Lauren McPhate first arrived in Asia in 2009 after losing her job as a risk analyst at an energy company. She daydreamed about moving to tropical Thailand to start over. The 27-year-old instead landed in Seoul, where an …
hong kong
Must-Reads From Around the World: April 26, 2012
Life For Death? – The five-year trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor, accused of 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other offenses, is finally coming to a close in The Hague on Thursday, with a …
Must-Reads from Around the World, April 19, 2012
In Hong Kong, a Setback for Domestic-Worker Rights
When Eni Lestari, an Indonesian domestic worker, heard about a ruling that might allow some 300,000 temporary foreign workers to live in Hong Kong permanently, she was thrilled. She likened it to the day in 2000 when she escaped …
Must-Reads from Around the World: March 26, 2012
Noisy Neighbors – China’s Global Times reacts to the Hong Kong election Sunday, by a small elite circle, of Leung Chun-ying as new Chief Executive with an opinionated ode for the region and the mainland to improve their sometimes …
Beijing’s Choice but Not the People’s: Why Hong Kong’s Next Leader Faces a Tough Task
The election on Sunday of wealthy chartered surveyor C.Y. Leung as Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive (CE) has come as little surprise in a city where the result has been seen as a foregone conclusion for some days. The campaign …
$5.2 billion
Trouble Down South: Why Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese Aren’t Getting Along
The traditional distance between Hong Kong Chinese and their mainland counterparts was thrown into sharp relief recently, after two widely seen videos dramatized the cultural gulf that still exist between the two sides nearly 15 …
A Bus Driver in Southern China Dies of Bird Flu. Could the Deadly Virus Strike Again?
News that a bus driver from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen died of the H5N1 bird-flu virus on Dec. 31 was greeted with a shrug in the nation that serves as the breeding ground for some of the world’s nastiest viruses. …
22 Years After Tiananmen, Shadow of Crackdown Looms Large Over China
“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
— Milan Kundera
More than 100,000 people gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park Saturday evening to mark the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown. Under the starry light of the city’s skyscrapers, the crowd lit small, white candles and lay …
Writing on the Wall: Hong Kong Artists Campaign for Ai Weiwei
My neighborhood has changed. The street’s sole piece of graffiti — a spray-painted picture of Hello Kitty defecating — has vanished. In its place: a portrait of missing Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei.
It’s been more than a month since Ai was seen in mainland China. But, suddenly, he’s everywhere in Hong Kong. I’ve seen his face …
I’m An April Fool — And It’s All China’s Fault
Today, over supper in Hong Kong’s Western District, I picked up a copy of HK Magazine, an English-language alternative weekly. As I happily slurped my noodles, I stumbled on a particularly eye-catching piece of news. It was a story about Victoria Habour, the sweep of sea that separates the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula from Hong …
Typhoon in a Teacup
Hong Kong has made the startling discovery that some of its young people are taking drugs instead of being the well-behaved ping-pong playing, academic over-achievers that they are supposed to be. Each day, it seems, the papers gloat over some new tale of teens and chemical depravity. Oddly, much of it occurs in the last place you would …