THE “China dream” of the president, Xi Jinping, is of a rejuvenated, rich and strong country that will once again enjoy the respect and fealty in Asia commanded by the empires of old. That last part is not happening: from a recalcitrant young despot, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, on its north-eastern border, to those ungrateful Vietnamese Communists to the south, flirting with America, insolent insubordination abounds. And perhaps most alarming of all, the people of “inalienable” territories wrested from the motherland by predatory imperialists—Hong Kong and Taiwan—show no enthusiasm at all for a return to its bosom.
Events in recent weeks have highlighted China’s difficulties in both places. In Hong Kong a visiting senior official from Beijing, Zhang Dejiang, had to scurry around under high security to avoid meeting protesters. Paving stones were glued down in case they became projectiles. And in Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, at her swearing-in on May 20th, rejected months of intense Chinese pressure to pay lip service to the notion that there is “one China”.
FOR more than 30 years now, political activists in Hong Kong have been agitating for a more democratic political system. On August 31st China made it plain they will not get their way. “Take it or leave it,” is how the South China Morning Post summed up China’s position. Not wanting to take it, several thousand people attended a rally in protest that rainy Sunday evening. They heard Benny Tai Yiu-ting, a mild and thoughtful academic, declare a new “era of resistance” and civil disobedience. He is one of the organisers of the “Occupy Central” movement, which is planning waves of street protest, culminating in the peaceful “occupation” of Hong Kong island’s central business district. “The road of dialogue has come to the end,” he said. Months of debilitating confrontation are in prospect.
INSIDE the world’s first Bitcoin store in Hong Kong, a visitor from Tokyo hands over a wad of thousand-dollar bills and waits for a clerk to process the transaction on a laptop. Moments later, a notification on his phone shows that bitcoins have been added to his “digital wallet”, one more transaction in a city that has become a regional hub for the crypto-currency.
Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong are scrambling to offer new services for bitcoin investors and enthusiasts in the region, despite a dip in confidence after the collapse of Mt Gox, a Japanese online exchange. The former British territory’s status has been enhanced by mainland China making it hard for the Bitcoin business—banning financial institutions from dealing in bitcoins and closing the bank accounts of online trading platforms.
Hong Kong, on the other hand, continues to be run under the “one country, two systems” set-up, agreed before it was handed back from British to Chinese sovereignty. So it has its own monetary authority and its own British-style legal system. A slew of startups are racing to lay out a network of Bitcoin ATM machines (where you pay money in to obtain bitcoins) and to open exchanges for online buying and selling, while a handful of bricks-and-mortar businesses are starting to accept payments in bitcoins.
An investor group led by Hong Kong tycoon Richard Li is the likely winner of a government loan owed by Fisker Automotive, the now-dormant maker of plug-in hybrid sports cars, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
The U.S. Department of Energy picked Li's group after an auction held Friday to sell the green-energy loan. The DOE and Li are now nailing down the final details of the sale, which has not yet closed, the people said.
Buying the loan would allow Li, the youngest son of Asia's richest man and an early Fisker investor, to restructure Fisker unencumbered by the obligations of the DOE funds and potentially avoid a bankruptcy filing that would wipe out equity investors.
Sources familiar with the company have said however that reviving Fisker outside of a bankruptcy would be an expensive and difficult process.
