China Security Office Flexes New Power With Hong Kong Probe
Beijing's national security office in Hong Kong carried out its first known joint operation with city officials, marking an expansion of China's direct law enforcement in the financial hub.
Local authorities on Thursday night announced they were investigating a case of alleged foreign collusion with China's Office for Safeguarding National Security. The office interviewed six people after requesting the support of Hong Kong police using new powers granted last month, according to a statement.
Hong Kong security officials searched the homes of six suspects, as well as the office of an organization, and seized evidence including bank documents and devices. The individuals were also required to surrender their travel documents.
The suspects are accused of 'collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security' from November 2020 to June 2024, the government said. The statement didn't reveal their identities.
The raids show Hong Kong's clampdown on dissent is still expanding, five years after President Xi Jinping imposed a security law on the city to cement Communist Party control.
Hong Kong officials this week banned a video game for the first time under security legislation, accusing it of advocating armed revolution. That came days after imprisoned former activist Joshua Wong was hit with a fresh security charge. The one-time poster child of the city's pro-democracy protest movement was due for release in early 2027, having served two-thirds of his current 56-month prison term.
In response to a Bloomberg News inquiry, a spokesman for the Hong Kong government said it 'strongly opposes to unfounded allegations and slandering remarks against the joint operation' without specifying the offending statements. No one has been arrested in the ongoing investigation, the person said in an emailed reply.
The joint operation this week marked the first application of the Safeguarding National Security Regulation, which was fast-tracked into law to facilitate Chinese security personnel.
While the Beijing-imposed security law allows mainland officials to assume jurisdiction in certain cases, the new measures bolstered that legal framework for China's security apparatus to operate directly within Hong Kong's common law system.
The May 13 legislation, which took effect before being review by lawmakers, requires Hong Kong government departments and civil servants to provide 'all necessary and reasonable assistance, facilitation, support, backing and protection' to the Chinese security officers upon request.
The new rules also criminalize acts that could impede the China-run office's work, including disclosing details of its investigations, with penalties extending up to seven years in prison and fines.
The Hong Kong government has signaled a continued emphasis on national security even as it vows to focus on supporting growth, which has been challenged by China's slowdown and an uncertain external environment.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mint
20 minutes ago
- Mint
Barry Eichengreen: Is the US Federal Reserve's independence at threat?
The independence of the US Federal Reserve is back in the spotlight. Late last month, Fed Chair Jerome Powell met at the White House with President Donald Trump 'to discuss economic developments," as the Fed antiseptically put it in a post-meeting statement. Market participants will wonder what went on. Held at the president's request, the meeting was exceptional but not unprecedented. Fed chairs have met with presidents on occasion, although those occasions generally were less than propitious. In 1965, William McChesney Martin met with Lyndon B. Johnson at LBJ's Texas ranch. Johnson worried that a Fed interest-rate hike had created headwinds for growth, and anticipated a challenging midterm election. Also Read: Powell versus Trump: Why Fed independence matters in times of turmoil Johnson confronted the Fed chair physically as well as verbally, using his considerable girth to pin Martin to a wall. The impact on Fed policy is disputed to this day. President Richard Nixon met with his Fed Chair Arthur Burns on scores of occasions, regularly pressing him to pursue expansionary monetary policies, which Burns obligingly did. In 1984, with another election looming, Ronald Reagan summoned Paul Volcker to the White House, where James Baker, the president's chief of staff, instructed Volcker not to raise rates. Ben Bernanke met repeatedly with George W. Bush during the Global Financial Crisis, when cooperation to prevent collapse of the financial system was imperative. Powell himself dined with Trump at the White House in 2019. Periodic meetings pose no threat to central bank independence. Independence requires accountability. And in describing the Fed's priorities and general outlook to the president, the Fed chair is demonstrating accountability to the public. But as in the case of Nixon and Burns, a president who regularly harangues the Fed chair, specifically over interest-rate policy, threatens that independence. Also Read: The US-China trade truce doesn't solve the Fed's headache Trump has, of course, repeatedly criticized the Fed's interest-rate decisions. The post-meeting statement issued by the Fed was careful to say that 'expectations for monetary policy" were not discussed. So far so good, assuming the statement can be taken at face value. The second event raising questions about Fed independence was the Supreme Court's 22 May decision in Trump vs Wilcox in which the court granted an administration request to allow the president to fire members of independent government agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees union elections and labour laws. Technically, the court paused a lower court ruling that would have stayed the president's power of dismissal, suggesting that presidential discretion is justified because NLRB members 'exercise considerable executive power." In other words, they are de facto members of the executive branch, subordinate to the president. This logic would appear to put the Federal Reserve squarely in Trump's crosshairs. Also Read: Barry Eichengreen: Trump is taking aim at the IMF, World Bank and US Fed But in a 6-3 ruling, the six-member majority on the court explicitly exempted the Fed. 'The Federal Reserve," the justices reasoned, 'is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States." This argument might be seen as providing strong support for Fed independence, except that it is illiterate, illogical and ahistorical. The First and Second Banks of the US, which executed limited functions on behalf of the government between 1791 and 1836, were private banks, full stop. Along with providing depository services to the government, they competed with other banks, extending commercial loans. There was nothing quasi about their private status. In contrast, the Federal Reserve Board—if we assume that's what the justices mean when they write 'Federal Reserve"—is made up of seven presidentially-appointed public servants. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), responsible for interest-rate policy, includes those seven board members and five regional Reserve Bank presidents, who are appointed by Reserve Bank directors, subject to the approval of the Federal Reserve Board. The regional Reserve Banks come closest to being 'quasi-private,' because private citizens serve on their boards. But to argue that the same is true of the FOMC or the Federal Reserve System as a whole is a non sequitur. Also Read: The Fed's 'Mission Impossible' is now 'Mission Accomplished' Beyond the Fed's governance is the scope of its authority. The First and Second Banks of the US lacked statutory authority to regulate banks, a key public-policy mandate of the Federal Reserve. In justifying its decision, the majority cited an earlier ruling, Seila Law LLC vs Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in which the court affirmed the president's power to remove the heads of agencies led by a single director and not a board. That decision included a footnote that the Second Bank and the Fed 'can claim a special historical status." But it provided no legal basis for that statement, and no judgment of validity of the claim. The note reads like a ChatGPT hallucination. Removing checks on presidential powers while arbitrarily exempting the Fed opens the door to arbitrarily not exempting the US central bank. Advocates of Fed independence should be worried. Maybe that's what Trump and Powell talked about. ©2025/Project Syndicate The author is professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of 'In Defense of Public Debt'
Time of India
20 minutes ago
- Time of India
View: Chips won the Cold War. Rare earths may win the next
By David Fickling In retrospect, the symbolism of the moment was foreboding. On May 15, 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning US firms from doing business with Chinese telecommunications companies, including Huawei Technologies Co. Five days after that first broadside in a brewing trade-and-technology war, President Xi Jinping was photographed touring a factory producing rare-earth magnets. Such devices, his visit seemed to imply, could be a geopolitical weapon for China quite as potent as advanced semiconductors are for the US. Six years later, those battle lines are hardening. In the first major US-China trade dispute of Trump's second term, Beijing was able to use its control of rare earths to force Washington to a deal last week. The magnets produced from them are essential for the lightweight, powerful motors driving everything from automated car seats to guided missiles. After the US imposed its first round of tariffs in April, China started limiting export permits, causing US manufacturers to warn of imminent shutdowns. 'FULL MAGNETS, AND ANY NECESSARY RARE EARTHS, WILL BE SUPPLIED, UP FRONT, BY CHINA,' Trump said in a social media post Wednesday, announcing the trade deal had been finalized. Beneath the all-caps boastfulness there's a worrying note of desperation. America has been caught napping. Beijing's response to being frozen out of the microprocessor ecosystem was an all-out drive to bridge the technological gap. State-owned chip foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. has deployed $33.5 billion on capital expenditures, and $4 billion on research and development, since the middle of 2019. Huawei spends 180 billion yuan ($25 billion) on R&D every year, founder Ren Zhengfei said in a recent interview. Just 12 months ago, the government created a separate $47.5 billion semiconductor investment fund. The US chip fortress still looks pretty impregnable, barring an unexpected DeepSeek moment. Although Huawei is reported to be developing a 3-nanometer chip to match the most advanced non-Chinese processors as soon as next year, Ren said its best designs still 'lag behind the US by a generation.' A lesson of asymmetric warfare, though, is to exploit your enemy's weaknesses, rather than attempt to match their strengths. That's where rare earths come in. A technological conflict is simply a disguised version of a real flesh-and-blood battle. As Chris Miller's 2022 book Chip War explains, the US advantage in semiconductors was a crucial factor in winning the Cold War. By making processing power incredibly lightweight and error-free, it enabled America to build a far more fearsome military machine. Cruise missiles guided by tiny onboard computers could destroy targets with pinpoint accuracy, rendering them more deadly than Soviet missiles that perennially veered off course. Rare-earth magnets promise to replicate that processing-power revolution in mechanical power — making motors smaller, stronger, cheaper, and more efficient. It's an innovative leap perceptible to anyone who's used a $25 drone: The tiny devices only exist today because of the way this new technology (along with the parallel revolution of lithium-ion batteries ) allows us to move objects in undreamt-of ways. As with cruise missiles in the 1970s, this innovation promises to change the way future wars will be fought. Consider Ukraine's bold drone strike on Russia's long-range bomber fleet earlier this month. Blinded by culture wars over the energy transition, America is doing far too little to close this technological gap. Its military needs for rare-earth magnets, as we've written, have been pretty much met at minimal cost. Compared to the hundreds of billions that China is pouring into chips , the Pentagon has built a rare-earth supply chain since the start of 2020 with $439 million in grants and loans. Worse is the way lithium-ion batteries are falling victim to politics. The looming repeal of Biden era clean-energy subsidies and the resultant collapse of the electric-vehicle supply chain may reduce the output capacity of US battery manufacturers in 2030 by about 75%. That would halt almost every plant not already under construction, and ensure the country can only produce enough cells to power about a fifth of annual car sales. America will be left more dependent on China, both for auto batteries and the host of more crucial niche applications for lithium-ion technology. In the golden age of semiconductors, the US instinctively knew that its strength as a great power lay in its determination to remain at the bleeding edge of innovation. When the might of the state forces technology to submit to ideology, though, the consequences can be disastrous. That's the road the US is heading down, however, in letting China take the lead in rare earths, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and the other clean electrical technologies of the future. Should American troops find themselves on some future battlefield without the critical minerals and batteries to match the swarms of drones deployed against them, they'll rue the day Washington turned its back on the future.
Mint
an hour ago
- Mint
Xi Pushes to Deepen Central Asia Influence With Kazakh Visit
(Bloomberg) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has arrived in Kazakhstan for talks with Central Asian leaders, providing a counterpoint to a Group of Seven summit by visiting a vast region at the nexus of competing interests from Washington to Beijing. Xi, who's making only his third overseas trip this year, will meet with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on Monday and attend the second gathering of the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan the following day. The summit in the Kazakh capital Astana is taking place in parallel to the G-7 event in Canada, and comes days after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Kazakhstan's foreign minister in Washington. Xi hosted the inaugural China-Central Asia Summit in the Chinese city of Xi'an two years ago. A key objective for Xi in Kazakhstan, where he launched the sprawling Belt and Road infrastructure initiative more than a decade ago, is 'future-proofing' China's economy for a potential rift with the US, according to Kate Mallinson, a partner at PRISM Strategic Intelligence Ltd. in London. 'China has come out of the last three years significantly stronger in Central Asia,' she said. 'Having observed the West's attempts to use its economic influence to isolate Russia since 2022, China continues to make efforts to safeguard its economy and supply chains against any future confrontation with the US.' US President Donald Trump's tariff war is likely to be high on the agenda as Xi cultivates alliances in Central Asia, where jockeying for resources and political influence has intensified between major powers. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited last month and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a trip in April. The region, which is home to vast reserves of uranium and oil, as well as rare earth metals, has grown in importance for China, providing overland routes for exporting to Europe. At the same time, Russia's historical influence over the former Soviet republics has been undermined by President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, now well into its fourth year, allowing China to ramp up exports to a region with a gross domestic product of about $500 billion. The Chinese leader is visiting Kazakhstan for the third time since 2020, making the country of 20 million people one of his favorite destinations in the years after Covid curtailed his global travels. Tokayev, who's been Kazakhstan's president since 2019, is a Mandarin speaker who once worked as a diplomat in China. His government has set the target of attracting $150 billion in investment by 2029, when Tokayev's term in office should come to an end. It's a goal that may require greater involvement from China, given Russia's diminishing role in the region. China has committed a total of $26 billion in capital, according to official Kazakh estimates, making it a top-5 investor behind the likes of the US and Switzerland. On Monday, Kazakh and Chinese firms signed deals worth over $24 billion at the Second Central Asia — China Industrial and Investment Cooperation Forum, the Kazakh Invest company said. 'China's development needs a thriving Central Asia,' Liu Jianchao, who heads the Communist Party's diplomatic arm, said in a speech in March. 'China welcomes Central Asian countries to take a free ride from China's growth and opening up.' China has sought to counter the US-led global order — a goal it shares with Russia — in part by courting the Global South. In recent months, Xi has attended summits with regional blocs, using meetings with countries from Latin America and Africa to push for closer ties. China has also used rival groups to the G-7, such as the BRICS club of nations, named after early members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, and to which Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are partners. The group, which was considering a common currency, will meet in July. At a seminar in Shanghai this month, Chinese academics highlighted the significance of Beijing's cooperation with Central Asia in curbing ethnic conflicts and separatism, according to a state media report. China has meanwhile made economic inroads into Central Asia, increasing bilateral trade as well as expanding investment into areas ranging from energy to railways. Since 2023, China has outstripped Russia as Kazakhstan's largest trading partner. That's despite the fact that Central Asia's largest economy is, along with neighboring Kyrgyzstan, a member of a Moscow-led customs union. China's exports to the five Central Asian countries rose by more than 40% in both 2022 and 2023 as its firms, such as Huawei Technologies Co. and BYD Co., expanded market share. That growth slowed last year, but it was almost three times the level in the same period in 2021 — the year before the Ukraine invasion — through the first four months of 2025. More business deals will likely be on the table as the Chinese and Kazakh leaders meet. China's East Hope Group seeks to build an aluminum smelter capable of producing 1 million tons of the metal a year in Kazakhstan. It's part of a large industrial project with an estimated price tag of over $12 billion, according to the state-run Kazakh Invest company. Ahead of the meeting between Tokayev and Xi on Monday, Kazakh and Chinese companies signed 58 commercial agreements worth over $24 billion, according to Kazakh Invest. Development Bank of Kazakhstan secured a $1 billion credit line in dollars and yuan from China Development Bank. Kazakhstan's Deputy Foreign Minister Alibek Kuantyrov said in a statement that his country's 'partnership portfolio' with China includes 224 projects worth around $66.5 billion, which are expected to create about 50,000 jobs. 'Kazakhstan traditionally attaches great importance to the development of mutually beneficial cooperation with the Central Asian countries and the People's Republic of China,' he said. --With assistance from James Mayger, Colum Murphy and Jing Li. (Updates with signing of investment deals in the 12th paragraph.) More stories like this are available on
