Week 12: Fly Safely
Hong Kong's new security laws make even transiting through the city dangerous
Flying to and from Europe last year, and on a recent trip to Taiwan, I have transited through Hong Kong. The city, along with Singapore, is a major hub that Australians use due to being more than a single tank of petrol away from most places. Being the cheap bastard that I am, transiting through Hong Kong on these trips was due to finding very affordable flights on Cathay Pacific, a Hong Kong-based airline. Yet I did so with a certain trepidation, knowing that the city is increasingly not safe for people who have written about China. And maybe even not the airport.
I suspect that I’m still quite small-fry for the Chinese government, given that I write for publications that do not have super-high circulation. But, undoubtedly, the Chinese Embassy in Australia keeps an eye on what is being published in The Diplomat on Australia-China relations, and in The Interpreter on broader issues concerning China, and makes note of people who write critical pieces on Beijing’s behaviour. Almost weekly I get notifications of attempts to hack into my social media accounts, and I don’t think it is a coincidence.
Currently in Hong Kong airport to move between section of the airport you need to scan your passport and have your face scanned. Then when boarding a connecting flight you don’t present a boarding pass, but are let through gates after having your face scanned again. These face scanners are starting to be rolled out in airports in the United States, yet they feel far more threatening when used in an authoritarian jurisdiction (and one that obsessively collects digital data).
This week this threat has increased. A new draconian security law has put the final nail in the coffin of the “one country, two systems” framework that is meant to govern Hong Kong. The city now is firmly under the dictatorial control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The new laws have broad interpretations of treason, insurrection and sabotage that will be punishable by life sentences. These laws also include the concept of “seditious intent”, which could mean anything the CCP doesn’t like.
What is most chilling is that these new laws are designed to have a extraterritorial effect. The CCP has already made it clear that it considers all ethnic Chinese to be under its jurisdiction, regardless of their citizenship and place of residence. But this new law is also a threat to anyone who writes critically about the PRC – including social media posts.
This makes it now incredibly difficult to even transit through Hong Kong safely. Reflecting this, the Australian government has updated its travel warning for Hong Kong to acknowledge that the city is now a very difficult place to travel to. The United Kingdom has also updated their travel advice to a similar warning.
The threat that these new security laws pose to individuals is also a threat to the business of Cathay Pacific. The company has recently increased its number of weekly flights to and from Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. Yet finding passengers to fill these flights may now prove difficult. Even if people are only using Hong Kong as a transit hub, they may think twice. This will clearly be the case for people from across the world as well who may also be thinking about travelling to or through Hong Kong.
As with many things the CCP does in its attempts to acquire total control this is a massive own goal. However, the party has become so obsessive and ideological under President Xi it’s possible that anyone who raises this as an economic problem may find themselves charged with “seditious intent.”
This Week’s Reading
A Serious Question: Can Australia Trust the United States?
Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“Trump 2.0 will not simply be something Canberra can ride out for four years like his first term given the growth of his resentment, the extremism of his movement, and the acceptance within the Republican Party of the January 6 assault on the Capitol building as a legitimate action. There will be far more norms and rules being broken should Trump return to the White House, many of which will be long-standing foreign policies.
But just as Europe is now being forced to seriously contemplate its own security problems with the prospect of a United States that lacks commitment to both Ukraine and NATO, Australia also needs to confront what it may mean to be able to trust the U.S. less. It isn’t a sign of betrayal to do so, as those mired in week’s hysteria may have believed, but instead the sign of an emotionally mature country that thinks seriously about its strategic circumstances.”
Jenna Bednar & Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar – Foreign Affairs
“It is true that the federal government imposes a variety of constraints on the states and controls key levers of foreign policy. When it comes to policymaking capacity and on-the-ground implementation, however, states increasingly hold a decisive edge—particularly in an era of partisan gridlock in Washington. And in a world in which economic, technological, and cultural influence is often spread through subnational regions, the largest U.S. states can make policies with direct global impact.
As the federal bargain moves in the direction of state power, it will have far-reaching consequences for the United States’ global profile and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Harnessed in the right way, the states can enhance U.S. power, providing new and more dynamic ways to advance an international agenda at a time of federal gridlock, while strengthening U.S. democracy at home. But as the January 6 crisis illustrates, states can also be used to undermine the country’s longstanding alliances or even to subvert the democratic process. How leaders in Washington, the courts, diplomatic circles in different regions, and local and state governments approach this shift will determine whether state-level action becomes a source of resilience or a destabilising force for Americans and the world.”
Can Germany’s Far Right Be Stopped?
Jeremy Stern – Tablet
“Critics under-appreciate the breathtaking scale of Germany’s accomplishment since 1949 in creating a society with much to admire. The quintessential example of this is the Mittelstand, the midsize, family-owned businesses that have historically accounted for about 80% of German GDP and employ three-quarters of the country’s workforce. As John Kampfner writes in Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country, two-thirds of successful global Mittelstand companies are based in German towns with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, where they sponsor local sports teams and social clubs and provide insurance. In the Mittelstand as well as Germany’s blue-chip companies, the practice of Mitbestimmung (co-determination) ensures that between a third and half of the seats of every company’s supervisory board are occupied by workers’ representatives.
For the most part, the result has been a country of highly skilled, high-wage industrial workers spread across hundreds of small towns with strong social capital and a deep sense of local community, and working identification with the independent family firms that employ them and look after their well-being over the course of their lifetimes. For most of the last several decades, large parts of German society have been less of a grey socialist nightmare than like television ads for the American dream circa 1959.
The problem in Germany—as in the U.S., U.K., and much of the Western world—is that this 20th-century social model has been gradually coming apart…the industrial strength which underwrote the German social market in the two decades since was also based on factors—ever-expanding export markets for manufactured goods, the integration of global supply chains, huge trade surpluses, and, most of all, the free flow of cheap Russian gas—which have since disintegrated.”
Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why?
The Ezra Klien Show (podcast) – New York Times
“For a long time, the story about the world’s population was that it was growing too quickly. There were going to be too many humans, not enough resources, and that spelled disaster. But now the script has flipped. Fertility rates have declined dramatically, from about five children per woman 60 years ago to just over two today. About two-thirds of us now live in a country or area where fertility rates are below replacement level.
But when I look at these numbers, I just find it strange. Why, as societies get richer, do their fertility rates plummet?
I invited Jennifer D. Sciubba on the show to help me puzzle this out. She’s a demographer, a political scientist and the author of “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.” She walks me through the population trends we’re seeing around the world, the different forces that seem to be driving them and why government policy, despite all kinds of efforts, seems incapable of getting people to have more kids.”
Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore
Russell Moore - Christianity Today
“From The Federalist Papers to the debates around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, virtually every Founding Father—even with all their differences on the specifics of federalism—would argue that constitutional procedures and policies alone were not enough to conserve a republic: Moral norms and expectations of some level of personal character were necessary.
Do these norms keep people of bad character from ascending to high office? Not at all. Hypocrites and demagogues have always been with us. What every generation of Americans have recognised until now, though, is that there is a marked difference between some leaders not living up to the character expected of them and leaders operating in a space where there aren’t expectations of personal character. You might hire an accountant to do your taxes, only later to find that he’s a tax fraud and an embezzler. That’s quite different from hiring an open fraud because you’ve concluded that only chumps obey the tax laws.
That’s because no leader of any community, association, or nation is an abstract collection of policies. We select leaders to make decisions about matters that haven’t happened yet, or that might not even be contemplated…What happens long-term with your policies in a post-character culture is important. What happens to your country is even more important. But consider also what happens to you.”
Self-Obsession Is The Root Of Modern Loneliness
James Mariott – The Times
“Unfortunately we are caught in a cultural Catch-22: the more isolated we are, the more accustomed we become to the idea that human beings are solitary animals who find meaning and purpose as individuals, not in groups. Companies like BetterHelp ask us to believe that unhappiness can be cured in isolation, pouring out our troubles to a virtual therapist or a chatbot on a smartphone.
Contrast that with the psychiatrist Anthony Storr’s tale about a friend who worked with a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa and was perplexed to find his clients turned up for therapy with their extended families in tow — to them the idea of understanding, let alone curing a human mind in isolation made no intuitive sense.
Much fashionable therapy speak and “wellness” jargon is underpinned by the assumption that if we want to be mentally healthy we must maintain an attitude of vigilant paranoia towards other people who might intrude on our lives. We are instructed to fear interactions that might contain “microaggressions” or unpleasant “triggers”.
Difficult people are not to be tolerated but condemned as “toxic”. In pop-psychology, “people-pleasing” is not a laudable instinct but a pathology. We must maintain “boundaries” and beware the effort of “emotional labour”.
Universities provide “safe spaces” for students to preserve their mental health through isolation. These seem precisely the wrong solutions for a society suffering from a dearth of human connection. I wonder how many people realise how unusual these ideas are from a historical perspective.”
Don’t Tell America the Babysitter’s Dead
Faith Hill – The Atlantic
“Even if parents do know potential young sitters nearby, they may still hesitate to rely on them. In the past few decades, as “intensive parenting” has become a child-rearing ideal across classes, grown-ups have broadly begun to see kids as fragile and in need of constant oversight. Tweens or younger teens might not seem like comforting sources of protection—they might seem like children in need of watching themselves. As Fass pointed out, it didn’t used to be unusual for 12-year-olds to babysit. Now more than two-thirds of American parents think kids should be 12 or older before they’re even left home alone. Several states have guidelines issuing a similar age limit; in Illinois, kids legally can’t be left unattended until age 14.
Families still need help caring for their kids. Teens still need money, and chances to practice responsibility. And neighbours could stand to trust one another more—to start building their village. That won’t look just like it did in 1950, but that’s for the best. Perhaps we’ll find a way to finally treat adolescents as just what they are: not children and not adults, not scary and not superhuman. Just young people who, with a bit of support, can be capable of a great deal.”
Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation
Brian Klass – The Garden of Forking Paths
“Every social species that thrives, from wasps to humans, requires a mechanism of stopping individual members from working against the group’s interests. In complex hives, specialised “police wasps” serve as enforcers, seeking out and destroying any wasps producing larvae that may lead to an excess number of queens in the colony. When detected, any rogues are “beheaded or torn apart by the workers soon after they emerge from their cells in the brood comb,” explain Professors Francis Ratnieks and Tom Wenseleers.
Unlike wasps, early human societies didn’t have police forces. Without an enforcement mechanism, social complexity and large civilisations came with enormous risks of predatory, anti-social behaviour that could undermine survival.
Over time, Norenzayan argues, divine forces shifted within these administratively weak human groupings. Thus emerged what Norenzayan calls “supernatural monitoring,” a belief in an omniscient presence that never averts His gaze from sin. Everything is tracked, monitored, then punished.”
It is true that music appreciation is subjective. However, something even more true is that Broadcast are objectively superior to all other musical artists. Unfortunately, in 2011 singer Trish Keenan died of pneumonia. However, over the past decade or so remaining band member James Cargill has been compiling and mastering an extensive catalogue of demos that Trish left behind. These will be released at the start of May. But one song from the compilation has been released this week.