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Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

nytimes.com

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Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#111

Post by [deleted] »

nyolfen wrote: post #75
zkirill wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a Canadian citizen who lives in British Columbia and is not Chinese or of Chinese descent. The fact that a Canadian citizen was "seized" is very concerning to me and I hope that our government gets on top of this swiftly. I also don't see any facts on which you can base your corruption claim.

>I also don't see any facts on which you can base your corruption claim. "Some of his most successful deals involved buying stakes in midsize financial institutions in smaller Chinese cities, often through a complex web of shell or dummy corporations. When Citigroup and other investors agreed to buy a big stake in the Guangdong Development Bank, for instance, one of Mr. Xiao’s investment vehicles — Puhua Investment —…

[deleted]

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#112

Post by johansch »

monort wrote: post #16

This happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearan...

There was some documentary about the Swedish citizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai that was shown on Swedish national TV recently.

"After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he obtained Swedish residency, and later became a naturalised citizen of Sweden, upon which he renounced his Chinese citizenship."

He has a teenage daughter in Sweden today.

He was holidaying in Thailand when he was kidnapped by Chinese agents. (Thailand obeys China...)

The "offical" Sweden is scared about negative trade consequences (China punished Norway quite thoroughly just because the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Chinese citizen) so they pretend like nothing has happened.

Gui Minhai eventually showed up in an obviously staged segment in Chinese state TV where he confessed to some crime he hadn't committed, and then begged Sweden to leave him alone, since he was now back in China "ready to answer to his crimes".

This is one of the most shameful aspects of Sweden that I know today, as a Swede. There is no way we would accept this unless there was quite a lot of trade at risk... and even considering this, it feels so wrong to give into them this easily.

This is a man who when he escaped to Sweden in the 80s trusted that Sweden would stand up for him.. Little did he know that the social democratic government (this is the same party that the assasinated Olof Palme used to run) would let him down so badly. :/

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#113

Post by jwtadvice »

skissane wrote: post #110

I wonder, what would the world be like today if the UK had refused to give back Hong Kong? Or, they could have refused to switch recognition from ROC to PRC, and then handed Hong Kong to ROC instead? The US and the UK basically gave the PRC everything they wanted in switching the UN's China seat from ROC to PRC. They could have driven a much harder bargain – e.g. have two Chinas in the UN, just like it has two Koreas…

China needed strong assurances from the US and UK that formally splitting from the Soviet Union wouldn't see the American alliance then turn against China in a divide-and-conquer strategy.

Could we have gotten a better deal? I'm not sure. Given the earlier incursion into Vietnam and Korea, the military support of the ROC and the militarization of the First Island Chain, I can't imagine that anything short of the very strong reassurance the alliance pursued with the "One China Policy" would have been acceptable.

The move is one of the only things heralded of the scandal-plagued Nixon Administration as a wild success for the United States, and is even often credited for being the key diplomatic victory that ultimately won America the Cold War.

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#114

Post by [deleted] »

sparky_z wrote: post #50
jwtadvice wrote: post #39

This appears to be an aspect of the anti-corruption drive that has been holding billionaires and politically connected people high up in the Chinese government to account of the law, with Xiao Jianhua caught in financial fraud. The controversy here isn't that China took Xiao Jianhua in to face the law, but that he was taken from Hong Kong, where an agreement with Britain gives its former colony de facto autonomy with…

It's not clear to me whether the anti-corruption drive arises out of a genuine antipathy towards corruption or as a means for Xi Jinping to consolidate personal power. This is especially hard because it seems likely that every Chinese bigwig is at least somewhat corrupt, and high-level Chinese power politics is opaque enough that it's not clear if only Xi's rivals are being targeted. I really don't know how to unpick…

[deleted]

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#115

Post by mwfunk »

jrockway wrote: post #103
paulddraper wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the US isn't a population based democracy Incorrect. Population corresponds to representation at national and state levels. This is enforced with a Constitutional base. "One person, one vote" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims

> "One person, one vote" So how come Trump's President? (It's because "one person" gets "one vote" for an elector. But some people get more electors than others, and electors vote for the President, not individual voters.)

Yep. There are a lot of things in the US political system that give states with lower populations more representation per capita than states with greater populations, and the electoral college is one of them and perhaps the most egregious, given that we're long past the time when it made sense to fear that US presidents would prioritize their home state over the country, if that was ever a concern.

The Senate is the most extreme example- every state gets two Senators. So Rhode Island and Wyoming have just as much representation in the Senate as California and Texas, despite having ~30x the population. Of course that's the whole point of the Senate, to counterbalance the representation-by-population of the House to avoid a tyranny by the majority. We may have worked ourselves into a tyranny by the minority at this point though. :(

Even the more egalitarian House somewhat overrepresents the more sparsely populated states, although it probably doesn't make nearly as much of a difference in practice. States get a number of representatives based on population, but every state gets at least one representative, so you have the case of (for example) Wyoming having one representative for its 600,000 people, but Texas ends up having one representative per ~800,000 people. Of course, Wyoming has one rep total and Texas has 36 of them, so I don't think Wyoming will be outvoting Texas anytime soon, but still.

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#116

Post by mistermann »

zkirill wrote: post #36
micaksica wrote: post #28

I don't have a lot of sympathy for this man's problems. When you're making your billions from the corruption in the Chinese state, you run the risk of ending up on the wrong side of it. It's no different than any other organized crime. I will be very surprised if Canada does or says anything of significance, given that these people are politically unpopular and causing issues for British Columbia. China has all the p…

I am a Canadian citizen who lives in British Columbia and is not Chinese or of Chinese descent. The fact that a Canadian citizen was "seized" is very concerning to me and I hope that our government gets on top of this swiftly. I also don't see any facts on which you can base your corruption claim.

> I also don't see any facts on which you can base your corruption claim.

The Canadian government hides most everything from it's citizens, especially when it comes to China. Statistics on real estate transactions using money from overseas are considered none of our business. People operating illegal hotels out of houses while not paying taxes on revenue? Just fine. Egregious tax evasion? No problem. Buying citizenship, driver's licenses, etc? A-ok.

All of these things are happening, but none of them are considered "facts", and you certainly won't ever see any facts if the government refuses to enforce the law on certain subsets of the population.

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#117

Post by imjustsaying »

Hong Kong has fallen, democracy there officially died after they refused to let those two legislators swear in.

Not sure whose idea it was to let HK get handed over to the commies back in the 1990's, why Taiwan didn't make a louder claim to it, or why HK didn't assert its right to independence from extraterritorial governments altogether.

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#118

Post by downandout »

true_religion wrote: post #63
downandout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: "She then said Xiao had contacted her and did not want to exaggerate the incident, according to the report." I'm not sure the incident could be exaggerated, given China's propensity to execute those convicted of corruption/embezzlement. They kidnapped a billionaire in another country with the likely intent to kill him sooner or later.

Hong Kong is not a country. It is an autonomous territory. It has only a little higher legal status than someplace like Guam or Puerto Rico, and that tiny bit is only there because of the sufferance of the higher government. Hong Kong does not have an army (even US states have their own militias). It does not defend its own borders. It does not negotiate its own diplomatic affairs. However, HK is still subservient to…

Territory or country, according to the articles, Chinese police shouldn't have been there, yet they were. That's a problem.

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#119

Post by Tuna-Fish »

imjustsaying wrote: post #117

Hong Kong has fallen, democracy there officially died after they refused to let those two legislators swear in. Not sure whose idea it was to let HK get handed over to the commies back in the 1990's, why Taiwan didn't make a louder claim to it, or why HK didn't assert its right to independence from extraterritorial governments altogether.

At that point, Hong Kong was entirely dependent from the fresh water provided by the mainland, to the point that if the taps were ever closed, hundreds of thousands would have died before alternative sources would have been available. You cannot just ship enough water for 6.5M people, and HK authorities were scared that if they started constructing desalinization systems, PRC would pressure them to stop doing that with the threat of immediately cutting off the water. PRC had effective power over HK before they were granted legal power over it.

Before the time of the transition they stressed that all the current treaties for water were written to end at the time of transition, and that they would not be willing to renegotiate them.

Any attempt to keep HK or to turn them over to Taiwan would have resulted in mass death and evacuations.

Re: Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

#120

Post by rrauenza »

Update:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-china-billionaire...

"Chinese billionaire whereabouts a mystery but denies abduction"

"A missing China-born billionaire was quoted by state media on Tuesday as saying he had not been abducted from Hong Kong by mainland Chinese agents as some news outlets had reported but was receiving medical treatment."

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