Hong Kong authorities should revamp their public inquiry hotline to better handle residents’ complaints by learning from Beijing’s model, lawmakers have told the chief executive at the first “rules-free and warm-hearted” closed-door dialogue session. While the current Legislative Council term marks the first since the 1997 handover not to hold any formal question and answer session with a city leader before the first summer recess, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu emphasised that the new form of...
When the S&P 500, Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average hit record highs in early July, US President Donald Trump hailed it as evidence of America’s economic revival. “This is WINNING. The Golden Age of America is beginning – and we are just getting started,” he wrote in a social media post on July 4, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. Though it was only the latest in a long series of boasts about the stock market that have punctuated Trump’s...
Eighty per cent of success is showing up, as they say. So, all but one of Hong Kong’s 89 legislators joining a week-long “national affairs study visit” to Beijing made a good impression. Lawmaker Stanley Ng Chau-pei called it a “groundbreaking opportunity” for legislators to study and deepen their understanding of national conditions. Showing up eager to learn and to better grasp how Hong Kong can play a more proactive role in national development is indeed commendable. The legislature had...
Hong Kong lawmakers have said they gained new insights on how best to assist the government in creating the city’s first five-year plan following an unprecedented study trip to Beijing that wrapped up on Saturday. Upon returning to Hong Kong, Legislative Council president Starry Lee Wai-king shared key takeaways from the week-long trip, highlighting a delegation meeting with Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, at the Great Hall of the People. She added that lawmakers...
Washington and Beijing’s top police officials met on Friday in the Chinese capital, the latest meeting by senior level representatives in advance of a much-anticipated summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, expected in the US capital in late September. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel met Wang Xiaohong, China’s state councillor and minister of public security, in Beijing on Friday, according to state news agency Xinhua. Wang said the two...
Beijing is ramping up its computing power and unveiling new policies to boost the city’s “token economy”, as China accelerates AI adoption across key industries in its tech race with the US. The Chinese capital aims to add another 50,000 petaflops of intelligent computing power in the second half of 2026, pushing its total capacity over 130,000 petaflops by the end of the year, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology said at a press briefing on Tuesday. One petaflop is...
New home prices in four Chinese first-tier cities rose by an average of 0.1 per cent last month, extending a four-month rebound and signalling a gradual recovery in market sentiment as housing stabilisation measures gain traction. Compared with May, home prices edged up 0.3 per cent in Shanghai and Shenzhen and by 0.2 per cent in Guangzhou, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday. However, they fell 0.3 per cent in Beijing. Among 70 large and medium-sized...
Hong Kong’s national security laws must be constantly improved to address risks and close loopholes amid geopolitical tensions, a former senior mainland Chinese official overseeing the city’s affairs has said, while insisting that the local pieces of legislation were less draconian compared with equivalent laws in the United States and United Kingdom. Wang Zhenmin, former bureau chief of the State Council’s Hong Kong and Macau Office (HKMAO), was among the mainland legal experts who spoke at a...
Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong has been restructured, with the economic department split into two and its district-level groups expanded, a move that an analyst said reflected the central government’s greater focus on financial, youth, and district work. A comparison of the office’s organisational chart on its website on Thursday with internet archive records showed that the number of departments had been reduced from 24 to 23, even as its Economic Department was split into two entities,...