Reports from the Busan summit are only about trade deals. While the trial of Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung (imprisoned for more than 1,500 days for Tiananmen vigils) is further postponed in Hong Kong, another independent newspaper is closing in Macau, and Radio Free Asia has come to a complete halt, stifled by cuts in US government funding. Is there still room for the fight for freedom in the era of transactional negotiations?

Milan (AsiaNews) – Geopolitical analysts around the world are discussing the outcome of the highly anticipated meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the first in six years, held yesterday in Busan, South Korea, on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

Beyond the usual rhetorical declarations of collaboration (Xi Jinping even went so far as to say that the slogan "Make America Great Again" closely resembles his mantra on China’s “renaissance”), the meeting, which lasted an hour and forty minutes, produced no joint statements or signed agreements and appears to be nothing more than a truce in the trade war between the United States and China.

In short, Washington is putting on hold the additional 10 per cent tariffs for one year in exchange for Beijing lifting its ban on rare earth exports and resuming imports of US-made soybeans.

Trade issues aside, Trump's "12 on a scale of 10" rating at the summit with Xi Jinping had nothing to say about human rights in China.

The US president had promised to raise during the talks the issue of Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy Catholic businessman held in a Hong Kong prison for nearly five years.

Recently, Washington had harshly condemned the wave of arrests in the People's Republic, such as that of Rev Jin Mingri and other leaders of the Zion Church, one of China's largest house churches, who have been held since 10  October.

The coming weeks will show whether anything has come out of the Trump-Xi meeting, beyond the silence. The fact remains that in the era of tariff and trade wars, the issue of human rights seems to have completely disappeared from Sino-US summits.

Yet the crackdown on dissent is getting worse every day.

While the world's attention was focused on the Xi-Trump summit, 92 international civil society groups and prominent figures appealed to the governments of the G7 countries (including the United States) and European Union member states regarding the fate of trade unionist Lee Cheuk-yan and lawyer Chow Hang-tung, who have been detained in Hong Kong for more than 1,500 days.

The two have been charged with "inciting subversion of state power" under the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020 for their role in organising every 4 June (along with local lawmaker Albert Ho, also detained since 2023) the vigils that, until 2019, commemorated the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Set for 3 November, their trial was postponed for another two months without any explanation.

“Chow, a distinguished barrister and an Amnesty International-recognized prisoner of conscience, and Lee, a prominent labour leader and fellow pro-democracy activist, have been unjustly imprisoned for over 1,500 days simply for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly.”

“We call upon the governments of the Group of Seven (G7) and member states of the European Union (EU)/European Economic Area (EEA) to closely monitor the trial and exert diplomatic pressure, both bilaterally and multilaterally, on the Hong Kong government to immediately release Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan, and to drop all criminal charges against them.”

Freedom of information is another issue. The Hong Kong Free Press – one of the last remaining independent voices in the former British colony after the 2020 crackdown that led to the closure of several newspapers due to economic strangulation, including Jimmy Lai's Apple Daily—released the results of months-long random audits conducted by the local tax agency, which sifted through seven years of accounts.

Having underpaid the tax authorities by 3,020 Hong Kong dollars (US$ 390, or 0.78 per cent of its revenue), the Hong Kong Free Press was forced to pay a fine of HK$ 57,692 (US$ 7,500), almost 20 times the original ammoung in order to continue operating.

Meanwhile, in Macau, a former Portuguese colony, which came under Chinese sovereignty in late 1999, All About Macau, a local independent media outlet, announced its closure today after the authorities denied its journalists access to official events and cancelled its registration.

It is striking that in this context, the Trump administration now seems indifferent to the demise of Radio Free Asia, the media funded by the US government that for nearly 30 years reported on dissent and human rights violations in China and other authoritarian regimes in the region.

After significantly reducing its activities in March following the White House's cuts to funding, Radio Free Asia on Wednesday stopped updating its website entirely, coincidentally on the eve of the Trump-Xi summit, warning that independent journalism “is at risk”.

In an era of grands summits, overshadowed by trade agreements resulting from transactional negotiations, is there still room for the fight for freedom in China? This is the real question left unanswered by the Busan summit.

• hong kong
• china
• united states
• south korea
• busan
• trump
• xi
• summit
• human rights