Cathay Pacific will launch Dallas service four times a week with an Airbus A350-1000 starting April 24, 2025.
It’s a flight that should have been added years ago,
That was before Hong Kong – and Cathay – turned inward towards the mainland. It was before China’s safety regulators forced out Cathay Pacific’s chief executive for failing to crack down on employee participation in pro-democracy activism. New leadership helped the regime ferret out disloyal employees.
And it was before jailing dissidents for speaking out about their city’s future with retroactive application of ‘national security’ laws that China committed would never be applied retroactively, and which renege on commitments the country made when Hong Kong was handed over by the British. “Do You hear the people sing,” by the way, is banned in China.
More than thousand HKers sing Les Miserables’ ‘Do you hear the people sing?’ at HK international airport with their calls for free election and democracy. Here is the Ground Zero in the war against authoritarian rule. That’s the reason for us never surrender. pic.twitter.com/1MkTp4BkVg
— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 (@joshuawongcf) August 10, 2019
Since American Airlines no longer flies to Hong Kong, and Dallas offers the greatest connectivity, this new flight would seem to be a strong bet as Cathay Pacific rebuilds its U.S. route network. It even makes sense, most likely, prior to restarting flights like Washington Dulles. But the flight and airline no longer matter nearly as much as they did until 5 years ago.
Larry Ellison says that AI will force everyone to behave in line with social norms because they’ll be constantly monitored. Maybe that’ll make the U.S. more like China.
At the same time, maybe the AI race will make China more like the U.S., because they can’t train as-effective AIs behind the Great Firewall without as much access to knowledge, and once AIs run on personal devices rather than central servers. So how long this difference between the Hong Kong of old and today even matters is an open question.
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