Reuters reports that a Donald Trump presidency does not mean the United States will withdraw from the South China Sea, but rather will continue pursuing "regional hegemony", Chinese academics who drafted a report for an influential government think tank said on Friday. Ensuring "absolute control" over the South China Sea was the crux of U.S. military strategy in the Asia-Pacific, according to what the authors said was China's first ever public report on the U.S. military presence in the region, released on Friday in Beijing. "There will be no overturning change to U.S. policy in the South China Sea," said Wu Shicun, head of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, an influential Hainan-based think tank that wrote the report.
Reuters reports that a growing independence campaign in Hong Kong is a terrible mistake that undermines the Chinese-ruled city's push for democracy and serves merely to provoke Beijing, Chris Patten, the last governor of the former British colony, said on Friday. Speaking after a speech to a packed Foreign Correspondents' Club, Patten said that while democratic development in Hong Kong had been disappointingly slow, independence was not the answer. "There is no stronger supporter of democracy in Hong Kong than me, but to confuse that campaign with a campaign for independence is a terrible mistake," Patten, who governed from 1992 to 1997 and was in tears at the handover ceremony, told Reuters.