Since midnight local time, CitizenNews articles are no longer updated. The 800,000 subscribers can still go to the site as we go to the museum. It’s like a headless duck that’s still running. CitizenNews journalists have decided to scuttle themselves. Why ? Because they are afraid. You have to understand them: they are experienced, they have a life, a family, no vocation to martyrdom. They saw last week, seven colleagues of a competing title (Stand News) thrown into the dungeon.
The world has resigned itself to the worst
The editor-in-chief and his predecessor are charged with “conspiring to carry out a subversive publication”. It will cost them dearly. We don’t know how many. It’s blurry, it’s always like that. We do not know either the contours of application of the law on national security which requires the media to publish only “safe information”.
When in doubt, “safe news” is news the Chinese Communist Party likes. But how do you know if this or that news will not displease her? It is a question of the balance of power. CitizenNews has stopped playing cat and mouse just as the newly elected Hong Kong Legislative Council pledges loyalty to Beijing. 89 of these 90 elected officials loudly applauded the closure of Stand News. We wonder about the 90th, the one who did not bark with the pack.
Just six months after the introduction of the National Security Law, Hong Kong is a special administrative region that is no longer anything special. For Beijing, the humiliations of British colonialism are washed away. For Democrats, the battle is lost. The world has resigned itself to the worst.
Standardization likely to recur in Taiwan
Deng Xiao Ping said he had found the magic formula to modernize China, it was Hong Kong. The world believed it. Everyone except Taiwan. The West naively believed that Hong Kong was China’s future. No one imagined the opposite, that Hong Kong should align with the mainland.
Taiwan where normalization is likely to recur. Willingly and forcibly, inevitable. What do Taiwanese experts who follow history from the front row say? That we must refuse bullying. Support the Democrats at all costs. Do not repeat like parrots the propaganda of Beijing which claims to be a great power, ready for any escalation, military if necessary.
Americans are responding to the challenge in their own way. This does not prevent Beijing from standing up to the world and banning, for example, for the last two years any investigation into the origin of the Covid.
It is urgent to listen and ally with the countries of the region which depend economically on Beijing but refuse to align. Our natural allies are India, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and even neighbors like Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, that half of the world that doesn’t want to end up like Hong Kong when it comes to ask what is a sure info …