(Bloomberg) -- Technology stocks led Chinese shares lower on Thursday after Beijing took aim at gaming companies for focusing solely on profit, underscoring the risk of calling a bottom to the market.
The Hang Seng Tech Index tumbled 4.5%, the most in six weeks, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. dropping by almost twice that amount in its worst day in more than a month. NetEase Inc. slumped 11% in a decline that accelerated after a report that China would halt approvals for new online games.
Thursday’s pullback was triggered by regulators summoning officials from companies including Tencent and NetEase to remind them of their social obligations and the harm caused by putting profits first. The news was a sharp blow to a tentative rebound that had investors eyeing the return of bull market for Hong Kong-listed tech stocks.
“This demonstrates the risk for those attempting to call the bottom with so much uncertainty still hanging,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Kanterman. “I don’t think the overnight news is a big departure from that which we already knew, but the reaction clearly signifies the skittishness of investors around any regulatory news.”
Investors remain torn between enticing valuations and China’s long-term economic prospects on the one hand, and on the other the difficulty of predicting how much further the government will go in its crackdown on private enterprise.
The risks and rewards of investing in the nation’s stocks is dividing some of the biggest names in global investing. Billionaire George Soros recently penned an op-ed in a Wall Street Journal with warnings of a “tragic mistake” while huge money managers like BlackRock Inc. are pushing to scale up their mutual fund businesses in China.
After edging toward a bull market, the Hang Seng Tech Index is now has 11% up from its Aug. 20 low, and around 40% below its February peak.
“We can see the negative news on the gaming sector also dragging down other tech names, with investors starting to consider the regulatory risks again rather than bottom fishing,” said Bu Jiajie, an analyst at China Galaxy International Securities. “Some tech stocks have had a good rebound in recent days and there is profit taking at the moment.”
Onshore, China’s CSI 300 Index closed little changed while the Shanghai Composite gained 0.5%.
(Updates throughout)
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The Hong Kong Alliance is the latest target of a sweeping national security law that China imposed on the city last year to quash dissent after huge and often violent democracy protests.
The raid came a day after security police arrested Chow Hang-tung, vice-chairwoman of the alliance, and three other leaders for "not providing information" according to the national security law.
The four are currently detained for investigation.
Last month, police ordered the group to hand over financial and operational details, accusing it of working as a "foreign agent".
The request included the personal details of all members since its founding in 1989, all meeting minutes, financial records and any exchanges with other NGOs advocating for democracy and human rights in China.
On Tuesday, the day of the information handover deadline, alliance members handed police a letter saying the request was illegal, arbitrary and that no evidence of their wrongdoing had been presented.
Foreign countries greeted the makeup of the new government in Afghanistan with caution and dismay on Wednesday after the Taliban appointed hardline veteran figures to top positions, including several with a US bounty on their heads.
As the newly appointed ministers and their deputies set to work after they were named late on Tuesday, acting Premier Mohammad Hasan Akhund urged former officials who fled Afghanistan to return, saying their safety would be guaranteed.
"We have suffered heavy losses for this historic moment and the era of bloodshed in Afghanistan is over," he told Al Jazeera.
Tens of thousands of people left after the Taliban seized power in mid-August following a lightning military campaign, many of them professionals fearing reprisals because of their association with the Western-backed government.
In Kabul, dozens of women took to the streets again to demand representation in the new administration and for their rights to be protected.
More broadly, people urged the leadership to revive the Afghan economy, which faces steep inflation, food shortages exacerbated by drought and the prospect of international aid being slashed as countries distance themselves from the Taliban.
The United States underscored its wariness on Wednesday. "This is a caretaker Cabinet," White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters. "No one in this administration, not the president nor anyone on the national security team, would suggest that the Taliban are respected and valued members of the global community."
The Islamist militant movement swept to power in a victory hastened by the withdrawal of US military support to Afghan government forces.
The Taliban's announcement of a new government on Tuesday was widely seen as a signal they were not looking to broaden their base and present a more tolerant face to the world.
The group has promised to respect people's rights and not seek vendettas, but it has been criticised for its heavy-handed response to protests and its part in a chaotic evacuation of thousands of people from Kabul airport.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington was assessing the Cabinet announcement. "But despite professing that a new government would be inclusive, the announced list of names consists exclusively of individuals who are members of the Taliban or their close associates, and no women," he said during a visit to a US air base in Germany that has been a transit point for evacuees from Afghanistan.
The European Union voiced its disapproval at the appointments, but said it was ready to continue humanitarian assistance. Longer-term aid would depend on the Taliban upholding basic freedoms.
Saudi Arabia expressed hope the new government would help Afghanistan achieve "security and stability, rejecting violence and extremism."
The new acting Cabinet includes former detainees of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, while the interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is wanted by the United States on terrorism charges and carries a reward of US$10 million.
His uncle, with a bounty of US$5 million, is the minister for refugees and repatriation.
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The last time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, women were banned from work and girls from school. The group carried out public executions and its religious police enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Taliban leaders have vowed to respect people's rights, including those of women, in accordance with sharia, but those who have won greater freedoms over the past two decades are worried about losing them.
Two days before 9/11, an Al-Qaeda suicide squad posing as journalists sat down for an interview with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the last major commander resisting the jihadist group's Taliban allies in northern Afghanistan.
Before he could answer a question, they detonated explosives that investigators said later had been cunningly disguised in their camera equipment.
Twenty years on, Massoud's assassination and the September 11 attacks on the United States are for many Afghans the twin cataclysms that started yet another era of uncertainty and bloodshed -- and which continue to reverberate following the Taliban's return.
The charismatic Massoud, known as the Lion of Panjshir after his native valley, built his name during the 1980s as a brilliant guerrilla commander repelling Soviet forces.
By the late 1990s, he was fighting the Taliban -- and their Al-Qaeda allies.
Both wanted him gone.
The audacious hit was ordered by Osama bin Laden himself.
The assassins pretended to be filming a documentary, and secured the Massoud interview by presenting a concocted back story printed on a letterhead from an Islamic centre in Britain. They used stolen Belgian passports to travel.
Then they hit a wall -- Massoud was too busy to sit down with them when they arrived in August 2001 at his base in Khwaja Bahauddin village.
"They spent 10 days with us calmly and patiently waiting, and never unnecessarily insisting on the interview," Fahim Dashti, a journalist and close Massoud aide, told AFP a few weeks after the assassination.
Dashti was setting up his own camera to record the interview as the two Al-Qaeda operatives relayed their questions in Arabic to the commander's close aide, Masood Khalili, for translation.
"We were not feeling comfortable," Khalili told AFP in October 2001, especially because they had asked questions about bin Laden.
"The 'cameraman' had a nasty smile. The 'journalist' was very calm," he said.
Just as Massoud heard the translation, the explosives went off.
- 'Your leader is dead' -
The killing sent shockwaves across Afghanistan and the world.
Massoud was seen as the last big hope by anti-Taliban Afghans at the time, and by Western governments as a potent ally against even more hardline Islamists.
With his Northern Alliance resistance already on the back foot against the Taliban, his aides hid his death for days.
A week after he was killed, Massoud was buried in his home district of Bazarak -- his body shrouded in the colours of the Afghan flag and with thousands of followers in the funeral procession.
A marble tomb was built attracting huge numbers of devotees.
"When (Massoud) was killed, I was in Panjshir. The resistance forces were...surrounded from all sides," a 47-year-old resident of the area told AFP on Monday, requesting anonymity because of security fears.
"The Taliban even announced on the radio: your leader is dead and you're done. But... the death of the leader gave the people another reason to fight harder."
The tables were turned within weeks as the United States, looking to punish the Taliban for harbouring the 9/11 perpetrators, invaded Afghanistan.
The Taliban regime fell by the end of 2001, pummelled by American bombers guided by Northern Alliance fighters.
Al-Qaeda, hoping to get the upper hand both against the United States and in Afghanistan with their two major attacks, was on the run.
- Panjshir falls -
The Taliban launched a lightning offensive as the last US-led troops left Afghanistan this year, capping their 20-year insurgency with the capture of Kabul on August 15.
Once again, the main opposition emerged in Panjshir -- led this time by Ahmad Massoud, who was 12 years old when Al-Qaeda killed his father.
But the Taliban swiftly sent fighters to surround the area, claiming eventually on Monday that they had captured Panjshir.
Among the resistance dead in the heavy fighting was Fahim Dashti, the journalist who survived the Massoud bombing 20 years ago.
One Taliban account posted a picture of fighters in Panjshir standing in front of a vandalised Ahmad Shah Massoud poster.
Ahmad Shah Massoud's brother Ahmad Wali said in Geneva Tuesday that while their National Resistance Front was "wounded", thousands of fighters can come back at any time.
It is a difficult scenario for Mohammad Sana Safa, a 63-year-old who worked with Massoud in the 1980s when there were daily attacks by the Soviets.
"Ahmad Massoud is a young man, patriotic, but he has no military experience like his father," Safa said Monday.
"Had (his father) been alive today, we would have not witnessed this... the fall of Panjshir to the Taliban."
Takaichi has the backing of former prime minister Shinzo Abe, local media said, and would base her challenge on policies to fend off China's technology threat and help strengthen an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic.
Takaichi became the first female internal affairs minister in the second Abe administration in 2014.
But even as local media have said that influential Abe has thrown his support behind Takaichi, helping her obtain the 20 lawmaker backers needed to run in the leadership election, she has ranked poorly in popularity ratings, which could hamper her chances.
Grassroots LDP members will vote in the leadership election along with the party's members of parliament, and whoever wins will lead the party to the lower house election that must be held by Nov 28, making public appeal an important factor in choosing the new leader.
Takaichi has said that she wants to work on issues left unresolved by previous administrations, such as achieving 2 per cent inflation, and introducing legislation "that prevents the leakage of sensitive information to China".
She said that an extra budget needed to be compiled as soon as possible to bolster Japan's medical system, which is under strain because of the pandemic.
A member of the party's most conservative wing, she often visits the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial to Japan's war dead. Such visits by Japanese leaders infuriate old wartime foes such as China and South Korea.
She has also opposed allowing married couples to keep separate surnames, to the disappointment of promoters of women's rights.
Takaichi is due to speak at 4pm local time (3pm, Singapore time).
KABUL (NYTIMES, AFP) - The Taliban on Tuesday (Sept 7) formally declared a caretaker government, appointing acting Cabinet ministers who were largely loyalists from the group’s first years of rule in the 1990s.
Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund was named as leader while Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar will be his deputy. Several Cabinet posts are yet to be announced.
The list of ministers was the clearest indication yet that the group sees power as something to be shared exclusively among the victors, rather than fulfilling their promise of an inclusive government that factored in the reality of a changed Afghanistan where women and ethnic minorities were represented in decision-making.
Though many of the new government’s senior figures have been in similar roles within the Taliban for years, relatively little is known about them, as the group's inner workings and leadership have long been shrouded in secrecy, even when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
Here are details about some of them:
Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, prime minister
PHOTO: AFP
Seen as one of the founding members of the Taliban in the 1990s, Mr Hassan will hold the prime ministerial role that looks after the day to day of governing.
He is a Taliban veteran who was a close associate and political adviser to Mullah Omar, the founder of the movement and its first supreme leader.
A member of the group's Supreme Council, he was a former deputy prime minister and foreign minister during the Taliban’s government that took control in the 1990s.
During the two decades of insurgency after the Taliban fell from power, he remained low profile and in the shadows, helping to coordinate and run the Taliban’s leadership council in Quetta, Pakistan. From Kandahar, he also served as the Taliban governor of the key province.
The United Nations said he had a reputation of having been "one of the most effective Taliban commanders".
He was placed on a UN Security Council sanctions list connected to the "acts and activities" of the Taliban.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, deputy prime minister
PHOTO: AFP
Mr Baradar was born in 1968 and raised in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban movement. Like most Afghans, his life was forever altered by the Soviet invasion of the country in the late 1970s, transforming him into an insurgent.
He was believed to have fought side by side with Mullah Mohammad Omar. The two would go on to found the Taliban movement in the early 1990s during the chaos and corruption of the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal.
He held senior posts in the first Taliban government, starting in 1996, and gained a reputation as one of the most brutal commanders on the battlefield as the Taliban sought to suppress their opponents among the northern resistance.
He was serving as deputy minister of defence in 2001, and after the Taliban regime was topped by the US-led forces that year, like other leaders, he fled to Pakistan.
When the Taliban reformed as an insurgency, Mr Baradar was Mr Omar’s principal deputy, and he led the movement’s military operations. He oversaw a sharp escalation of the insurgency in 2006, but was also believed to have been engaged in secret consultations with the emissaries of interim leader Hamid Karzai and international assistance organisations over a potential deal that would have seen the militants recognise the new administration.
He was detained in a joint US-Pakistani raid in 2010, which Pakistani officials later said had been to end his dialogue with the Karzai government. He was kept in custody until 2018, when - because of his respect within the Taliban and his previous openness to dialogue - the US pressed Pakistan to release him so he could help lead the talks that began in 2019.
He relocated to Qatar, where he was appointed head of the Taliban's political office and oversaw the signing of the troop withdrawal agreement with the Trump administration in the US. During the talks, he struck up what several officials described as a warm relationship with US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad.
In recent days, his movements within Afghanistan – first to Kandahar, the wellspring of the Taliban movement, and then to Kabul, where he began conducting leadership meetings – were seen as confirmation that the Taliban’s new government was near.
Sirajuddin Haqqani, interior minister
Mr Haqqani, who is thought to be 48 and is the son of mujahedeen commander and Haqqani network founder Jalaluddin Haqqani, is emerging as one of the biggest winners in the return of the Taliban to power.
He will be the acting interior minister, in charge of law and order and possibly even local governance, and has also ensured his commanders’ positions in other key departments of the government.
In 2016, he became one of two deputies to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Sheikh Hibatullah Akhundzada, overseeing a sprawling web of fighters and religious schools, and leading much of the Taliban’s military efforts.
His Haqqani network - a US-designated terror group long viewed as one of the most dangerous militant factions in Afghanistan - is known for its close ties to the Pakistani intelligence service.
The network was the most dogged opponent of the US presence in Afghanistan, and was responsible for some of the most high-profile hostage-taking, targeted assassinations and suicide bombings over the years, including huge truck bombings that killed civilians in Kabul.
Known for their independence, fighting acumen and savvy business dealings, the Haqqanis are mainly based in eastern Afghanistan and hold considerable sway over the Taliban's leadership council. Mr Haqqani and his network also have some of the strongest and longest-running ties to the Al-Qaeda.
“The Haqqanis sit at the nexus between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda – they are one of the key bridges,” said Mr Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and senior editor of the group’s Long War Journal.
Mawlawi Muhammad Yaqoub, defence minister
Mr Yaqoub, who is thought to be about 30, is the head of the Taliban’s military commission, which oversaw the vast network of field commanders charged with executing the insurgency.
He is the oldest son of Omar, who enjoyed cult-like status as the Taliban leader, and that potent lineage makes him a unifying figure in the movement.
Mr Yaqoub's name came to public attention during the Taliban’s leadership succession in 2016. But though he had the support of some of the movement’s military commanders, concerns about his youth became a factor in the eventual decision to choose Mr Akhundzada as the insurgency’s overall leader.
In the years since, Mr Yaqoub has risen in prominence. And in recent days he took an increasingly public role in trying to keep order among the group’s triumphant rank and file, warning that anyone caught looting “will be dealt with”, and any theft of government property would be a betrayal of the country.
“There is no permission to take a car or a house from someone or anything else,” he said.
Amir Khan Muttaqi, foreign minister
Mr Muttaqi, who until recently was the head of the Taliban’s powerful Invitation and Guidance Commission responsible for persuading many members of the Afghan army and police forces to surrender in recent months, has been rewarded with the key post of foreign minister.
He served as information and culture minister, then education minister, in the first Taliban government. During the two decades of the Taliban insurgency, he helped shape the group’s strategy for propaganda and psychological warfare, before serving as chief of staff to the supreme leader and as a member of Taliban political delegation in Qatar.
In a movement known for its shadowy ways, Mr Muttaqi has been one of the few consistent public faces since the 1990s. He was among the Taliban leaders who held back channel talks with US officials over the years and was among the first senior Taliban figures seen meeting with former Afghan officials, including Mr Karzai, the former president, as well as Mr Abdullah Abdullah, the former chief executive of the government, after the fall of Kabul.
Abdul Haq Wasiq, intelligence chief
Mr Wasiq was one of the five Guantanamo Bay prisoners released in exchange for the last US prisoner of war, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. Upon his release, he arrived in Doha, Qatar, and became a key member of the Taliban’s talks with the US, spending months negotiating with his former captors their departure from Afghanistan. He is a native of Ghazni province and is believed to be in his early 50s.
While all five of the detainees who were part of the Bergdahl exchange have gotten senior positions in the new government – three of them ministerial roles, one deputy minister and one governor – Mr Wasiq steps into the key role of leading the same intelligence agency where he served as deputy in the 1990s. The intelligence agency was central to the Taliban’s hold on power as a police state that ran wide networks of informants.
His interrogation files from his time in Guantánamo accuse Mr Wasiq of close ties to Al-Qaeda, including arranging for the terrorist group to provide training for intelligence agents of the Taliban government.
Zabihullah Mujahid, deputy information and culture minister
PHOTO: AFP
Mr Mujahid, who says he is 43 and a native of Paktia province, has been the Taliban’s main spokesman and chief propagandist for years, answering reporters’ calls and keeping up a barrage of social media posts. But the world did not see his face until Aug 17, when he conducted the Taliban’s first in-person news conference in Kabul.
Since then, he has played a primary role in trying to urge Afghans and the world to accept the Taliban as legitimate rulers of Afghanistan, and in saying that the group was turning away from some of the harsh policies of its first tenure in power.
“We don’t want Afghanistan to be a battlefield any more – from today onward, war is over,” he said at the news conference.
Khalil Haqqani, minister for refugees
PHOTO: NYTIMES
Mr Haqqani is a special representative of the Taliban’s supreme leader, and an uncle of the Taliban’s deputy leader. He has long been an important fundraiser for the Haqqani network, with close ties in the Gulf region, and he is included on US and UN lists of global terrorists.
In recent days, he has played a public role in establishing Taliban authority in Kabul.
Just a few days after Kabul’s fall, he appeared at a prominent mosque within the city and told a cheering crowd that the Taliban’s “first priority for Afghanistan is security – if there is no security, there is no life".
He has been the primary Taliban figure in securing bayat, an Islamic oath of allegiance, from prominent Afghan figures over the past two weeks.
