Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into China

It seems to me that it's an actual genuine effort, given that the publicity of the drive has damaged Chinese public confidence in their institutions of government (high profile corruption is often featured in the news) and because many of the people taken to court have been in Xi Jinpeng's own circle and have represented for him a loss of personal power in the party. I haven't read much about Xi's personal power growing all particularly much during the anti-corruption drive, and there is a legitimate question whether he will be revoted to lead the party during the congress next year (though it is expected to continue).

Definitely this angle on understanding the drive should not be ignored. An attempt to corroborate it - to unpick the knot - would require a great amount of study of the Chinese People's Party, of Xi Jinping's constituency, and both the consistency of and the timing of charges brought to bring in the high level fraud. Documents and communications from Jinping or his circle discussing "who to go after" would represent a smoking gun (of course we haven't even smelled anything like this).

I read an expose from Foreign Policy where they tried to build a case that Xi Jinping has been using it to consolidate power, but it was very clumsy and as its predictions and information came into question the investigative direction taken by the expose has been abandoned (as far as I can tell).

The way the anti-corruption drive has proceeded, as I understand, has been in tracking how government finances are being used and that the Chinese Government tends to find - using traditional accounting audits - rings of people who are enriching themselves using various schemes (though many times really obvious transfers into personal accounts). So far it has appeared that the anti-corruption effort has both been making an actual positive effect on government efficiency and that it has been primarily non-political and untargetted, focusing more on finding abuse of public funds than in chasing after any officials in particular.

And this is the exact same argument that is made by oligarchs everywhere... Oligarchs pillage their own countries and people, then when it goes south they escape to the west, claiming they're political refugees, and perpetuate the cycle of corruption.

You know China very well. There is no genuine antipathy towards corruption in Chinese ruling group. However, there is genuine antipathy towards corruption benefiting opponents in Chinese ruling group.

I would be inclined towards genuine antipathy towards corruption.

I have a brother that at one point regularly dealt with top levels of Chinese government. His summary was, "China is a country of crooks ruled by honest men; the USA is a country of honest men ruled by crooks." He's not sure which is worse in the end.

Based on that, I would bet on the top levels of the Chinese government being basically ethical (albeit within an ethical system that values life and liberty a lot less than we would).

They probably just want to instill fear. If they are powerfull enough to get away with this, then who would ever oppose them?

To consolidate the similar threads of discussion, another comment mentioned this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13533864

To consolidate the similar threads of discussion, another comment mentioned this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13533864

and by that you mean he's only LEGALLY Canadian and Antiguan...

That's probably why they forcibly moved him across the border, taking a step to normalize the behavior, before moving on to more sympathetic targets in the future.

>I also don't see any facts on which you can base your corruption claim.

"Some of his most successful deals involved buying stakes in midsize financial institutions in smaller Chinese cities, often through a complex web of shell or dummy corporations. When Citigroup and other investors agreed to buy a big stake in the Guangdong Development Bank, for instance, one of Mr. Xiao’s investment vehicles — Puhua Investment — took an 8 percent interest, and then just weeks later transferred it to another state financial institution. Few analysts or journalists knew he was involved.

While shell companies are widely used in China as investment vehicles, securities experts say they can also be employed to hide the ownership stakes of public officials, providing cover for favors distributed by businessmen. Their frequent use by Mr. Xiao has fanned speculation that he gets privileged access to deals involving state assets and that he shares the benefits with the families of the ruling elite."

[...]

"But a review of corporate registration records has found that on at least three occasions during the last five years, companies affiliated with Mr. Xiao have struck deals that appear to have benefited the relatives of China’s highest-ranking leaders."

from: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/world/asia/tiananmen-era-...

not conclusive, but he certainly walks like a duck

I think parent is making a good point. See, in corrupt/poor countries when someone becomes a billionare he does not get the benefit of doubt. The entire legal and executive systems are so rotten and shady that there is no legal way for someone to become that rich unless they play dirty regardless of their capabilities, luck, education or great ideas.

You think that Canadians should essentially be immune from local enforcement while outside of Canada?

> I also don't see any facts on which you can base your corruption claim.

The Canadian government hides most everything from it's citizens, especially when it comes to China. Statistics on real estate transactions using money from overseas are considered none of our business. People operating illegal hotels out of houses while not paying taxes on revenue? Just fine. Egregious tax evasion? No problem. Buying citizenship, driver's licenses, etc? A-ok.

All of these things are happening, but none of them are considered "facts", and you certainly won't ever see any facts if the government refuses to enforce the law on certain subsets of the population.

That's not my point, at all.

The fact of the matter is that in political situations, there is a calculated risk taken by both states in a diplomatic conflict. At the end of the day it is about power and what resources are required to fight this. China has the upper hand here.

On the Chinese side, they have renditioned a Chinese-born, Chinese-made, PRC-living billionaire from a Chinese SAR that's more "one country, one and a half systems" and slipping further as China can get away with it. This man's rendition is likely part of an anticorruption initiative that started a few years back, given that it was done by Chinese security services. He pissed off the wrong people in the Party and now he is having to deal with it.

As the man is a Canadian citizen, the Canadian government now has to decide how much to protest this action. Protesting actions against their citizens requires political will and/or capability of enforcement. China has already stepped over the usual line and stolen him away anyway; will the Canadian state act? This is where I am skeptical. I don't believe that the Canadian state will find that this man is worth burning more than a little diplomacy on, maybe a protest or two.

Fighting this action requires burning political capital. There is a province in which these people have become woefully unpopular; unless a lot of Canadians get really angry, there is little reason for the Canadian state to do more than informally protest through an ambassador and at best a back room dealing or two to free him (e.g. we will share financial data on Chinese-Canadian citizens if you give us our citizen back.) Either way, by making the first move China has extracted something from Canada.

To add: I also believe that the UK will not do anything regarding this rendition. They have enough international issues to deal with re: EU/Brexit and I doubt they will feel that Hong Kong is important enough to their shrinking empire to push back on China with this.

US/CIA does "extraordinary rendition" all the time and sends missiles into sovereign states via drone daily. Whether or not one objects doesn't matter if there is no way to deter the behavior. If China sees no consequences China will do as China pleases. Law is irrelevant.

I agree that I don't like seeing China wandering into Hong Kong, but the way China acts, the "one country, two systems" thing really is in name only. China will eventually subsume all of Hong Kong as they see fit. The question is whether it is done subversively or not. As of right now, the subversive actions are costing them less on the world's stage so they'll keep chipping away at the SAR until it is at least controlled by puppets of the PRC government.

> There's no Seal Team Six and CSIS really isn't tasked with Jason Bourne styled missions which you are thinking of.

I'm not sure how you extrapolated my post to this extreme. I replied to a poster below as to how I am viewing the politics of the situation in more detail, if you'd prefer to get a more reasoned view than the "gut summary".

I'm not anti-Chinese. I don't live in Vancouver. It would be rather strange for me to be anti-Chinese; see my bio. I personally get a lot of benefit from East Asia. If anything, you could say that I am in many ways pro-Chinese, but I support the Chinese people.

What I do have is a strong dislike for people like this man, who have made billions for themselves through graft, rent-seeking, and cronyism by ingratiating themselves with the party elite. Much of this man's economic wealth is extracted from ordinary Chinese people. When I wrote "these people" I was not talking about Chinese: I was talking about Chinese nationals that made their wealth through corruption and exploitation instead of providing true value to their greater countrymen, then run off to a Western sovereign state in hopes that their actions don't catch up with them.

I interpreted "these people" to mean wealthy Chinese-born Chinese nationals who are taking their wealth out of China and parking it in British Columbia real estate. This would exclude Canadian-born Canadian citizens of East Asian descent.

This man obtained Canadian citizenship. He must have ties to one province or another. British Columbia is the most likely candidate since it is on the West Coast.

> so who are you speaking for when you use the blanket term "these people"?

I'm not the GP, but I think it very clearly means corrupt people.

Still, I have almost as much problem taking China's government accusation of corruption on face value as I have believing somebody can honestly become a billionaire in China.

> I'm seeing more and more of these anti-Chinese comments popping up on reddit /r/vancouver and frankly annoyed to see similar fear mongering and FUD spreading fake comments outside of that cesspool of bitter and shut in crowd.

It's not really an 'anti-Chinese' sentiment I'm seeing. It's more that British Columbians aren't happy with the effects of the influx of global capital and high net worth individuals on Vancouver. An additional factor into the negative attitudes around the influx of high net worth foreigners there is a sense (coupled with a fair bit of evidence) that many of these real estate speculators and high net worth individuals aren't playing by the rules and are avoiding taxes and other rules.

I understand that this is a sensitive issue, but your point would be stronger if you dropped the tone by several degrees. In this case, you seriously misrepresented the parent and turned what should be a very civil conversation into the polarized bullshit that absolutely ruins the internet.

Yes, as mentioned in the article, Lee Bo and others, some in HK, one even in Thailand, apparently.

Because Hong Kong is a separate state. They govern themselves.

He might think he can buy his way out.

If the story gets too big, the Chinese government might be forced to make an example of him.

Hong Kong is not a country. It is an autonomous territory. It has only a little higher legal status than someplace like Guam or Puerto Rico, and that tiny bit is only there because of the sufferance of the higher government.

Hong Kong does not have an army (even US states have their own militias). It does not defend its own borders. It does not negotiate its own diplomatic affairs.

However, HK is still subservient to its parent government in terms of legal matters. Taking a foreign national would be a political affair that Hong Kong has no actual right to adjudicate.

The only thing Hong Kong has is a separate legal system, immigration control, and its own delegates in international bodies like the WTO.

> In this case, China shouldn't have had any trouble getting Hong Kong authorities to arrest and extradite this person, so it doesn't seem like the same thing.

Given the current political situation in Hong Kong, this may not be a valid assumption.

As I grow older, I seem to be coming to the same conclusion again and again - there is nothing right or wrong, moral or amoral. Power is what matters. Heck, entire notion of "Government" can be boiled down to "entity with monopoly on force" for a given area.

They forced him (or maybe it was a different bookseller) to go on TV and claim he turned himself in for some crime he committed as well, as I recall.

Thanks for sharing. I had wondered what the word on the street was and couldn't find good information about it despite having searched before.

Thank you for this information, very interesting!

> who is also the first female leader democratically elected in Asia

There have been plenty of other female leaders elected in Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_or_appointed_f...

Did the US-China alliance win the Cold War? To what extent did it contribute to the fall of the Soviet Union? I think most of the reasons why the Soviet Empire fell were internal factors rather than external pressures, and the US-China alliance made at best a marginal difference to the outcome.

Indeed, what did the US and its allies actually get out of their anti-Soviet alliance with PRC? Nixon hoped that it would help the US in Vietnam; but obviously it didn't – South Vietnam lost the war and they probably would have lost it just the same even if Nixon's China trip never happened. More broadly, I honestly can't see any military benefits for the US and its allies from the deal. The various potential military hotspots – Vietnam, the Korean peninsula, the South China Sea – would probably be in much the same state if the US-China deal never happened. Obviously some sort of understanding with PRC had to be reached eventually, since pretending ROC was the government of the whole of China wasn't tenable in the long run, but the US could have extracted some major concessions from PRC in exchange for recognition instead of basically conceding to PRC all its major objectives – an alliance against the Soviets was not a huge concession from PRC given that PRC and USSR were already mutually hostile since the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s.

Many people say that Nixon's decision was a great strategic move, but I am unconvinced – the US got some short-term assistance against the Soviets which it didn't really need and didn't make much difference anyway; in exchange, the US put itself in a weaker strategic position vis-à-vis China for many decades to come.

And of course, China's economic development since the 1980s has provided many economic benefits to the US and its allies. But, that still could have happened even if there was a more assertive US policy towards PRC, such as a "two Chinas policy" of recognising both PRC and ROC and maintaining diplomatic relations with both. Under this model, it would not be essential that PRC itself abandon the "one China" position, merely that it be willing to accept trade and diplomatic relations with countries that adopted the "two Chinas" position instead. If the US had made that the price for US-PRC trade from the outset, I think Beijing probably would have come around to paying it. In the 1970s, the US was a vastly richer country than PRC (the gap is still there but it has closed a lot in the last 30-40 years), and PRC had far more to gain from US trade than vice versa, so the US arguably had more power to set the ground terms for the relationship – but the US despite having the far stronger hand chose not to play it.

1. Casablanca the movie was timed to open in 1942 to benefit from the publicity surrounding the just-completed Allied takeover of Casablanca the city. Until November of 1942, this port city in Morocco, which was formerly a part of the French colonial empire, had been under the dual control of Nazi Germany and the Nazi-puppet government in Vichy, France, that the Germans had installed after occupying France in 1940.

2. Nowaday, the situation of Hong Kong looks like Casablanca during World War II.

There's a difference between "Change" and complete chaos. One is an orderly transition from one state to another.

The second is the devolution of order into entropy, with the attendant waste and loss of information.

I wonder which better describes the policies of the current US administration.

If the minority wants a Constitutionally limited government founded on equality replaced with a racist, religiously-biased authoritarianism, and manages to elect a government with that intent over the wishes of the majority, that doesn't make that governments steps to implement it's authoritarianism any less of a crisis.

I think by safe they mean he is alive.

Isn't that the difference between sovereignty and self-governance? HK is self-governing in a lot of ways, but it's not a sovereign state, so it exists at the mercy of China. I don't know to what degree HK's independence is guaranteed by international treaties vs. agreements that are purely internal to China. If there's no international agreement with entities outside of China to honor HK's independence, surely the Chinese government could overrule the local government when it sees fit (like the US Federal government taking precedence over state governments when there are conflicting laws and interests).

The billionaires increase the housing supply(see Cityplace) or are buying such high end properties that the worst they do is make life a bit more expensive in the Bridle Path.

Can you can buy a Chinese citizenship with a Mastercard or Visa and not even appear in the country? Buying passports in these countries are almost exclusively used for hiding money.

Antigua might? How could China punish them?