Hong Kong District Court judge Ernest Lin Kam-hung handed down a judgment Aug. 31 sentencing Tommy Yuen Man-on, a former Cantopop boy-band member, to 26 months imprisonment. Yuen was convicted of "acts with seditious intention" among other charges. Lin found that Yuen made seditious statements on Facebook and Instagram in 2021, including posts about the death of a marine police officer, injuries suffered by then Chief Executive Carrie Lam after a fall, and cases of officer misconduct. Lin asserted that Yuen had been insulting Hong Kong's government and implicitly advocating for Hong Kong independence.

The US Department of State has announced visa restrictions on Chinese officials linked to the systematic "forced assimilation" of over a million Tibetan children in state-operated boarding schools. This decision is part of a broader strategy by the Biden administration to address China's treatment of its ethnic minorities, with a particular focus on the Tibetan and Xinjiang Uighur regions.

Hong Kong's pro-democracy Citizen Radio aired its final broadcast June 30, with the founder citing the "dangerous" political environment. Tsang Kin-shing, a veteran political activist, wrote in the station's closing Facebook post of difficulties faced since protest movements in the city in 2014 and 2019. Under the National Security Law imposed by the Chinese government in 2020, the station's bank account was "frozen," and consequently it could only afford rent for the studio through August. "We could do nothing but to stop the broadcasting," said Tsang at the end of the post.

Russia has suspended the import of dairy products from Kyrgyzstan, ostensibly citing concerns about quality control. But the report on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty suggests that the move is retaliation after the Kyrgyz National Commission on State Language & Language Policy announced that the country is to begin a transition from Cyrillic to a Latin-based alphabet. Barring of dairy imports hs apparently been used several times over past years as a "blunt foreign policy instrument against former Soviet states whose actions Moscow dislikes," including Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

The parliament of Moldova on March 17 voted to remove references to the "Moldovan" language from the country's constitution and enshrine Romanian as the official language for all legislation. Lawmakers asserted that "Moldovan" is actually indistinguishable from Romanian, and that the notion that it is a separate language is a product of Soviet propaganda. The vote was applauded by Romania, whose foreign minister Bogdan Aurescu stated that the Moldovan language is an "artificial construct."

The Russian Foreign Ministry on March 9 issued sanctions against 144 citizens of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Moscow accused the individuals of hostile acts against the Russian state. The alleged acts include lobbying for sanctions, interference with Russia's internal affairs, and inciting "Russophobic" sentiments. The names of the individuals are not yet available.

In Episode 154 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg conducts an in-depth interview with Gina Anne Tam, author of Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960 (Cambridge University Press) on how Mandarin (Putonghua) became the official language of China, and what has been the role in China's national identity of the regional "dialects," or fangyan. In a dilemma that has vexed China's bureaucracy for 2,000 years, the persistence of fangyan raises questions about conventional notions of nationalism and state formation. What can the tenacious survival of Shanghaihua (Wu), Fujianese (Min), Cantonese (Yue), Toisan and Hakka tell us about the emergence of an "alternative Chinese-ness" in the 21st century? 

The German Bundestag on Nov. 33 voted to formally recognize the Holodomor, a politically induced famine that decimated Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, as a genocide. The declaration found that Soviet authorities demanded inflated quantities of grain from Ukrainian farmers and punished those who fell short with additional demands. Affected regions were cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union so that Ukrainians could not receive aid. As a result, approximately 3.5 million Ukrainians starved to death. Ukraine declared the Holodomor a genocide in 2006.