We Don't Have to Trade With China

And yet we do:

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said on Tuesday the government could intervene if necessary in the Bar Association, whose chief has been labelled an "anti-China politician" by Beijing's top representative office in the city.

Paul Harris, chairman of the Bar Association, has been repeatedly targeted by pro-Beijing forces, with the latest remarks coming from the Liaison Office on Sunday criticising him for speaking out against jail terms handed down to several democracy activists this month.

Speaking at her weekly press briefing, Lam said that while Hong Kong respects freedom of expression, there are limits.

 

(Sidebar: wow! Do you and Guilbeault go bowling?) 

"For the time being I do not see the case for any government intervention into the affairs of the Hong Kong Bar Association," Lam said. "But, of course, if there are instances or complaints about the bar not acting in accordance with the Hong Kong law, then of course the government would be called into action."

Harris had challenged the prison terms given to media tycoon Jimmy Lai and others for taking part in an unauthorised assembly during anti-government demonstrations in 2019, and also defended the right to peaceful protests.

The Liaison Office accused him of being "an anti-Chinese politician with intimate foreign connections," and questioned how he could safeguard the rule of law in the former British colony as well as if he should remain on as chairman.

 

 

Australia seems to the only country in the Pacific with any any real clout to stick it to China.

How long will that last?:

"Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again ... for the curse of war," Pezzullo said in a letter to staff on Anazac Day, which honours the country's war dead.

Pezzullo did not specify the catalyst for his warning but it follows a sharp deterioration in Australia's relationship with China and a rise in regional tensions over Taiwan.

Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton said on Sunday that a conflict involving China over Taiwan "should not be discounted".

That's because there was never a real repeal of that draconian law:

China is set to report its first population decline since records began in 1949 despite the relaxation of the government’s strict family planning policies, which was meant to reverse the falling birth rate of the world’s most populous country.

The latest Chinese census, which was completed in December but has yet to be made public, is expected to report the total population of the country at less than 1.4 billion, according to people familiar with the research. In 2019, China’s population was reported to have exceeded the 1.4 billion mark. ...

China’s birth rates have weakened even after Beijing relaxed its decades-long family planning policy in 2015, allowing all couples to have two children instead of one. The population expanded under the one-child policy introduced in the late 1970s, thanks to a bulging population of young people in the aftermath of the Communist revolution as well as increased life expectancy.

Official data showed the number of newborns in China increased in 2016 but then fell for three consecutive years. Officials blamed the decline on a shrinking number of young women and the surging costs of child-rearing.

The real picture could be even worse. In a report published last week, China’s central bank estimated that the total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman was likely to have in her lifetime, was less than 1.5, compared with the official estimate of 1.8.

I'll just leave these right here:

In the span of a generation, Chinese families will be much thinner than ever before. Extended kinship networks will atrophy across the nation, and many people will no longer have close blood relatives. This shift in the nature of the Chinese family is the unavoidable consequence of China’s prolonged decline in fertility rates, a trend that predated the implementation of Beijing’s harsh one-child policy in 1979 ...

**

It has been nearly two years since the Chinese Government modified its planned birth policy. In December of 2015, the Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee officially transitioned from a one-child policy with a two-child policy.

Under the new policy, married couples are prohibited by the Communist government from having more than two children. For unmarried women who find themselves pregnant, the Chinese Government continues to enforce a zero-child policy, counting all unwed births as out-of-quota births unless they marry within 60 days after the child’s birth.

Special circumstances apply for divorced and remarried couples, and for couples with a handicapped child who “will not be able to join the labor force upon reaching maturity.”  ...

As a recent PRI on-the-ground investigation in China has revealed, in certain locales the two-child policy is being just as rigorously enforced as the one-child policy was. Indeed, as greedy and unscrupulous family planning officials find fewer targets for their fines and extralegal confiscations of property, and face the prospect of seeing their income reduced, they seem to be bearing down even harder on those who violate the new policy.

 **

Wang's uncle describes abandoning his own newborn daughter, hoping someone would adopt her, but he found her the next day dead, covered with bugs.

"My mom threatened to kill herself and said, 'If you keep this baby girl, I will either kill myself or I will strangle her to death first before killing myself,'" he shared. "I thought I could save her life by giving her away but she ended up dead."

Almost every person they spoke to said they didn't have a choice, from family planning officials to midwives to ordinary Chinese citizens.

Wang asks in the film: "What made these good people do evil things?"

 

 

No, you are not boycotting her. She is boycotting you: 

Last week, Japanese actress Yui Aragaki was appointed by H&M Japan for their new campaign Let’s Change, which will be held during Japan's Golden Week from Tuesday (27 April). Owing to the Xinjiang cotton scandal in China, many Chinese fans of the actress are upset with her endorsement. ...

Amid the furore, Aragaki’s appointment as ambassador for H&M Japan proved to be a vexing situation for Chinese fans, who have boycotted the clothing brand. Some of these fans said they were “heartbroken” and wanted to “divorce” Aragaki, who has been known as the “national wife” in China.