,” said a veteran reporter with 11 years’ experience in television, newspapers, and digital platforms in Hong Kong, who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

While markets still function, at least three media professionals told CPJ that the erosion of press freedom — often overlooked — is a key factor behind Hong Kong’s fading financial appeal to market participants. One reporter described the media as “paralyzed.” 

Another hastily passed security law enacted in March 2024 in Hong Kong further deepened fears that it would be used to suppress press freedom and prosecute journalists.

“There has never been an international financial center in history that operates with restrictions on information,” Simon Lee, an economic commentator and former assistant CEO of Next Digital Group, the parent company of Apple Daily, told CPJ.

Hong Kong long served as a base for reporting on China’s economy and power structures, said a former financial journalist on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns.

“Most Hong Kong-listed companies come from the mainland [China]. Foreign media used Hong Kong to observe China’s economic operations or wealth transfers,” the former financial journalist told CPJ. “Now the risks feel similar to reporting from inside China.”

Crackdowns, shutdowns, and an exodus of major media

Since the introduction of the National Security Law in 2020, at least eight media outlets have shut. These included Apple Daily, news and lifestyle magazine Next Magazine, both published by Lai’s Next Digital group, and the online outlet Stand News, after they were raided by authorities.

At least four other media organizations — Post852, DB channel, Citizen News, and FactWire — ceased operations voluntarily, citing concerns over the deteriorating political environment.

Reporting was also criminalized in several cases, with journalists prosecuted for “inciting subversion” or “colluding with foreign forces.”  

China had the world’s highest number of imprisoned journalists in CPJ’s latest prison census — 50 in total, including eight in Hong Kong.

The New York Times moved part of its newsroom to Seoul in 2020. In March 2024, Radio Free Asia closed its Hong Kong office, and in May, The Wall Street Journal relocated its Asia headquarters to Singapore.

 “With fewer foreign correspondents based in the city, there’s simply less reporting on Hong Kong,” the former financial journalist told CPJ. “As a result, the city’s economy may receive less objective attention on the global stage.”

The former financial journalist said that one of the biggest losses after the security law was the disappearance of Apple Daily. Unlike most local media, which focused on routine market updates, Apple Daily connected business to politics and mapped interest networks — an increasingly rare practice.

Next Digital, through Apple Daily, built a reputation for investigative financial reporting. A former staff member told the BBC that the company once spent over 100,000 yuan (US$14,000) tracing dozens of property owners to uncover a developer’s hidden ties with a bank.

“From a financial news perspective, one of our biggest problems is losing Apple Daily,” the former financial journalist told CPJ.

Local business reporting also fades away

As Hong Kong’s financial hub reputation comes under question, stories on high unemployment rates, struggling small businesses, and store closures are increasingly out of sight.

“One direct effect is feeling increasingly unable to grasp what’s happening in the city; important information no longer seems easy to access,” Lee said. “Previously, competition among professional outlets encouraged source sharing and helped maintain a power balance. Now, one-way government-controlled information faces little resistance.”

Lee told CPJ that changes in Hong Kong’s media landscape are particularly evident in major financial events, pointing to the coverage of the 2024 sale of Li Ka-shing’s port assets, in which local outlets failed to question the deal’s structure, rationale, or political implications.

“Beijing called it a national security matter, and the other side of the story disappeared,” Lee told CPJ. “Many focus on the judicial system when discussing fairness, but true fairness also depends on the free flow of information … Without information freedom, public oversight fades, and the market’s system of checks and balances collapses.”

Lee also cited the case of Alvin Chau, a casino tycoon in Macao who was sentenced in 2023 to 18 years for illegal gambling. While foreign media uncovered his alleged links to oil smuggling operations to North Korea, local media offered little follow-up.

“These investigations and reports simply no longer exist,” Lee said.

Sources can’t speak freely

Two journalists told CPJ they have noticed increasing reluctance from interviewees. 

During previous years of the Annual Budget Speech, Hong Kong’s yearly announcement of its public spending and economic plans, the media would host analysis shows with economists debating government spending and policies. 

“We would ask about the fiscal surplus, support for the poor, and whether measures were targeted,” the veteran reporter told CPJ, adding that now, “only one professor is willing to speak openly.”

Lee told CPJ that the atmosphere of “not being allowed to criticize” the broader structure or government policy has also extended to the reporting on how financial markets operate.

Market participants should be free to take either optimistic or pessimistic views of the economic outlook, Lee told CPJ, adding that today in Hong Kong, it is discouraged to express pessimism, and even silently shifting toward defensive investment strategies or risk-averse behavior may be interpreted as making a political statement.

“It’s hard for any place with such high information costs to remain a global financial hub,” Lee said. “Because even pulling back on investment can send a signal. If investors are accused of intentionally dragging down the market just because they try to hedge or take a cautious view, they may decide it’s safer to avoid the market altogether.”

In response to CPJ’s request for comment, a Hong Kong government spokesperson referred CPJ to a statement that said the security law has enabled the city to “make a major transition from chaos to order” and “the business environment has continuously improved,” while press freedom is protected under the law.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ's Asia-Pacific program staff.

Sebastien Lai has sought a meeting with Starmer for more than two years to advocate for the release of his father, 77-year-old Jimmy Lai, who founded Apple Daily. His health is deteriorating and he risks dying in jail.

Lai has been imprisoned for over 1,600 days, mostly in isolation, while awaiting the outcome of a long-delayed trial for sedition and conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the Beijing-imposed National Security Law. After Lai’s arrest in 2020, Apple Daily was shuttered on June 24, 2021, following police raids and the freezing of the paper’s assets.

Read the full joint letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CP Staff.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

The first demonstration I ever went on was at the age of 12, against the Vietnam War.

The first formal history lesson I received was a few months later when I commenced high school. That day the old history master, Mr Griffiths, chalked what I later learnt was a quote from Hegel:

“The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history.” It’s about time we changed that.

• READ MORE: ‘I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer’ — The My Lai massacre

Painful though it is, let’s have the courage to remember what they desperately try to make us forget.

Cultural amnesia and learning the lessons of history
Memorialising events is a popular pastime with politicians, journalists and old soldiers.

Nothing wrong with that. Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Recalling the liberation of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) on 30 April 1975 is important.

What is criminal, however, is that we failed to learn the vital lessons that the US defeat in Vietnam should have taught us all. Sadly much was forgotten and the succeeding half century has witnessed a carnival of slaughter perpetrated by the Western world on hapless South Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many more.

It’s time to remember.

Memory shapes national identity
As scholars say: Memory shapes national identity. If your cultural products — books, movies, songs, curricula and the like — fail to embed an appreciation of the war crimes, racism, and imperial culpability for events like the Vietnam War, then, as we have proven, it can all be done again. How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia, that “fighting communism” was a pretext that lost all credibility, partly thanks to television and especially thanks to heroic journalists like John Pilger and Seymour Hersh?

Just as in Gaza today, the truth and the crimes could not be hidden anymore.

If a culture doesn’t face up to its past crimes — say the treatment of the Aborigines by settler Australia, of Māori by settler New Zealand, of Palestinians by the Zionist state since 1948, or the various genocides perpetrated by the US government on the indigenous peoples of what became the 50 states, then it leads ultimately to moral decay and repetition.

Lest we forget. Forget what?
Is there a collective memory in the West that the Americans and their allies raped thousands of Vietnamese women, killed hundreds of thousands of children, were involved in countless large scale war crimes, summary executions and other depravities in order to impose their will on a people in their own country?

Why has there been no collective responsibility for the death of over two million Vietnamese? Why no reparations for America’s vast use of chemical weapons on Vietnam, some provided by New Zealand?

Vietnam Veterans Against War released a report “50 years of struggle” in 2017 which included this commendable statement: “To VVAW and its supporters, the veterans had a continuing duty to report what they had witnessed”. This included the frequency of “beatings, rapes, cutting body parts, violent torture during interrogations and cutting off heads”.

The US spends billions projecting itself as morally superior but people who followed events at the time, including brilliant journalists like Pilger, knew something beyond sordid was happening within the US military.

The importance of remembering the My Lai Massacre
While cultural memes like “Me Love You Long Time” played to an exoticised and sexualised image of Vietnamese women — popular in American-centric movies like Full Metal Jacket, Green Beret, Rambo, Apocalypse Now, as was the image of the Vietnamese as sadistic torturers, there has been a long-term attempt to expunge from memory the true story of American depravity.

All, or virtually all, armies rape their victims. The US Army is no exception — despite rhetorically jockeying with the Israelis for the title of “the world’s most moral army”. The most famous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968 in which about 500 civilians were subjected to hours of rapes, mutilation and eventual murder by soldiers of the US 20th Infantry Regiment.

Rape victims ranged from girls of 10 years through to old women. The US soldiers even took a lunch break before recommencing their crimes.

The official commission of inquiry, culminating in the Peers Report found that an extensive network of officers had taken part in a cover-up of what were large-scale war crimes. Only one soldier, Lieutenant Calley, was ever sentenced to jail but within days he was, on the orders of the US President, transferred to a casually-enforced three and half years of house arrest. By this act, the United States of America continued a pattern of providing impunity for grave war crimes. That pattern continues to this day.

The failure of the US Army to fully pursue the criminals will be an eternal stain on the US Army whose soldiers went on to commit countless rapes, hundreds of thousands of murders and other crimes across the globe in the succeeding five decades. If you resile from these facts, you simply haven’t read enough official information.

Thank goodness for journalists, particularly Seymour Hersh, who broke rank and exposed the truth of what happened at My Lai.

Senator John McCain’s “sacrifice” and the crimes that went unpunished
Thousands of Viet Cong died in US custody, many from torture, many by summary execution but the Western cultural image of Vietnam focuses on the cruelty of the North Vietnamese toward “victims” like terror-bomber John McCain.

The future US presidential candidate was on his 23rd bombing mission, part of a campaign of “War by Tantrum” in the words of a New York Times writer, when he was shot down over Hanoi.

Also emblematic of this state-inflicted terrorism was the CIA’s Phoenix Programme, eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. According to US journalist Douglas Valentine, author of several books on the CIA, including The Phoenix Program:

“Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers”.

Common practices, Valentine says, quoting US witnesses and official papers, included:

“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair.”

No US serviceman, CIA agent or other official was held to account for these crimes.

Tiger Force — part of the US 327th Infantry — gained a grisly reputation for indiscriminately mowing down civilians, mutilations (cutting off of ears which were retained as souvenirs was common practice, according to sworn statements by participants). All this was supposed to be kept secret but was leaked in 2003.

“Their crimes were uncountable, their madness beyond imagination — so much so that for almost four decades, the story of Tiger Force was covered up under orders that stretched all the way to the White House,” journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss reported.

Their crimes, secretly documented by the US military, included beheading a baby to intimidate villagers into providing information — interesting given how much mileage the US and Israel made of fake stories about beheaded babies on 7 October 2023. The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths — and no one ever faced real consequences.

Helicopter gunships and soldiers at checkpoints gunned down thousands of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, much as US forces did at checkpoints in Iraq, according to leaked US documents following the illegal invasion of that country.

The worst cowards and criminals were not the rapists and murderers themselves but the high-ranking politicians and military leaders who tried desperately to cover up these and hundreds of other incidents. As Lieutenant Calley himself said of My Lai: “It’s not an isolated incident.”

Here we are 50 years later in the midst of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the US fuelling war and bombing people across the globe. Isn’t it time we stopped supporting this madness?

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.

• Next article: The fall of Saigon 1975: Part two: Quiet mutiny: the US army falls apart.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“His body is breaking down ... It’s akin to torture,” Sebastien Lai told Reuters ahead of the Human Rights and Democracy summit in Geneva on Feb. 18. “Time is running out for my father.”

Lai, 77, has spent more than 1,500 days behind bars, and is diabetic. He is a British citizen.

In jail since his arrest in December 2020, Lai is currently standing trial for “collusion with foreign forces” under Hong Kong’s National Security Law. He has also been handed separate sentences for lighting a candle and praying for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, for irregularities in the use of his newspaper’s office space, and for taking part in the 2019 protests.

(Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

Sebastien Lai called on global leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump — who has pledged to help get Lai out of jail — and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, to take urgent action, as his father faces his fourth year of solitary confinement.

“We are incredibly grateful that [Trump] said that. It gives us a lot of hope,” Sebastien Lai said, but called for a stronger response from the United Kingdom.

“If (Britain) wants to normalize relations, they shouldn’t normalize citizens being arrested for standing up for democracy,” he said.

The Hong Kong government told Reuters that Hong Kong “strongly disapproves of and rejects misinformation and smearing remarks made by Sebastien Lai,” while China’s permanent mission in Geneva described the claims about Lai’s health as “slanderous.”

Sebastien Lai called on governments to “champion” his father, who decided not to flee the city when Beijing imposed the first of two national security laws in 2020, despite knowing he’d be a target.

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“He refused to leave,” he told Voice of America. “Six decades after landing on the shore of this island in pursuit of freedom, he decided to stay and stand with his fellow protesters.”

Human rights groups say Lai’s trial is a “sham” and part of a broad crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong that has all but destroyed its reputation as the only place in Greater China where the rule of law and freedoms of speech and assembly were preserved.

In November 2024, a Hong Kong court jailed 45 democracy supporters at the end of the city’s biggest national security trial to date.

Those sentences drew international condemnation and calls for further sanctions on Hong Kong and the expansion of lifeboat visa schemes for those fleeing the political crackdown in the city.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alice Yam for RFA Cantonese.

The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor said in a Feb. 7 post to its X account that Lai, 77, “has spent more than 1,500 days imprisoned while standing up bravely for democracy and free speech in Hong Kong.”

“We urge the HK government to immediately and unconditionally release Jimmy Lai,” the tweet said.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong said the remarks were “erroneous,” and accused Washington of “openly supporting anti-China and Hong Kong-disrupting element Jimmy Lai.”

Lai on Monday spent his 39th day on the witness stand on the 131st day of his national security trial.

(ANN WANG, Ann Wang/Reuters)

The statement accused Lai of being “the main planner and instigator” of the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong, which started as mass popular protests against plans to allow extradition to mainland China, and broadened to include demands for fully democratic elections and greater official accountability.

“The louder the US shouts for Lai, the more it proves that Lai is in cahoots with it, and its actions are doomed to be futile,” the spokesperson said, calling on Washington to “stop interfering in Hong Kong’s judiciary,” and to stop “sheltering” pro-democracy activists in exile.

The Hong Kong government said in a statement on Feb. 8 that the State Department comment was “inappropriate,” given that Lai’s trial is still ongoing.

It said the authorities “will continue to resolutely discharge the duty of safeguarding national security, prevent, suppress and punish in accordance with the law acts and activities endangering national security.”

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According to Benedict Rogers, founder and chief executive officer of the London-based rights group Hong Kong Watch, Lai, a British citizen and a devout Catholic, is currently being held in solitary confinement and reportedly only permitted 50 minutes of exercise per day.

“That means he spends over 23 hours daily without natural light, fresh air, or human contact except with prison guards,” Rogers wrote in a Feb. 7 op-ed for the Catholic news site UCANews.

“A diabetic, he has been denied independent medical care and concerns are growing about his failing health.”

Lai has been in jail since his arrest in December 2020, awaiting trial for “collusion with foreign forces” under the National Security Law, and also serving separate sentences for lighting a candle and praying for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, for irregularities in the use of his newspaper’s office space, and for taking part in the 2019 protests.

“If lighting a candle, saying a prayer and joining a peaceful protest is a crime, deserving 13 or 14 months in jail per candle, prayer, or protest, I should be locked up for the rest of my life,” Rogers wrote.

He said Lai had sacrificed a life of wealth and freedom anywhere else in the world to stay in Hong Kong to fight for his principles, “in the knowledge that a jail cell could be his home for the remainder of his life,” he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

Northern Marianas Governor Arnold Palacios and Senator Celina Babauta have travelled to Guam to attend a luncheon with Taiwan President Lai Ching-te.

Taiwan is officially known as the Republic of China (Taiwan). China claims Taiwan as its own territory, with no right to state-to-state ties, a position Taiwan strongly disputes.

Palacios welcomed the opportunity to meet Lai and said this could pave the way for improved relations with the East Asian country.

• READ MORE: Other Taiwan and the Pacific reports

“This meeting is an opportunity for the CNMI to foster relations with allies in the region.”

When asked if meeting the President would upset the People’s Republic of China, which considers Taiwan a rogue state and part of its territory, Palacios said: “As far as being in the crosshairs of China, we already are in many ways.”

Worldwide, a dozen countries maintain formal diplomatic ties with Taipei.

In January, Nauru cut ties with Taiwan and shifted its diplomatic allegiance to Beijing.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Lai, 76, is facing charges under the 2020 National Security Law that Beijing imposed on the former British colony a year after it was rocked by anti-government protests. He faces life imprisonment.

“We were always in support of movements for freedom,” Lai, wearing a gray blazer and glasses, told the West Kowloon Magistrates Court, the Reuters news agency reported.

Scores of Lai’s supporters lined up outside the court in the rain early on Wednesday, hoping to get in to show their support, media reported.

The founder of the now-closed Apple Daily, a Chinese-language tabloid renowned for its pro-democracy views and criticism of Beijing, pleaded not guilty on Jan. 2 to “sedition” and “collusion” under the security law.

The United States, Britain and other Western countries have denounced Lai’s prosecution and called for his release.

Human rights groups say Lai’s trial is a “sham” and part of a broad crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong that has all but destroyed its reputation as the only place in Greater China where the rule of law and freedoms of speech and assembly were preserved.

The hearing comes a day after a Hong Kong court jailed 45 democracy supporters for up to 10 years for subversion at the end of the city’s biggest national security trial.

Those sentences drew international condemnation and calls for further sanctions on Hong Kong and the expansion of lifeboat visa schemes for those fleeing the political crackdown in the city.

Trump vow

Lai is a British citizen who, despite being born in the southern province of Guangdong, has never held Chinese citizenship. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer raised concerns about Lai’s health when he met Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday at a G20 meeting in Brazil.

Beijing said the 2020 security law was necessary to safeguard the Asian financial hub’s economic success.

But critics say crackdowns on dissent and press freedom that followed its introduction sounded the death knell for the “one country, two systems” formula under which Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997, that was meant to safeguard freedoms not enjoyed elsewhere in China for 50 years.

Lai has been in prison for nearly four years. He was jailed for nearly six years in 2022 on a fraud conviction linked to his media business.

Lai has long advocated for the U.S. government, especially during the first term of President Donald Trump, to take a strong stance in supporting Hong Kong’s civil liberties, which he viewed as essential to the city’s role as a gateway between China and global markets.

Prosecutors, however, allege that Lai’s activities and his newspaper’s articles constituted lobbying for sanctions against Beijing and Hong Kong, a violation of the national security law. Lai’s lawyers argue that he ceased such actions after the law took effect on June 30, 2020.

Trump has vowed to secure Lai’s release, media reported.

During Trump’s first term, the U.S. revoked Hong Kong’s special trade status and enacted legislation allowing sanctions on the city’s officials in response to China’s crackdown on the city.

During the peak of the 2019 protests, Lai visited Washington and met then-Vice President Mike Pence and other U.S. politicians to discuss Hong Kong’s political crisis.

“Mr President, you’re the only one who can save us,” Lai said in an interview with CNN in 2020 weeks before his arrest.

“If you save us, you can stop China’s aggressions. You can also save the world.”

Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

Sebastien, who leads the #FreeJimmyLai campaign, last saw his father in August 2020 — weeks after Beijing imposed a national security law that led to a massive crackdown on pro-democracy advocates and journalists. Among them Lai, founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily.

After nearly four years in Hong Kong’s maximum-security Stanley Prison and multiple delays to his trial, the aging British citizen was due to take the stand for the first time on November 20 on charges of sedition and conspiring to collude with foreign forces, which he denies.

Lai, who has diabetes, routinely spends over 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, with only 50 minutes for restricted exercise and limited access to daylight, according to his international lawyers.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has found that Lai is unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for his release.

Responding to CPJ’s request for comment, a Hong Kong government spokesperson referred to a November 17 statement in which it said that Lai was “receiving appropriate treatment and care in prison” and that Hong Kong authorities “strongly deplore any form of interference.”

In an interview with CPJ, Sebastien spoke about Britain’s bilateral ties with China, as well as Hong Kong — a former British colony where his father arrived as a stowaway on a fishing boat at age 12, before finding jobs in a garment factory and eventually launched a clothing retail chain and his media empire.

What do you anticipate when your father takes the stand for the first time?

To be honest, I do not know. My father is a strong person, but the Hong Kong government has spent four years trying to break him. I don’t think they can break his spirit but with his treatment they are in the process of breaking his body. We will see the extent of that on the stand.

Your father turned 77 recently. How is he doing in solitary confinement?

The last time I saw my father was in August of 2020. I haven’t been able to return to my hometown since and therefore have been unable to visit him in prison. His health has declined significantly. He is now 77, and, having spent nearly four years in a maximum-security prison in solitary confinement, his treatment is inhumane. For his dedication to freedom, they have taken his away.

For his bravery in standing in defense of others, they have denied him human contact. For his strong faith in God, they have denied him Holy Communion.

We have seen governments across the political spectrum call for Jimmy Lai’s release —the U.S., the European Parliament, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Ireland, among others. What does that mean to you?

We are incredibly grateful for all the support from multiple states in calling for my father’s release. The charges against my father are sham charges. The Hong Kong government has weaponized their legal system to crack down on all who criticize them.

You met with the U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently, who said Jimmy Lai’s case remains a priority and the government will press for consular access. What would you like to see Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government do?

They have publicly stated that they want to normalize relationships with China and to increase trade. I don’t see how that can be achieved if there is a British citizen in Hong Kong in the process of being killed for standing up for the values that underpin a free nation and the rights and dignity of its citizens.

Any normalization of the relationship with China needs to be conditional on my father’s immediate release and his return to the United Kingdom.

Your father’s life story in many ways embodies Hong Kong’s ‘never-give-up’ attitude. Do you think Hong Kong journalists and pro-democracy activists will keep on fighting? What is your message to Beijing and the Hong Kong government?

I think most of the world shares his spirit. Hong Kong is unique because it’s a city of refugees. It’s a city where we were given many of the freedoms of the free world. And as a result, it flourished. We knew what we had and what we escaped from.

My message is to release my father immediately. A Hong Kong that has 1,900 political prisoners for democracy campaigning, is a Hong Kong that has no rule of law, no free press, one that disregards the welfare of its citizens. This is not a Hong Kong that will flourish.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Beh Lih Yi.

“This show trial must end before it is too late,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg on Monday. “The case of Jimmy Lai is not an outlier, it’s a symptom of Hong Kong’s democratic decline. Hong Kong’s treatment of Jimmy Lai — and more broadly of independent media and journalists — shows that this administration is no longer interested in even a semblance of democratic norms.”

Lai, the founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, has spent nearly four years in a maximum-security prison and solitary confinement since December 2020. He has faced multiple postponements to his trial, in which he has been charged with sedition and conspiring to collude with foreign forces.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told parliament in October that the case of Lai, who is a British citizen, was a “priority” and called for his release. Similarly, United Nations experts in January urged Hong Kong authorities to drop all charges against the publisher and free him.

The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Lai is unlawfully and arbitrarily detained in Hong Kong, expressed alarm over his prolonged solitary confinement, and called for immediate remedy. Lai suffers from a long-standing health issue of diabetes.

Lai won a press freedom award from CPJ and the organization continues to advocate for his freedom.

Responding to CPJ’s request for comment, a Hong Kong government spokesperson referred to a November 17 statement in which it said that Lai was “receiving appropriate treatment and care in prison” and that Hong Kong authorities “strongly deplore any form of interference.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te said the island can take advantage of its semiconductor industry not only to promote the development of the economy but also as a key reason for the world to protect the island. 

Commenting on a rumor circulating in the U.S. that Taiwan’s semiconductor industry could be the very reason for China to decide to attack Taiwan, Lai said he would try his best to protect the island’s security. 

“Since TSMC’s operating system is very complex, not any group of people could just take it and continue to operate it,” he said during a televised interview on Sunday. 

TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company.

In the first quarter of 2024, TSMC recorded a market share of 61.7% in the global semiconductor foundry market, while its closest competitor, South Korea’s Samsung, occupied 11%.

Since controlling semiconductor production and distribution can reshape global economics and trade as well as establish a new technological order, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry has become crucial in the strategic competition between the U.S. and China. 

Lai said the purpose of any Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not be about acquiring more territory, but rather about the desire to change the “rules-based world order” in order to achieve hegemony.

Counting on the international community’s support for Taiwan, the Taiwanese President said the Taiwan Strait issue was “not only a Taiwan-China issue, but also an Indo-Pacific issue, and even a world issue”. 

This echoes remarks made last month when Lai urged the world’s democratic countries to come together and act to prevent China from expanding authoritarianism.

“China has even weaponized trade. Using various pressures and threats, it’s politically manipulating not just Taiwan, but also Japan, Korea, Australia, Lithuania, Canada, and other countries,” said Lai last month. 

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Taiwan proposes biggest ever defense spending of US$19.7 billion

China regards Taiwan as a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. The democratic island has been self-governing since it effectively separated from mainland China in 1949 after the Chinese civil war.

Regarding a rumor about his visit to the U.S., Lai said during the Sunday interview that he had no plans to do so, stressing that there were already “very good” channels of communication between Taiwan and the U.S.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This story has been updated to clarify a translation of Lai's remarks.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

China regards Taiwan as a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. The democratic island has been self-governing since it effectively separated from mainland China in 1949 after the Chinese civil war.

Speaking at the annual Ketagalan Forum on Indo-Pacific security in Taipei, Lai cautioned that Taiwan was not Beijing’s “only target”.

“China has even weaponized trade. Using various pressures and threats, it’s politically manipulating not just Taiwan, but also Japan, Korea, Australia, Lithuania, Canada, and other countries,” said Lai. 

“China intends to change the rules-based international order. That is why democratic countries must come together and take concrete action. Only by working together can we inhibit the expansion of authoritarianism,” he added, stressing that China’s “growing authoritarianism” would not stop with Taiwan.

Lai is a member of Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which Beijing accuses of harboring separatist aspirations.  

He came to power after winning a January election despite Beijing’s fierce opposition to his bid. He ran on a platform of promoting peace in the Taiwan Strait while not compromising on claims of Taiwanese sovereignty. 

China has dialed up diplomatic, economic and military pressure on the island since former president Tsai Ing-wen’s administration came to power in 2016, as DPP member Tsai also refused to acknowledge that Taiwan and the mainland belonged to “One China.”

There have been near-daily sightings of Chinese warships around the democratic island as well as fighter jets and drones in the skies around it. 

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Taiwan proposes biggest ever defense spending of US$19.7 billion

But Lai said China’s “military expansionism” was taking place elsewhere, pointing to its joint exercises with Russia in the South China Sea, among other places.

“Such actions are intended to intimidate China’s neighbors and undermine regional peace and stability,” Lai said. “Taiwan will not be intimidated. We will take responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”

The annual Ketagalan Forum is aimed at enhancing cooperation and dialogue among like-minded parties so as to maintain and advance peace, security, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific. 

Former and current senior officials from 11 countries, including former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley attended the gathering, the first of its kind since the Lai administration took office.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

The letter said Neuberger’s role in the Hong Kong ruling, as a non-permanent overseas judge on Hong Kong’s top court, contradicts his previous efforts in advocating free speech and press freedom. Neuberger’s continued involvement would be, in effect, “sponsoring a systematic repression of human rights against peaceful activists and journalists in the city.”

Neuberger, a former head of Britain’s Supreme Court, resigned as chair of an advisory panel to the Media Freedom Coalition on August 14, two days after the conviction of Lai and six pro-democracy campaigners was upheld. Lai has been behind bars since December 2020.

The MFC is a group of 50 countries that pledge to promote press freedom at home and abroad. CPJ is a longstanding member of the MFC’s consultative network of nongovernmental organizations.

Read the joint statement here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“It is impossible to reconcile Lord Neuberger’s judicial authority as part of a system that is politicized and repressive with his role overseeing a panel that advises governments to defend and promote media freedom. The Media Freedom Coalition should immediately review his role as chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom,” said CPJ Advocacy and Communications Director Gypsy Guillen Kaiser.

Lai, the 76-year-old founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, has been behind bars since 2020. On August 12, Hong Kong’s top court rejected his appeal against a conviction for taking part in unauthorized anti-government protests. Lai, whose trial on national security charges was adjourned again last month to late November, faces possible life imprisonment if convicted. He was honored by CPJ and the organization continues to advocate for his immediate, unconditional release.

The MFC is a group of 50 countries that pledge to promote press freedom at home and abroad. CPJ is a longstanding member of the MFC’s consultative network of nongovernmental organizations.

CPJ believes the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, which serves as the secretariat for the MFC’s panel of media freedom experts, should also review Neuberger’s role.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

“There is no journalism without press freedom,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “Hong Kong journalists must be allowed to defend their right to report independently without the fear of reprisal or losing their livelihood. If Hong Kong is serious about reviving its slowing economy, then it must improve the media climate swiftly to shake off a reputation as a place with ever-increasing repression.” 

In recent months, officials and pro-Beijing news outlets have heaped pressure on the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), the city’s largest trade union for journalists.

In June, Hong Kong’s security chief Chris Tang accused the HKJA of lacking legitimacy and siding with demonstrators in 2019, while China’s state-backed Global Times in a July report described the group as “disingenuous and dangerous.”

In July, HKJA’s chair Selina Cheng said she was fired from her role at The Wall Street Journal after she was elected to lead the journalists’ union. She had been the sole candidate for the position amid a growing climate of self-censorship in Hong Kong, once a beacon of press freedom in Asia.

Asked for comment, a WSJ spokesperson told CPJ in an email that the outlet made “personnel changes” but could not comment on specific individuals. The spokesperson added that the WSJ advocates for press freedom in Hong Kong, the city which had been WSJ’s Asia headquarters before they were moved to Singapore in May. 

Another foreign correspondent and a local nonprofit adviser resigned immediately after they were elected to the HKJA’s executive committee in the group’s election following Tang’s criticism of the union.

Between May 2023 and March this year, Tang wrote eight letters to various international news outlets over their editorials or opinion articles about Hong Kong, some of which he labeled “extremely misleading,” “scaremongering,” and “lies.” Four of the eight letters were sent to WSJ.

A Hong Kong government spokesman said the city’s media landscape was “as vibrant as ever” with over 200 media organizations registered with local authorities, and that press freedom and the right to join trade unions were both protected under the law.

“As always, the media can exercise their freedom of the press in accordance with the law. Their freedom of commenting on and criticizing government policies remains uninhibited as long as this is not in violation of the law,” the spokesman told CPJ in an email.

Lengthy trials

The HKJA is the main journalists’ union in Hong Kong and has been advocating for press freedom since it was founded in 1968, but has been battling dwindling membership and funds after Beijing imposed a national security law in Hong Kong in 2020 that saw journalists arrested, jailed, and threatened. 

Among them, the then-HKJA chair Ronson Chan was sentenced to five days in jail in 2023 for obstructing a police officer while reporting.

Hong Kong passed its own homegrown national security law in March, and the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Asia shut its Hong Kong bureau days later over safety concerns for its reporters – joining an exodus of media and journalists who left the city since the 2020 crackdown began.

Journalists who remain point to a rising culture of self-censorship in local newsrooms and an increasing hesitation to criticize the government as Hong Kong loses its shine as a leading global financial hub. The city, once the world’s largest IPO market by value for years, saw proceeds raised from new share listings in the first half of 2024 plunge to a two-decade low.

Journalists also face lengthy delays and repeated postponements in their trials.

This includes the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily’s founder Jimmy Lai, whose trial on national security charges was adjourned again last month to late November. A representative for advocacy group Reporters Without Borders who went to Hong Kong to monitor Lai’s trial was detained and deported upon arrival.

The 76-year-old has been behind bars since 2020. On August 12, Lai lost an appeal against his conviction for taking part in unauthorized anti-government protests.

Patrick Lam and Chung Pui-kuen, former editors of the now-defunct independent news outlet Stand News are expected to hear the verdict in their sedition trial in late August, after a court in April postponed the long-awaited decision. The duo were granted bail in late 2022 after being remanded in custody for nearly a year.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

However, according to the “Constitution of the Republic of China (Taiwan)”, which was publicly announced on 1 January 1947, that narrative is simply not true: the escapees from mainland China who had set up that government in Taiwan, made no claim at that time alleging they controlled and ruled over anything but “Taiwan.” (On the other hand, the Truman Administration got Taiwan’s government appointed to the China-seats at the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly, and this remained in force until 25 October 1971 when mainland China received those seats instead.)

Lai’s speech ignored this historical fact — that the Constitution alleged to pertain only to Taiwan — and stated the opposite, by using the following argument:

We have a nation insofar as we have sovereignty. Right in the first chapter of our Constitution, it says that “The sovereignty of the Republic of China shall reside in the whole body of citizens,” and that “Persons possessing the nationality of the Republic of China shall be citizens of the Republic of China.” These two articles tell us clearly: The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other. All of the people of Taiwan must come together to safeguard our nation; all our political parties ought to oppose annexation and protect sovereignty; and no one should entertain the idea of giving up our national sovereignty in exchange for political power.

The U.S.-empire propaganda vehicle, Britain’s Financial Times, grudgingly headlined on May 21, “China has a point about Taiwan’s new leader: Lai Ching-te’s language on sovereignty has already strayed from the path taken by his more cautious predecessor”, and reported:

China is right to say that Lai is straying from the path of his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen — a leader whom China refused to engage but who managed to keep a delicate peace. And some question the wisdom of taking such a gamble at a time of high tension.

“Lai’s stance is a step back towards more confrontation, undoing much of Tsai’s line,” says Chao Chun-shan, a Taiwan academic who advised Tsai and her three predecessors on China policy. He argues that it puts China’s leader Xi Jinping in a difficult spot. “Xi doesn’t want a showdown now, before the result of the US election is clear.”

Lai ran for president with a pledge to follow Tsai’s China policy and preserve the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. …

But critics say Lai deviated from his promises this week during an inaugural address that used conspicuously different language, while also spelling out some of the facts that most jar Beijing.

They failed to identify what ‘facts’ they were referring to there, but said only:

He cited the ROC constitution’s language that sovereignty resides with the people, who are of ROC nationality. “This tells us clearly: the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other,” he concluded.

While this textual analysis may verge on hair splitting, China policy experts say Lai is in danger of upending the ambiguity that has provided political space to allow Beijing’s territorial claim to sit alongside Taiwan’s de facto independence without sparking conflict.

“He is raising the stakes by stressing a difference in sovereignty between the two countries,” says Tso Chen-dong, a professor at National Taiwan University who has advised the Kuomintang (KMT), the opposition party that embraces the notion of Taiwan being part of a greater Chinese nation. The KMT argues the ROC’s territory, under its constitution, still includes all of China; what divides it from Beijing is not a battle over sovereignty, but a question of jurisdiction.

Even the pro U.S-empire “Course Hero” online site gets the history here right when it says:

In 1949, China ended a long civil war. The victorious communist forces led by Mao Zedong established their capital in Beijing. About two million supporters of the losing side, known as the nationalists, retreated to Taiwan. China was divided between two governments, one on the mainland and one in Taiwan, that each considered itself China’s legitimate ruler. The government on the mainland never gave up its claim on Taiwan, and Taiwan never declared independence.

Lai did in his inaugural speech go even beyond declaring Taiwan’s independence — he declared himself to be the ruler of all of China, including mainland China. He is demanding to reverse the fact that Mao won that civil war and that Chiang lost the civil war.

By contrast, the Financial Times article said “Lai spoke of ‘China’ throughout. He also tackled the controversial issue of sovereignty head-on.”

The tactics by which U.S.-and-allied propaganda-vehicles warp meanings, and warp realities, 180 degrees to their exact opposites, are instructive models for any of the sophistry professions.

Also on May 21, the house-organ of the real China headlined “’Lai-style Taiwan independence’ agenda is a dead-end: Global Times editorial” and opened:

On May 20, Lai Ching-te assumed the role of Taiwan region’s new leader and delivered his inaugural speech. Lai shamelessly stated in his speech that “the Republic of China Taiwan is a sovereign, independent nation” and “the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other,” spewing various “Taiwan independence” fallacies and hostile provocations against the Chinese mainland, once again exposing his stubborn nature as “a worker for Taiwan independence.” This speech can be described as a blatant “Taiwan independence manifesto” and “a declaration of harm to Taiwan.” It is extremely dangerous, and the Taiwan compatriots should be particularly vigilant and united in opposition.

We noticed that in this speech, the term “democracy” was mentioned 31 times, and “peace” 21 times, which precisely exposes the anxiety of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities – they are well aware that what they are doing now is pushing Taiwan into a dangerous pit of war and danger, hence desperately using “democracy” as a fig leaf and talisman to cover themselves. It is clear to all discerning eyes that the so-called “democracy” is nothing but inferior makeup smeared on the face of “Taiwan independence,” unable to conceal its true face of “seeking independence by relying on foreign support and by force.”

In the positioning of cross-Straits relations, Lai boldly defines the two sides of the Straits as “two countries,” listing “Taiwan,” “Republic of China Taiwan,” and “Republic of China” as so-called “national names,” further advancing on the “one China, one Taiwan” path of “Taiwan independence.” This blatant “two states” theory cannot change the fact that Taiwan is only a part of China, nor can it stop the historical trend of reunification of the motherland. Its only effect is to exacerbate the tension in the Taiwan Straits and make Taiwan society pay a high price for the reckless gamble of “Taiwan independence.”

While treating compatriots from the mainland as “foreigners,” Lai in his speech regards Western anti-China forces as “family members,” throughout the speech filled with servility and begging for mercy from Western anti-China forces, which is very shameful. In order to gain the support of Western anti-China forces, he claims that “the world greeting a new Taiwan,” Taiwan is “an important link in the global chain of democracies,” ” Taiwan is strategically positioned in the first island chain,” and so on. These remarks of selling out Taiwan treat the hard-earned social achievements and wealth accumulated by the Taiwan residents for decades as offerings to anti-China forces in the West, reducing Taiwan to a pawn of the US and giving it the appearance of “unworthy descendants.”

Even more dangerous is the subtle manifestation of the arrogant ambition of “seeking independence by force” in his speech. On the one hand, Lai echoes the fallacies of certain Western countries, smearing the mainland as a “threat”; on the other hand, he attempts to indoctrinate the residents in Taiwan into cannon fodder for “Taiwan independence,” openly advocating for raising the citizens’ “defense awareness,” fully exposing the sinister intention of sacrificing innocent people on the island for the selfish desire of “Taiwan independence.” …

The U.S. Government said, and signed with China’s Government, in 1972, the Shanghai Communique, including “The U.S. side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” George W. Bush’s Administration tried unsuccessfully in 2007 to outlaw internationally the phrase “Taiwan is a part of China”; and, so, the Shanghai Communique has remained the official U.S. Government policy to this day. (It hopes to get China to invade Taiwan in order for the U.S. to have a supposed pretext to then ‘defend that independent nation’ ‘against China’s aggression’, by invading China.)

On 19 July 2023, I headlined and documented “Biden Wants to Invade/Conquer China”. It opened:

His plan is to arm Taiwan and entice it to announce its complete independence from China — that Taiwan is no mere province of China but instead an independent country — which announcement would then immediately force China either to invade China or else to accept Taiwan’s becoming a separate and independent country.

Taiwan’s new leader has complied with that, even in his inaugural address. Will Biden go to war against China in the months leading up to the November 5 U.S. elections if China invades Taiwan in order to make clear to Taiwan’s voters that they had been suckered by U.S.-imperial propaganda to choose as their ‘President’ someone who would declare that Taiwan is not only independent of China but ruling over China? How much international backing would the U.S. regime have if it did that?

Taiwan’s billionaires — like Taiwan’s public — are hardly unified about whether Taiwan should concede that it is a Province of China (as it long had been). On 7 August 2023, the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post headlined “Two titans of tech are offering two very different views of Taiwan” and reported that whereas Foxconn’s leader Terry Guo was opposed to the independence movement and thought it wouldn’t win power, “Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) who is often called the godfather of the island’s tech industry, said he didn’t think there was likely to be a war across the Taiwan Strait,” and,

We all hope he is right, but of course he would say that. After all, some Washington politicians have openly declared that at the first sign of conflict, the US military would blow up all of TSMC chip foundries to deny them to the mainland Chinese.

These billionaires are aware that the independence movement threatens them, but do nothing about it. On the other hand, Radio Taiwan International headlined on 16 August 2022, “UMC Founder: KMT needs to give up ‘one China policy’” and opened:

United Microelectronics (UMC) Founder Robert Tsao says the Kuomintang (KMT) party needs to give up its one China policy. He made the remarks in an interview with Radio Taiwan International on Tuesday.  The UMC is the world’s second-largest contract microchip maker.

Tsao recently announced he is donating NT$3 billion (US$100 million) for Taiwan’s defense. As China has been elevating its military threat against Taiwan, he said the people of Taiwan need to be determined to strengthen the nation’s defense abilities to deter China from attacking Taiwan.

He criticized the opposition KMT’s 1992 Consensus policy in which Taiwan and China agree to one China, but each side has its own interpretation. He said that’s because China has never accepted another interpretation.

On 15 January 2024, Australia’s Financial Review bannered “Billionaire urges Taiwan to ‘prepare for the worst’”, and reported:

Billionaire Robert Tsao warns that Taiwan’s 23 million people must be prepared for an eventual war with China, even though the risk of an invasion has eased while Xi Jinping fights economic challenges at home.

The 76-year-old founder of one of Taiwan’s first semiconductor manufacturers has retired from big business to devote his life to what he believes is protecting the island nation’s interests from its aggressive neighbour.

So, not only is he not doing nothing about it, but he is actually encouraging what America’s Government is encouraging (by its donating U.S. weapons to Taiwan): an open public declaration of Taiwan’s independence from China.

The only difference from Lai’s policy is that the policy of Tsao and unofficially of the current U.S. Government is that Taiwan and China are two separate countries and are at war against each other.

That policy, of course, is exactly what the world’s biggest armaments manufacturers, which are headquartered in the United States, would want and lobby for. Whether Tsao is receiving any behind-the-scenes financial benefits from the U.S. for this isn’t yet known.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Lai took office alongside Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim. His Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will be the first party to govern for a third consecutive four-year term since the democratic island held its first direct presidential election in 1996.

Lai and Hsiao won the election on Jan. 13 after taking about 40% of the vote.

During the inauguration ceremony at the Presidential Office, Lai wore a purple tie representing a butterfly native to Taiwan, as well as a yellow pin on his lapel depicting mustard flowers, a common plant across the island. He received two seals symbolizing his presidential power from the parliament speaker: the seal of the Republic of China and the seal of honor. 

Both seals were brought to Taiwan when the Republican government fled to the island in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists.

The swearing-in ceremony was attended by outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen.

Also at the ceremony were former U.S. officials sent by President Joe Biden, lawmakers from countries including Japan, Germany and Canada, and leaders from some of the 12 countries that still maintain formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, including Paraguay President Santiago Pena.

Lai, a four-term legislator and two-term mayor of Tainan, served as premier from 2017 to 2019 under Tsai, and became her deputy in 2020 during her second term. He is the first vice president to become president since  Taiwan began holding direct presidential elections.

The former physician is viewed with suspicion by China’s ruling Communist Party.

Last week, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said Lai, who it called the “Taiwan region’s new leader” had to make a clear choice between peaceful development or confrontation.

China regards Taiwan as a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. Since separating from mainland China in 1949, Taiwan has been self-governing.

Tensions have increased since Tsai’s administration took power in 2016, refusing to acknowledge the “One China” principle. During the January election, China’s actions, including floating balloons through Taiwanese airspace and deploying aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Strait, exacerbated tensions and increased public dismay.

China has convinced several of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies to shift recognition to Beijing in recent years, leaving only 12 countries maintaining official relations with Taiwan.

During his winning speech in January, Lai vowed to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, while keeping the cross-strait status quo.

His domestic challenges loom large too. The DPP has recently faced criticism for becoming the establishment, particularly from the younger generation. Under Tsai’s rule, issues like slow wage growth, high housing costs, and power shortages have become points of contention. 

Despite winning the presidential election, the DPP lost its majority in the Legislature after losing seats in legislative elections.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

The parliamentary resolution condemned Hong Kong’s adoption last month of a new security law, which includes offenses for treason, sabotage, sedition, theft of state secrets, and espionage. The latest legislation expands on a Beijing-imposed 2020 national security law, under which more than 200 people — including Lai — have been arrested, according to the European Parliament.

“The European Parliament’s resolution sends a clear signal to Hong Kong authorities — we are standing shoulder to shoulder with Apple Daily’s Jimmy Lai and pro-democracy activists who have been jailed for speaking out against repression,” said Tom Gibson CPJ’s EU representative. “Hong Kong and Chinese authorities should repeal the Hong Kong security laws and stop harassing and prosecuting journalists.”

In 2023, the European Parliament urged Hong Kong to immediately and unconditionally release Lai, saying that he had been detained on “trumped-up charges.”

Lai faces life imprisonment if convicted of conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the 2020 security law.

A former British colony, Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 with the guarantee of a high degree of autonomy, including freedom of speech, under a “one country, two system” formula.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Taipei-based Aleksandra Bielakowska was held for six hours, searched and questioned after arriving at Hong Kong's International Airport on Wednesday, the group said in a statement.

She had been planning to meet with journalists in the city in the wake of a stringent new security law passed last month under Article 23 of the city's Basic Law, and to monitor a hearing in Lai's ongoing trial, the group said.

"[They asked] what I'm doing here, if it's a work-related visit. I said of course, yes, because I'm [an] NGO worker," Bielakowska said in an interview with RFA Cantonese on Thursday after her return to Taiwan. 

"They searched my belongings, in depth, in detail -- they scanned them twice, checked my shoes, everything, checked how much money I had,” she said, adding that 12 officers and staff were watching her the whole time she was being interviewed and searched.

"The person who questioned me was an immigration officer, plus there was a customs officer, but I couldn't tell if there were any police or plainclothes officers inside of the room, because they hadn't given me any IDs," Bielakowska said. "But there were some people who didn't look like immigration officers."

Eventually, she was given a notice of refusal of entry, with a reason she described as "nebulous." Immigration officers refused to clarify the reason for the decision, even when asked repeatedly, Bielakowska said.

Hong Kong's immigration authorities have a stated policy of not commenting on individual cases. A form handed to Bielakowska said only that she would be “imminently/immediately” removed from the city “within a reasonable time,” and that this justified her detention.

Article 23

The Safeguarding National Security Law, known as “Article 23,” was billed by the government as a way to protect the city from interference and infiltration by "hostile foreign forces" that Beijing blames for waves of mass popular protests in recent years.

But its critics -- and some of the city's residents -- say it will likely have far-reaching effects on human rights and freedom of expression that go further than the 2020 National Security Law under which Lai is being prosecuted, with a far broader reach and tougher penalties.

Jimmy Lai stands accused of "collusion with foreign forces" and faces a potential life sentence, yet the case against him relies heavily on opinion articles published in his now-shuttered flagship Apple Daily newspaper.

Bielakowska, who was allowed into Hong Kong in December 2023 to monitor the start of Lai's trial, said Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, isn't a political organization and that she wasn't doing anything "seditious." 

"We just fight for the rights of journalists and press freedom around the world," she said. "It's our obligation as an NGO to attend the hearings and the trials."

Bielakowska's colleague, Asia-Pacific Bureau Director Cédric Alviani, was allowed to enter Hong Kong, but returned to Taipei the next day "for security reasons," she said.

‘Dire erosion’

RSF said it was "appalled" by the treatment of Bielakowska, who was "simply trying to do her job."

"We have never experienced such blatant efforts by authorities to evade scrutiny of court proceedings in any country, which further highlights the ludicrous nature of the case against Jimmy Lai, and the dire erosion of press freedom and the rule of law in Hong Kong," RSF's Director of Campaigns Rebecca Vincent said in a statement, calling for an immediate explanation from the Hong Kong authorities.

Vincent said the remainder of Lai's national security trial "cannot take place in darkness."

"The world must know what is happening in Hong Kong, which has implications for global press freedom," she said.

The group said it was the first time any of its representatives has been denied entry or questioned at Hong Kong's airport. Its staff had t

raveled there without hindrance in June and December 2023, and were able to meet with journalists and diplomats, as well as monitoring court proceedings without any problems, it said.

RSF said it regularly monitors trials around the world as part of its normal work defending press freedom – from proceedings against journalists in Türkiye, to the ongoing US extradition case against Julian Assange in UK courts.

Plunging rank

Hong Kong ranks 140th out of 180 in RSF’s 2023 World Press Freedom Index, having plummeted from 18th place in the past two decades. The rest of China ranks 179th out of 180 countries and territories.

To Yiu-ming, a former assistant professor at the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong's Baptist University, said the questioning of Bielakowska would send a strong message to foreign journalists and international organizations that follow developments in Hong Kong.

"Most importantly, this will have a negative impact on the way that foreign media and the international community view Hong Kong, particularly the impact of the Article 23 legislation on press freedom in Hong Kong," To told RFA Cantonese in an interview on Thursday.

He said that rather than laying down clear guidelines about who will be denied entry, they are proceeding on a case-by-case basis.

"I think [such cases] will be subject to review by national security police," To said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alice Yam for RFA Cantonese.

Enacted under Article 23 of Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the law punishes offenses ranging from theft of state secrets to sedition. The statement said this could make journalism “even riskier” and intensify censorship in the Asian financial hub.

Once a beacon of press freedom in Asia, Hong Kong has seen a dramatic decline with journalists arrested, jailed, and threatened since Beijing implemented a national security law in the city in 2020. Among those jailed includes Jimmy Lai, founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily.

The new security law, passed by Hong Kong’s legislature on Tuesday, expands on the 2020 Beijing-imposed legislation.

Read the joint statement here:

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Two Vietnamese boys, Truong Bon and Truong Nam, were on the road to My Lai 4 moments before they were shot and killed. Photo: Ron Haeberle (Library of Congress).

Around 11:30 on March 16, 1968, Captain Ernest Medina ordered a ceasefire of US troops under his command in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai 4. After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There was silence, even though the order only applied to American soldiers. There was silence because none of the Viet Cong in the village were firing back. There was silence because the Viet Cong had never fired on US troops that day. There was silence because there were no Viet Cong in the village that day. There was silence because most of the people who were in the village that day were dead.

The gunfire began at 7:50 in the morning when two Huey gunships began strafing the boundaries of the village to provide cover for Medina’s advancing platoons. The Hueys shot anyone who fled the village, under the assumption they must be Viet Cong.

A mere five minutes later, Charlie Company was already on the ground, under the command of Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley. A radio report from Calley’s platoon claimed they’d already killed 15 Viet Cong and had as yet encountered no resistance. They continued killing for the next 210 minutes. They yanked families out of their hooches, lined them up along a ditch, and shot them. They shot people working in the fields. They shot people running for cover. They shot the wounded. They shot people who tried to aid and comfort the wounded. They shot the young and the old. They shot mothers and grandmothers. They shot everyone they saw. What they didn’t shoot was anyone who shot at them. What they didn’t shoot was anyone who had a gun. What they didn’t shoot was any Viet Cong.

By 11:30, when Medina issued his ceasefire order,  US forces had killed as many as 502 people. When they combed through the piles of bodies, and searched the huts, bunkers and tunnels, they found three weapons, all of them US-made. In the entire operation, no US troops were injured by enemy fire. The closest any US troops came to being shot that day was when Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, and his two crewmates, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotti, intervened to keep GIs in the 2^nd Platoon from killing a group of Vietnamese women and children cowering in a bunker. One other US soldier shot himself in the foot to avoid being forced to kill wounded civilians.

+++

It was Hugh Thompson who blew the whistle on the massacre. From his helicopter, he and his crew witnessed the slaughter. They saw what looked to be Vietnamese women and children marched to a ditch and shot. What they didn’t see was any enemy fire. They didn’t see any Viet Cong, at all. Thompson and his crew were so appalled, they landed in the free-fire zone. Almost immediately after touching down, they spotted a Vietnamese woman with a gaping chest wound. Thompson called for a Medivac to help her. Before it arrived he saw a US soldier with Captain’s bars on his helmet approach the woman, kick her with his boot, take a few steps back and riddle her body with bullets from his M-16. “She’s history and I’m sitting here,” Thompson said to Colburn. “My God, he just killed her.” The man with the Captain’s bars and the M-16 was Ernest Medina.

The burning of My Lai 4 as seen from a US Army helicopter. Photo: Library of Congress.

Thompson wasn’t the only one in the air that day with a view of the massacre. So were three of the men who ordered the raid on Pinkville, the name the US Army had given to the Son My villages. The airspace at 1,000 feet was reserved for the helicopter carrying Lt. Colonel Frank Barker, at 1,500 feet the helicopter of Colonel Oran Henderson circled the villages and rice paddies, and above it all was the helicopter carrying Major General Samuel Koster, all of whom would later be complicit in covering-up the mass killing that took place below.

From their airborne observation posts, circling counter-clockwise around the villages, the commanders claim to have seen things that didn’t happen and missed things that did. What the commanders claim they saw was first, a fierce battle between the US Army and the 48th Local Force Battalion of the People’s Liberation Army (Viet Cong); and second, a battle that went according to plan. What the commanders claim they didn’t see were piles of civilian bodies, the deliberate killing of women and children, rapes and gang rapes of women as young as 12, the wounded being kicked, stabbed with bayonets and shot, bodies being mutilated.

If the “battle” of My Lai went according to plan, what was the plan? And who came up with it?

At the operational level, the raid on the four hamlets of Son My–My Lai 4, My Khe 4, Binh Tay, and Binh Dong–was about retaliation for the Tet Offensive a month earlier that blew away the Johnson administration’s propaganda about how the US had turned the tide and winning the war. In that respect, the planners of the My Lai massacre went right to the top: General Westmoreland, General Earl Wheeler (chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, and LBJ, himself.

Both the CIA and Army intelligence identified Pinkville as the staging area for the Viet Cong forces that rose up across Quảng Ngãi province during Tet and they wanted Pinkville to pay the price. Normally, the US Army went out on patrol alongside ARVN troops, but the spooks wanted the raid on Pinkville to be a US-only operation. Why? The official reason was they didn’t trust the ARVN troops not to leak the plans to the Viet Cong. But the real reason may well have been that they didn’t trust to ARVN troops to go along with the nature of the plan itself, which was to “neutralize” the village, kill its inhabitants (who they claimed were all VC), slaughter the livestock, burn the hooches, and poison the wells with rotting animal carcasses.

The neutralization of Pinkville was abetted by the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which had been created a year earlier to target, detain, interrogate, torture and kill suspected Viet Cong. Phoenix’s man on the ground in Quang Ngai province was Nguen Duc Te, who described My Lai 4 as a “combat village of the Communists” and handed over to his handlers at the CIA a so-called “Black List” of several hundred names of villagers, many of them women, suspected of aiding or sympathizing with the Viet Cong. The Phoenix Program operated under a monthly quota system of “neutralized” Viet Cong. Wiping out My Lai would put a big number on the body count board.

Bodies of women and children on the road to My Lai 4. Photo: Ronald Haeberle. (Library of Congress.)

The battle plan for Pinkville wasn’t committed to paper, for no obvious reasons. But the objectives trickled down the chain of command from above. Neutralize the forces behind Tet, wipe out their supplies and local support networks, destroy their bunkers and tunnels, burn their food sources, and make it impossible for those who survived to return.

The intelligence officers behind the massacre–the CIA’s Robert Ramsdell and the Army’s Eugene Koutuc–made it clear to the commanders–Koster, Henderson, Barker, and Medina–that the Pinkville hamlets were VC strongholds and that all of the people in the hamlets at the time of the raids should be considered VC. The civilians, Ramsdell assured the commanders, would have all left the villages for the market by 7 am. Ramsdell said they should expect to encounter around 450 VC in Pinkville. Ramsdell’s estimate for the number of people in Pinkville wasn’t far off. But none of them were members of the 48^th Battalion.

Then again none of that seemed to matter. There would be no distinctions made between VC and civilian. There would be no effort to make a distinction. The villages were considered a stronghold of the VC; therefore, everyone and everything in them was part of the support network of the “enemy.” As Barker told Medina, his troops had permission to “destroy the village, to burn down the houses, to destroy the food crop that belonged to the Viet Cong and to destroy their livestock.”

The night before the raid Medina briefed his anxious troops. Many of the GIs in Charlie Company, including 2^nd Lieutenant Calley, were new to Vietnam. They’d seen little action and the action they had seen was terrifying: mines, booby traps, ambushes. A few days earlier along the Song Diem Diem River, Charlie Company had suffered 28 casualties, including five killed, and never even seen the enemy.

Medina’s speech to his soldiers played on these fears and desires for revenge. He told them they would be outnumbered two-to-one by the forces who’d just killed and wounded their friends. He said the landing zone would be hot and that they should expect heavy casualties from enemy fire. Medina said that they should consider My Lai 4 a free-fire zone. He told the troops everyone in the village should be considered VC.

Calley later said Medina’s orders were clear: “Our job is to go in rapidly and to neutralize everything. To kill everything.” Medina’s radio officer, John Paul, recalled that Medina said only VC and VC sympathizers would be in the village, and “I understood them to be annihilated.” PFC Charles Groover said the message he got from Medina was: “Wipe it out. Burn the village. Every living thing. Just kill it. Exterminate.” Herbert Carter claimed Medina closed his talk by saying, “When we go into My Lai 4, it’s open season. When we leave, nothing will be living.”

The troops landed outside My Lai 4 around 7:50, and despite not taking any enemy fire, almost immediately started shooting at people. One of the first to die was an old man, who despite having obeyed a soldier’s orders to stop running and put his hands up, was machine-gunned. Another elderly man was found curled up in a hut. Sgt. David Mitchell barked out: “Shoot him.” And he was shot. A few minutes later Mitchell threw a grenade into a hut, killing several women and children. Thus it began.

Bodies of an infant and its mother outside of their home. Photo: Ron Haeberle. (Library of Congress)

In the center of the village, 20 women and children were shot in the back, while they were praying at a Buddhist shrine. An old woman was shot in the stomach at close range with a grenade launcher. An old man was shot in the head, as his three grandchildren clung to him. Another old man was thrown into a well, and then blown up with a hand grenade.

Calley’s troops moved through the village, pulling people out of huts. Around 8:00 Medina radioed him complaining about how slow the operation was going. Calley responded: “I’ve got a lot of Vietnamese here.” Medina snapped back: “Well, get rid of them.”

Calley knew what Medina wanted and began to move the group of several dozen women and children toward a ditch, when he spotted one of his privates by the side of the road, clutching a woman by the hair. His pants were at his ankles. The woman was on her knees, an arm around her child. The private, a soldier named Dennis Conti, had his rifle jammed to the head of the young girl, while he demanded oral sex from its mother. Calley testified at his trial that he ran over to Conti, shouting: “Get your damn pants on and get over where you’re supposed to be.”

There would be at least nine women raped that day, several of them children. The sexual assaults didn’t bother Calley. What bothered Calley was that the rapes delayed the implementation of the plan.  And the plan was to kill. To pile up the dead. To accumulate a body count. “If a GI is getting a blow job,” Calley told journalist John Sack, “he isn’t doing his job. He isn’t doing what we’re paying him to do. He isn’t destroying Communism. He isn’t combat-effective.”

Medina radioed again, furious at the delay.

“Why did you disobey my order?”

“I have these bunkers,” Calley tried to explain.

“To hell with the bunkers!” Medina shouted.

“And these people, and they aren’t moving too swiftly….”

“I don’t want all that crap,” Medina ordered. “Now damnit, waste all those goddamn people.”

After the second call with Medina, Calley summoned PFC Paul Meadlo, a farm kid from New Goshen, Indiana, and pointed at the group of about 80 Vietnamese.

“You know what to do with them, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Meadlo replied.

Calley wandered off for a few minutes, then came back, barking at Meadlo.

“So why haven’t you killed them, then?”

“I didn’t know we were supposed to kill the people!” Meadlo protested.

“Let’s kill them,” Calley snapped.

And so they did. A year later Meadlo, now out of the Army after losing his foot to a landmine, told William Wilson, an investigator from the Army’s Inspector Generals’ office: “Calley opened up first and then I joined in. We stood about 10 to 15 feet away from them. Calley started shooting. Then he told me to start shooting. I used more than one clip. I think I used four or five clips.” There were 17 rounds to each clip.

As Calley and Meadlo machine-gunned the Vietnamese in the ditch, another member of the platoon, Michael Turner, watched from a nearby dike. After they stopped shooting, Calley and Meadlo began walking toward Turner when a young girl approached them with her hands held up. “Lieutenant Calley,” Turner testified at Calley’s trial, “raised his rifle and shot her several times and she fell over into a rice paddy.” As the girl bled out, Calley shouted at his men to stop looking and get moving.

An hour or so later, Calley ordered his fire team leader Ronald Grzesik to burn all the remaining buildings in My Lai 4. As he approached the hamlet, Grzesik encountered Meadlo on his knees, crying near the ditch filled with entangled bodies. Grzesik asked Meadlo what was wrong and he said Calley had ordered him to kill these people.

The My Lai killings weren’t indiscriminate. The GIs weren’t killing just anyone. They were killing everyone. They were killing everything: chickens, pigs, dogs, rabbits, cows, water buffalo, grandmothers, and children. Young girls, wounded boys, toddlers, infants. More than half of the 504 people murdered in Pinkville that morning were minors. The GIs were following orders and the orders were: to kill everything. Kill everything that breathes. Kill everything that moves.

Looking for a precedent? See Wounded Knee. Think things have changed? See El Mozote, Fallujah and Mosul.

Most of the GIs on the ground that day stayed silent while they were still in Vietnam about what went down in Pinkville, even the ones–and there were several–who didn’t kill unarmed civilians, fearful that they might be fragged by those who did.

The cover-up of the My Lai murders began within hours. Less than hours. It began as soon as Barker learned that there was a helicopter crew (Ridenhour’s) accusing GIs of killing unarmed, non-resisting civilians. Many suspect Barker radioed Medina and ordered him to issue the sudden ceasefire. The perfunctory investigation that followed was a case of the Army commanders reviewing the operation they ordered, observed and declared a victory. The investigation was so cursory Col. Oran Henderson didn’t even interview Calley. When this was exposed as a cover-up by Ridenhour and Hersh, the Army then investigated its own cover-up. It was a case of the perpetrators investigating their own crimes.

Even so, what happened at My Lai was not a mystery. The only ones kept in the dark were the people who funded it: the American taxpayers. Everyone on the ground that day knew what happened and why. Everyone in the air saw the slaughter below and the lack of enemy fire. Hugh Thompson and his crewmates tried to stop the killing and reported it as a war crime within hours. Ron Haeberle photographed the atrocities as they were committed. An Army reporter, Jay Roberts, watched civilians being sexually assaulted, killed and their bodies mutilated. The local Vietnamese counted the dead and buried the bodies the next day. Within forty-eight hours, the Census Grievance Committee in Quang Ngai City reported that US troops had massacred civilians “both young and old.”

The bodies of Truong Nhi and his 9-year-old son, Truong Cu Ba, on the road to My Lai 4. Photo: Ronald Haeberle. (Library of Congress)

And so matters stood for more than a year, until a former helicopter gunner named Ron Ridenhour, who later became a prize-winning investigative reporter, tracked down rumors of the massacre at Pinkville, interviewed participants, wrote up their accounts, and sent a five-page letter detailing his findings to the Pentagon and Members of Congress. Ridenhour’s report initiated a review of the bloodbath by the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s office. The Pentagon closed ranks and made Rusty Calley–the semi-literate second lieutenant on one of his first patrols–the scapegoat for an atrocity whose ultimate architects went to the very top of the command structure. The brass thought they could control the damage, and keep the court martial quiet. A colonel told Calley everything would be okay if he kept his mouth shut, and stayed silent: “There’s no need to publicize this thing. The US Army won’t publicize it, if you won’t.”  But it was Calley whose name would be attached forever to My Lai. Calley who would be tried for the pre-meditated murder of what the indictment called “111 Oriental human beings,” Calley who would be convicted, sentenced to life in prison and, after spending only four months in the stockade, have his sentence commuted by Richard Nixon, who called Calley “a good soldier” who was “getting a bum rap” for an “isolated incident.”

Then in November 1969 the story of My Lai, and its cover-up, slowly began to crack open publicly: first in a front-page story in the Alabama Journal by Wayne Greenshaw disclosing the Army’s investigation into Calley’s actions. Then a day later in Seymour Hersh’s more detailed account, including an interview with Calley, that was distributed to papers across the country by David Obst’s Dispatch News Service.

Nixon became obsessed with My Lai. Not the massacre, but the exposure of the mass killings, which he thought, rightly, would deflate what little support remained for the war and doom his “peace” through a bombing plan. He was obsessed with the “talkers” and ordered John Ehrlichman to put together a “My Lai Task Force” (Agnew, Kissinger, Herb Klein, Patrick Buchanan and Lyn Nofzinger) to silence and discredit Ridenhour (“this Goddamn what’s his name!”) Haeberle (“His parents were Cleveland peaceniks”) and Hersh (“a no-good son of a bitch.”) Negative stories were planted in the press and Ridenhour and Hersh were tailed by Ehrlichman’s Watergate break-in gang of “plumbers.” Nixon said he wanted Hugh Thompson “discredited,” even if they had to do some “dirty tricks” at “not too high a level.”  Nixon wanted the Task Force to undermine any military trials by concealing or destroying key evidence, leaking forged documents and tarring the potential witnesses as biased or out for money. “It’s the dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it,” Nixon insisted, perhaps unaware that the people he suspected of being New York Jews, Ridenhour and Hersh, were from Oakland and Chicago, respectively.

+++

When Medina finally called the ceasefire, he sat down with his platoon near a pile of bodies of women and children, and began to eat lunch in a cloud of smoke from a nearby hooch where the inhabitants had been blown up by a grenade and the thatch roof set on fire with a Zippo lighter. The smoke stank of burning flesh.

There was silence as they ate. Then a burst of gunfire ripped the quiet.

There had been a boy standing along the trail to the village. A child, five or six years old. He had been shot and was bleeding from a wound in his leg. He wasn’t crying. He was just standing there, staring blankly as the GIs streamed past him. The boy was silently looking at them as if he were dazed or in shock. The photographer Ron Haeberle came upon him and started to take the boy’s photo.

A group of Vietnamese children and women, one of whom had just been sexually assaulted, moments before they were murdered. Photo: Ron Haeberle (Library of Congress).

Haeberle himself was in a daze. A few minutes earlier he had taken what would become his most famous photograph, an image that would come to symbolize the horrors of My Lai. It depicted seven Vietnamese women and children, terror on their faces, clustered together, holding each other, outside of a hut. One of the women had just been raped and she was clutching at her torn shirt. Shortly after he snapped the shutter on his camera, two soldiers opened fire. The women collapsed to the ground. When Haeberle looked up, only a child was still standing. Then they shot him. Right in front of a photographer. “It’s just that they didn’t know what they were supposed to do,” said Haeberle’s sidekick Jay Roberts, the Army reporter. “Killing them seemed like a good idea. So they did it.” Michael Terry, the conscience-stricken Mormon interviewed by Ridenhour, put it more starkly: “It was a Nazi-type thing.”

As Haeberle focused his camera lens on the wounded, silent young boy now in front of him, he heard another GI coming along the trail. The soldier stopped, knelt next to the trembling kid, took his M-16 off his shoulder, aimed and shot him three times.  The last child of My Lai. Then he stood, flashed Haeberle “the coldest, hardest look” and continued down the path, into the silence.

Sources

My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent Into Darkness
Howard Jones
Oxford (2017)

Four Hours in My Lai
Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim
Penguin (1992)

My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath
Seymour Hersh
Random House (1970)

Cover-Up: the Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4
Seymour Hersh
Random House (1972)

The Peers Inquiry of the Massacre at My Lai
Robert Lester, Ed.
University Publishers (1997)

Medina
Mary McCarthy
Harcourt-Brace-Jovanovich (1972)

The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War
Marshall Poe
Cambria Press (2023)

Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story
John Sack
Viking (1971)

After Tet: The Bloodiest Year of the War
Ronald H. Spector
Free Press (1993)

The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars
John Tirman
Oxford (2011)

Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Nick Turse
Henry Holt (2013)

“My Lai,”
Michael Uhl
Mekong Review,
Feb-Apr. 2018. Vol.3, No. 2.

The Phoenix Program
Douglas Valentine
William Morrow (1990)

This first appeared in the March 19, 2023 edition of CounterPunch +.

The post The Last Child of My Lai appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Jill Edwards, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, said Wednesday that she had written to the authorities in China calling for an investigation before evidence is admitted in court.

“I am deeply concerned that evidence that is expected to be presented against Jimmy Lai imminently, may have been obtained as a result of torture or other unlawful treatment,” Edwards said in a statement.

“An investigation into these allegations must be conducted immediately, before any evidence is admitted into these present proceedings.”

Edwards alleged that a key prosecution witness was tortured during his detention in a prison in China between 2020 and 2021, when the evidence was obtained.

Torture and other coercive techniques, including the use of fixed restraint chairs, to force confessions have been well-documented in China, she noted.

“The absolute prohibition of reliance on evidence obtained as a result of torture or other ill-treatment in any proceedings is a fundamental protection,” she said. 

“I have urged the Chinese government to undertake an investigation into these claims. I also reminded China of its duty to investigate all allegations of torture, prosecute or extradite suspects, punish those responsible and provide remedies to the victims.”

China has ratified the U.N.’s Convention against Torture.

Special rapporteurs appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council are unpaid experts who operate independently and do not represent the official voice of the U.N.

Edwards’ statement came after lawyers acting for Lai appealed to the U.N to investigate, saying a key witness for the prosecution was tortured before “confessing” to conspiring with Lai.

Lai's international legal team in London filed the appeal with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment over the treatment of Andy Li, among a group of 12 Hong Kong protesters captured by China’s Coast Guard as they tried to flee to democratic Taiwan by speedboat.

“Credible evidence is emerging that Andy Li was tortured when in prison in China before confessing to allegedly conspiring with Jimmy Lai to collude with foreign entities to endanger national security,” Lai’s lawyers said in a statement on Jan. 4.

“Andy Li’s evidence against Jimmy Lai – which it is suspected was coerced and obtained after he endured torture, inhuman and degrading treatment in Chinese detention, with the knowledge of the Hong Kong authorities – is central to the prosecution’s case,” it said at that time.

Lai, 76, founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily, a Chinese-language tabloid renowned for its pro-democracy views and criticism of Beijing, pleaded not guilty on Jan. 2 to “sedition” and “collusion” under the sweeping national security law imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong in 2020.

His trial, which began in late 2023 following over 1,100 days in jail, has faced widespread international condemnation, though Beijing has dismissed such criticisms as external interference. The British national is being tried without a jury and was not permitted to choose his preferred lawyer. 

Edited by Elaine Chan and Mike Firn

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

Taiwanese voters elected Vice President Lai Ching-te from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, as their new president on Saturday, signaling a continuation of the island’s policies aimed at preserving its de facto independence, despite increasing tensions with China.

Nonetheless, the results were split between three main candidates, and Lai and his party will face a challenging journey in managing the escalating pressure from Beijing.

As of 09:10 p.m. local time, with the vote still being tallied, Lai had received 5.57 million votes, or 40.1%, while Lai’s main opposition Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang, or KMT, had received about 4.66 million votes, or 33.5%. Ko Wen-je of Taiwan’s People’s Party, or TPP, considered an “alternative option,” garnered 3.68 million votes, or 26.5%.

In a press conference on Saturday night after his win, Lai thanked the Taiwanese people for writing a new chapter in democracy and likened it as the “first victory for the global community of democracy.”

“We have shown the world how much we cherish our democracy; this is our unwavering commitment,” said Lai, thanking his opponents for demonstrating the spirit of democracy.

Hou, Beijing’s preferred candidate, conceded the election by saying he respects the final choice that the Taiwanese people made.

“I would not only like to extend my congratulations to Lai Ching-te and Hsiao Bi-khim [Lai’s running mate] for being elected, but also hope that they will live up to Taiwanese people’s expectations of a ruling party,” said Hou, calling for all parties to unite, and urged the DPP to build a new and efficient government that Taiwan could trust.

Separately, Ko noted that despite the defeat, the election has turned the TPP into a significant force, highlighting a positive outcome from the setback.

“Every vote represented an endorsement of us. This is also the first time in Taiwan, amid the blue-green [KMT-DPP] structure, that a three-party situation has emerged. It shows that Taiwan needs another voice.” 

Voters from the island of 24 million people journeyed back to their hometowns to participate in the presidential and legislative elections on Saturday. They cast their votes in a variety of locations, including schools, temples, parking lots and community centers. 

Taiwanese also voted for representatives in the 113-seat legislature. As of 09:10 p.m. local time none of the seats had been officially declared but Lai acknowledged that the DPP had failed to hold onto a majority.

Viewed with suspicion

Lai, a former physician and mayor of Tainan, is viewed with suspicion by China’s ruling Communist Party.

China regards Taiwan as a renegade province that should be politically reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. The democratic island of Taiwan has been self-governing since it effectively separated from mainland China in 1949 after the Chinese civil war.

China has dialed up diplomatic and economic pressure on the island since the incumbent Tsai Ing-wen’s administration first came to power in 2016, as Tsai and her party refuse to acknowledge that Taiwan and the mainland belong to “One China.”

During the election period, China’s actions, such as floating balloons through Taiwan airspace and deploying aircraft carriers in the critical Taiwan Strait, heightened its unpopularity in Taiwan. These military maneuvers, viewed by Taipei as intimidation tactics, exacerbated the already tense relationship.

China also has successfully swayed several of Taipei’s diplomatic allies to shift their recognition to Beijing. As a result, only 13 countries currently maintain official diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

Dialogue, not confrontation

Lai’s election triumph doesn’t solve the issue of Beijing’s aggression and is more likely to heighten tensions. Nevertheless, Lai expressed confidence that despite dwindling official recognition on the world stage, support for Taiwan’s de facto independence remains robust.

During his Saturday winning speech, Lai said that he has the important responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, while keeping the cross-strait status quo.

“We will use changes to replace obstructionism, dialogues to replace confrontations,” said Lai, adding Taiwan “will stand on the side of democracy” between democracy and authoritarianism.

“Taiwanese people resisted the efforts from external influence to this election and trusted only that they themselves had the right to choose their leader,” he said. 

In response to the election result, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said on Saturday the victory of Lai would not change the basic landscape of cross strait relations.

In a statement carried on China's state Xinhua news agency, Chen Binhua, a spokesperson for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, said the results showed the DPP cannot represent mainstream public opinion on the island.

George Ren, a political analyst, believes that Lai’s win would not deal the Chinese Communist Party, or CPP, an unknown card, as a Ko victory could.

“I’d be more concerned if the DPP was able to warrant a majority win in the legislature. If there was one, it would be easier for Lai to implement his policy, which means the CCP may have some countermeasures,” Ren said.

He also pointed out that the bigger worry is implementing domestic policies in the legislature that address issues critical to the voting public such as policies to improve infrastructure and housing construction. 

Economic worries

The DPP has recently faced criticism for becoming the establishment, particularly from the younger generation. Under Tsai’s rule, issues like slow wage growth, high housing costs, and power shortages have become points of contention. 

In November, Taiwan’s statistics bureau reported a reduction in the island’s 2023 GDP growth forecast to just 1.42%, the lowest since the 2008 global financial crisis.

Furthermore, Taiwan is grappling with soaring housing prices, ranked among the highest globally, while its wage levels were among the lowest compared to other developed economies, according to March figures.

Addressing these challenges will be a primary focus for Lai and the DPP moving forward.

The president-elect said he will “prioritize issues that have consensus with other political parties and would embrace them as long as they benefit the people.” 

Edited by Mike Firn and Malcolm Foster.

Updated to add percentages of votes won, and add a statement from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang and Elaine Chan for RFA.

Lai, a British citizen and founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, has been behind bars since December 2020 and is due to be tried on charges of foreign collusion under the national security law – imposed by Beijing three years ago – that has been used to stifle free speech and crush dissent in the city, once a bastion of press freedom in Asia.

“The trial is a travesty of justice. It may be Jimmy Lai who is in the dock, but it is press freedom and the rule of law that are on trial in Hong Kong,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, on Friday. “The government is pulling out all the stops to keep Lai behind bars. This is a dark stain on Hong Kong’s rule of law and is doing a disservice to the government’s efforts to restore investor confidence.”

The start of the trial has been postponed multiple times, and it will be held without a jury. The Hong Kong government has prevented Lai’s choice of counsel, British lawyer Timothy Owen, from representing him and a court in May upheld the decision.

Lai is currently serving a prison sentence of five years and nine months on fraud charges related to a lease dispute.

Lai received CPJ’s Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award in 2021 in recognition of his extraordinary and sustained commitment to press freedom.

China ranked as the world’s second-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s 2022 prison census, which documented those imprisoned on December 1, 2022, with at least 43 journalists behind bars.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

"Foreign Secretary @David_Cameron met with Sebastien Lai in London today to listen to his concerns for his father, Jimmy Lai, detained in Hong Kong," the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office said via its account on X, formerly Twitter.

"The UK opposes the National Security Law and will continue to stand by Jimmy Lai and the people of HK," it said, in a statement that fell short of what Lai and London-based campaigners had been hoping for.

Lai, who founded the now-shuttered pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, faces two counts of "conspiracy to collude with foreign forces" and one count of "collusion with foreign forces" under a draconian security law imposed by Beijing in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, along with a charge relating to "seditious" publications. 

Speaking to Radio Free Asia after the meeting with Cameron, Sebastien Lai called on the British government to send a more direct message to the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities.

"I hope the British government will ask the Hong Kong government to release my father immediately," he said. "The U.S. government has called for my father's release, the European Parliament has also done so, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur has also made an appeal."

"This is a very black-and-white case, as he has sacrificed everything for Hong Kong and freedom," he said. "The British government must stand with him."

Sebastien Lai said he worries about his father's mental and physical health.

"My father is 76 years old," he said. "He just sits in jail every day and doesn't know when he will be released."

"You can imagine how sad and worried we are," he said.

‘Unfair’ law

The meeting followed a letter from Hong Kong Watch to Cameron and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak marking Lai's 76th birthday, urging them both to meet with his son.

"Hong Kong Watch thanks the Foreign Secretary for agreeing to meet with Sebastien Lai this week as he visits the UK ahead of his father’s expected national security trial on Dec. 18, 2023. We hope the Prime Minister will do the same," the group said in a statement on its website.

To Yiu-ming, a former assistant professor at the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University, said the repeated delays and Lai's lengthy pretrial incarceration violate a key principle of justice in a common law system.

"They violate the principle of the presumption of innocence, which is very frustrating, not just for Mr. Lai." To said. 

"It shows the overall lack of respect for the presumption of innocence under the National Security Law, which has managed to change the entire legal system," he said.

Caoilfhionn Gallagher, who heads the Lais' international legal team, said the charges against Jimmy Lai are being brought under an "unfair" law.

"Jimmy Lai has already spent three years in prison for his journalism and his peaceful pro-democracy activities," she said in a statement on the website of Doughty Street Chambers. "He is now being prosecuted for illegitimate reasons, under an unfair law, and in a broken legal system." 

"He needs the UK Government to do all they can to secure his freedom."

Hong Kong Watch patron Lord Alton of Liverpool agreed.

"The key question now is whether [Cameron] finally joins the U.S. and Europe’s Parliament in calling for Jimmy Lai’s immediate and unconditional release," he told Radio Free Asia. 

"The U.K. Government needs to demonstrate that it stands up for its own citizens and puts as much effort into fighting their corner as it does trying to drum up business deals with the [Chinese Communist Party] regime."

The Chinese Embassy in the United Kingdom said the British government was "confusing right and wrong and interfering with the rule of law in Hong Kong" in a Sunday statement on Lai's case and the National Security Law.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Amelia Loi for RFA Mandarin, Alice Yam for RFA Cantonese.

Ulate had taken over the case in August 2022 from two other lawyers, Romeo Montoya García and Mario Castañeda, after the prosecutor in Zamora’s case announced that they were under investigation. After less than three months of representing Zamora, Ulate left Guatemala for a trip to Honduras. The attacks, he said, stopped abruptly.

Looking back, Ulate believes the harassment was part of a clear pattern. Other lawyers who would go on to represent Zamora — there were 10 in total by the time of the journalist’s June conviction on money laundering charges widely considered to be retaliation for his work — were harassed, investigated, or even jailed. 

“We knew that the system was against us, and that everything we, the legal team, did around the case was being closely scrutinized,” Ulate told CPJ. 

Zamora’s experience retaining legal counsel, while extreme, is hardly unique. CPJ has identified lawyers of journalists under threat in Iran, China, Belarus, Turkey, and Egypt, countries that are among the world’s worst jailers of journalists. To be sure, lawyers are not just targeted for representing journalists. “Globally lawyers are increasingly criminalized or disciplined for taking on sensitive cases or speaking publicly on rule of law, human rights, and good governance issues,” said Ginna Anderson, the associate director of the American Bar Association, which monitors global conditions for legal professionals. 

But lawyers and human rights advocates told CPJ that when a lawyer is harassed for representing a journalist, the threats can have chilling effects on the free flow of information. Inevitably, journalists unable to defend themselves against retaliatory charges are more likely to be jailed – leaving citizens less likely to be informed of matters of public interest.  

A barometer of civil liberties 

Attacks on the legal profession – like attacks on journalists – can be a barometer of civil liberties in a country, legal experts told CPJ. Hong Kong, once viewed as a safe harbor for independent journalists, is one such example. The territory has seen multiple members of the press prosecuted under Beijing’s 2020 national security law, including media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, who faces life imprisonment. Lai, a British citizen, is represented by both U.K. and Hong Kong legal teams, which work independently of each other, and both have faced pressure.  

Caoilfhionn Gallagher, the head of the U.K. team, has spoken openly on X, formerly Twitter,  about attacks on Lai’s U.K.-based lawyers, from smears in the Chinese state press to formal statements by Hong Kong authorities. Gallagher has faced death threats, attempts to access her bank and email accounts, and efforts to impersonate her online. “That stuff is quite draining and attritional and designed to eat into your time. They want to make it too much hassle to continue the case,” Gallagher told the Irish Times.

The Hong Kong legal team representing Lai — who has been convicted of fraud and is on trial for foreign collusion — has also appeared to have come under pressure from authorities. After Lai’s U.K. lawyers angered Beijing by discussing Lai’s case with a British minister, the Hong Kong legal team issued a statement distancing itself from the U.K. lawyers.   

Any appearance of working with foreigners could compromise not only Lai’s case but also the standing of his lawyers, said Doreen Weisenhaus, a media law expert at Northwestern University who previously taught at the University of Hong Kong.  

“They have to appreciate the potential harm that they could face moving forward — that they could become targeted — as they try to vigorously represent Jimmy Lai,” she told CPJ. 

CPJ reached out to Robertsons, the Hong Kong legal firm representing Lai, via the firm’s online portal and did not receive a reply.

Moves to isolate and intimidate lawyers working on Lai’s case are part of a larger crackdown over the last decade, including China’s 2015 roundup of 300 lawyers and civil society members. “In many ways, China institutionalized wholesale campaigns of going after journalists, activists, and now lawyers,” said Weisenhaus.  

Defending journalists who cover protests 

In Iran – another country where the judiciary operates largely at the government’s behest –   lawyers representing journalists have been targeted in the wake of the 2022 nationwide protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in morality police custody. Those protests saw the arrests of thousands of demonstrators and dozens of journalists, including Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, who helped break the story of Amini’s hospitalization. The two reporters are accused of spying for the United States; the two remain in custody while awaiting the verdict in their closed-door trials.  

Hamedi and Mohammadi’s lawyer, Mohammed Ali Kamfiroozi, who also represented human rights defenders, received warnings to dissuade him from continuing his work: phone calls from unlisted numbers, threats in the mail, ominous messages to his family, and an official letter from authorities telling him to stop his work, according to CPJ’s sources inside the country. Nevertheless, Kamfiroozi continued his work, publishing regular updates about his clients’ cases on X until he, too, was arrested on December 15, 2022 while inquiring at a courthouse about a client.

Kamfiroozi’s last post on X before his arrest lamented the state of Iran’s judiciary: “This level of disregard for explicit and obvious legal standards is regrettable.” 

Kamfiroozi was released from Fashafouyeh prison after 25 days in detention and has not returned to his work as a lawyer, according to CPJ’s sources inside the country. A new legal team has since taken over the journalists’ cases. Since then, the crackdown on the legal profession has continued, with lawyers being summoned by the judiciary to sign a form stating they will not publicly release information about clients facing national security charges – a common accusation facing journalists. Lawyers who fail to sign can be disbarred and arrested at the discretion of local judges. 

Belarusian lawyers have also been muzzled in the wake of nationwide protests. After widespread demonstrations following the disputed August 2020 presidential election — during which dozens of journalists were arrested — Belarusian lawyers were forced to sign nondisclosure agreements preventing them from speaking publicly about many criminal cases. At least 56 lawyers representing human rights defenders or opposition leaders were disbarred or had their licenses revoked in the two years after the protests, and some were jailed, according to the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Initiative, the American Bar Association, and the group Lawyers for Lawyers. 

Belarusian lawyer Siarhej Zikratski, whose clients included the now-shuttered independent news outlet Tut.by, imprisoned Belsat TV journalist Katsiaryna Andreyeva, and program director of Press Club Belarus Alla Sharko, was required to undergo a recertification exam which ultimately resulted in authorities revoking his license. He fled the country in May 2021 after he was disbarred and amid ongoing pressure from the government on his colleagues.

In the months after he left, Tut.by was banned in Belarus and Andreyeva, who was nearing the end of a two-year imprisonment, was sentenced to another eight years on retaliatory charges. (Sharko was released in August 2021 after serving eight months.) 

“They took away my beloved profession and my business,” Zikratski wrote in a Facebook post announcing his emigration to Vilnius, Lithuania. “I will continue to do everything I can to change the situation in Belarus. Unfortunately, I cannot do that from Minsk.”

Lawyers in exile can lose their livelihoods 

While exile is not an uncommon choice to escape state harassment, it comes at a cost: lawyers are unable to continue their work in their home countries. 

“The bulk of the harassment against media and human rights lawyers, including criminal defense lawyers who represent journalists and other human rights defenders [occurs] in-country,” said Anderson of the ABA. “Increasingly this is forcing lawyers into exile where they face enormous challenges continuing to practice or participate in media rights advocacy.” 

This was the case for Ethiopian human rights lawyer Tadele Gebremedhin, who faced intense harassment from local authorities after he began defending reporters covering the country’s civil conflict in the Tigray region that began in November 2020.   

Gebremedhin represented freelance journalists Amir Aman Kiyaro and Thomas Engida, Ethio Forum journalists Abebe Bayu and Yayesew Shimelis, Awramba Times managing editor Dawit Kebede, and at least a dozen others, including the staff of the independent now-defunct broadcaster Awlo Media Center, whose charges are related to their reporting on the Tigray region. 

Gebremedhin told CPJ that the harassment started in May 2021 with thinly veiled threats from government officials and anonymous calls telling him not to represent journalists because members of the media are terrorists. He strongly suspected that he was under physical and digital surveillance, and his bank account was blocked.  In November 2021, he was detained by authorities and held for 66 days without charge before being released. 

“That was my payment for working with the journalists,” Gebremedhin said. 

He fled to the United States shortly after his release from police custody, and now works as a researcher at the University of Minnesota Law School Human Rights Center. Just a few of the dozens of reporters he defended are still working in journalism. While they are not behind bars, the damage done to civil society remains, Gebremedhin said. 

Lawyers arrested alongside journalists

Sometimes, lawyers are arrested alongside the journalists they represent. In the runup to Turkey’s May 2023 presidential elections, Turkish lawyer Resul Temur was taken into government custody in Diyarbakır province for his alleged ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkish authorities consider a terrorist organization, along with several Kurdish journalists who were also his clients. 

Authorities took his work phone, computer, and all of his electronic devices, including his 9-year old daughter’s tablet, and all of the paper case files he had in his office, Temur told CPJ. He was released pending investigation, and fears he’ll soon be charged. 

“Lawyers like me who are not deterred by judicial harassment will continue to be the targets of Turkish authorities,” he said.

In Egypt, a country where numerous human rights defenders have been locked up, Mohamed el-Baker, the lawyer of prominent blogger and activist Alaa Abdelfattah, was arrested as he accompanied Abdelfattah to police questioning in September 2019. Authorities charged both with spreading false news and supporting a banned group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

After serving nearly four years of his sentence and amid growing international pressure, el-Baker was granted a presidential pardon in July. However, it remains unclear if the lawyer will be allowed to return to work. Many of his clients, Abdelfattah among them, remain in prison. 

Retaliation leads to censorship

The damage, from Egypt to Turkey to Guatemala and beyond, is great. When lawyers for reporters fear retaliation as much as the journalists do, it creates an environment of censorship that harms citizens’ ability to stay informed about what is happening in their countries.

“When journalists can’t have access to lawyers, they’re kind of left on their own,” Weisenhaus told CPJ. “I think we’ll still see courageous journalists who will continue to write about what they perceive as the wrongs in their country and their society. But those numbers could dwindle if they’re constantly being prosecuted and convicted.”

Additional research contributed by Dánae Vílchez, Özgür Öğret, and CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program staff.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Katherine Jacobsen.

On Tuesday, 75-year-old Lai will have been behind bars in Hong Kong for 1,000 days. The release of Lai, who is facing charges that could lead to life imprisonment, is a fundamental step to safeguard press freedom in Hong Kong, the groups said.

Read the full letter below.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

1. Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

2. Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

— Sunzi, “Chapter 3: Attack by Stratagem,” The Art of War

Chinese wisdom from 6th century BCE explains why China, barring the crossing of a redline by separatists in Taiwan, has no inclination to attack. Why would China want to destroy a part of itself? Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the country has navigated bumps in the road while pursuing a path of supreme excellence.

In the late 1940s, in the latter stages of the Chinese civil war, after the Communists had defeated the Guomindang (KMT) on the mainland, the KMT escaped across the Taiwan Strait. Because the US 7th fleet was patrolling the waters and protecting the KMT, and because the Communists lacked a formidable navy, an aquatic pursuit was ruled out for the Communists.

The US interjecting itself into a far flung conflict was not unusual. Author William Blum wrote about this, remarking about American untrustworthiness toward erstwhile allies in his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (pdf available online).

The communists in China had worked closely with the American military during the war, providing important intelligence about the Japanese occupiers, rescuing and caring for downed US airmen.¹ But no matter. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek [of the KMT] would be Washington’s man. (p 20)

Fervent anti-communism in Washington and Langley, saw the CIA aiding the KMT against the mainland. But the US would have to address One China:

The Generalissimo, his cohorts and soldiers fled to the offshore island of Taiwan (Formosa). They had prepared their entry two years earlier by terrorizing the islanders into submission—a massacre which took the lives of as many as 28,000 people.¹⁵ Prior to the Nationalists’ escape to the island, the US government entertained no doubts that Taiwan was a part of China. Afterward, uncertainty began to creep into the minds of Washington officials. The crisis was resolved in a remarkably simple manner: the US agreed with Chiang that the proper way to view the situation was not that Taiwan belonged to China, but that Taiwan was China. And so it was called. (p 22)

Thus it was that the anti-Communist US had a dog in this fight, and that dog was (and still is) Taiwan. The US backed Jiang Jieshi (aka Chiang Kai-shek), and the CIA trained, organized, and conducted military incursions across the Taiwan Strait against the mainland. (p 23)

Manifestly, the big fish for the imperialist hegemon to try and fry is the One-China policy, to which the US is a signatory, which acknowledges there being only one China and that Taiwan is a province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Such is the fervor of the diminishing imperial US that it unabashedly is in violation of an agreement it signed by de facto treating Taiwan as a separate country by selling arms to it and sending political representatives and military personnel without seeking the approval of the government in Beijing. How would the US feel if China sent political representatives to meet with the Hawaiian sovereignty movement? If China sold or gave arms to this movement? After all, the Apology Resolution — passed in 1993 by a Joint Resolution of the US Congress 100 years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy — “acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands.”

Canadian and American media reported on 4 June “that a Chinese warship came within 150 yards of colliding with an American destroyer in the Taiwan Strait during a joint U.S.-Canada exercise.” Of note: the US media report mentions that the US-Canadian warships were “allegedly in international waters.” If not allegedly in international waters, then presumably they were in Chinese waters.

Of concern to US militarists is the realization that China’s navy is larger than the US navy and the gap is widening. More foreboding for any potential attacker are China’s hypersonic anti-ship missiles.

Even if the warships were enforcing freedom of navigation (FON), an analysis, published on 15 May by the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) at Peking University, questions what exactly FON means for the Taiwan Strait.

SCSPI argues that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea “ultimately aims to maintain a balance between the interests of maritime powers and coastal states. There has never been an unrestricted right of navigation in the Convention or in general international law.”

Although foreign ships enjoy the right of innocent passage in the territorial sea, Article 25 of the Convention provides that the coastal state may take the necessary steps to prevent passage which is not innocent. That is, the coastal States have the right to decide whether the passage of a foreign ship is consistent with the “right of innocent passage” under Article 19. The Convention also provides that the coastal State may adopt domestic law on innocent passage and may require a foreign warship that disregards any request for compliance with domestic law to leave the territorial sea immediately…. U.S. warships may exercise the right of innocent passage, but at the same time must respect the coastal state’s determination of whether the passage is innocent and comply with the laws and regulations of the coastal State concerning passage through the territorial sea.

If China was a militaristic country, then people ought to consider when would be the most opportunistic time for China to militarily reincorporate Taiwan back into the motherland. How about when the US is on the verge of an embarrassing defeat in Ukraine, having sunk almost $115 billion into losing a proxy war and having depleted much of its weapons stores, having its missile defense batteries destroyed, HIMARS defended against, anti-tank Javelins brushed aside, Bradley tanks rendered nugatory, etc?

What conclusion then can one draw from the fact that militarily powerful China has not launched any attack against Taiwan during this period of time?

The US seeks to keep Taiwan separate from the mainland, as a reincorporated Taiwan would open strategic access to the Pacific for the PRC. Thus, president Joe Biden has doubled down on his pledge to intervene in any fighting between China and its province Taiwan. Two problems with Biden’s tough-guy posturing: 1) words are cheap; and 2) aside from making clear its redlines, the talk of China attacking its province of Taiwan is all from the US side. It is clearly not in the mainland’s interest to kill its own citizens or cause damage to the island. China has pledged itself to peace.

I asked Wei Ling Chua, the author of Democracy: What the West can learn from China and Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence, his analysis of what US interventions hold for the One-China policy.

*****

Kim Petersen: Taiwan became part of the Chinese Qing dynasty in 1683. That is almost a century before European natives destroyed several Indigenous nations and dispossessed them of their land, resources, culture, language — i.e., genocide — and established the ill-begotten United States of America in 1776.

Yet the US encourages the separatist movement in Taiwan led by the Democratic Progressive Party. Importantly, the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan) also claims that there is one China and that the mainland, Tibet, and, until 2002, even outer Mongolia constituted the ROC.

Why is Taiwan outside the direct control of the PRC? This is because despite being aided by the US, Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang (KMT) were defeated by the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong. The US 7th Fleet, however, protected the escape of the KMT to Taiwan, as China at that time had a minuscule navy. If not for that, the Communists might well have brought Taiwan fully back into the motherland’s fold long ago.

The US and western-aligned media serially warn that the PRC is poised to invade Taiwan. The US says it stands poised to blow up Taiwan’s critical chip producer TSMC in case of a Chinese attack. Why would the PRC militarily attack a valuable part of the motherland, especially given that the vast majority of the planet’s 190 or so countries recognize the one-China policy whereby Taiwan is a province of the PRC?

Wei Ling Chua: To explain clearly a series of essential facts (including not widely noticed facts) about the relations between Taiwan Province, China, and the USA, I need to breakdown the information as follows:

Ignorance of Taiwan Youth about their own Constitution

Recently, a number of street interviews were conducted in Taiwan province asking young Taiwanese “Do you know the relationship between the Republic of China and Taiwan?”, the reply shocked the interviewer as the majority of the youth in Taiwan didn’t even know their political entity’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC), and that the ROC’s constitution regards the mainland of China and Taiwan being parts of the ROC sovereign territory. For example:

• A street interview in June 2023 asked: “What is the relationship between Taiwan and the ROC?” The reply: “…Enemy…”;  The interviewer then asked: “Have you heard of ROC? Do you know where is ROC?” The reply: “The other side of the Taiwan Straits? … I don’t know, I don’t know…” During the interview, almost all interviewees didn’t know the ROC, some later replied: “Taiwan” (with a guessing element after observing the interviewer’s tone);
• A street interview in May 2023 asked: “What is the relationship between Taiwan and the ROC?” The reply: “… looks like the relationship is not too good…”; The interviewer then asked: “According to the ROC constitution, Taiwan sovereignty includes the mainland of China, do you know that?” The reply: “No”.

The above interviews demonstrated the success of the ongoing brainwashing tactics used by the current ruling party (the DPP) in Taiwan province by modifying historical facts in school textbooks in the past 2 decades. One needs just to search under “DDP modify Taiwan history textbook” to learn about the issues. If one uses simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese to search the subject, one will get even more examples and news on the topic of young Taiwanese being heavily brainwashed into believing that they are not a part of the Chinese civilization despite their shared history, culture, tradition, values, food habits, ethnicity, religions, and languages (spoken and written). This reflects the scary effect of what fake news and propaganda could do to divide society and create conflict across the world.

The one-China wording in the ROC Constitution

It is important to note that the content of the ROC Constitution is still the same today as before the Nationalist government lost the internal war to the Communist Party and escaped to Taiwan Province in 1949. It is also important to note that all the incoming Taiwan Presidents and MPs have to be sworn in under the Constitution of The ROC before taking office. So, what does the ROC Constitution say about the relation between the mainland of China and Taiwan island? The full text of the ROC’s Constitution is on the current Taiwan (Province) government’s official website. The following points shown that the ROC Constitution includes the entire mainland of China as it sovereign territory:

• Point 4 of the Constitution: The territory of ROC based on its inherent boundaries, cannot be changed without a resolution of the National Assembly;
• Point 6 refers to the design of the ROC flag used since 1928 (which is still in use today across Taiwan Province by whoever is in power);
• Point 26: Outline the number of Representatives based on the population in an area/region for the National Assembly (with special mention of the Mongolia and Tibet regional representatives);
• Point 64: About the makeup of representatives for law-making: this point also mentioned the minority population representative with special mention of Mongolia and Tibet regions.
• Point 91: About the makeup of representatives in the Government Supervisory Body: again Mongolia and Tibet regions are mentioned.

If we search for a map of the ROC, one will notice that the ROC territory in the map includes the entire People’s Republic of China (PRC) territory. That means the territory outlined in the Constitution of both the PRC and ROC includes Taiwan province and the Mainland of China. Both documents are the legal foundation of one-China. So:

• Any Western media wording that suggests Taiwan province is not a part of China is without any legal foundation under both the ROC and the PRC Constitutions.
• The Western media and politicians’ ongoing warning that “China is going to invade Taiwan” is preposterous because what they are warning is that China is about to invade itself.
• America named the war between the South and the North (12 April 1861 to 26 May 1865) as the American Civil War revealing the double standard regarding the use of the term “invasion” to describe a possible future China reunification process through military action.

Therefore, the dispute between the PRC and ROC is a yet-to-settled historical event. It is purely a domestic issue between the 2 governments. Former Singapore Foreign Minister George Yao is right to point out in a recent interview that “China sees the Taiwan issue as a matter of historical justice”; he warns the Western powers about the danger of interfering in the reunification process.

The territory still under ROC control includes islands only 2 km away from the PRC-governed Mainland

Many people did not notice that the territory under the control of today’s ROC includes not only Taiwan Island itself but a number of islands right next to the mainland of the PRC. See the following screenshot map of the ROC (the purple territory in the bottom right-hand corner below is still under the control of the ROC):

One should note from the above map of the ROC-controlled (purple) territory that there are islands located right next to the mainland of China:

• • Kinmen Islands: The nearest part of the Kinmen group of Islands is just 1.8 km from the PRC (mainland China); it is 210 km from Taiwan Island. Former Chinese World Bank Chief Economist Justin YiFu Lin was a ROC army official stationed in Kinmen Islands. He is the man who in 1979, swam 2130 meters to mainland China to call the PRC home;
  • Matsu Islands: The nearest part of this group of islands is 18.5 km away from the Mainland of China and 203 km away from Taiwan Island;

• As for Taiwan Island itself, the nearest part to the mainland is 126 km away.

The above distance information between the ROC-controlled territory and the PRC-controlled mainland tells us a lot about the intention of the PRC government working towards a peaceful reunification:

• If China (PRC) wanted to take those islands right next to the mainland by force, they would have done it a long time ago. There is no reason to doubt the PRC military capability to do so given their ability to force the US-led military coalition back more than 500 km from the China-DPRK border to the 38th parallel and stop the US-led military coalition’s further aggression in the 1950-1953 Korean War;
• Even Taiwan Island (province) itself is so close to the mainland that a modern short-range missile and artillery are good enough to do the job of crippling the island’s economy and forcing a surrender; some contend that the current military technological capability of the PLA may be more advanced than the USA.
• Therefore, the ongoing Western media articles and news with headings that suggest China’s pending aggression and possible invasion of Taiwan to justify US/Japan/NATO/Australia/Canada militarism on the Chinese doorstep is nothing more than a smear campaign against China.

The History of Taiwan Island’s relation with the Chinese dynasties dates back to 230AD 

The history of Taiwan being a part of China was far earlier than 1683. This site (English) and this site (Chinese) provide a detailed Timeline of Taiwan’s relations with the Chinese dynasties beginning as early as the year 230AD: During the 3 kingdoms era, a written record of （沈莹） Shen Ying under the title 《临海水土志》 (direct transaction word by word: “surrounding seas water lands record”) already mentioned the Island of Taiwan. And that is almost 1800 years ago.

The trouble for many people who haven’t researched much about Chinese history is that they may be susceptible to Western media propaganda that portrays China as historically backward compared to the West, hence the ongoing smear campaign that China steals Western technology. So, it may be hard for some people to believe that in 230 AD, the Chinese already had the shipping technology to explore islands hundreds of km away in the rough sea. So, it is important for one to note the following facts about the Chinese being far more advanced than the West in shipping technology for thousands of year:

• One should note that the compass used by Columbus to “discover” America in 1492 AD was a Chinese-invented compass (invented during the Han Dynasty between 202 BC – 220 AD);
• 2500 years ago, China not only had a great military strategist Sun Zi (The Art of War) for land battles but also had a navy war strategist (伍子胥) Wu Zi Xu for water battles 《水战兵法》 (direct word by word translation “Water war military strategy”).

One should also take note that before Columbus “discovered” America in 1492 (as if the Indigenous peoples on the continent at that time were not regarded as “human beings” and so, the land has to be “discovered” by a “higher being” from Europe), the Ming Dynasty Navy General Zheng He had already led 7 ocean expeditions traveling the world (1405 to 1433), with “hundreds of huge ships and tens of thousands of sailors and other passengers. More than 60 of the 317 ships on the first voyage were enormous Treasure Ships, sailing vessels over 400 hundred feet long, 160 feet wide, with several decks, 9 masts, 12 sails, and luxurious staterooms complete with balconies.”

It is important to note that, despite such a scale of world voyages, China did not do what Columbus and Captain Cook’s voyages did to the Indigenous population in what would become America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Ming Dynasty Imperial Voyages led by General Zheng He (a Chinese Muslim) were peaceful in nature.

There is also a well-researched book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (including America) by Gavin Menzies (a former British Royal Navy Submarine Commanding Officer) who spent 15 years tracing the astonishing voyages of the Ming Dynasty’s fleet, visited over 900 museums across the world, engaged in conversations and correspondence with Universities professors specialized in Asia Study, and reading hundreds of titles in European country’s libraries that mentioned the Chinese voyages. Despite the fact that Gavin’s compelling narrative pulls together ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy, and the surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators, and that Gavin’s research also brings to light the artifacts and inscribed stones left behind by the emperor’s fleet, the evidence of the Ming Dynasty’s sunken junks along its route, and ornate votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, Gavin’s book still discredited by the Western propaganda machine as “fiction” and “controversy”. As a reader of Kevin’s book to the last word, I am convinced by the incontrovertible evidence presented in regard to the Ming Dynasty Imperial Voyages, however, other readers’ opinions are also important. Please read the thousands of reader comments here, here, and here.

So, for those who are interested to know in detail about the 1800 years of history of Taiwan Island’s relation with the Chinese dynasties, please click here (English) and here (Chinese).

One should note that, in July 1894, Japan launched a war of aggression against China. In April 1895, the defeated Qing Dynasty government was forced to cede Taiwan, etc, to Japan in an unequal treaty  (Treaty of Shimonoseki in Japanese, also known as Treaty of Maguan in Chinese).

International Treaties by US, UK, China, and Japan recognized Taiwan as China’s territory 

1943 Cairo Declaration (Image of the original document): Signed by President Roosevelt (USA), Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek (ROC President), and Prime Minister Churchill (UK) as military allies against the Japanese military aggression. The objective of the Cairo Declaration is to “procure unconditional surrender of Japan,” and that “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa (known as “Taiwan” in Chinese), and … shall be restored to the Republic of China” (The Chinese government at that time).

(Note: It seems that the US government history document website (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments) has removed the Cairo Declaration document)

1945 INT Potsdam Declaration (image of the original document) Point 8 stated: “The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out and Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, and such minor islands as we determine.” And again, this international treaty was entered into by the US, China, and UK governments, and agreed upon by the Japanese government after the US dropped the 2 atomic bombs on Japan.

Note: the US government history document website shows the full content of this 13-point document including point 8.

So, the above two international documents entered into by the US, China, UK, and Japan recognized Taiwan as a part of China, and Japan’s territory is limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.” 

UN Resolution replaced ROC with PRC as the only legitimate government of China

UN Resolution 2758: passed on 25 October 1971: “Recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and removed “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” (referring to the ROC)  from the United Nations.

Since then, as of June 2023, out of the 193 UN member nations, only 12 smaller nations recognize the ROC government, and 181 recognize the PRC government. (Including the US and all other Western governments. This is the condition for establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC.)

As a result, the ROC (in Taiwan) needs the PRC’s approval to get access to any international organizations or institutions such as the Olympics, WHO, etc. The PRC’s sovereignty over Taiwan is officially recognized by the UN document and 181 UN member states.

Blood is Thicker than Water: The Policy of Peaceful Reunification Since Mao’s Era

If one searches on the Internet for “台湾 血比水浓” (Taiwanese Blood is Thicker than Water), one will notice that there are millions of articles and news headlines over the decades describing the feeling of the Chinese people in the PRC towards the Chinese people in the ROC (Taiwan Province). They regard people in Taiwan as their brothers and sisters and hope for peaceful reunification.

Since the founding of the PRC, the Chinese leadership (from Mao to Xi) has been working hard toward a peaceful reunification with Taiwan Province. Just to name a few examples as follows:

Example 1:

During the Chinese Revolution, the then Nationalist Party government led by ROC President Chiang Kai-shek killed 6 of Chairman Mao’s relatives including Mao’s beloved wife (Yang Kaihui). In 1957, Chairman Mao wrote a touching poem in remembrance of his late wife with a description of his grief when he heard the news of her murder by the Nationalist government: “bursting into tears like rainwater” (泪飞顿作倾盆雨). Despite such personal grief in losing his loved one, Chairman Mao put the interest of the people and the Chinese nation first: For example:

After China and DPRK won the Korean War against the US-led 16-nation military coalition, there was a perception of Western nations trying to break Taiwan away from the motherland to create two Chinas, like the two Koreas (North and South Korea), and the two Germanys (East and West Germany). To prevent that, in 1956, Mao wrote a personal letter to Chiang Kai-shek, telling him the importance of Taiwan’s geographical position in accessing the Pacific Ocean for the Chinese nation, and urged him to safeguard the interest of the Chinese civilization to maintain the principle of a one-China policy. That is Taiwan province and the Mainland as integrated parts of one China. He then raised the idea of negotiation toward a peaceful reunification under the following principles:

• Foreign Power should be out of Taiwan;
• Taiwan must recognize the Central People’s Government as the only legitimate government of the PRC.
• Both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party have to uphold the principle of a one-China policy;
• Chiang Kai-Shek will enjoy a special privileged status once Taiwan is unified with the mainland;
• Once unified, besides Foreign Affairs and Defence, Chiang Kai-Shek will retain the power of administering Taiwan in all other aspects such as the power for the appointment of officials and their removal in Taiwan, the treasury in Taiwan, and Chiang is allowed to keep his arm forces, and the central government will fund the development of Taiwan.
• Once unified, both sides will stop covert operations and propaganda against each other, and will not do anything to damage the relationship of both political parties.
• In the letter, Mao also enclosed a photo of Chiang’s ancestor’s grave in China, telling him that they are well maintained. (Photo below):

Unfortunately, for Chiang, it was a hard decision.

Chiang died in 1975; to this day, his coffin is still not buried. According to his son Chiang Jing-guo’s Diary: Chiang wished to be buried on the mainland: at Nanjing, Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Zijin Mountain, Zhengqi Pavilion. Therefore, they are waiting for the day when the political climate is such that Chiang can be so interred.

Example 2:

In 1981, the PRC spelled out a 9 points policy toward peaceful reunification under a One-China policy (below is a translation from the Chinese text):

• The Communist Party and the Nationalist Party can negotiate on an equal footing;
• The two parties reached an agreement on postal, commercial, air, family visits, tourism, and academic, culture, and sports exchanges;
• After reunification, Taiwan can retain the military and enjoy special autonomy as a special administrative region;
• Taiwan’s society, economic system, way of life, and economic and cultural relations with other foreign countries remain unchanged; private property, houses, land, business ownership, legal inheritance rights, and foreign investment are inviolable;
• Political leaders in Taiwan can serve as leaders of the national political institutions and participate in national management;
• When Taiwan’s local finances are in difficulty, the central government can subsidize them at its discretion;

1. 1. Taiwanese who wish to return to the mainland to live are guaranteed to make proper arrangements, come and go freely, and not be discriminated against;

• Welcome Taiwanese businesses’ investment in the mainland, their legal rights and profits are guaranteed;
• People and organizations from all walks of life in Taiwan are welcome to provide unified suggestions and discuss state affairs together.

One should acknowledge that no other nation in world history ever went to such length, patience, inclusiveness, and generosity in pursuing a nation’s peaceful reunification with an offer like this. The PRC government always believes that given time, they will be able to develop China into a better and better society, and will eventually unify every heart and mind in Taiwan.

Has any other nation in world history ever gone to such lengths, patience, inclusiveness, and generosity in pursuing peaceful reunification with an offer like this? The PRC government has always believed that given time, it would be able to develop China into a better and better society, and would eventually unify with the hearts and minds in Taiwan.

Of course, the Western mass media will never tell the world the above generous 9 points offered to Taiwan for peaceful reunification. They will only tell the world China is bullying Taiwan.

Example 3:

After years of negotiations, in 1992, the PRC Communist Party and the ROC Nationalist Party reached an agreement in Singapore to deepen the exchange of people between both sides. Both Parties agree to the principles of One China, and any other issues can be negotiated with flexibility. The term used for such a historic agreement is “1992 Consensus.”

Example 4:

In order to win the hearts and minds of the brothers and sisters in Taiwan province, the PRC has been very generous to Taiwan’s farmers and businesses and allowed Taiwan to enjoy an enormous trade surplus of up to $104.68 billion a year. About 44% of Taiwan’s exports go to mainland China. Without the PRC’s economic support, Taiwan’s economy would likely have fallen into a negative GDP like most parts of the Western world.

Again, the Western mass media is uninterested in reporting the above trade statistics.

Example 5:

The ROC-controlled Kinmen (Jinmen) Islands with a rising population and water shortage problem. Between 2006 and 2022, the population of the Jinmen Islands increased from 76,000 to 141,500.  To help the brothers and sisters in Jinmen solve their water problem, the PRC government invested heavily over a period of 22 years in infrastructure to lay an underground and undersea pipeline to deliver water from the mainland to the islands. And sell the water to the islands at a subsidized price of 9.89 Taiwan dollars per unit of water, which is cheaper than the charges per unit of water supplied by the local authority on the islands.

Again, the Western media won’t report news like this. They will only keep spreading the message to the world: “China bullies Taiwan” and “China is going to invade Taiwan”.

Example 6:

Like the US, after decades of political infighting, corruption, and incompetency in managing the economy and infrastructure upgrade, Taiwan suffered a series of issues including an electricity shortage that requires rationing from area to area. So, power Rationing Information is made available for residents to check when their area power will be cut off and for how long. Such a situation has been the new normal for a number of years already. It has badly affected business activities and damaged foreign investment. As a result, Taiwan’s youth unemployment rate has been consistently above 10%. And nearly 60% of the Taiwanese working overseas went to China. A report in 2017 by TVBS Taiwan showed that: over a period of 35 years, Taiwan startup wages remained almost the same, 70% of Taiwan youth refused to be trapped by low wages and wished to start their own business in order to make more money. Forbes Magazine reported the issue: “Workers in Taiwan are struggling. They took home an average of $1,510 per month in 2016, according to Taiwan’s National Development Council, which is low for an industrialized Asian economy that has developed a lot like Singapore and South Korea over the decades.”

In response to such low wages and employment problems faced by Taiwanese youth, Chairman Xi canceled the work permit requirement for Taiwanese people to seek employment on the mainland.

In fact, as early as 2016, the China People’s Congress had already set up an RMB40 billion fund, to help facilitate Taiwan Youth intent on setting up their own business in China.

Again, the Western mass media is uninterested in this kind of news. They will keep telling the world that China is bullying Taiwan.

Example 7:

There are too many stories of the PRC government (from Chairman Mao to Chairman Xi) extending goodwill to the Taiwanese people and awaiting eventual peaceful reunification. It is impossible to list them all. So, just to provide a couple more examples below:

• Whenever an overseas emergency happens, such as an outbreak of war, the Chinese embassies and military will immediately evacuate all Chinese citizens, including any Taiwanese who apply to the PRC with a Taiwan Compatriot ID document. Click here for a few dozen short news and videos.
• Any Taiwanese who run into trouble while overseas can easily seek help from any of the Chinese embassies in the respective country. A number of Taiwanese friends I met, while I was working in Eastern Europe based in Hungary in the 1990s, told me that the PRC embassy staff are more helpful than the ROC commercial office representative.

In 2022, China released a White Paper titled “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era” (Here is the full text in English and Chinese).  It is a bit lengthy but worth reading. The policy document outlines the intention to reintegrate Taiwan by all possible peaceful means, and the many benefits  Taiwan people will enjoy in the process, including all the tax revenue collected in Taiwan will be used solely for the social well-being of the Taiwanese people and the economic development of Taiwan.

China: There is no Taiwan problem, only an American-caused problem.

China is a country with a very long history of peace culture. Examples:

• Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir said: “We always say, we have had China as a neighbor for 2000 years, we were never conquered by them. But the Europeans came in 1509, and in two years, they conquered Malaysia.”
• East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta defended China’s role as a growing strategic and economic power in Asia-Pacific in the National Press Club of Australia (2022), arguing: “China has hardly ever invaded other countries and was unlikely to do so in the future.”
• Indonesia’s Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto said in Singapore (2022) during an interview with Aljazeera: “But China has also helped us. China has also defended us and China is now a very close partner with Indonesia. And actually, China has always been the leading civilization in Asia. Many of our sultans, kings, our princes in those days would marry princesses from China. We have hundreds of years of relationship.”

The above 3 positive comments about China are from leaders of three of China’s neighboring countries in Asia. Their country’s experience with China since ancient times tells a lot about the peaceful nature of China. The question here is: will Latin American countries, African countries, other Asian countries, and Middle Eastern countries say the same about their country’s experience with the US and Europe? Or perhaps, will European countries say the same about their own neighboring countries in Europe?

The reality is that: Western imperialism is not dead after the 2 World Wars; in particular, the USA has always been a troublemaker for the rest of the world. The following examples should provide us with a good picture of how the US is threatening peace in Asia, and its main target since 2008 is China:

• US: Chinese are not allowed to be wealthy

During the 2008 GFC, US Secretary of Finance Henry Paulson visited China almost every month to seek help to stabilize the dollar’s status as a reserve currency. As a result, China bought almost an extra $600b in US Treasury debts in 2008, which accounted for over half the total issued by the US government to bail out the too-big-to-fail banks and the US economy that year.

Once the US economy stabilized, the world stopped dumping the dollar due to China having injected ($600b) confidence in US treasury debts, the only positive thing China received from America in return for its support of the US economy is open praise from Henry Paulson in the New York Times on 22 Oct 2008 “Thanking China’s cooperation in easing the Financial Crisis“.

Since then, in 2010, Obama said in Australia: “If over 1 billion Chinese citizens have the same living patterns as Australians and Americans do right now, then all of us are in for a very miserable time. The planet just can’t sustain it.”

In 2011, an opinion piece in the New York Times suggested that Obama “should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United State-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015.” Years later, a Wikileaks leaked email revealed the then Secretary of States Hillary Clinton wanted to discuss ditching Taiwan in exchange for China to erase US debts.

In 2013, a Jimmy Kimmel Live show on ABC asked some kids what to do about the $1.3 trillion of debts the US owes to China, a very young boy suggested that “The US kill everyone in China instead of repaying its debts.”

In 2021, Joe Biden said in a press conference: “China wants to become the most wealthy, powerful country but it’s ‘not gonna happen on my watch’.”

In 2023, under the excuse of an imaginary “China threat” and to “Protect Taiwan from China invasion”, US politicians proposed a series of bipartisan bills aiming to restrict how China can use its money, restricting China’s rights in International Financial Institutions, and a plan to confiscate China’s sovereign fund and Chinese citizens’ overseas bank accounts and assets like the way the US and Europe did to the Russians in 2022.

Please click the following links for details of their proposed “looting” bills:

• H.R.554, the “Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act of 2023”, sponsored by Rep. French Hill;
• H.R.510, the “Chinese Currency Accountability Act of 2023,” sponsored by Rep. Warren David;
• H.R.839, the “China Exchange Rate Transparency Act of 2023,” sponsored by Rep. Dan Meuser;
• H.R.803, the “Protect Taiwan Act,” sponsored by Rep Frank Lucas;

From the above series of behavior and statements made by two US Presidents, a Secretary of State, a very young boy, the US media, and 4 politicians who sponsored anti-China bills, it is hard not to come to the conclusion about the ungrateful nature of Americans. It would appear to me that the robber DNA is deep in the blood and bone of many people in the US society (I hate to generalize my comment unless someone can convince me that the above-named series of behaviors within the US society are merely coincident!).

• US military threat to China at China’s doorstep

Let’s put aside the various issues from a reported 2012 US plan to deploy 60% of the US Navy fleet to the Asia Pacific by 2020, and the 2011 Obama Pacific Pivot with a secret plan to start a war against China by 2030 with a coalition of nations to militarily control commercial shipment to and from China via the South China seas to limit China freedom to trade with the rest of the world, and should China resist, the US-led military coalition would begin to attack China.

John Pilger is an award-winning journalist who produced a 2 hours documentary with details of US military bases around China and how the US may plan to start a war with China.

In 2017, US Admiral Scott Swift assured everyone he was ready to follow President Trump’s orders to launch a nuclear missile against China.

In 2022, former US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien suggested destroying Taiwan’s semiconductor factories rather than letting them fall into China’s hands.

In 2023, US talk show host Garland Nixon wrote on Twitter that White House insiders said that US President Joe Biden had warned about a plan for “the destruction of Taiwan” when asked if there could be any greater disaster than the Ukraine crisis.

There are endless US military activities and arrangements targeting China in recent years. Just to list a few more examples below:

• While the Western media and politicians keep telling the world that the PLA is increasingly aggressive against Western countries’ (military) freedom of navigation in the South and East China Seas, a recent report by the US Department of Defence revealed that “the US has conducted around 120 military exercises a year with allies and partners in the region.” Ironically, such statistics of US military aggression on China’s doorstep failed to attract the interest of the Western Media.

• In 2017, the US deployed the THAAD missile system in South Korea with total disregard for China’s protest.

• In 2021, Australia reached a deal with the US and UK on a $386b nuclear submarine deal with China as their target.

• In 2022, US Defense Secretary Austin announced that: “The US is at a pivotal point with China and needs military strength to ensure that American values, not Beijing’s, set global norms in the 21st century.” He then talked about the need to align the US budget as never before to the China Challenge. He then mentioned a $1.2 trillion estimated cost as part of a major nuclear triad overhaul underway by the Congressional Budget Office.

One should note that such an additional budget for military expenses is on top of the fact that the US military already spent more than the next 10 countries combined.

• In July 2023, USS Kentucky, a US nuclear submarine (capable of firing nuclear ballistic missiles) suddenly arrived in Busan, South Korea.
• Again, in July 2023, Nato head Jens Stoltenberg pushed to increase ties with Asia with the intention to form an Asia NATO alliance. Former Australia PM Paul Keating labeledStoltenberg a ‘supreme fool’ and ‘an accident on its way to happen’.

To justify NATO’s intention to set up its military presence in Asia, NATO engaged in a series of smear campaigns against  imaginary Chinese threats based on NATO’s own past behavior across the world. The latest smear campaign was in the NATO Vilnius Summit Communique. As a result, China’s Permanent Representative to the UN refuted NATO’s false accusations against China, and challenged NATO if it can make the same claims as China on the following 6 points:

1. China has never invaded other countries;
2. China has never engaged in proxy wars;
3. China has never carried out military operations around the world;
4. China did not threaten other countries with force;
5. China did not export ideology
6. China did not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs

The reality is that the US initiated an all-out hostility against China after China helped the US out of the 2008 GFC [Global Financial Crisis]. Examples:

1. Obama’s Pacific Pivot;
2. Obama’s TPP to Exclude China from International Trade;
3. Trump and Biden all-out trade Wars;
4. Trump and Biden all-out technological wars;
5. US military deployments, and military activities surrounding China. Despite the US already having 313 of its 750 worldwide military bases surrounding China, the US continued to expand by another 4 recently via the Philippines with 3 of them close to Taiwan.

The Ukrainization of Taiwan

Despite the past US administrations (1972, 1979, 1982) entering into 3 Joint Communiques with China over the Taiwan question (The One-China agreements), the US politicians have over the years, through their own acts, brutally violated all the written agreements with China re the One-China Policy. The latest developments are the worst:

In July 2023, US House of Congress passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to ban Pentagon maps from depicting Taiwan and its major outlying islands, Kinmen, Penghu, Mazudao, Wuchudao, and Ludao (etc) as part of China. (Here is the content of the original amendment bill).

Below is just a quick list of examples of US violating all its signed One-China documents with China to provoke a war over Taiwan:

• In 2021, Taiwan English News reported the news of “Pentagon doubled the number of US troops in Taiwan”,

• In 2022, VOA (Chinese news) reported that the US has again increased the number of its military personnel in Taiwan. The intention is to help coordinate both militaries in a possible future war with China.

• In April 2023, US lawmaker, Chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul pledged to help provide training for Taiwan’s armed forces and to speed up the delivery of weapons.

• In June 2023, Taiwan (ROC) Foreign Affair website issued a press release titled “US government officially notifies Taiwan of latest arms sales.”

• In July 2023, it was widely reported in Taiwan that the U.S. wants Taiwan to set up a P4 Biological Laboratory. Yahoo Chinese News pointed out that Taiwan Chinese newspaper (联合报) is the first to break the detail of the Biological Weapons Lab story. Taiwan CTI TV news reported in detail that the Lab is to test biological weapons using Chinese DNA as “the DNA of the Taiwan population can represent Chinese DNA.” Not surprisingly: the Western media is very much silent on this kind of news despite the fact that the US State Department later denied the Taiwanese report that the US asked Taiwan to develop weaponized biological agents.

• Perhaps to justify a possible preemptive war against China under the Bush Doctrine in the foreseeable future, the US Congress passed a $500m anti-China propaganda bill in February 2022. How much of this $500m goes to brainwashing Taiwanese?

In a recent interview, Jeffrey Sachs describes a series of US actions against China as a “Path to War With China.”

DPP politicians prepare for war and an escape route while Taiwanese people reject war

The trouble with Western forms of so-called democracy is that to win an election, one needs to build an election war chest. That is to seek political donations in return for favors when one is in a position of power. It usually involves an under-the-table deal between politicians and their donors. As a result, corporate donors, billionaires, foreign cash, and foreign powers could easily penetrate domestic politics.

Since the beginning of Taiwan having a Western form of election, dark money, corruption, bribery, and scandals news become a part of the social norm within the Taiwanese political circle. If we search for the name of any DPP senior politicians (especially Ministers and Prime Ministers) with the term “Dark-Money”, “corruption”, or “scandals”, one should notice almost no innocent people in the system. As Western media usually self-censored negative news linked to the Pro-independent party, so, the best way to search for such news is to search in the Chinese language. For examples,

• Search in Chinese for corruption of the Current Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen;
• Search her deputy (the coming DPP presidential candidate) Lai Ching-te;

Corruption and democracy often go hand in hand. Here are some hyperlinks to examples of how the US interferes in foreign elections:

• Foreign electoral intervention
• The US is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries
• “Stop US interference”: Interview with the Labour Party of Taiwan

Those who follow the Taiwan issue via the Taiwan media should notice that, while those Taiwan politicians ally with the US foreign policy and campaign for independence, most of their family members (including themselves) already have US or other Western countries’ citizenship, bank accounts, and assets. For examples,

• A report in Taiwan media in 2015 revealed half of current Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen family members have foreign citizenship;
• As for the Vice President (the coming DPP presidential candidate) 赖清德 (Lai Ching-te), his son and grandson are American citizens;

The irony is that, while these pro-independence politicians eagerly ally with the US to provoke war with the PRC by promoting Taiwan independence, their family members have on the other hand migrated overseas during this time. This is a bit like President Zelensky acting in the interest of the USA, and allowing the entire Ukraine to be bombed and destroyed, because, according to OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project): “Zelensky and his inner circle have unexplained $ billions overseas.”

In fact, during Taiwan’s military exercises, one of their programs is on how the president could safely escape if a war breaks out. (Of course, whenever the Taiwan media reports such escape details, the Ministry of Defense will deny it.)

The tragedy for the average Taiwanese person is that the island economy is already damaged before such a war would begin. According to a recent Financial Times report: “‘People are nervous’: Taiwan’s wealthy shelter money overseas in fear of China conflict.” The same thing happened to foreign companies in Taiwan with “half of the foreign companies in Taiwan making contingency plans due to evacuations and supply chain disruptions concerns.”  The latest Taiwan GDP is down 3.02%.

The reality in Taiwan is that many young people refuse to join the army, and the DPP government is having a problem recruiting new soldiers. As a result:

• The DPP government decided to extend serving time of the existing soldiers by an additional year;
• In June 2023, Taiwan amend the military recruitment regulation to include recruits from Hong Kong and Macao people working and living in Taiwan;
• Again, in June, the DPP government reportedly worked with the Ministry of Education to impose a 3 + 1 university program. That is 3 years of study plus a year of military training.

In February 2023, Jinmen Island local lawmakers voted to declare Jinmen a non-military zone, and Jinmen governor Li Zhufeng (李炷烽) suggests using Jinmen Island as a pilot program for the One Country Two Systems and expanding gradually thereafter.

Professor John V. Wash in a recent article titled “Arming Taiwan is an Insane Provocation” cited a hyperlink to a 2022 polling that showed that an overwhelming majority (82.1%) of Taiwanese now would like to preserve the status quo with only 5.3% wanting immediate independence.”

How much longer will China tolerate the US’s endless escalating military provocations?

In July 2023, Hungary Prime Minister Orban observed that “Beijing managed to develop as much in 30 years as other countries in 200 years. Therefore, they can claim their “place under the sun”. However, Washington does not accept that quick development, the fact that China preceded them in many sectors… As a result, a clash between the two world powers is inevitable…. War is not inevitable, but the USA does not accept that it has become the world’s second most powerful nation, Orbán added.”

An article on Education Monitor News rightly pointed out that “The Greatest Threat to the USA is not China, but Peace.”

In 2014, the New York Times put up an article titled ‘The Lack of Major Wars may be Hurting Economic Growth.’

One should bear in mind that the USA was created on the foundation of invasion, massacre, looting, and enslavement of others. Not a single thing the US possesses today is through peaceful means including every inch of its current territory.

Since 2008, China has already realized that its kindness towards the US will only be perceived as a weakness. That will only encourage more aggression and greed from the US imperialist rulers. So, the first thing Chairman Xi did after taking office in 2012 is to visit a PLA military base. He openly called upon the PLA to prepare for war and to win the war.

In February 2023, China released a report titled “US Hegemony and Its Perils,” and in May “America’s Coercive Diplomacy and its Harm” outlining the many crimes committed by the US against the world and that China is no longer interested in accommodating the US crimes and behaviors.

In March 2023, a Chinese government website reported that Chairman Xi Jinping told a group of more than 300 high-ranking government officials that: “History has repeatedly proven that if we seek security through resolve, security will prevail; If we seek security through concessions, security will perish; If we seek development through resolve, development will prosper; If we seek development through compromises, our development will suffer.”

In June 2023, China released The Law on Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China outlining the country’s attitude toward foreign relations, UN Charters, International Laws, and possible counter-action against any hostile foreign policy and behavior that harms Chinese interest and security.

In July, China called NATO “a trouble-maker”, and issued a warning to NATO: “Beijing doesn’t cause trouble, but is not afraid of trouble”. Days later, the Chinese ambassador to the US issued a direct warning to Washington: “If people violate me, I will hit back.”

So, how long will China continue to tolerate US provocation? How long will China allow the US military to continue to violate its sovereignty in Taiwan? Will China allow the US more time to arm Taiwan like what they did in Ukraine before Putin would no longer tolerate the threats and was forced to take military action?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

A panel of three High Court judges delayed Lai's trial until Dec. 18, the second delay since the original trial date was set for December 2022.

Lai, who founded the now-shuttered pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, faces two counts of "conspiracy to collude with foreign forces" and one count of "collusion with foreign forces" under a draconian security law imposed by Beijing in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, along with a charge relating to "seditious" publications. 

He was first arrested in August 2020 and is currently serving time for fraud in connection with the lease on his Next Digital media empire's headquarters.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong National Security Police questioned a woman with reported links to Law, one of the eight activists in exile with arrest warrants and bounties on their heads, the London-based rights group Hong Kong Watch reported.

The move comes after police detained and questioned the parents of fellow overseas activist Anna Kwok, who heads the Hong Kong Democracy Council, a U.S.-based lobby group.

Kwok and Law are among eight prominent overseas Hong Kongers wanted by the authorities for "collusion with foreign forces" under the national security law, with a HK$1 million bounty on each of their heads, as the city authorities claim the right to "long-arm" enforcement of the law anywhere in the world.

Hong Kong leader John Lee has vowed to pursue the eight activists for the rest of their lives.

"This was the latest escalation in the application of the Hong Kong National Security Law against opposition figures, in particular since the announcement of arrest warrants and bounties against the eight activists in exile," Hong Kong Watch said in a brief statement.

Looking like the mainland

Former pro-democracy district councilor Sam Yip, who is currently studying in Tokyo, said Hong Kong's judicial system is looking increasingly like that of mainland China.

"It's very similar to the Chinese courts, where the prosecution and courts can extend an arrested person's time in detention at will," Yip said. "The courts and the entire judicial system in Hong Kong are nearly identical with those in mainland China, particularly where national security law cases are concerned."

"Those cases no longer follow the common law system, but instead follow the Chinese legal system."

He said the common law system once ensured a fair trial in Hong Kong, but no longer.

A former adviser to the Chinese Communist Party government in Beijing last week criticized the Hong Kong government over its plan to allow extradition to mainland China, which sparked the mass protests of 2019 and the ensuing crackdown on public dissent.

Former Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference standing committee member Charles Ho said he had tried to dissuade the city's current and former leaders from pressing ahead with the plans, which sparked months of mass popular protest that broadened from an anti-extradition campaign to include demands for fully democratic elections.

Ho told a radio show last week that then Chief Executive Carrie Lam's handling of the protest was "a man-made disaster."

"I explained to her that if she went ahead and implemented the amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, it would lead to U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong," Ho said, adding that he had issued the same warning to then security chief and current chief executive John Lee.

"I was in the Jockey Club coffee shop with John Lee, and I told him I had advised Lam not to do this, because it would affect Hong Kong's [trading status] with the United States," he said.

Then-U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law in November 2019 after months of pro-democracy protests, targeting officials responsible for the erosion of the city's promised freedoms and prompting mass celebrations by protesters.

When Beijing imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong from July 1, 2020, Washington responded by declaring an end to the city's status as a separate trading entity from mainland China.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin, Jojo Man for RFA Cantonese.

“We welcome the Hong Kong court decision to quash the conviction of journalist Choy Yuk-ling. It’s high time for the Hong Kong government to stop persecuting the media and drop all criminal cases against journalists for their work,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Press freedom is constitutionally guaranteed in Hong Kong. No journalists should be criminally charged, let alone convicted, for their reporting.”

Choy was convicted in April 2021 on two counts of giving false statements to obtain car ownership records on a public registry while researching a documentary for Hong Kong’s public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong about a mob attack on a group of protesters. The court fined her 6,000 Hong Kong dollars (US$765).

In unanimously overturning her conviction on Monday, June 5, a panel of five judges at the Court of Final Appeal ruled that when Choy chose “other traffic and transport related matters” to search the public registry, that category should not exclude “bona fide journalism.”

Separately, on Sunday evening police detained Mak Yin-ting, a correspondent with French broadcaster Radio France Internationale and former chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, while she reported on public attempts to commemorate the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to the HKJA, a report by the journalist in RFI, and news reports. She was released after a few hours without charge.

CPJ has documented the dramatic decline of press freedom in Hong Kong, once a beacon of free press in the region, since Beijing introduced a national security law on June 30, 2020, with journalists being arrested, jailed, and threatened.

Among them include Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, editors of the now-shuttered news website Stand News, who are on trial for conspiracy to publish seditious publications.

Jimmy Lai, founder of the shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily and CPJ’s 2021 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Awardee, is facing life imprisonment on national security charges in a trial that is due to start in September. Lai, a British citizen, is serving a sentence of five years and nine months on fraud charges. He has been behind bars since December 2020.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

"I raised [Lai's] case with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng earlier this month, and we have raised it at the highest levels with the Hong Kong authorities," Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs James Cleverly said in a statement introducing his government's six-monthly review of the situation in Hong Kong, a former British colony.

Han attended the coronation of King Charles III in London on May 6, amid growing criticism of the ruling Conservative Party, which appears to be backing away from promises of a tough stance on China.

Cleverly didn't say if a face-to-face meeting with Han had taken place, but said his government would "work with China where our interests converge while steadfastly defending our national security and our values."

He accused the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities of deliberately targeting "prominent pro-democracy figures, journalists and politicians in an effort to silence and discredit them."

He called on the Chinese Communist Party and the Hong Kong government to implement recommendations made by the United Nations Human Rights Council last July, which included repealing a national security law that has been used to justify a crackdown on peaceful political opposition and public dissent in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.

"The Hong Kong authorities use the National Security Law and the antiquated offense of sedition to persecute those who disagree with the government," Cleverly said, pointing to the ongoing trial of 47 opposition politicians and democracy activists for "subversion" after they organized a democratic primary election in the summer of 2020, as well as Lai's national security trial for "collusion with a foreign power."

He said Beijing "remains in a state of non-compliance" with a bilateral treaty governing the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, pointing to a "steady erosion of civil and political rights and Hong Kong’s autonomy."

Benedict Rogers, who heads the London-based rights group Hong Kong Watch, called for further action against "those who are actively undermining China’s obligations to the people of Hong Kong."

"A failure to do so will only embolden the Chinese government to deepen its human rights crackdown, putting at risk not only Hong Kongers but U.K. nationals and businesses operating in the city," Rogers said in a statement responding to the government report.

Emergency visas

In April, British lawmakers called on their government to issue emergency visas to journalists at risk of arrest or prosecution in Hong Kong, and to apply targeted sanctions to individuals responsible for Lai's arbitrary arrest and prosecution.

The group also expressed concerns over last week's ruling by Hong Kong’s Court of First Instance, which rejected an appeal from Lai’s legal team after the city's leader John Lee ruled that his British barrister, Tim Owen KC, couldn't represent him.

Policy director Sam Goodman said Hong Kong's courts no longer have enough judicial independence to act as a check on the current national security crackdown, nor to ensure a fair trial for political prisoners.

"There is no such thing as a common law system which operates with 'Chinese Communist Party' characteristics," Goodman said, adding that Hong Kong's "common law system ... has been systematically dismantled by Beijing."

Exiled former pro-democracy lawmaker Ted Hui welcomed the criticism of Hong Kong's human rights record.

"In the long run, it will ... unite our allies in free countries, and they will take a relatively tough stance, which will have an effect on their leadership," Hui said. 

"If more allies of free countries clearly say that Hong Kong’s human rights are regressing, and that the national security law is a violation of human rights, then that is a very clear position," he said.

The Hong Kong government slammed the U.K. report as "malicious slander and a political attack on Hong Kong," while Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the British government "has yet to wake up from its colonial dream."

"It continues ... to interfere in Hong Kong affairs through a misleading 'report' which is steeped in ideological bias and inconsistent with the facts," Mao told a regular news conference in Beijing.

Lai's son Sebastien warned earlier this month that Hong Kong is now a "risky" place to do business, and that arbitrary arrests, sentences and raids will likely continue under the national security crackdown.

International press freedom groups say the ruling Communist Party under supreme leader Xi Jinping has "gutted" press freedom in the formerly freewheeling city, since Lai's Apple Daily and other pro-democracy news outlets were forced to close.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jojo Man, Ng Ting Hong and Chingman for RFA Cantonese.

Just hours after Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and 116 publishers, editors-in-chief, and senior editors from around the world called for the release of Apple Daily founder and RSF Press Freedom Prize laureate Jimmy Lai (in Cantonese: Lai Chee-ying), the Hong Kong government responded with a veiled threat.

It published a statement threatening in veiled terms the “organisations and individuals” who “interfere with the judicial proceedings” without explicitly mentioning RSF or the signatories to the call.

In the Hong Kong government’s views, calling for Lai’s release “is very likely to constitute the offence of criminal contempt of court or the offence of perverting the course of justice,” which could carry a sentence of respectively two and seven years in prison under the Criminal Procedure Ordinance in Hong Kong.

• READ MORE: ‘Free Jimmy Lai now’ plea by RSF and 116 global media leaders
• Other Jimmy Lai reports

The statement also claimed, against mounting evidence to the contrary, that press freedom was still being “respected and protected” in the territory.

It also said that the arrest and prosecution of Jimmy Lai and other press freedom defenders were “completely unrelated to the issue of press freedom”.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

More than 100 media leaders from around the world have joined Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in signing an unprecedented joint statement expressing support for detained Apple Daily founder and publisher Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong.

They have called for his immediate release.

Among the signatories are publishers, editors-in-chief, and senior editors from 41 countries, including New Zealand — and two Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

• READ MORE: Other Jimmy Lai reports

This powerful joint statement is signed by 113 media leaders spanning 41 countries, from Egypt to Turkey, from India to Gambia, from Myanmar to Mongolia, and everywhere in between.

RSF coordinated this call in support of Jimmy Lai, who has become an emblematic figure in the fight for press freedom in Hong Kong and globally.

The action also seeks to highlight the broader dire state of press freedom in the Chinese-ruled territory, which has deteriorated sharply in recent years.

A former laureate of RSF’s Press Freedom Prize, 75-year-old Jimmy Lai has worked over the past 25 years to uphold the values of freedom of speech and press through his independent media outlet Apple Daily.

Concurrent sentences
Detained since December 2020 in a maximum security jail and repeatedly refused bail, Lai is already serving concurrent sentences on charges of attending “unauthorised” pro-democracy protests and allegations of fraud.

He now faces a possible life sentence under the draconian national security law, with his trial scheduled to start on September 25.

“We stand with Jimmy Lai. We believe he has been targeted for publishing independent reporting, and we condemn all charges against him,” said the RSF and co-signatories.

“We call for his immediate release.”

They also called for the release of all 13 currently detained journalists in Hong Kong, and for any remaining charges to be dropped against all 28 journalists targeted under national security and other laws over the past three years.

Among the signatories are 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureates Dmitry Muratov (Novaya Gazeta, Russia) and Maria Ressa (Rappler, the Philippines); publisher of The New York Times A.G. Sulzberger; publisher of The Washington Post Fred Ryan; CEO Goli Sheikholeslami as well as editor-in-chief Matthew Kaminski of Politico (USA); editors from a wide range of major UK newspapers including Chris Evans (The Telegraph), Tony Gallagher (The Times), Victoria Newton (The Sun), Alison Philipps (The Daily Mirror); Ted Verity (Mail newspapers), and Katharine Viner (The Guardian); editor-in-chief of Libération Dov Alfon, editorial director of L’Express Éric Chol and director of Le Monde Jérôme Fenoglio (France); editors-in-chief of Süddeutsche Zeitung Wolfgang Krach and Judith Wittwer, and editor-in-chief of Die Welt Jennifer Wilton (Germany); editor-in-chief of Expressen Klas Granström (Sweden); and many more from around the world.

Among the signatories is Dr David Robie, editor and publisher of the New Zealand-based Asia Pacific Report.

The RSF appeal over Apple Daily founder and publisher Jimmy Lai.

‘Powerful voices’
“We have brought these powerful voices together to show that the international media community will not tolerate the targeting of their fellow publisher. When press freedom is threatened anywhere, it is threatened everywhere,” said RSF’s secretary-general Christophe Deloire in a statement.

“Jimmy Lai must be released without further delay, along with all 13 detained journalists, and urgent steps taken to repair the severe damage that has been done to Hong Kong’s press freedom climate over the past three years, before it is too late.”

Jimmy Lai’s son Sebastien said: “Hong Kong is now a city shrouded in a blanket of fear. Those who criticise the authorities are threatened, prosecuted, imprisoned. My father has been in prison since 2020 because he spoke out against CCP [Chinese Community Party] power.

“Because he stood up for what he believes in. It is deeply moving to now see so many powerful voices — Nobel prize winners, and many of the leading newspapers and media organisations across the world — speak out for him.”

Over the past three years, China has used the national security law and other laws as a pretext to prosecute at least 28 journalists, press freedom defenders and collaborators in Hong Kong — 13 of whom remain in detention, including Lai and six staff of Apple Daily.

The newspaper itself was shut down — a move seen as the final nail in the coffin of press freedom in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is ranked 140th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2023 World Press Freedom Index, having plummeted down the rankings from 18th place in just 20 years.

China itself ranked 175th of the 180 countries and territories surveyed.

• The full text of the statement and list of signatories are here.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

More than 100 media leaders from around the world have joined Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in signing an unprecedented joint statement expressing support for detained Apple Daily founder and publisher Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong.

They have called for his immediate release.

Among the signatories are publishers, editors-in-chief, and senior editors from 41 countries, including New Zealand — and two Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

• READ MORE: Other Jimmy Lai reports

This powerful joint statement is signed by 113 media leaders spanning 41 countries, from Egypt to Turkey, from India to Gambia, from Myanmar to Mongolia, and everywhere in between.

RSF coordinated this call in support of Jimmy Lai, who has become an emblematic figure in the fight for press freedom in Hong Kong and globally.

The action also seeks to highlight the broader dire state of press freedom in the Chinese-ruled territory, which has deteriorated sharply in recent years.

A former laureate of RSF’s Press Freedom Prize, 75-year-old Jimmy Lai has worked over the past 25 years to uphold the values of freedom of speech and press through his independent media outlet Apple Daily.

Concurrent sentences
Detained since December 2020 in a maximum security jail and repeatedly refused bail, Lai is already serving concurrent sentences on charges of attending “unauthorised” pro-democracy protests and allegations of fraud.

He now faces a possible life sentence under the draconian national security law, with his trial scheduled to start on September 25.

“We stand with Jimmy Lai. We believe he has been targeted for publishing independent reporting, and we condemn all charges against him,” said the RSF and co-signatories.

“We call for his immediate release.”

They also called for the release of all 13 currently detained journalists in Hong Kong, and for any remaining charges to be dropped against all 28 journalists targeted under national security and other laws over the past three years.

Among the signatories are 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureates Dmitry Muratov (Novaya Gazeta, Russia) and Maria Ressa (Rappler, the Philippines); publisher of The New York Times A.G. Sulzberger; publisher of The Washington Post Fred Ryan; CEO Goli Sheikholeslami as well as editor-in-chief Matthew Kaminski of Politico (USA); editors from a wide range of major UK newspapers including Chris Evans (The Telegraph), Tony Gallagher (The Times), Victoria Newton (The Sun), Alison Philipps (The Daily Mirror); Ted Verity (Mail newspapers), and Katharine Viner (The Guardian); editor-in-chief of Libération Dov Alfon, editorial director of L’Express Éric Chol and director of Le Monde Jérôme Fenoglio (France); editors-in-chief of Süddeutsche Zeitung Wolfgang Krach and Judith Wittwer, and editor-in-chief of Die Welt Jennifer Wilton (Germany); editor-in-chief of Expressen Klas Granström (Sweden); and many more from around the world.

Among the signatories is Dr David Robie, editor and publisher of the New Zealand-based Asia Pacific Report.

The RSF appeal over Apple Daily founder and publisher Jimmy Lai.

‘Powerful voices’
“We have brought these powerful voices together to show that the international media community will not tolerate the targeting of their fellow publisher. When press freedom is threatened anywhere, it is threatened everywhere,” said RSF’s secretary-general Christophe Deloire in a statement.

“Jimmy Lai must be released without further delay, along with all 13 detained journalists, and urgent steps taken to repair the severe damage that has been done to Hong Kong’s press freedom climate over the past three years, before it is too late.”

Jimmy Lai’s son Sebastien said: “Hong Kong is now a city shrouded in a blanket of fear. Those who criticise the authorities are threatened, prosecuted, imprisoned. My father has been in prison since 2020 because he spoke out against CCP [Chinese Community Party] power.

“Because he stood up for what he believes in. It is deeply moving to now see so many powerful voices — Nobel prize winners, and many of the leading newspapers and media organisations across the world — speak out for him.”

Over the past three years, China has used the national security law and other laws as a pretext to prosecute at least 28 journalists, press freedom defenders and collaborators in Hong Kong — 13 of whom remain in detention, including Lai and six staff of Apple Daily.

The newspaper itself was shut down — a move seen as the final nail in the coffin of press freedom in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is ranked 140th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2023 World Press Freedom Index, having plummeted down the rankings from 18th place in just 20 years.

China itself ranked 175th of the 180 countries and territories surveyed.

• The full text of the statement and list of signatories are here.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent, and Lai, a pro-democracy Hong Kong media magnate, are among record numbers of journalists in prison as the United Nations marks the 30^th anniversary of its special day for media freedom on Wednesday, May 3, in New York.

Their imprisonment, by countries that make up two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, highlight the shrinking of media freedom globally and the need for the UN to do more to address it.

Gershkovich was one of the few foreign correspondents left in Russia since Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine last year and clamped down on all independent reporting. Lai had tried to keep alive the promise of a free press in Hong Kong but in 2020 was silenced by Beijing’s security state.

When World Press Freedom Day was inaugurated in 1993, independent news outlets were springing up in Russia and the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual prison census did not find any journalists jailed in the country for their work. CPJ’s most recent census, by contrast, recorded 19 in prison on December 1, 2022. Independent news media are now either shuttered or forced abroad.  

In 1993, Hong Kong was four years away from being handed back to China by Britain and enjoying a robust media landscape. The mainland was still a minefield for independent Chinese reporters, but many learned to pick a path through Communist Party censorship. Chinese jails housed 29 journalists that year, compared with 43 last December. 

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West believed it had won the Cold War and would usher in a new democratic world order. Many Eastern European nations embraced new freedoms and independent journalism emerged from the dissident underground into the daylight.

The impetus to establish a day to honor press freedom, however, came out of Africa with the Windhoek Declaration of 1991. Then, a sense of political optimism gripped much of the continent as apartheid unraveled in South Africa, Namibia shook off colonial rule and Ethiopia toppled a murderous dictator.

In the decade that followed, independent journalism blossomed globally. The arrival of the internet and the publishing freedoms it brought briefly tipped the balance of power between state control of information and the press in favor of free expression.

But that began to shift back in the 2000s, coinciding with the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the ability of governments to turn the new liberating technologies into tools of censorship and surveillance.

Journalism needs democracy and rule of law to thrive. It is now losing both. 

The Swedish-based V-Dem Institute, which monitors political freedoms globally, says the gains of the past 35 years have been wiped out. It estimates that 72% of the world’s population – 5.7 billion people – now live in autocracies. “The decline is most dramatic in the Asia-Pacific region, which is back to levels last recorded in 1978,” it says in its 2023 Democracy Report. The U.S. watchdog Freedom House agrees. Global freedom declined for the 17^th consecutive year, it notes in its 2023 report.

So, has the UN made any progress all these years?  

At the constant prodding of civil society organizations and free-press-friendly member states, UNESCO – the Paris-based UN agency responsible for free expression – has helped promote journalist safety and an end to impunity in the killing of journalists. In 2012, it launched a Plan of Action to defend free media. It has also designated November 2 as International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. 

But UNESCO is a relatively small unit with the UN structure. It is constrained by UN member states’ power politics, which prevent it from calling out individual countries for repressing the media, and it lacks the global footprint and resources to intervene quickly where journalists are detained, attacked or murdered.

The limits of the UN mechanisms to keep journalists safe were clearly on display after the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. It was down to the individual initiative of Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard to assemble a team and go to Turkey to investigate the killing and draft a report for the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. Special rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed, but not paid, by the UN to investigate violations. They can only visit countries to probe abuses if the country under scrutiny agrees. 

However, there is still a lot the UN can do with its existing authority and structure to address press freedom. First, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and supportive member states need to invest the resources needed to strengthen UNESCO’S plan on journalist safety. Then they need to say and do more against states that flagrantly ignore or violate human rights, as they did by voting to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council last year.

David Kaye, a former special rapporteur for freedom of expression, suggests creating a task force of investigators under the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council to probe attacks on the media. He also sees a bigger role for the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and its new head, Volker Türk, in defending the press. “I think that the ability to get human rights researchers or investigators on the ground in the immediate aftermath of an attack or a series of attacks on journalists, can be really meaningful,” Kaye told me.  

Türk’s office is already working with press freedom groups to draw up its own list of imprisoned journalists and called for the release of those who have been arbitrarily detained for “doing their essential work”– encouraging signs that can  reinforce swift action by existing UN institutions when journalists are killed or detained.

“The key is that you want press freedom to be a part of the fabric of the UN process rather than a one-off,” Kaye added. “It’s great to have a day, but you need to have it day after day, you have to have the institutional ability to actually address impunity.”

Evan Gershkovich, Jimmy Lai, and some 363 other jailed journalists are counting on just that.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Robert Mahoney.

The APPG’s report urged the U.K. government to treat the case of Lai, a British citizen and founder of Hong Kong’s now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, as a political priority and to consider his detention arbitrary. The group found the U.K. government’s response to Lai’s case has been “minimal, arguably negligent.”

CPJ was among the groups that submitted evidence to the APPG inquiry.

“British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his government must heed the newly released All-Party Parliamentary Group report, which calls on them to pressure for publisher Jimmy Lai’s release,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “It is time for Sunak to say enough is enough. In five months, Lai will be tried under Hong Kong’s national security law, which could see him spend the rest of his life in jail. Will the British PM end his deafening silence?”

Lai has been behind bars since December 2020. He is serving a sentence of five years and nine months on fraud charges and is awaiting trial on national security charges, due to start in September, which could imprison him for life. 

The APPG on Hong Kong is an informal cross-party group in the U.K. Parliament, started in November 2019.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Lai, whose Next Digital media empire and its flagship Apple Daily newspaper were forced to close amid a national security investigation, will be tried on charges of "collusion with a foreign power" and others linked to "seditious publications."

His legal team filed a writ calling on the city's High Court to overturn a decision by the Committee for Safeguarding National Security not to grant barrister Timothy Owen the necessary visa to represent 

In a separate writ, his legal team argued that if the committee is empowered to decide whether any judicial procedure is related to national security, the entire judicial system will collapse given the fact that the committee is not itself subject to any judicial review processes.

Last month, Lai's lawyers testified to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva over ongoing criticisms and concerns about the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities’ treatment of Lai.

China's National People's Congress ruled in December that top officials in the Hong Kong government have the power to bar foreign lawyers from representing clients in "national security" cases, after three failed bids in the city's courts to get Owen disqualified.

The Court of Final Appeal had ruled in favor of Lai’s application to engage Owen, but Chief Executive John Lee subsequently asked the National People’s Congress Standing Committee for an interpretation of the national security law regarding overseas lawyers’ participation in such cases.

Trial postponed

Lai's trial on several charges of "collusion with a foreign power" -- under a national security law imposed by the ruling Communist Party in the wake of the 2019 protest movement -- has been postponed until September 2023. He is currently serving a separate five-year, nine-month jail term for fraud over the subletting of office space at his Next Digital headquarters. 

The dispute over Lai’s hiring of British Kings Counsel barrister Tim Owen to lead his defense team, has highlighted concerns that Hong Kong's promised judicial independence is already rapidly eroding in favor of top-down control by an executive that takes orders from Beijing.

Much of the prosecution's evidence -- in a trial that will take place before a panel of government-appointment judges and no jury -- centers on opinion articles published in Lai's now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper.

The legal challenges came as the government introduced a bill in the city's legislature that would allow the chief executive to rule on whether foreign lawyers can be engaged in national security trials, Radio Television Hong Kong reported.

Power controlled by Communist Party

Current affairs commentator Sang Pu, who is a lawyer by training, said Lai is unlikely to win either legal challenge, but that the case could force the government to be more transparent about who decides what.

He called for an explanation of how the Committee for Safeguarding National Security was able to put pressure on the Immigration Department to deny Owen a work visa.

"Even if this challenge is successful ... the [authorities] could just call for the chief executive to issue a decision, and that would be the end of it anyway," Sang said. 

"All the power is in the hands of the Hong Kong government, which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, so there is a limit to what Jimmy Lai can do about it," he said.

Justice Minister Paul Lam told lawmakers that it was legitimate, logical and reasonable to make Hong Kong's chief executive the gatekeeper on matters involving national security.

"We have to emphasize again that the bill has no adverse impact on the rule of law, the courts' independent judicial powers as guaranteed under the Basic Law, and the parties' right to choose their legal representation and the right to a fair trial," Lam claimed in comments reported by Radio Television Hong Kong.

Lam denied the changes would amount to a blanket ban on foreign lawyers taking cases under the national security law.

Freedom under attack

The move came as an overseas journalists' association described a recent exodus of Hong Kong journalists from the city amid a "severe crackdown on freedom of expression" under the national security law, which was imposed by Beijing in the wake of the 2019 pro-democracy movement.

The Association of Overseas Hong Kong Media Professionals estimated in a recent report that hundreds of former Hong Kong journalists are now living overseas, and that the number is growing.

The majority of exiled journalists interviewed for the report worked as reporters in Hong Kong, while more than one-third of them had more than 21 years’ experience in the industry.

"The overwhelming majority do not plan to return to Hong Kong in the near future, despite facing problems in their new homes," the group said in a press release attached to the report.

It said more than half of respondents are no longer working as journalists, although most would like to.

"Many have found a wide range of alternative employment in occupations ranging from car mechanic work, to floristry and employment as a barista," the report said, citing language barriers and other barriers to media jobs overseas.

It said many reported suffering from "burnout and in other cases trauma as a result of their experience in Hong Kong."

“Overall, this survey paints a picture of an exiled media community facing multiple challenges combined with a motivation to maintain the tradition of a free Hong Kong media, albeit in exile," group Chairman Joseph Ngan said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cheryl Tung and Ng Ting Hong for RFA Cantonese.

CPJ recommended that APPG members send an urgent appeal to the Hong Kong government to request the release of Jimmy Lai and other imprisoned journalists and seek British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s immediate action to secure Lai’s release.

Lai, a British citizen and the founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper, Apple Daily, has been behind bars since December 2020. He is serving a sentence of five years and nine months on fraud charges and is awaiting trial on national security charges, due to start in September 2023, which could jail him for life. 

The APPG on Hong Kong is a cross-party group with no official Parliament status formed in November 2019 in response to the political and social crisis in Hong Kong. The APPG’s inquiry is often used to advise the government.

Read the complete inquiry submission here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Pressure Drops

Read over 400 magazine and newsletter back issues here

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

“We weren’t there to kill human beings, really. We were there to kill ideology.” (Lt. William Calley)

Officially termed an “incident” (as opposed to a “massacre”), the events of March 16, 1968, at My Lai — a hamlet in South Vietnam — are widely portrayed and accepted to this day as an aberration. While the catalog of U.S. war crimes in Southeast Asia is far too sordid and lengthy to detail here, it’s painfully clear this was not the case.

In fact, on the very same day that Lt. William Calley entered into infamy, another U.S. company entered My Khe, a sister sub hamlet of My Lai. That visit has been described as such:

“In this ‘other massacre,’ members of this separate company piled up a body count of perhaps a hundred peasants — My Khe was smaller than My Lai — ’flattened the village’ by dynamite and fire, and then threw handfuls of straw on corpses. The next morning, this company moved on down the Batangan Peninsula by the South China Sea, burning every hamlet they came to, killing water buffalo, pigs, chickens, and ducks, and destroying crops. As one of the My Khe veterans said later, ‘what we were doing was being done all over.’ Said another: ‘We were out there having a good time. It was sort of like being in a shooting gallery.’

Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with covering up the My Lai killings, put it succinctly in 1971: “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.”

Of the 26 U.S. soldiers brought up on charges related to My Lai, only Calley was convicted. However, his life sentence was later reduced to three and a half years under house arrest.

Never forget, my friends: This is what we’re up against.

But let’s also never forget the actions of a man named Hugh Thompson.

Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr. wanted to fly choppers so badly that after a four-year stint in the Navy, he left his wife and two sons behind to re-up into the Army and train as a helicopter pilot. Thompson arrived in Vietnam on December 27, 1967, and quickly earned a reputation as “an exceptional pilot who took danger in his stride.”

In their book, Four Hours at My Lai, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim also describe Hugh Thompson as a “very moral man. He was absolutely strict about opening fire only on clearly defined targets.”

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Thompson’s sense of virtue would be put to the test.

Flying in his H-23 observation chopper, the 25-year-old Thompson used green smoke to mark wounded people on the ground in and around My Lai. Upon returning a short while later after refueling, he found that the wounded he saw earlier were now dead.

Thompson’s gunner, Lawrence Colburn, averted his gaze from the gruesome sight.

After bringing the chopper down to a standstill hover, Thompson and his crew came upon a young woman they had previously marked with smoke. As they watched, a U.S. soldier, wearing captain’s bars, “prodded her with his foot, and then killed her.”

What Thompson didn’t know was that by that point, Lt. Calley’s Charlie Company had already slaughtered more than 560 Vietnamese—primarily women, children, infants, and elderly people. Many of the women had been gang-raped and mutilated.

All Thompson knew for sure was that the U.S. troops he saw pursuing civilians had to be stopped.

Bravely landing his helicopter between the charging GIs and the fleeing villagers, Thompson ordered Colburn to turn his machine gun on the American soldiers if they tried to shoot the unarmed men, women, and children.

Thompson then stepped out of the chopper into the combat zone and coaxed the frightened civilians from the bunker they were hiding in.

With tears streaming down his face, he evacuated them to safety on his H-23.

Never forget, my friends: This is how we can choose to live.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

“The harsh sentence handed to Jimmy Lai on trumped-up fraud charges shows how Beijing and Hong Kong will stop at nothing to eliminate any dissenting voices,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi in Frankfurt, Germany. “Authorities must end this persecution once and for all. Lai is 75 and has served two years behind bars. He must be released immediately and all charges must be dropped.”

The sentence was handed down after a court on October 25 convicted Lai of two counts of fraud for allegedly violating the terms of the lease of Next Digital’s headquarters. He was also fined HK$2 million (US$257,000).

Lai plans to appeal the jail sentence, former Next Digital executive Mark Simon told CPJ via email.

Wong Wai-keung, a Next Digital administrative director was also convicted on the same charge and sentenced to 21 months in prison.

Lai has been in prison since December 2020 and has served a 20-month prison term for two other charges relating to his alleged involvement with unauthorized demonstrations. He is awaiting trial on national security charges, for which he faces life imprisonment; proceedings are expected to begin on December 13.

In 2021, Lai received CPJ’s Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award in recognition of his extraordinary and sustained commitment to press freedom.

China was the world’s worst jailer of journalists in 2021, according to CPJ’s 2021 prison census, the first time that journalists in Hong Kong appeared on CPJ’s census. CPJ will release its 2022 prison census on December 14.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

The Honorable John Lee
Chief Executive
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People’s Republic of China
Chief Executive’s Office
Tamar, Hong Kong

Sent via email: ceo@ceo.gov.hk

Dear Chief Executive Lee,

We, the undersigned press freedom and human rights groups, are writing to request your leadership to cease targeted persecution against Jimmy Lai, the 74-year-old founder of Next Digital Limited and the Apple Daily newspaper, release him from jail, and immediately drop all charges against him.

On December 1, Lai will stand trial without a jury on collusion charges under the national security law. He has been behind bars for more than 22 months since December 2020 after being charged under the national security law.

Prior to your inauguration in July, you promised freedom of the press in Hong Kong would continue to be protected by the city’s Basic Law and meet the international standards of media freedom. You reiterated in a September speech at a National Day media reception that Hong Kong is governed by rule of law, and that freedom of speech and of the media are fully guaranteed under the Basic Law.

We welcomed your commitment to uphold press freedom and your remarks recognizing journalists as a force “for societal progression and the improvement of people’s lives through objective and fair reporting and commentary.”

But these promises ring hollow when Lai, one of Hong Kong’s best-known media figures, sits behind bars for his commitment to critical journalism. Such journalism is essential to your efforts in cementing Hong Kong’s role as a global financial hub, for which a free press and judicial independence are vital elements, and to comply with international legal obligations to uphold press freedom.

Lai’s imprisonment and the jailing of other Hong Kong journalists, including several executives of the now-defunct Apple Daily, have seriously undermined the confidence in the city’s judiciary and the rule of law.

Lai was first sentenced to 14 months in prison in April 2021 for “organizing and knowingly taking part in unauthorized assemblies” in August 2019. The following month, a court sentenced him to another 14 months for “organizing an unauthorized assembly” in October 2019 and ordered Lai to serve a total of 20 months’ imprisonment.

In December 2021, Lai was sentenced again to 13 months in prison for “inciting others” to take part in an unauthorized assembly in 2020.

While the judge ordered the sentence to run concurrently to the previous sentences he was serving, Lai has now been behind bars for more than 22 months, exceeding the 20-month term he was previously given.

As well as his upcoming national security trial, a court in October found Lai guilty of fraud for allegedly violating the lease of Next Digital’s headquarters, although it is clear that he was targeted in retaliation for his journalism.

Also in October, another court upheld a ruling that police could search Lai’s two mobile phones that stored journalistic information, violating the basic principles of press freedom and journalistic confidentiality.

In addition, his international legal team at Doughty Street Chambers has faced intimidation and harassment through anonymous emails, warning the lawyers against traveling to Hong Kong to defend Lai or risk facing action under the subversion law.

We welcome your pledge to enhance the confidence of the public and the international community in Hong Kong’s rule of law in your first policy address as chief executive. As the chairperson of the Committee for Safeguarding National Security of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region that oversees the Hong Kong Police Force’s national security department, exercising your authority to drop the charges against Jimmy Lai and free him immediately is a crucial step toward regaining global confidence in Hong Kong.

Time is of the essence for your government to act and we strongly urge you to do so now.

Sincerely,

Amnesty International
ARTICLE 19
Association of Taiwan Journalists
Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation
Committee to Protect Journalists
Croatian PEN Centre
Freedom House
Human Rights Watch
Independent Chinese PEN Center
International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)
PEN America
PEN Club Français
PEN International
PEN Lebanon
PEN Netherlands
PEN Türkiye Center
PEN Ukraine
Peoples’ Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), India
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Swedish PEN
Taiwan Association for China Human Rights
Trieste PEN Centre
Vietnamese League for Human Rights in Switzerland

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jennifer Dunham.

“Today’s conviction of Jimmy Lai on trumped-up fraud charges shows that Hong Kong will stop at nothing to silence one of its fiercest media critics,” said CPJ President Jodie Ginsberg in New York. “Lai is clearly being targeted for his journalism, and the persecution must stop. Hong Kong authorities should let Lai go free and drop all charges against him.”

The court convicted Lai of two counts of fraud for allegedly violating the terms of the lease of Next Digital’s headquarters. A sentence has yet to be announced, but Lai will appeal, Next Digital executive Mark Simon told CPJ via email. 

Wong Wai-keung, a Next Digital administrative director who has been awaiting trial on bail, was also convicted on the same charge.

Lai has been behind bars since December 2020 and has served a 20-month prison term for two other charges relating to his alleged involvement with unauthorized demonstrations. He is awaiting trial on national security charges, for which he faces life imprisonment; proceedings are expected to begin on December 1.

In 2021, Lai received CPJ’s Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award in recognition of his extraordinary and sustained commitment to press freedom.

China was the world’s worst jailer of journalists in 2021, according to CPJ’s December 1 prison census. It was also the first time that journalists in Hong Kong appeared on CPJ’s census.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp.

On Tuesday, August 30, a High Court judge ruled that police could search two phones with journalistic information owned by Lai, the imprisoned founder of the Next Digital media company and the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, according to news reports. Lai’s legal team has said they will file an appeal, and the court ruled that the search would not be conducted until 11 p.m. on September 6, while the appeal is pending, according to those reports.

“Hong Kong authorities’ pursuit of information on Next Digital founder Jimmy Lai’s phones violates basic principles of press freedom and journalistic confidentiality,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Hong Kong authorities should not contest Lai’s appeal against this search, and should release him and all other Next Digital executives held in retaliation for their work.”

Lai, CPJ’s 2021 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Awardee, is being held in pretrial detention after serving a 20-month prison term for charges related to his alleged involvement in illegal demonstrations. He is awaiting trial on national security and sedition charges, according to CPJ research; if convicted on the national security charges, he could face life in prison.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Lai's plea was revealed at a case management hearing in Hong Kong on Monday. Six other former staff members -- former senior editors and columnists at his now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper -- said they would plead guilty.

Lai's trial will have no jury, and will be held instead before a panel of three national security judges vetted by the government.

Lai appeared in court on Monday, appearing relaxed in a blue suit, waving and smiling to friends and relatives in the public gallery, and talking from time to time with his daughter, guarded by three prison guards at all times.

Meanwhile, veteran democracy activist and former organizer of the now-banned candlelight vigils for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre Albert Ho was released on bail after a year behind bars.

Ho, 70, recently also completed four "illegal assembly" sentences handed down in connection with June 4th memorial activities in 2020.

He is still awaiting trial for "incitement to subvert state power" under the national security law, and was bailed for H.K.$700,000 and a H.K.$400,000 surety.

Ho is required to report to his local police station three times a week, and could be redetained at any time on remand, and is barred from making comments deemed harmful to "national security" on any platform.

'

The announcement came to cheers among Ho's supporters in court.

Ho's former colleagues at vigil organizers the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung also stand accused of "inciting others to organize, plan, implement or take part in the subversion of state power," and remain behind bars.

Ho and Lee have said they plan to plead not guilty and stand trial, while Chow has requested a preliminary hearing, scheduled for Sept. 2.

The subversion of state power refers to "overthrowing or destroying the fundamental system of the People's Republic of China established by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, or overthrowing the central government organs of the People's Republic of China," according to the national security law.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the Hong Kong authorities on Monday to immediately drop the "politically motivated" charges against 47 former opposition lawmakers and democracy activists, and release them.

Describing the national security law as "abusive," the group said five of the defendants including the founder of the 2014 Occupy Central movement Benny Tai and former opposition lawmaker Au Nok-hin could face life imprisonment, as they had been flagged by the prosecution as "major organizers" of a democratic primary election that aimed to field candidates who could win a majority in the 2020 Legislative Council (LegCo) elections.

The election was postponed by the government, mass arrests of opposition politicians followed, and the government rewrote the election rules to ensure that only supporters of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) now hold seats in LegCo.

Contempt for democracy, rule of law

The 47 lawmakers, protest leaders, unionists, and academics, who range in age from 24 to 66, are being prosecuted for “conspiracy to commit subversion” due to their peaceful political activities, HRW said.

"Hong Kong’s biggest national security case is wrapped in legal language, but it’s just part of the Chinese government’s relentless efforts to smother Hong Kong’s democracy movement," HRW's senior China researcher Maya Wang said in a statement on the group's website.

"The very real threat of life in prison for peaceful activism shows Beijing’s utter contempt for both democratic political processes and the rule of law," she said.

Subversion and other crimes established by the national security law, which the Chinese government imposed on Hong Kong from July 1, 2020, are overly broad and arbitrarily applied, the group said.

It said denial of a jury trial would deprive defendants of their right to a fair trial. National security trials may also be held behind closed doors if the authorities decide that state secrets are involved.

Many of the 47 defendants have been detained for nearly 18 months since police charged them in late February 2021, HRW.

Observers have pointed out that the majority of guilty pleas are coming from those denied bail, and could reflect the defendants' wish to earn a sentence reduction of roughly 33 percent, as well as avoiding the grueling process of attending court day in, day out during a lengthy trial for which they must rise at the crack of dawn and spend hours in cramped holding cells and prison buses with little food or rest.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Yu Fat, Raymond Cheng and Cheryl Tung for RFA Cantonese.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cheryl Tung, Chen Zifei, Yu Fat and Lu Xi.