Not sure why you're being downvoted. Your statement is entirely accurate and the Inkstone piece is far from balanced. The SCMP is famously biased:
SCMP:
"Man who killed girlfriend in Taiwan could be free by October, setting effective deadline for Hong Kong government’s extradition plan...“There is no time to lose. We must strive to pass the law by the 2018-2019 session of the Legislative Council meetings – that is, by this summer,” Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said. “The Taiwan murder case has set the clock ticking. We don’t want the suspect to escape.”"
HKFP:
"Taiwan won’t ask for murder suspect if Hong Kong passes ‘politically motivated’ extradition law"[2]
I work for Inkstone, part of SCMP but of a different division from the China and Hong Kong news desks.
You're citing an SCMP article dated April 29, before Taiwan made those remarks, and comparing it with an AFP story published by HKFP on May 10.
How about comparing apples to apples, starting from this May 9 piece by SCMP titled "Taipei will not agree to transfer of Hong Kong murder suspect if Taiwanese citizens risk being sent to mainland China"?
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3009506...
> “Without the removal of threats to the personal safety of [Taiwan] nationals going to or living in Hong Kong caused by being extradited to mainland China, we will not agree to the case-by-case transfer proposed by the Hong Kong authorities,” the council’s deputy minister Chiu Chui-cheng said.
> “We want the relevant suspect to face justice but our government cannot ignore damages to the human rights of our nationals.”
> “We have to ask whether the amendment proposed by the Hong Kong government is politically motivated, as some have speculated,” he said.
The Taiwan government had already mentioned back in March that they would not accept the bill, would potentially issue a travel alert on HK if it were passed, and that their requests to the Kong Kong government for assistance in the murder had been ignored three times.
The article selections put forwrad may not be ideal, but the point regarding the SCMP remains. I appreciate that as a writer you likely strive to present the truth in a balanced way, but the reality of the ownership structure of the SCMP cannot be ignored.
Let's not forget the Zhao Wei interview, the Gui Minhai interview, and the various SCMP staff/contributor resignations over exactly this issue. To quote one:
Totally not ignoring the ownership structure of the SCMP. As I said earlier in another comment in this thread, following the money is almost always a good idea. But I invite readers to decide for themselves by examining the goods, not just the money behind it. This applies to every publication that has an owner or a leader.
I appreciate that you acknowledged the comparison wasn't ideal.
Zhao Wei, Gui Minhai, and staff resignations are all issues people have raised over and over again, and I think the scrutiny is justified. I wasn't around when those things happened, though, so I don't know more than you do.
Thank you for taking the time to explain your reasoning.
An Inkstone editor here. It's almost always a good idea to follow the money, but I'd argue that there's no better way to determine our impartiality by examining our work. Alibaba owns Inkstone but we've received absolutely no editorial direction from them and/or from any of their executives, including Jack Ma. This editorial independence matters to readers and matters to those of us who work here.
If you think you see evidence of abuse, bring it to our attention so we can look into it: hn@ycombinator.com. It's against the site guidelines to go on about this in in the threads without evidence, so please don't.
From years of looking at this data, I can tell you that beliefs about "brigading", "astroturfing", and so on almost always turn out to be imaginary. What's really happening is simply that the community is divided on divisive topics.
I'd be really interested in hearing of HN moderators have observed that kind of thing. It definitely feels like it from time to time, but it could also just be that the topics are inherently polarizing, so only the loudest voices on each side come out.
This is very important -- Chinese people and CCP are separate. Yet years of very successful propaganda have resulted in even fairly well educated Chinese (overseas nevertheless) to treat any criticisms on the party as an attack on all Chinese people.
Although to be fair, criticisms and journalism also rarely make the distinction between "China" and "CCP".
