Hong Kong

Hong Kong residents experienced the effects of an earthquake nearby. Meanwhile, the Internet is coldly ignoring Baltimore's lack of an NBA team today, heartlessly blabbing on about the league's just-passed trade deadline. Welcome to your online trends report for Friday, Feb. 22. An earthquake in southern China created an unusual stir in Hong Kong, which usually does not noticeably feel the effect of such tremors. The 4.8-magnitude quake struck about 110 miles north of the city. Relatively nearby, India and Australia were battling out a cricket test, gaining substantial worldwide Twitter attention.

Hong Kong residents experienced the effects of an earthquake nearby. Meanwhile, the Internet is coldly ignoring Baltimore's lack of an NBA team today, heartlessly blabbing on about the league's just-passed trade deadline. Welcome to your online trends report for Friday, Feb. 22. An earthquake in southern China created an unusual stir in Hong Kong, which usually does not noticeably feel the effect of such tremors. The 4.8-magnitude quake struck about 110 miles north of the city. Relatively nearby, India and Australia were battling out a cricket test, gaining substantial worldwide Twitter attention.

The twin tasks of improving relations between Washington and Beijing and shrinking the enormous U.S. trade deficit to a manageable size depend to a large degree on China importing more American goods and services. That's partly the job of Donald Tong. As Hong Kong's commissioner for economic and trade affairs in the United States, Tong has the task of building trans-Pacific ties and promoting that special Chinese administrative district as a destination for U.S. exports, not just a source of imports.

Carolyn P.G. King, the state director of Children's Bible Ministries of Maryland, died of a stroke Oct. 6 at her Elkridge home. She was 73. Born Carolyn Patricia Grace Byers in Front Royal, Va., she was the daughter of an Army instructor who also sold fabrics and sewing machines. Her mother was a homemaker. Mrs. King attended Dundalk High School. She was a 1980 graduate from the Baltimore School of the Bible. She became active in Catonsville Baptist Church and had been a member of the Faith Bible Church in Elkridge for the past 35 years.

Hong Kong was a British colony without an elected government in 1984 when Britain agreed in cede it to China in 1997, in return for China's respecting its institutions. Capitalism and personal rights were part of the deal. Democratic reforms promulgated since by the current British governor, Tory politician Chris Patten, were not.So the vote of China's Standing Committee of the National People's Congress -- to disband in 1997 the Hong Kong legislature that will be wholly elected for the first time next year -- does not violate the letter of the 1984 accord.

SINCE CHINA took back Hong Kong from British colonial rule, the forces eroding its residents' liberties have been less like the typhoons regularly blowing in from the South China Sea and more like the insidious pink-hued clouds of pollution that often envelope the territory's islands, thanks to mainland factories. Along with Singapore, Hong Kong still sits atop various worldwide rankings of relative economic freedoms, but under Chinese rule its economy has become ever more linked to the mainland -- and its political system ever more under Beijing's thumb.

CHINA'S SURPRISE announcement last week that it is dropping its drive to enact a vaguely worded and much feared set of internal security laws for Hong Kong is very welcome, though with a good dose of caution. On the face of it, the sudden turnabout appears to be a notable victory for oppressed Chinese desires for democracy. But Beijing seldom yields on political control, and so this appears much more of a strategic retreat than a declaration of defeat. Still, this summer's standoff over the proposed changes to Hong Kong's security law has been stirring.

It is obviously very tempting to celebrate any successful political action by Hong Kong's dedicated corps of democracy activists. And at first glance, the legislative defeat last week of a Beijing-backed package of modest political reforms was a rare victory for the territory's pro-democracy forces. But it might ultimately prove to be a big setback on the path toward their ultimate goal: universal suffrage. The defeated reform package, pushed hard by Beijing, would have doubled the size of the appointed committee that selects Hong Kong's chief executive and enlarged its legislature, only half elected by the public.

LONDON -- It is perhaps fortunate that Deng Xiaoping died when he did, just four and a half months before the Union Jack is run down in Hong Kong. Britain and China appeared to be on an unavoidable collision course.If Beijing holds ultimate power in Hong Kong after July 1, London, through its audacious governor, Chris Patten, has held the trump of the electorate's will. He has over the last five years engineered Hong Kong's entry into the democratic community -- earning, among other epithets, Beijing's obloquy as ''a serpent, a whore and a sinner for all millennia.

PANAMA CITY -- Is Panama City about to become Hong Kong West?Immigration officials were astounded recently when as many as 8,000 Hong Kong Chinese expressed an interest in Panama's little-used policy of granting a passport to anybody willing to put $80,000 in the national bank for five years.The passports appeal to Hong Kong businessmen made nervous by China's takeover of the British colony in 1997, say members of the long-established Chinese community in Panama.Despite Beijing's promise that no changes will be made in Hong Kong's freewheeling way of life and trade before 2047, the switch of sovereignty could generate a westward-bound rush of cash from the Far East's financial capital.

Olive Ann Evans, a retired federal employee active in Masonic orders, died of a heart attack March 13 at her daughter's Walbrook home. She was 86. Born Olive Ann Dillard in Sharon, Pa., she was the daughter of Thomas Dillard, a steel worker, and Elizabeth Dillard, a homemaker. She attended public schools in Sharon and studied at Howard University. She moved to Baltimore in 1947 and worked as an analyst at the Health Care Finance Administration in Woodlawn, retiring in 1992 after 31 years.

As a teenager attending a Catholic school in Hong Kong in the 1960s, Carolyn Y. Woo never imagined that her studies were helping prepare her to one day lead Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, one of the world's largest international humanitarian relief agencies. Woo took over this month as CRS' chief executive officer and president, replacing 18-year veteran Ken Hackett. Woo, 57, brings an academic and business background to her job, having most recently served as dean of the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business.

Richard K.C. Hsieh, a public health specialist and former National Library of Medicine official who in retirement traced his family tree back to seventh-century China, died of a heart attack Dec. 31 at his Towson home. He was 79. Born in 1932 in Tianjin, China, not far from Beijing, Richard Hsieh (pronounced Shay) moved with his family to Taiwan after World War II, according to his wife of 51 years, the former Rebecca Tung. He came to the United States in 1953 from Hong Kong to enroll at the Johns Hopkins University, where his father had done graduate studies in the 1920s.

Colts legend Art Donovan never thought he'd get his ring back. The cherished keepsake of the 1958 NFL championship game — often called "the greatest game ever played" — was stolen from a Hong Kong hotel room in 1977. Donovan assumed it was gone forever. But 34 years later, the ring has been returned to its rightful owner after it showed up for sale on the Internet. A Howard County police detective followed up on a tip and found the ring, engraved with the defensive tackle's name and jersey number, listed for $25,000 on Craigslist.

Andrea Keating was 27 and working for a creative staffing agency in Washington, D.C., when the economy took a turn for the worse. But instead of agonizing over her job security, Keating took control of her destiny and quit to launch a business of her own. “I did it because in my gut I knew it was going to work,” says Keating, about her decision 23 years ago to start Crews Control, a business that provides local camera crews for corporate video...

The public library in Pingwen, a rural village in southern China, is also a Communist pantheon. Images of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Deng look out from a plaster wall at shelves of multicolored agriculture literature. But that socialist sextet wouldn't recognize what's going on outside. Instead of working for the Communist state, the village's 643 families control their own land, choose which crops to grow and earn profits from their toil. Sometimes they lease hectares to private corporations.

The twin tasks of improving relations between Washington and Beijing and shrinking the enormous U.S. trade deficit to a manageable size depend to a large degree on China importing more American goods and services. That's partly the job of Donald Tong. As Hong Kong's commissioner for economic and trade affairs in the United States, Tong has the task of building trans-Pacific ties and promoting that special Chinese administrative district as a destination for U.S. exports, not just a source of imports.

Baltimore-based FTI Consulting Inc. said Thursday that it is expanding in Asia with the acquisition of a Hong Kong firm. Like FTI, Baker Tilly Hong Kong Business Recovery Ltd. specializes in forensic accounting, litigation support and corporate restructuring. FTI, which did not disclose what it is paying, said the firm will change its name to FTI Consulting (Asia) Ltd. - Jamie Smith Hopkins