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The growing trend among Asia's rich families

July 15, 2021

This week's top stories:

  • Young Asians inheriting wealth are putting their money to work in more novel ways that may also have positive impacts — like backing businesses that benefit women. 
  • Boris Johnson spoke out about racism after England's Euro 2020 loss. A player said one of his ministers helped stoke it.
  • Civil rights leaders had a message for Joe Biden during their White House meeting.

Dozens of LGBTQ accounts run by university students were suddenly deleted last week from WeChat, China's ubiquitous chat app. 

It's unclear where the order to do that came from or who did it. When asked about the closures, a foreign ministry spokesman gave the usual boilerplate explanation that the Chinese internet sector is governed according to the law and gave no further details. 

In China, LGBTQ issues haven't dominated the political and legal agendas in the same way they do in countries like Russia and Hungary, where conservative governments, as my colleague Clara Ferreira-Marques has written, wield homophobia as a weapon. 

Just months ago, nationalist influencers hounded dozens of feminists off social media by accusing them of not being patriotic enough and having ties to Western groups like the CIA. Darius Longarino, a research scholar at Yale Law School, said that sets a "frightening precedent" for gay and transgender people in China. 

The attempt by nationalists to link support for liberal causes with being unpatriotic is reminiscent of Russia's Vladimir Putin and Hungary's Viktor Orban, who have also likened support for gay rights to supporting foreign-funded ideologies. Similar rhetoric against LGBTQ people has always existed in China, but has become much louder on social media.

(That rhetoric ignores the fact that China has "a long recorded history of same-sex love," wrote Yun Jiang, a scholar affiliated with Australian National University, in her newsletter, adding that it's homophobia that can arguably be called a 19th century Western import.)

Even if the Chinese state doesn't announce outright that it's against LGBTQ people, portraying them as dangerous to national cohesion is only likely to intensify in an age where ultra-nationalism is seeping into all areas of life. 

The message for LGBTQ people in China is now — choose to be a quiescent, apolitical "good gay," as Longarino put it, rather than a "bad gay" who agitates for rights.

- Isabella Steger

By the Numbers

International food prices have risen close to their 2011 peak.

Ten years ago, they triggered waves of protests, especially in the Middle East. The region is still exposed today — seven of the 10 most-exposed emerging market economies are in the Middle East according to Bloomberg Economics' food vulnerability scorecard — but its weakest links are Sudan and Lebanon instead of Egypt and Tunisia, with Yemen rounding off the top three.

New Voices

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Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Policygenius on helping women find insurance.
Bloomberg News supports amplifying the voices of women and other under-represented executives across our media platforms.

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