–
Hong Kong will strengthen its regulatory regime and impose stiffer penalties to ensure strong deterrence against building violations, the city leader has pledged, following a series of substandard construction scandals including the latest controversy involving a luxury residential development in Stanley. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu vowed to safeguard the high professional standards of the city’s construction industry on Tuesday in the wake of a debacle involving a house at One Stanley,...
In 2019, President Xi Jinping became the first Chinese leader to publicly call for the exploration of detailed proposals for governing Taiwan after reunification. Seven years later, the first proposals from a handful of the mainland’s leading research institutes have either been finalised or are nearing completion, the South China Morning Post has learned. Rather than setting out a single fixed model, scholars involved in those studies told the SCMP there should be different scenarios based on...
Beijing’s push to accumulate gold serves a larger goal: yuan internationalisation. In this series, Part I traces China’s path to becoming a gold superpower, while this article explores Hong Kong’s key role in safeguarding the nation’s financial security. In 2013, one-third of the world’s traded gold passed through Hong Kong. That year, the city imported 1,158 tonnes of bullion, overtaking India, the traditional top buyer. For all our love of the glittering metal, little of it stayed in our...
Temperatures in Hong Kong dropped to about 23 degrees Celsius (73 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday morning, the lowest so far this autumn. According to the Hong Kong Observatory, the cooler weather was caused by a dry northeast monsoon. “A dry northeast monsoon will bring mainly fine weather to the coast of Guangdong in the next couple of days. It will be windier and slightly cooler in the morning over the region,” the forecaster said. “The monsoon is expected to moderate slightly in the latter part of...
Hong Kong’s building authorities should consider inspecting the remaining properties in a luxury residential development and tightening work process documentation after one house was found to have used insufficient steel bars during construction, experts have said. Their suggestions followed the Buildings Department revealing at the weekend that it had launched an investigation into work quality issues at One Stanley in Stanley, one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in Southern district, and...
The US Justice Department (DOJ) is seeking to revoke the citizenship of a former Navy sailor convicted of spying for China and a Florida man convicted of conspiring to act as an agent of Beijing, it announced on Monday. Jinchao Wei and Ping Li are among 40 people facing denaturalisation actions in what the department described as the largest batch of such filings under the Trump administration. The civil proceedings remain pending, with no determination of liability, the DOJ said. The case...
The United States has accused mainland China of hiring an American citizen of Chinese origin to surveil the family of Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te, days after President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington. The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Sunday arrested 34-year-old Zhang Wanying at Los Angeles International Airport, alleging that she attempted to flee the country and charged her with acting as an unregistered agent for the Chinese government. The FBI accused her of surveilling...
The hotly contested court battle over government plans to build 12,000 public flats on Hong Kong’s oldest golf course has played its final round. The government decided not to appeal against a ruling that held its approval of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) report on the project to be unlawful. This is better than pursuing a further attempt to persuade the courts to uphold a fatally flawed process. Now, a broader review of the plans can be undertaken in light of the Court of Appeal’s...
Mainland Chinese prefer coercion over military force to settle the “reunification question” with Taiwan, and their opinion of the US remains low, although they favour engaging with Washington on trade and security. These are the results from the latest survey of mainland citizens, conducted between April 16 and June 26. This straddled the first summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing but came before the second one in Washington last month. “The...
Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington in September was steeped in pageantry. The Chinese president received two 21-gun salutes in three days, watched a flyover by the powerful B-2 stealth bomber, and viewed the founding documents of American democracy at the National Archives. US President Donald Trump called his summit with Xi a “great meeting” and rated it a “12 out of 10”. Xi was also positive, saying “everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every...
