An attempted color revolution in Hong Kong

by Philip Bowring, a British journalist and long-time Hong Kong resident

A NEW ASSISTANT

As a South China Morning Post reporter in 1991, I noted the rise of a new political group called the United Democrats, who had an “executive assistant” who was always seen at the right hand of the leaders.

His name was Tom Boasberg. So, not Chinese, but American. He was hyper-political, and his previous employer was the United States government. 

Many businesses in Hong Kong employed Americans, sure. We all liked Americans. But this wasn’t a business – it was supposedly a "grassroots" political party—and I thought it odd to have a foreigner at the top end of the noisiest political organization in the city. 

And when Boasberg moved on in 1992, I noticed that he was replaced by another executive assistant, a woman named Minky Worden. She too was American, she too was hyper-political, and she too was previously employed by the United States government: a coincidence.

When Ms Worden left that role in 1998, the group took another person in her place: a woman named Emily Bork.  She too was American, she too was hyper-political, and she too previously worked for the United States government. A series of coincidences? 

(Ms Worden went on to become an enthusiastic player in the Uyghur genocide hoax. Her journalist husband Gordon Crovitz, with whom I worked directly, later went on to sign a contract to work on media monitoring with the Pentagon.)

.

FACTIONS

For some of this period, I was a Legislative Council columnist for the South China Morning Post.

I lived next door to Yeung Sam, a leading member of the so-called “pro-democracy” party, and soon learned there were factions within it. Everyone’s favorite (including mine) was a rough diamond called Szeto Wah who was noisily patriotic about China while believing that western democracy would be good for Hong Kong. (Yeung himself was unpopular within the organization.) 

But many of the other “pro-democracy” politicians, unfortunately, became closely tied in with anti-China groups funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, which had taken over the CIA's “soft power” covert regime change duties. 

The NED had quietly started funding political organizations in Hong Kong in 1990, but kept under the radar, using multiple other identities. Cash arrived in Hong Kong listed as “donations” from a non-existent body called the American Institute for Free Labor Development (set up by the CIA for money transfers).

.

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

The NED were and are extremely bad people. Working worldwide, they used the “pro-democracy” label as a cover to poison the public against local candidates who failed to be pro-Washington in any country. 

The NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992, as intelligence historians noted.

And they would eventually cause chaos in my peaceful, gentle Hong Kong. 

The NED did this by using their bottomless funds to blend Hong Kong’s “pro-democracy” politicians with two groups they funded to poison Hong Kong people against mainland China. One was called the Human Rights Monitor and the other was the Confederation of Trade Unions (not to be confused with the HK Federation of Trade Unions, which was a genuine trade union organizing group).

.

DESTRUCTION OF LEGCO

The "pan-democrats" quickly lost the goodwill of the Hong Kong people by automatically vetoing every act the government did, causing massive delays in a city used to efficiency. Legco became dysfunctional, sometimes grinding to a halt.

The physical violence seen in the Taiwan parliament was transferred to Hong Kong, with people such as Ted Hui throwing fists and foul matter into the parliamentary chamber (and becoming hated by the building's cleaners).

By 2012, this pro-US movement was working with the Oslo Freedom Foundation (which, despite the name, is based in the US), in a multi-year operation to organize massive demonstrations in Hong Kong with the aim of destabilizing the city.

The US plan was to present these anti-China protests as home-grown “pro-democracy” protests, trusting in the western mainstream media to excuse the horrific violence and hide the US funding. (Which they did.)  

A major aim was fearmongering. By forcing Beijing to send the tanks into Hong Kong, Taiwan would abandon its growing friendship with the mainland, and became once again a dependable part of the Pentagon's First Island Chain.

.

A FAILED OPERATION

The rest is history. The Chinese refused to send in the tanks. The PLA stayed at home. The Hong Kong police managed to quell the riots without killing a single person (unlike police or soldiers in the six other uprisings in the world that same year, all of which led to multiple deaths). The US operation against Hong Kong failed.

By 2021, many people in Hong Kong knew about the foreign forces involvement and were disgusted with the pan-democrats. My friends and I, almost all of whom had been big fans for many years, became totally disillusioned with western-style democracy as a whole. 

The western mainstream press rigidly turned their faces away and refused to see any of this.

And today, the China-hostile media, from Reuters’ James Pomfret to the BBC’s Danny Vincent, continue to fail to report the real story. Whether they are hiding it or are genuinely unaware of what is going -- that's not for me to say.

But I will say that the catastrophic loss of trust in the western mainstream media is well deserved.

the Nanjing Massacre

 A professor from Nanjing on why the Nanjing Massacre can never be forgiven:

"What we remember is not hatred, but the absence of civilization — an absence that shows us how we must safeguard peace, protect life, and uphold justice…

As long as civilization survives, we can neither forgive nor forget."

"Why do we reopen this wound and remember the Nanjing Massacre, again and again? Not because I am from Nanjing, or China. It is because I am a human being."

"I have sat with dozens of survivors of the Nanjing Massacre. In their telling, I have never once heard a word of willingness to forgive.

Because those were their own mothers, fathers, siblings… We have no right to forgive on their behalf. Neither do any generations to come. Our only duty is to remember—for them."

"We remember because Japan chooses to forget. We remember because an official apology remains absent. We remember because war criminals are glorified at Yasukuni. We remember because the truth is still obscured in their textbooks. To forget would be to betray history itself."

https://fb.watch/E2Qr8sQYmf/

Who was Samuel Slater?

https://pooley.com/was-americas-industrial-revolution-based-on-trade-secret-theft/

By 1774, fifteen years before Slater slipped out of the country, England had criminalized both the export of textile machinery and the emigration of textile mechanics. Slater, because he had been trained in the craft, committed a criminal act just by leaving the country.

Samuel Slater is remembered well but variously. In the United States, Andrew Jackson dubbed him the “Father of American Manufactures.” In his hometown of Belper in Derbyshire, he is less fondly known as “Slater the Traitor.” (It also bears mention that Slater’s wife, Hannah Wilkinson Slater, became the first woman in America to receive a U.S. patent, covering her invention of cotton sewing thread.)

Is it reasonable to say that the U.S. got an unfair head start on the Industrial Revolution by stealing secrets from Britain? I don’t think so. Industrial espionage had been practiced in Europe throughout the 18th Century, with the British and French particularly active, even using diplomats to get access to valuable commercial information. 

Moreover, Britain, like some other European countries, frequently granted “patents of importation,” which didn’t require the applicant to be an inventor, if the invention was new within the country’s borders. In this way, governments regularly encouraged people to “steal” ideas from abroad and bring them home.

But there may be a broader lesson to be drawn from the Slater story, one that resonates in the modern, information-based economy. Some scholars think that Massachusetts, near where Slater’s mills were established, lost the march to Silicon Valley because non-competition agreements were regularly enforced against employees there and in other Eastern states. 

Many of those employees decamped to California, where the law prohibits such restrictions. Undoubtedly some confidential information has been lost along the way. But consider the results. Perhaps we should look to Slater as demonstrating the universal economic value of labor mobility.

Deng Xiaoping

 https://www.quora.com/How-did-China-surpass-South-Korea-and-Japanese-firms-to-become-the-leader-in-display-panel-manufacturing-industry/answer/Kanthaswamy-Balasubramaniam

In 1983, China had picture tubes made locally and also picture tubes imported from Japan for their State manufactured TV brands

The Japanese imports were top class and the Chinese Picture Tubes were low low quality

Chinese families would save longer to buy Japanese and scoff at the Chinese product

So the Chinese Party members advised to close down the Chinese factory making picture tubes and negotiate with Japan on reducing prices of imports

Deng Xiaoping said they had to better the production of Picture Tubes and match Japanese Quality and beat it

The Chinese party members reacted like how most Indians like Balaji Viswanathan and friends would react

They said:

We have to be Practical

We are an Agrarian Country

We have so many poor people

We can't compare ourselves with Japan

Luckily Deng had power and commanded what he wanted and weeded out most people and retained only those he felt could carry out his vision.

government lies

 

https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-high-speed-rail-was-fantasy-its-inception

California’s HSR is perhaps the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country. And the reason it failed is because of a gross failure of state governance, one on such a grand scale that it is nothing short of a betrayal of Californians.

The betrayal dates back to the project’s inception. A report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) found that the program’s 2008 business plan—which had been legally required to be submitted to the state legislature on September 1, 2008 but was not released until after the bond issue was voted—was deficient. The plan did not present statistics on train capacity, forecasts of segment service levels, how funds would be secured, how costs would be distributed by system segment, an operating break-even point, what analytical methods were used to forecast ridership, expected completion dates for environmental review and construction, and how risks would be mitigated.

Imagine a business plan without discussion of future funding, project capacity, demand at the product (segment) level, how costs would be allocated, or how risks would be mitigated. The 2008 business plan was anything but a business plan. Voters approved $9.95 billion in bond financing for a dream, not a vetted project. And like most dreams, California high-speed rail has turned out to be a fantasy.

If the plan had been submitted by the required date—more than two months before the election—then these deficiencies would have come to light. Instead, voters trusted those whom they elected and voted to tax themselves to fund a project that was never going to be feasible. They trusted that California’s state government was capable of spending their tax dollars effectively. At one time, California governance was among the best in the country. Our state government created and built capital projects efficiently and quickly. In the 1960s, such trust was warranted. It no longer is.

reflections on the need to use physical violence as an African American woman

https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/6907f0b8-fd01-4525-9bbe-20f6cfc7cd7f/content

Andrea, 25, was harassed by another female student since her freshmen year in college because of her relationship with a male classmate. By Andrea’s junior year she had endured multiple episodes of relational aggression and two verbal altercations with the female student.

While the situation was the typical girlfriend/boyfriend drama, Andrea did not want to fight the female student but got tired of the harassment and decided to fight as she felt she had no other choice. Because the incident was premeditated, the consequence Andrea received was expulsion from the university. Here is a segment of the events that led to the altercation:

…So this was September of my junior year, it was around my birthday weekend, it was my birthday weekend. I had friends come up from Delaware, around this time at the school, it wasn’t a pep rally we had some type of function. I can’t remember exactly what it was but a lot of people were there so you could have your off campus people come in or whatever the case may be. 

As I’m walking, after the party is over, as I’m walking back to one of my friends’ dorm rooms, she’s walking behind me like, swinging behind my head as if she’s going to hit me. What she didn’t know was I had two of my friends behind her, and they didn’t say anything because they wanted to see what exactly it was she was going to do. 

So that was my breaking point at that time because now, I don’t know what you’re thinking and in my mind I’m thinking eventually you’re going to get me, so before you get me, now I’m saying to myself I have to get you first. So we actually were on our way to get something to eat and one of her friends said oh is the party going to be in room 207, so I said okay great, I think that’s where she lives at. 

Mind you by this point in time, I’m not living on campus I’m commuting back and forth between Lincoln University and Delaware. So I said when we come back, I got something for her. We came back from getting something to eat, changed my clothes and everything and this was where I got myself in trouble because by this time everything that I’m doing is premeditated, changed my clothes and everything. 

I say I’m going to go to room 207 and I’m going to see if she’s there, knock on the door, she opened it, my friend hit her first, and we just started fighting and that’s how the fight happened…With that I ended up getting assault charges, battery charges, so I ended up with one count of misdemeanor for assault, they tried to add on some robbing, some robbing, I had to ask my friends, did y’all steal something? 

Because I didn’t understand you see, that’s the thing, not being knowledgeable I didn’t know that it was going to be to that magnitude of us getting in trouble, but because we entered into their room they automatically put that down…

…I actually did talk to one of the administrative officers, somebody that my mom knew and he told me Andrea, he was like, I wish you would have come to me at the beginning when this first was an issue so then that way we could have been able to resolve [this]. Because now you are telling me all these things she’s done to you from your freshmen year until now, it’s not going to matter because you look like the bad guy because you approached her. 

You went to her dorm room…and it didn’t help that all my friends were there, not to jump her, they were there to celebrate my birthday but because they were there, it looked like I called them up to say hey listen, we need to go jump this girl and it wasn’t worth it, I ended up getting kicked out of school…

gallium

  What is gallium?

Gallium is a chemical element with the symbol Ga and atomic number 31. It’s a soft, silvery metal that sits in group 13 of the periodic table, below aluminum.

  Is it a rare earth?

No, gallium is not a rare earth element. It’s a metal in group 13 of the periodic table, classified as a post-transition metal, alongside aluminum and indium. 

  What is it used for?

Electronics: Gallium arsenide and gallium nitride are vital for semiconductors in LEDs, solar cells, 5G telecom, and high-frequency circuits. For example, gallium-based chips power smartphones, satellites, and military radar systems.

  Where does it comes from?

China ~90% (630 metric tons)

Russia ~5% (35 metric tons)

Japan ~3% (21 metric tons)

South Korea ~1% (7 metric tons)

  What kind of ore is it found in?

Bauxite, Primary source (~95%) Aluminum ore; contains 10–50 ppm gallium.