Hong kong

Thursday

Elliot Wilson

Why everyone will suffer if China cracks down on Hong Kong

With all the chaos and confusion engulfing Hong Kong in recent weeks, it’s worth reminding ourselves what an extraordinary city it is — and what a loss to investors the removal of one of the world’s great safe havens would be. Hong Kong has long operated in a culturally neutral zone somewhere between China and the world, a bridgehead between the West and the world’s rising superpower. By the time London handed it back to Beijing in 1997 after 150 years of British rule, a once barren rock had been transformed into a genuinely global city. In the 17 years since, China has adhered largely to a set of principles

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 9 October 2014

Home Alan Henning, 47, a British volunteer aid worker taken captive in Syria by Islamic State, was murdered, and footage of his death, which included an appearance by a man with an English accent nicknamed Jihadi John, was posted online. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We will do all we can to hunt down these murderers and bring them to justice.’ Four men were arrested in London on suspicion of terror offences; MI5 sources suggested that the arrest might have ‘foiled the early stages’ of a planned attack. A 12-year-old girl in a wheelchair was saved from injury by her arm-braces when two men set a pit bull dog

Thursday

Jonathan Mirsky

Am I wrong to fear another Tiananmen?

For Beijing, the tens of thousands of protestors choking the centre of Hong Kong are such a dangerous outrage that mainland media cannot report on them. The real outrage is this: China agreed to hold free elections in 2017, but now a Beijing-appointed committee will determine whether candidates for chief executive can be relied on to toe Beijing’s line. On 6 September, a Chinese embassy official wrote to the Times that in 2017 there would be a one-man one-vote election in Hong Kong. He omitted to mention that Beijing has selected the committee that will approve the candidates. On 15 September, Ambassador Liu Xiaoming wrote to the Daily Telegraph attacking

James Palmer

What really scares Beijing about the Hong Kong protests

 Beijing There’s a nondescript building tucked away near my house, about the size of a college dormitory. Sometimes I wave from my roof to the scrawny boys having a smoke on the balcony; they wave back enthusiastically, since foreigners are a rare sight in their home villages. They are soldiers; the building is a barracks, one of many scattered through the city after the murderous crackdown on protestors in 1989. In my alley, several of the retired residents have temporarily abandoned mah-jong and gossip to don red ‘security patrol’ armbands. They are among the 850,000 volunteers the city government has mustered for the National Day holidays this week, charged with

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why the real winner from George Osborne’s ‘Google tax’ could be Nigel Farage

George Osborne’s promise to crack down on multinational companies’ avoidance of UK taxes by the use of impenetrable devices such as the ‘Double Irish’ and the ‘Dutch Sandwich’ certainly has the support of this column. I have long argued that the ‘fiduciary duty’ (identified by Google chairman Eric Schmidt) to minimise tax bills within the law for the benefit of shareholders has to be balanced against a moral duty to pay at least a modicum of tax in every profitable territory. Google, Apple, Amazon and eBay, as well as Starbucks and big names of the pharmaceutical sector, are among those known to use smart schemes which variously involve sales bookings

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Cameron visits UN HQ, Scotland checks its bruises, and a Swede sells his submarine

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited New York for talks at the United Nations; he said Britain supported the American air strikes on the Islamic State. ‘These people want to kill us,’ Mr Cameron said on NBC news. Mr Cameron met President Hassan Rouhani of Iran in New York, the first such meeting since the Iranian revolution in 1979. Mr Cameron was caught by cameras in New York saying to Michael Bloomberg, its former mayor, that when he rang the Queen with the Scottish referendum result, ‘She purred down the line.’ Alex Salmond resigned as First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party, with effect from November. This

Thursday

James Mcconnachie

A Labour MP defends the Empire – and only quotes Lenin twice

In a grand history of the British empire — because that is what this book really is —  you might expect more hand-wringing from a historian and Labour MP who has previously written a life of Engels. But despite quoting Marx half a dozen times (and Lenin, twice!) there is something about the idea of empire that excites Tristram Hunt. And this is a book about ideas, for all that it is rich in architectural description, economic fact and colourful anecdote. It describes how — and indeed when and where — the imperial ideology shaped and reshaped itself. As such, it is a nuanced riposte to those historians of empire,