A controversy is raging in Hong Kong. This time it has nothing to do with politics, sex or money. It has to do with a storm in a cup, over a documentary which chronicles the lives of six students from Ying Wa Girls School.

Win, lose or draw, the path to peace in Ukraine, strangely, goes through China. Of this there seems little doubt. Russia has hinted darkly that if it loses this war, what awaits is the nuclear option.

With political insanity off the streets, Hong Kong gets its second wind to find its old magic and mojo. But to do so, it must first exorcise one demon that has possessed the soul of the city. I am talking about housing, the single most encompassing issue facing its leadership.

Just three weeks into the new year, America has 36 mass shootings under its belt. It is more than a daily occurrence. The latest took the lives of 11 innocent Chinese elders in a dance hall celebrating the all-important Lunar New Year. The motive is unknown. A few days ago, an Asian girl was stabbed seven times by an angry white woman. Her excuse was frighteningly simple: "I thought she was Chinese." So now, being Chinese makes one a legitimate target of violent attacks.

2023 is the year of reckoning for Donald Trump. The evil deeds Trump has done are finally coming home to roost. After years of lying about his taxes being under audit and therefore unable to be made public, he has come to the end of the road. This self-proclaimed “stable genius” is neither stable nor a genius. Instead he has been exposed to be a habitual tax cheat who paid zero taxes in 2020, and just $750 for each of 2016 and 2017. Financially, he is reduced to selling NFT digital trading cards in guises as a superhero. This is the ridiculous act of a con artist. This is the picture of a man without morals.

The World Cup fever has subsided. Strangely, my thoughts turn to Hong Kong classrooms. Unlike the football stadium, these learning places are cold and cruel, a world away from the cauldron of emotion and magic that has stolen the hearts  of the world.

Canada's long-awaited Indo-Pacific Strategy is a bitter disappointment. It is a foolish document. Despite its noble-sounding words, it is a warmed-up version of a fruitless and failed approach. Coiled within its rhetoric is a coded anti-China message.

Boris is never boring. He can always be counted to say the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is incomplete without his comedy of errors. That is his personal brand. But his gaffes are not always funny. In the latest outbreak of Borisitis, he was invited to speak at a recent major Asian business event in Singapore, where he promptly ruffled a lot of feathers by launching into another anti-China tirade, calling it a "coercive autocracy", forgetting that he was no longer in Britain playing to his base.

In his book "Chinese Characteristics", published in 1894, Arthur Henderson Smith, an American missionary, painted a dismal picture of a people wallowing in misery, poverty and disunity. For more than a century, it served as a handbook to dissect the Chinese personality, and remained the most authoritative and widely read book by a Westerner on China.

It has been a long wait—135 years to be exact, from the dark days when Chinese immigrants had to pay a shameful Head Tax to enter and work in Canada.

These days, if you read Western news reports, you might come to the inescapable conclusion that "China is not normal or nice." But you would only be half right. The Chinese are incredibly nice, but China is not normal: Never in history has a country of this size chalked up so much progress in such a short span. As an overachiever, China is beyond normal.

Do you know when is the freest and most open period in Hong Kong's history? It was the 20 odd years immediately following its handover to Chinese sovereignty. Under the British, street protests were banned; and calling for the downfall of the British government would be a jailable offence. Political dissidents were unceremoniously deported to the mainland. But for 23 years after 1997, "freedom fighters" practically had the streets to themselves.

From day one of the UN's existence, it has come under the giant shadow of the US. After an unbroken period of overbearing American dominance, people are beginning to ask: Is the UN an irrelevance?

With nearly 96 million members, in size, the CPC is the largest. In longevity, at 100 years old, it ranks third. But in delivering the goods, China's party wins by a country mile.

UNHCR's report on Xinjiang displays a shameful ignorance of Chinese history and the Chinese national character. It is not worth the paper it is printed on, peddling the big lie as the gospel truth, chockful of sinister speculations, projections and tainted testimony by alleged victims who live in America's pocket.