"China executes billionaire, 4 others" New York Times February 10, 2015
HONG KONG — A Chinese billionaire who was building a mining empire in Australia was one of five people executed Monday after a court last year sentenced them to die for running a criminal gang that engaged in murder and extortion.
My eyes nearly fell out of my head when I say this, and then I began dreaming of Wall Street bankers be treated in such a way thinking maybe the fraud might stop.
Liu Han, 49, his brother Wei, and three associates were executed on Monday, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported, citing the Xianning Intermediate People’s Court in the central Chinese province of Hubei.
The men had been sentenced in May for running a criminal syndicate that killed at least eight people, ran extortion schemes, trafficked weapons, and operated gambling dens.
Their crimes were “deeply evil and particularly cruel,” Xinhua cited the court as saying.
China leads the world in executions, but Liu Han’s case was particularly noteworthy because of his wealth — with one official report pinning his family’s assets at $6 billion.
Yeah!
His arrest in 2013 came as he was in talks to buy the Australian mining company Sundance Resources. The deal collapsed the following month. In 2009, his flagship company, Sichuan Hanlong Group, bought a controlling stake in another Australian mining company, Moly Mines.
Liu Wei was a torchbearer for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He was convicted of ordering the killings of three people in 2009 at a tea house in his hometown.
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He's not alone:
"2 members of sect executed in China for deadly beating at McDonald’s" New York Times February 03, 2015
BEIJING — A Chinese court said Monday that two members of a banned religious sect had been executed for the fatal beating of a woman at a McDonald’s restaurant in May, an episode that was caught by a cellphone camera and sparked outrage across China....
The Zhangs were members of the Church of Almighty God, a Christian sect the Chinese government outlawed in 1995 and labels an “evil cult.” They had entered the McDonald’s with other church members, hoping to recruit followers in the city of Zhaoyuan.
We got our nutties over here, too.
They encountered the victim, Wu Shuoyan, 35, who declined to give her phone number. They identified her as an “evil spirit” and attacked her.
The killing was recorded on a cellphone by one of several bystanders who watched the attack but did not intervene. The video set off a debate about lack of help from witnesses and accusations that police were slow to respond.
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Even industry is dying in China:
"China registered a record trade surplus last month as imports plunged the most in more than five years, by 19.9 percent from a year earlier. Exports fell 3.3 percent, leaving a trade surplus of $60 billion. A property downturn and a stall in manufacturing are signals the government may need to step up measures to stimulate the economy as domestic demand for commodities, including crude oil and iron ore, declines. The record trade surplus complicates the government’s management of currency exchange rates following January’s depreciation. It’s not in China’s interest to let the yuan depreciate sharply, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group analysts wrote. China’s central bank “will continue to use a slew of instruments, including fixing rates, open market operations, and direct interventions,” to prevent it from weakening sharply, they wrote. “The slump in imports means a slump in the overall situation of the economy,” said Hu Yifan, at Haitong International Securities Group. “We are going to see more of these alarming data in the next few months.” Slumping exports “underscore concerns about fading competitiveness and weak external demand,” Bloomberg economist Tom Orlik wrote."
"Heavy industry falls sharply in China" by Keith Bradsher, New York Times February 10, 2015
HONG KONG — Steel prices in China have fallen 12 percent in the first five weeks of this year — almost as much as in all of last year — as demand dwindles.
China’s imports of rubber, oil, iron ore, and other industrial materials also fell sharply in January. And the global market for bulk freighter charters is in free fall, already below levels in the worst days of the global financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009.
“In the past two months, it has been more or less a vertical correction, and this is a proxy for China,” said Basil M. Karatzas, a Manhattan ship broker.
Heavy industry in the country, which has the world’s second-largest economy, is suffering a much sharper downturn than was apparent or expected even several weeks ago. That slowdown seems to be mirrored to a lesser extent in other sectors. But the full scope of China’s economic weakness is obscured by limited data, as the country prepares for a nationwide weeklong holiday beginning Feb. 18, in observance of the Lunar New Year.
“It’s too early to be saying we’re moving toward disaster, but there’s nothing in this data to be cheery about,” said Louis Kuijs, chief China economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Following its standard practice, China’s National Bureau of Statistics will not release a wide range of monthly economic statistics for January — a month in which the timing of the Lunar New Year, from late January to mid-February, can distort figures. So investors, business executives, and others will get only limited, partial figures on industrial production, real estate investment, retail sales, and other crucial barometers until mid-March, when the figures for all of January and February are scheduled to be released.
Why do I feel like I'm reading about my own nation and its government?
China has many tools to halt a slowdown, though all of the tools have potentially undesirable side effects. The banking system is still under tight central government control and can be told to step up lending further.
Here it is under private control, and it's wor$e.
Overall credit, though, has already grown faster as a share of economic output since 2009 than practically anywhere except Ireland. Some restrictions on housing market speculation have been lifted, at the risk of making homes more expensive.
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At least some life is blooming:
"Hong Kong protesters renew demands" by Chris Buckley, New York Times February 02, 2015
HONG KONG — Prodemocracy protesters streamed through the heart of Hong Kong on Sunday in their first sizable show of strength since the police cleared occupations that blocked streets for 11 weeks late last year.
The protest was much smaller and milder than the “Occupy” protests that ended in December, and it fell short of the 50,000 participants that organizers promised. In the end, they estimated 13,000 people joined; police estimated the crowd at 8,800 at its peak.
For the propaganda pre$$ to have co-opted the name of the movement they shat on is insulting.
But the march marked a tentative test of how much support the prodemocracy groups could muster in the new year for their campaign to force the government into accepting open elections for the city’s top official.
“We want to sustain the momentum after the Occupy protests,” Joshua Wong, an 18-year-old student leader at the forefront of last fall’s street demonstrations, said.
Hundreds of police officers watched Sunday as the crowd walked through streets crammed with weekend shoppers. But there were no signs of confrontation with the protesters, many of whom held yellow umbrellas, a symbol of the street occupation last year.
Anytime there is some fancy name or color attached it is some covert, globe-kicker effort at destabilization or a coup attempt. When the propaganda pre$$ hollers such things and issues warnings about a takeover, you can rest assured that is a true people's revolution. Either that or the "terrorists" show up so the United States can then initiate military action to clear the problem.
For both the protest organizers and the police, the return of demonstrators to the crowded streets presented a challenge.
While many Hong Kong residents back demands for unfettered democracy, growing numbers had grown tired of the street occupations by the time they ended in mid-December.
What? Wait a minute. What does unfettered democracy mean? What kind of agenda-pushing garbage is that? And what's this with the AmeriKan agents and agitators not being that well liked?
For the police force, heavy-handed tactics could inflame public anger, as they did in late September, when the sight of democracy protesters, many of them students, being dispersed by tear gas ignited an outpouring of sympathy.
Or what happened over here in AmeriKa over Mike Brown and other things.
The demonstration was organized by the Civil Human Rights Front, a coalition of advocacy groups, which secured police approval for the assembly, unlike the unapproved protests that erupted into street camps across three parts of the city and drew tens of thousands at their height.
The protesters seek to overturn an election plan for Hong Kong issued by the Chinese national legislature on Aug. 31.
That plan would allow residents to directly vote for the city’s leader, or chief executive, starting from 2017, but only from a short list of two or three candidates already approved by a committee where most members are loyal to Beijing. Prodemocracy groups and politicians say that pre-screening would deprive voters of any real say.
I know how they feel (we call them primaries over here).
”We are at a critical juncture,” Fernando Cheung Chiu-hung, a member of the prodemocracy Labor Party in Hong Kong’s city legislature, or Legislative Council, said. Advocates of full democracy need to win over wavering public opinion, which could be alarmed by renewed street violence, he said.
“It depends on whether we can win that support or whether the middle ground will go along with the government’s proposals,” Cheung said. “It would be difficult to go back to Occupy on the streets; that would get a hostile response.”
What do you mean? People not like freedom, democracy, and all that rigamarole?
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That's the last I saw of any protests in Hong Kong in my Globe as I am now current on the China file.
