This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Major shipping companies are pulling out of Hong Kong as it loses its status as a free, international container port, according to analysts, who blamed a recent political crackdown and structural changes for the development.
“Hong Kong is being rapidly deselected from the East-West trades by all major shipping lines,” the Danish-based consultancy Sea-Intelligence said in an April 2 report citing recent data from shipping lines.
Total container volumes coming through Hong Kong fell to 14.3 million TEUs in 2023, the lowest volume since 1998.
While the decline was exacerbated by the closure of Hong Kong’s borders during the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, cutting off cross-border road links and prompting shipping lines to send containers straight to Shenzhen, political factors including the international reaction to the city’s ongoing crackdown on dissent in the wake of the 2019 protest movement also played a role, according to industry analysts.
“Hong Kong enjoyed a special relationship with the United States and other countries, because it was seen as semi-independent and autonomous, with little interference from mainland China in its day-to-day operations,” Tom Derry, Chief Executive Officer at the Institute for Supply Management, told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview. “That’s no longer seen as the case.”
“Foreign nationals, both U.S. and from other countries, have been arrested under charges due to the new National Security Law,” Derry said. “The rule of law in Hong Kong is seen as being a little more arbitrary today than it was in the past, because national security cases can only be heard by specially appointed justices in Hong Kong, not by the main judicial system.”
“So Hong Kong’s … special status as a preferred port has been eroded. It’s to the detriment of Hong Kong and to the benefit of other mainland Chinese ports.”
On Jan. 18 RFA Cantonese shot footage of the No. 9 Container Terminal at Kwai Ching, which was once stacked with containers several high, and which is now an empty expanse of concrete.
According to Derry, Hong Kong was hit by the loss in May 2020 of its separate trading status previously accorded by the U.S. government — a move that was in direct response to the crackdown on the 2019 pro-democracy movement — and by tariffs imposed on technology products amid a Sino-U.S. trade war begun under the Trump administration.
“Mainland China has 38% market share, the largest in the world, in those particular kinds of firms,” Derry told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview. “Hong Kong enjoyed a large volume of integrated circuits that were moving to those [electronics] firms in mainland China and then moving from those mainland China firms back through Hong Kong and to their ultimate destinations around the world.”
“That has been significantly impacted by the removal of preferential status, and by the later imposition of tariffs … which has only made those conditions a little bit worse,” he said.
Derry said Indonesia, Singapore and Manila will be significant beneficiaries of the shift away from Hong Kong, including Manila due to a significant semiconductor presence in the Philippines.
“Those will be the beneficiaries, and it will be Hong Kong’s relative loss,” he said.
Shipping containers are seen at a port of Kwai Tsing Container Terminals in Hong Kong, Nov. 5, 2021. (Kin Cheung/AP) 
Meanwhile, a recent network overview from the Gemini Cooperation shipping alliance of Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, revealed no direct deep-sea calls in Hong Kong since the alliance pivoted to using Shanghai, Ningbo, Yantian, Singapore and Tanjung Pelepas as major hubs on regional container shipping routes, downgrading Hong Kong to the status of “feeder” port with cargo trucked or shipped to Yantian in the neighboring mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen.
Hong Kong isn’t the only port that will lose direct connectivity under the Gemini network: the northeastern Chinese port of Dalian, Taiwan’s Kaohsiung and South Korea’s Busan have also been downgraded.
Yet the damage to its status as an international container port will likely be extensive, with the city’s port losing throughput traffic from Hapag-Lloyd of around 615,000 20-foot-equivalent units (TEU) a quarter and around 261,000 TEUs a quarter from Maersk to Yantian, according to U.K. maritime consultancy MDS Transmodal.
Consolidating routes
The developments come as the Alliance, which groups South Korea’s HMM, Japan’s Ocean Network Express and Taiwan’s Yang Ming shipping lines, is cutting the number of direct port calls it makes to Hong Kong from 11 to just 6, Sea-Intelligence reported.
Hong Kong will only be included on one of Yang Ming’s 13 regional and trans-Pacific routes from 2025, according to a press release published to Yang Ming’s website.
The consolidation of routes “does not bode well for the Port of Hong Kong,” Sea-Intelligence commented in its report. “Analysis of network design and network efficiency will show that fewer, but larger, hubs are economically more efficient. Hong Kong appears to be the first major ‘victim’ of this.”
An aerial view shows containers at the Kwai Chung Container Terminal in Hong Kong, China June 6, 2021. (Aleksander Solum/Reuters)
Hong Kong’s Transport and Logistics Bureau issued a statement in response to RFA Cantonese reporting on the issue on April 5, calling it “unreasonable.”
“Radio Free Asia’s unreasonable comments on the rapid deterioration in Hong Kong’s status as an international shipping hub have no basis in fact and have been fabricated out of thin air,” a spokesman for the bureau said in a statement.
“This is wanton criticism and attack … and can never be accepted.”
Declining numbers
It cited the Xinhua-Baltic International Shipping Centre Development Index Report（2023), a collaboration between China’s state news agency Xinhua and the Baltic Exchange, which claimed that the city ranks fourth in the world as an international container port.
However, Lloyd’s List ranked Hong Kong 10th in the world in terms of throughput last year, one place lower than in 2022.
Financial commentator Joseph Ngan, a former assistant controller at Hong Kong’s i-CABLE News, wrote in a recent commentary for RFA Cantonese that Hong Kong has indeed “lost its role as an entrepôt port,” citing figures that showed a 0.8% decline in the city’s exports in the year to Feb. 29, 2024 and a 1.8% decline in imports, “far worse than market expectations.”
Ngan cited data from the Hong Kong Maritime and Port Board, which shows that the throughput of Kwai Tsing Container Terminal, which accounts for 70% of Hong Kong’s total cargo volume, fell for 25 consecutive months to the end of December 2023, the largest decline on record.
Shipping containers stack at the Kwai Chung terminal at Hong Kong’s port on Tuesday, April 7, 2009.(Vincent Yu/AP)
Total throughput fell by nearly 14% for the whole of last year, Ngan wrote, citing a further double-digit decline in February following a brief spike ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday in January.
Hong Kong’s biggest container terminal operator, CK Hutchison, saw a 9% decrease in its China-Hong Kong port revenue and a 18% fall in its gross earnings last year, Ngan wrote.
“We have seen that the ranking of container terminals has dropped from No. 1 in the world 20 years ago to the bottom of the top 10,” Ngan wrote. “It is clear from the data that container throughput has plummeted.”
He said Hong Kong officials were choosing to deny the problem in favor of issuing positive propaganda about the city’s outlook instead.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by .This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Updated Sept. 25, 2023, 11:52 p.m. ET.
An appeal court in Vietnam’s Dak Lak province on Tuesday upheld an eight-year prison sentence for music lecturer Dang Dang Phuoc, his wife Le Thi Ha told Radio Free Asia.
The 60-year-old instructor at Dak Lak College of Pedagogy was convicted on June 6 this year of “making, storing, spreading or propagating information, documents and items aimed at opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”
He was prosecuted under the penal code’s controversial Article 117, which rights groups say is frequently used to suppress free speech.
Police arrested him on Sept. 8 last year after he posted on Facebook in support of activist Bui Tuan Lam, known as “Onion Bae.”
His wife was also questioned about songs he sang and posted on social media, including one by a former political prisoner and another with lyrics about the problems faced by Vietnam under the Communist Party.
Speaking to RFA Vietnamese on Tuesday Le Thi Ha called the appeal a sham.
“There is nothing different from the first-instance hearing,” she said.
“The examiners of the province’s Department of Information and Communication continued to be absent while the court panel did not respect the defenses of my husband and his lawyers.”
Over the past 10 years Phuoc campaigned against corruption and for better protection for civil and political rights. He signed pro-democracy petitions and called for changes to Vietnam’s constitution, which grants the Communist Party a monopoly on power.
“Dang Dang Phuoc shouldn’t be in prison for simply calling for better treatment and justice for the poor and vulnerable Vietnamese, and demanding the government provide better social services and a cleaner environment for all,” said Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson, ahead of the appeal.
“If the Vietnamese government cared at all about the welfare of the people, they would be listening to principled activists like Dang Dang Phuoc, not imprisoning him.”
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.
Updated to add quote from Phuoc’s wife Le Thi Ha.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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As President Joe Biden’s top aides fly into Beijing one by one, China appears to be facing an unprecedented slowdown of its formerly spectacular GDP growth machine, leading some to conjecture that China may consider injecting some pragmatism into its foreign policy.
Foreign direct investment is calculated to have fallen to U.S.$20 billion in the first quarter of this year, compared with $100 billion in last year’s first quarter, when China was in lockdown, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Initial bounce-back growth in the aftermath of long lockdowns due to COVID-19 is fading as consumers draw back from spending and exports slump. Compounding the pinch is the slow collapse of China’s all-important real estate sector as well as the ongoing problem of accumulated local-government debt.
Beijing has stated it has no money to bail out local government debt due to overspending on COVID-19 mitigation. A massive infrastructure spending spree on the heels of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 saw the construction of roads to nowhere, ghost cities, unoccupied tower blocks and unfinished theme parks.
Local governments have to deal with a debt hangover from years of profligate spending compounded by what is believed to be an 18% jump in health expenditure during COVID-19 and a 23% fall in revenue due to the real estate sector slump.
People visit a booth of Ant Group during the 2022 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China September 1, 2022. Credit: Reuters In the meantime, 2023 was supposed to be the “Year of Investing in China,” as Beijing has hailed it, but foreign investors aren’t buying it, not least because President Xi Jinping’s administration has shown every sign of being determined to make it harder to do business in China, not easier.
Following the implementation of a new counter-espionage law last month, the U.S. State Department advised Americans to reconsider travel to China due to “arbitrary enforcement of local law,” “exit bans” and “wrongful detentions.”
China’s economy grew just 0.8% in the second quarter compared with the first three months of the year, and more than a fifth of Chinese aged 16 to 24 are out of work.
Open for business?
Li Qiang, China’s premier and second-highest official, has repeatedly reassured the foreign business community that China is “open for business” at the China Development Forum in March and again more recently in Tianjin at the World Economic Forum.
Reality suggests otherwise. The U.S. and China are at loggerheads over transfers of high technology and the materials used to manufacture semiconductor chips.
Meanwhile, China’s financial regulators have reportedly invited some of the world’s biggest investors to a rare symposium this week, three sources said, with the aim of encouraging investment into the world’s second largest economy.
The meeting, which is due to be held in Beijing on Friday, will focus on the current situation and challenges faced by U.S. dollar-denominated investment firms in China, Reuters reported.
“China’s decision making is as hidden from our view as it has ever been, but China’s economic weakness is obvious for all to see, even China’s leaders, which can’t help but be one source of the recent moderation in foreign policy and willingness to engage Washington,” Scott Kennedy, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the New York Times.
Job seekers wait to enter a job fair for college graduates in Yantai, Shandong province February 12, 2011. Credit: Reuters “The Chinese economy is clearly sputtering,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy and economics at Cornell University who suggested that China required further stimulus and policy reform. The latter is unlikely to happen in any meaningful way, while Beijing has repeatedly hinted that it is unwilling to throw the kind of stimulus at the economy it has in the past.
“What we all expected was a consumption and service-led recovery. If that is sputtering, then there’s no engine left for the recovery,” said Louis Kuijs, chief economist for Asia Pacific at S&P Global Ratings.
‘Targeted actions’
There are some signs that the U.S. is pressuring China to open up and talk at a time of economic weakness, perhaps sensing a vulnerability.
But on her visit to Beijing earlier this month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was largely pragmatic, voicing concerns over market barriers for American firms operating in China.
She said Washington would “in certain circumstances, need to pursue targeted actions to protect its national security,” but disagreements over such moves should not jeopardize the broader relationship.
“We seek healthy economic competition that is not winner-take-all but that, with a fair set of rules, can benefit both countries over time,” she said.
Nationalist state tabloid the Global Times, in an uncharacteristically positive turn, editorialized at the time of Yellen’s visit that even though U.S. officials were downplaying any expectations from Yellen’s visit, “Chinese experts believe that one major point of significance of Yellen’s trip is to keep high-level communication channels open, which may help bilateral relations walk out of their downward spiral.”
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chris Taylor for RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The appeals court in Hanoi on Thursday rejected land rights activist Truong Van Dung’s appeal against his six-year prison sentence, his wife told RFA.
Dung protested his innocence loudly in court and demanded to be released immediately, Nghiem Thi Hop said.
She said her husband was escorted out of the courtroom twice for arguing with the judge and shouting “down with the Communist Party.”
Dung’s lawyers argued that he did not commit any crime and challenged prosecutors to re-examine the “evidence,” but they refused, Hop said.
She said the appeal was just a “show trial” with the judge ordering Dung’s lawyers to “speak less and be quick,” while the judge’s comments were barely audible because there was no microphone.
On March 28, Hanoi City Court found 65-year-old Dung guilty of “conducting anti-state propaganda.”
According to the indictment, Dung gave interviews to U.S.-based Saigon Dallas Radio between 2015 and 2022 that “distorted and smeared Vietnam’s government, propagated fabricated information and caused confusion among the people.” The interviews and video clips were posted on social media.
The Hanoi People’s Procuracy also accused Dung of storing copies of two books: “Popular Politics” by human rights activist Pham Doan Trang and “Life of People Behind Bars” by former prisoner of conscience Pham Thanh Nghien. The books were allegedly printed and distributed illegally.
Dung was prosecuted under Article 88 of Vietnam’s 1999 penal code, a controversial law used to target dissidents that rights groups say is one of several wielded to stifle voices of dissent in the one-party communist state.
There are 193 activists in Vietnamese prisons according to human rights group The 88 Project.
“Sadly but not surprisingly land activist Truong Van Dung lost his appeal,” Human Rights Watch Asia Director Elaine Pearson said in a Tweet.
“So what in the Vietnamese government’s view were Truong Van Dung’s “crimes”? Essentially, he exercised his rights to freedom of expression, association & peaceful assembly.”
Truong Van Dung (C) holds a photo of captain Nguy Van Tha who was killed in the January 1974 Battle of the Paracel Islands, during an anti-China protest in front of the Opera House in Hanoi May 11, 2014. Credit: Reuters Dung participated in protests in Hanoi, including demonstrations against China’s occupation of the Paracel Islands – an island group in the South China Sea also claimed by Vietnam – and protests against the Taiwan-owned Formosa Company for polluting the coastline of four central Vietnamese provinces in 2016.
Public protests even over perceived harm to Vietnam’s interests are considered threats to its political stability and are routinely suppressed by the police.
“Truong Van Dung has experienced years of government harassment and intimidation, including police interrogations, house arrest, a travel ban and physical assaults,” said Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson ahead of the appeal.
He accused Hanoi of “inexorably adding peaceful activists to the growing list of more than 150 Vietnamese political prisoners,” thereby violating human rights laws and betraying its duty to protect people’s rights as a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
“Every time the authorities throw an activist like Truong Van Dung behind bars, respect for human rights in Vietnam takes a hard knock,” Robertson said.
“Donors and international trade partners should be clear that if Vietnam wants growing trade and investment, its leaders need to recognize that people speaking their minds are part of the solution that strengthens, not weakens, the country.”
Truong Van Dung was arrested at the end of May 2022 and held incommunicado for nine months before his trial.
Amnesty International joined calls for Vietnamese authorities to drop all charges against him and spoke out against the country’s judicial system.
“The Vietnamese authorities are yet again misusing the criminal justice system to suppress dissent. Arrested for giving interviews to foreign media, Truong Van Dung should have never been put in prison in the first place,” Amnesty’s Deputy Regional Director of Campaigns Ming Yu Hah said.
Amnesty said Dung’s appeal came as Vietnam cracked down on a growing number of people whose views differ from that of the government, and against independent civil society organizations.
“The unfair charges and inhumane prison conditions [show] the Vietnamese authorities’ willingness to systematically silence dissent in direct violation of international human rights law,” Hah said, calling Vietnam’s ratification of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and its their seat on the UN Human Rights Council “no more than empty gestures.”
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.
