A senior Chinese law expert has said Hong Kong isn't ready for full democracy partly because the community lacks a consensus on the issue and people need better patriotic education, local media reported yesterday.
The comments were widely reported in the media because leading Chinese legal academics are believed to serve as the spokesmen for the communist leadership.
The remarks were made on Thursday at a conference in Beijing about Hong Kong's mini Constitution, or "Basic Law." by legal scholar Wang Zhenmin (
"I believe Hong Kong can achieve universal suffrage one day. But we need to conduct research and measure carefully how to approach it," the South China Morning Post quoted Wang as saying.
Wang, deputy dean of Tsinghua University's law school in Beijing, also said Hong Kong needs an anti-subversion law. The measure originally drew intense opposition when officials tried to initiate it in 2003, reported Ming Pao Daily News.
He said there was a lack of civic education that inspires patriotism, the Post reported.
Wang also said Hong Kong's political culture needed to be more mature, the pro-Beijing Wen Wei Po reported.
He said the legislature's defeat of the government's political reform package last year was a sign that Hong Kong wasn't ready for greater reform.
Pro-democracy lawmakers defeated the bill because it didn't include a timeline for when Hong Kong would become democratic.
The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump by a shooter at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed. US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election. The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung (袁國勇) has done battle with some of the world’s worst threats, including the SARS virus he helped isolate and identify, and he has a warning. Another pandemic is inevitable and could exact damage far worse than COVID-19 pandemic, said the soft-spoken scientist sometimes thought of as Hong Kong’s answer to former US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci. “Both the public and [world] leaders must admit that another pandemic will come, and probably sooner than you anticipate,” he said at the city’s Queen Mary Hospital, where he works and teaches. “Why I make such a horrifying prediction
HIGH TENSIONS: Local media reported that police had fired into the air to try to disperse an angry crowd at the garbage dump, while investigators called for calm and cooperation A total of eight bodies, all female, have been recovered so far from a garbage dump near Nairobi, Kenya’s acting police chief said yesterday, after authorities a day earlier confirmed they had found more bags filled with dismembered female body parts, the latest macabre discovery that has horrified and angered the country. Detectives have been scouring the site in the Mukuru area of Nairobi since the mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on Friday in sacks floating in a sea of garbage. On Saturday, the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said that five bags had been retrieved from