| Wednesday, Aug 26, 2020 | | | Good morning. We’re covering a lockdown in Xinjiang, Beijing’s high-tech tactics in Hong Kong and the U.K.’s strategy to restart its restaurant industry. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | A coronavirus test in Urumqi in Xinjiang Province in July. China News Service, via Reuters | | | Officials say it’s to prevent a resurgence of the coronavirus, but cases seem to be under control, with no local transmission in nine days. Residents have posted videos of people handcuffed to metal posts for breaking quarantine rules, and of people yelling from their homes in despair. | | | There are persistent concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang, where the government has sent up to one million Uighur Muslims to internment camps. Activists worry the pandemic is being used to expand the crackdown. | | | The restrictions began in mid-July as dozens of people got sick with Covid-19. Thousands of police officers were dispatched to impose a lockdown in several cities in what officials called a “wartime campaign.” For some, it now feels indefinite. | | ■ Two more cases of reinfection with the coronavirus were reported in Europe on Tuesday, a day after a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong was confirmed to have been infected a second time. ■ Seoul closed schools and switched to online classes again as South Korea reported 280 new cases on Tuesday, the 12th-straight day of triple-digit daily increases in virus infections. ■ Hong Kong on Tuesday announced plans to begin easing its social-distancing rules, and its leader dismissed privacy concerns about a Beijing-led testing program throughout the city. | | | Tony Chung, who says the Hong Kong police pinned his head in front of his phone in an attempt to trigger the facial recognition system. Isaac Lawrence/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Their approaches — from sophisticated cyberattacks to installing a camera outside the home of a prominent politician — look similar to the ones used by China’s secret police. | | | Residents and foreign internet giants are struggling to respond. Activists put out cybersecurity tutorials, and people have flocked to encrypted messaging services. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo have cut off data sharing with the police or implemented other protections. | | | Quotable: “The problem is this slows everything down, because now everyone is double checking: ‘Did you send this message? Did you send that?’ It never stops,” said an executive at Next Digital who got a suspicious message asking for information about the media mogul Jimmy Lai. | | | Online finance has exploded in China in recent years, and Alipay has been a key driver. Aly Song/Reuters | | | Online finance has exploded in China, and Ant’s flagship service, Alipay, with 900 million users, has been a key driver. Filings did not indicate how much Ant hoped to raise, but they did give investors a detailed look at its major financials. | | | Context: The company’s choice of Chinese exchanges over American ones is meant to capitalize on the interest of local investors, for whom Alipay is a household name. But it also reflects heightened tensions and worsening prospects for Chinese technology firms in the U.S. | | | Alexander Ingram for The New York Times | | | When the British government told people they no longer had to stay home, it needed a persuasive pitch to get everyone back outside and, crucially, spending money. The answer: half-price restaurant meals, subsidized by the government on certain days of the week. “Last Wednesday, my God, was pandemonium,” said the owner of a food market in Liverpool. | | | Britons eager for a bargain have taken up the offer, and restaurants are grateful for the rush of customers. But now some wonder how sustainable the recovery will be when it gets too cold for outdoor dining — especially with a wave of layoffs expected. | | | PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM CAMPAIGN MONITOR | | TEST: Email Marketing 101: Never Sacrifice Beauty for Simplicity | | A drag-and-drop email builder, a gallery of templates and turnkey designs, personalized customer journeys, and engagement segments. It's everything you need to create stunning, results-driven email campaigns in minutes. And with Campaign Monitor, you have access to it all, along with award-winning support around the clock. It's beautiful email marketing done simply. | | | Learn More | | | | Thailand: Facebook is planning legal action against the government for ordering the social media platform to partly shut down access to a group critical of the monarchy. The group, Royalist Marketplace, has more than a million members and was set up by a self-exiled Thai academic living in Japan. | | | Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times | | | What we’re reading: Adam Pasick, on the Briefings team, recommends this deep dive into infrastructure planning by Aaron Gordon of Vice, who examined a deeply flawed model that has been used to falsely justify billions of dollars in highways and bridges. | | | Johnny Miller for The New York Times | | | Cook: This ginger lime chicken may look basic, but don’t be fooled — it’s buzzing with bright flavors, and a secret ingredient: mayonnaise. | | | Watch: “The Vow,” an HBO documentary series about the cult Nxivm, which goes down a dark path to examine why people fall for psychological traps. | | | Brian Palmer for The New York Times | | | What brought you to this idea initially? | | | There’s this idea of the “urban heat island” effect, which we traditionally think of as cities being much hotter than the surrounding countryside. But actually, there’s a really unequal urban heatscape within cities, which poses a pretty huge problem for people’s health. We reported on this last year, but we didn’t get deep into the reasons that the disparity exists. | | | Now, some new research has started to unravel how historical housing and other urban planning policies that were often quite explicitly racist helped create the urban heat environment in cities across the U.S. We ended up focusing specifically on Richmond, because we found it to be a really compelling example of some of these practices. | | | Were residents aware of these disparities? | | | One woman we spoke to told us that she walks her two boys a mile and a half to a cooler, leafier park in a wealthier part of town instead of letting them play out in the glaring sun at the local playground. Others are definitely not as aware. When you get your local weather, you get one number for the whole city — not these really local pictures of what the temperature is in different parts of the city. | | | How did you approach the challenge of capturing heat visually? | | | Visualizing heat is a unique challenge, especially for photography. So for this piece, we wanted to lead it with maps that use satellite data to show heat disparity. We then overlaid them with historical redlining maps to show people how these government-imposed policies overlap, quite literally, with the urban heatscape today. | | | We also worked with a really great photographer, Brian Palmer, who’s actually based in Richmond, Virginia, to show the human side of the story. He took amazing, beautiful photos, both of families we had spoken to who are impacted by the heat, and also of the difference in neighborhoods, to show people what abundant tree canopy cover looks like in the cooler neighborhoods, and also what having so much pavement in a neighborhood and no shade really looks like. | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. — Melina | | Thank you
To Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
