Public enemy
Recently: Why does nothing in the United Kingdom seem to work? A.G. Hopkins on the decades of self-inflicted wounds that have hollowed out the British state.
Today: The American president won’t say whether he raised a high-profile case with his guest from Beijing this week. … In 2020, Hong Kong’s new security law made it a crime to ask the outside world for help. … &c.
For members—from the weekend despatch: Is China as strong as it looks? Standpoints from Andy Rothman, Dan Wang, and Kevin Slaten. … &c.
+ Newly released music from John Coltrane …
Developments / global
Show and tell
On Thursday, after meeting China’s President Xi Jinping in the Oval Office, U.S. President Donald Trump ignored reporters’ shouted questions about whether they’d discussed Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong publisher serving 20 years in prison. That evening, as guests arrived for the state dinner, protesters at the gates of Lafayette Park, across the street, chanted “Free Jimmy Lai.” On Friday, the Trumps took Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, to the National Archives, where the archivist, Bradford Wilson, showed them the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “Ours goes 250 years,” Trump said. “Theirs goes 6,000 years. … But we’re very proud of our 250.”
‘A tough one’
Two days earlier, Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham had asked Trump to raise the case of Lai, a British citizen, with Xi. Burnham’s office says he pressed for Lai’s immediate release. In May, Trump asked Xi to free Lai and Ezra Jin, the pastor of an unregistered church in Beijing, and Chinese authorities released Jin in July. After the summit, Trump said Xi had called Lai’s case “a tough one.” Lai is 78. His son, Sebastien Lai, told the U.S. Congress this month that his father’s nails fall off and his teeth are rotting. Lai’s biographer, Mark Clifford, says Beijing “needed to show the 7 million people of Hong Kong that even a man of Jimmy’s wealth and stature could be locked up.”
Foreign forces
When Beijing imposed its national-security law on Hong Kong in 2020, Glacier Kwong, a former columnist for Lai’s newspaper, Apple Daily, left for Germany. The law, she says, closed off every way to resist: “If you’re urging for international support—calling for sanctions or global attention—you’re colluding with foreign forces.” Two of the three counts against Lai were conspiracy to collude with foreign forces. She felt guilty leaving her colleagues behind. One of them hugged her and said, “My part is to stay and go to jail, and your part is to live in exile and do international lobbying.” … See “Scream to a whisper.”
Medical parole
On October 29, 1997, at a press conference in Washington, with China’s President Jiang Zemin beside him, U.S. President Bill Clinton said the Chinese government’s human-rights policy was “on the wrong side of history.” On the case of the democracy activist Wei Jingsheng, Jiang said, “I am the President of the People’s Republic of China and not the Chief Judge of the Supreme Court of China.” Eighteen days later, Beijing released Wei on medical parole and sent him into exile in the United States. He had heart trouble and had lost most of his teeth. The next April, two months before Clinton’s reverse visit to China, Beijing released Wang Dan, a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, in the same way.
Meanwhile
Phone and internet networks go dark across Ethiopia’s Tigray region as fighting resumes. … Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva bans online betting nine days before he stands for re-election. … Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, takes a record 349 of the 450 seats in the Duma. … Indian police fire tear gas at protesters demanding that the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, resign over changes to the voter rolls. … The U.S. cuts off health funding to Zimbabwe, whose government won’t share its health data. … & Indonesian volcanologists find that 25 hours of eruption at Anak Krakatau, the “child of Krakatoa,” has created two new islands.
Thoughts? concierge@thesgnl.com.
Your reading list for a changing world
Browse The Signal’s bookshop—organized into collections that track key themes in our investigations of current affairs: what’s driving the information wars, why societies are fracturing, how power keeps reinventing itself. Contributors’ titles alongside books we've featured in our coverage.
The weekend despatch
Out of sight
Is China as strong as it looks? Standpoints from Andy Rothman, Dan Wang, and Kevin Slaten.
In the air
- Is China as strong as it looks? Standpoints from Andy Rothman, Dan Wang, and Kevin Slaten.
Features
- Why did Beijing break its promise to Hong Kong so early? Minxin Pei on how it became just another Chinese city.
- Why does nothing in the United Kingdom seem to work? A.G. Hopkins on the decades of self-inflicted wounds that have hollowed out the British state.
Books
- How strong is the Chinese-Russian “friendship,” really? Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner, Entangled Empires: Four Centuries of China-Russia Relations.
Music
- What was John Coltrane’s “churning tension”?
- & New tracks from him, Rhiannon Giddens, Beck, Chvrches, & Radie Peat.
+ Weather report
- Hurricane Nolo moves in on the area of Hawaii that Lala wrecked six weeks ago—with nearly a meter of new rain …
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Music
‘Giant Steps (226 bpm—Live From the Tiberi Tapes)’
Jazz musicians have traded rumors about these tapes for six decades. In the early 1960s, the saxophonist Frank Tiberi followed John Coltrane into clubs in Philadelphia and New York with a tape recorder in a bag …
