August 19, 2019 • 11
Comments
The ferociously anti-Chinese
network behind the demonstrations has been cultivated with the help of U.S.
funding and a Washington-linked local media tycoon, reports Dan Cohen.
Trump’s befuddlement might be
understandable considering the carefully managed narrative of the U.S.
government and its unofficial media apparatus, which have portrayed the
protests as an organic “pro-democracy” expression of grassroots youth. However,
a look beneath the surface of this oversimplified, made-for-television script
reveals that the ferociously anti-Chinese network behind the demonstrations has
been cultivated with the help of millions of dollars from the U.S. government,
as well as a Washington-linked local media tycoon.
Since March, raucous protests
have gripped Hong Kong. In July and August, these demonstrations transformed
into ugly displays of xenophobia and mob violence.
The protests ostensibly began
in opposition to a proposed amendment to the extradition law between Hong Kong,
Taiwan, mainland China, and Macau, which would have allowed Taiwanese
authorities to prosecute a Hong Kong man for murdering his
pregnant girlfriend and dumping her body in the bushes during a vacation to
Taiwan.
Highly organized networks of
anti-China protesters quickly mobilized against the law, compelling Hong Kong
Chief Executive Carrie Lam to withdraw the bill.
But the protests continued
even after the extradition law was taken off the table — and these
demonstrations degenerated into disturbing scenes. In recent days, hundreds of
masked rioters have occupied the Hong Kong airport, forcing the cancellation of
inbound flights while harassing travelers and viciously assaulting
journalists and police.
Fu Guohao, reporter of GT
website is being seized by demonstrators at HK airport. I affirm this man being
tied in this video is the reporter himself. He has no other task except for
reporting. I sincerely ask the demonstrators to release him. I also ask for
help of West reporters
The protesters’ stated goals
remain vague. Joshua Wong, one of the most well known figures in the movement,
has put
forward a call for the Chinese government to “retract the
proclamation that the protests were riots,” and restated the consensus demand
for universal suffrage.
Wong is a bespectacled
22-year-old who has been trumpeted in Western media as a “freedom campaigner,”
promoted to the English-speaking world through his own Netflix documentary, and
rewarded with the backing of the U.S. government.
But behind telegenic
spokespeople like Wong are more extreme elements such as the Hong Kong National
Party, whose members have appeared at protests waving the Stars and Stripes and
belting out cacophonous renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner. The leadership
of this officially banned party helped popularize the call for the full
independence of Hong Kong, a radical goal that is music to the ears of
hardliners in Washington.
Xenophobic resentment has
defined the sensibility of the protesters, who vow to “retake Hong Kong” from
Chinese mainlanders they depict as a horde of locusts. The demonstrators have
even adopted one of the most widely recognized symbols of the alt-right,
emblazoning images of Pepe the Frog on their protest literature. While it’s
unclear that Hong Kong residents see Pepe the same way American white
nationalists do, members of the U.S. far-right have embraced the protest
movement as their own, and even personally joined their ranks.
Hong Kong protesters fly high
Pepe the Frog Flag. LMAO
Among the most central
influencers of the demonstrations is a local tycoon named Jimmy Lai. The self-described “head of
opposition media,” Lai is widely described as the Rupert Murdoch of Asia. For
the masses of protesters, Lai is a transcendent figure. They clamor for photos
with him and applaud the oligarch wildly when he walks by their
encampments.
Lai established his
credentials by pouring millions of dollars into the 2014 Occupy Central
protest, which is known popularly as the Umbrella Movement. He has since used
his massive fortune to fund local anti-China political movers and shakers while
injecting the protests with a virulent brand of Sinophobia through his media
empire.
Though Western media has
depicted the Hong Kong protesters as the voice of an entire people yearning for
freedom, the island is deeply divided. This August, a group of protesters
mobilized outside Jimmy Lai’s house, denouncing him as a “running dog” of
Washington and accusing him of national betrayal by unleashing chaos on the
island.
#HongKong tycoon Jimmy
Lai criticized as conspirator behind violence in HK
Days earlier, Lai was in
Washington, coordinating with hardline members of Trump’s national security
team, including John Bolton. His ties to Washington run deep — and so do those
of the front-line protest leaders.
Millions of dollars have
flowed from U.S. regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) into civil society and political organizations that form the
backbone of the anti-China mobilization. And Lai has supplemented it with his
own fortune while instructing protesters on tactics through his various media
organs.
With Donald Trump in the White
House, Lai is convinced that his moment may be on the horizon. Trump
“understands the Chinese like no president understood,” the tycoon told The
Wall Street Journal. “I think he’s very good at dealing with gangsters.”
Born to Wealthy Mainland
Parents
Born in the mainland in 1948
to wealthy parents, whose fortune was expropriated by the Communist Party
during the revolution the following year, Jimmy Lai began working at 9 years
old, carrying bags for train travelers during the hard years of the Great
Chinese Famine.
Inspired by the taste of a
piece of chocolate gifted to him by a wealthy man, he decided to smuggle
himself to Hong Kong to discover a future of wealth and luxury. There, Lai
worked his way up the ranks of the garment industry, growing enamored with the libertarian
theories of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the latter of
whom became his
close friend.
Friedman is famous for
developing the neoliberal shock therapy doctrine that the U.S. has imposed on
numerous countries, resulting in the excess deaths of millions. For his part,
Hayek is the godfather of the Austrian economic school that forms the
foundation of libertarian political movements across the West.
Lai built his business empire
on Giordano, a garment label that became one of Asia’s most recognizable
brands. In 1989, he threw his weight behind the Tiananmen Square protests,
hawking t-shirts on the streets of Beijing calling for Deng Xiaoping to “step
down.”
Lai’s actions provoked the
Chinese government to ban his company from operating on the mainland. A year
later, he founded Next Weekly magazine, initiating a process that would
revolutionize the mediascape in Hong Kong with a blend of smutty tabloid-style
journalism, celebrity gossip and a heavy dose of anti-China spin.
The vociferously
anti-communist baron soon became Hong Kong’s media kingpin, worth a whopping
$660 million in 2009.
Today, Lai is the founder and
majority stakeholder of Next Digital, the largest listed media company in Hong
Kong, which he uses to agitate for the end of what he calls the Chinese
“dictatorship.”
His flagship outlet is the
popular tabloid Apple Daily, employing the trademark mix of raunchy
material with a heavy dose of xenophobic, nativist propaganda.
In 2012, Apple Daily carried a
full page advertisement depicting mainland Chinese citizens as invading locusts
draining Hong Kong’s resources. The advertisement called
for a stop to the “unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women in Hong Kong.”
(This was a crude reference to the Chinese citizens who had flocked to the
island while pregnant to ensure that their children could earn Hong Kong
residency, and resembled the resentment among the U.S. right-wing of immigrant
“anchor babies.”)
Ad in Lai’s Apple Daily:
“That’s enough! Stop unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women!”
The transformation of Hong
Kong’s economy has provided fertile soil for Lai’s brand of demagoguery. As the
country’s manufacturing base moved to mainland China after the golden years of
the 1980s and ‘90s, the economy was rapidly financialized, enriching oligarchs
like Lai. Left with rising debt and dimming career prospects, Hong Kong’s youth
became easy prey to the demagogic politics of nativism.
Many protesters have been seen
waving British Union Jacks in recent weeks, expressing a yearning for an
imaginary past under colonial control which they never personally
experienced.
In July, protesters vandalized
the Hong Kong Liaison Office, spray-painting the word, “Shina” on its facade.
This term is a xenophobic slur some in Hong Kong and Taiwan use to refer to
mainland China. The anti-Chinese phenomenon was visible during
the 2014 Umbrella movement protests as well, with signs plastered around the
city reading, “Hong Kong for Hong Kongers.”
支那(Shina)
is Japanese word for China that became derogatory during Sino-Japanese War.
Post-War Japan gov ban its use in Kanji form (Chinese characters) in official
document. Yet some people in Hong Kong and Taiwan use it to insult people from
Chinese mainland. It=“Chink” in Eng https://twitter.com/galileocheng/status/1152907402775281664 …
This month, protesters turned their
fury on the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, spray-painting
“rioters” on its office. The attack represented resentment of the left-wing
group’s role in a violent 1967 uprising against the British colonial
authorities, who are now seen as heroes among many of the anti-Chinese
demonstrators.
Besides Lai, a large part of
the credit for mobilizing latent xenophobia goes to the right-wing Hong Kong
Indigenous party leader Edward Leung. Under the direction of the 28-year-old
Leung, his pro-independence party has brandished British colonial flags and
publicly harassed Chinese mainland tourists. In 2016, Leung was exposed for
meeting with U.S. diplomatic officials at a local restaurant.
Though he is currently in jail
for leading a 2016 riot where police were bombarded with bricks and pavement –
and where he admitted to
attacking an officer – Leung’s rightist politics and his slogan, “Retake Hong
Kong,” have helped define the ongoing protests.
A local legislator and protest
leader described Leung
to The New York Times as “the Che Guevara of Hong Kong’s revolution,”
referring without a hint of irony to the Latin American communist revolutionary killed
in a CIA-backed operation. According to the Times, Leung is “the
closest thing Hong Kong’s tumultuous and leaderless protest movement has to a
guiding light.”
The xenophobic sensibility of
the protesters has provided fertile soil for Hong Kong National Party to
recruit. Founded by the pro-independence activist Andy Chan, the officially
banned party combines anti-Chinese resentment with calls for the U.S. to
intervene. Images and videos have surfaced of HKNP members waving the flags of
the U.S. and U.K., singing the Star Spangled Banner, and carrying flags emblazoned
with images of
Pepe the Frog, the most recognizable symbol of the U.S. alt-right.
While the party lacks a wide
base of popular support, it is perhaps the most outspoken within the protest
ranks, and has attracted disproportionate international attention as a result.
Chan has called for
Trump to escalate the trade war and accused China of carrying out a “national
cleansing” against Hong Kong. “We were once colonized by the Brits, and now we
are by the Chinese,” he declared.
Protesters in Hong Kong waving
the American flag and singing the American National anthem as they advocate for
democracy. Wow!
Displays of pro-American
jingoism in the streets of Hong Kong have been like catnip for the
international far-right.
Patriot Prayer founder Joey
Gibson recently appeared at
an anti-extradition protest in Hong Kong, livestreaming the event to his tens
of thousands of followers. A month earlier, Gibson was seen roughing up antifa
activists alongside ranks of club wielding fascists. In Hong Kong, the
alt-right organizer marveled at the crowds.
“They love our flag here more
than they do in America!” Gibson exclaimed as marchers passed by, flashing him
a thumbs up sign while he waved the Stars and Stripes.
Xenophobic Propaganda
Such xenophobic
propaganda is consistent with the clash of civilizations theory that Jimmy Lai
has promulgated through his media empire.
“You have to understand the
Hong Kong people – a very tiny 7 million or 0.5 percent of the Chinese
population – are very different from the rest of Chinese in China, because we
grow up in the Western values, which was the legacy of the British colonial
past, which gave us the instinct to revolt once this extradition law was
threatening our freedom,” Lai told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. “Even America has
to look at the world 20 years from now, whether you want the Chinese
dictatorial values to dominate this world, or you want the values that you
treasure [to] continue.”
During a panel discussion at
the neoconservative Washington-based think tank, the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, Lai told the
pro-Israel lobbyist Jonathan Schanzer,
“We need to know that America
is behind us. By backing us, America is also sowing to the will of their moral
authority because we are the only place in China, a tiny island in China, which
is sharing your values, which is fighting the same war you have with China.”
While Lai makes no attempt to
conceal his political agenda, his bankrolling of central figures in the 2014
Occupy Central, or Umbrella movement protests, was not always public.
Leaked emails revealed
that Lai poured more than $1.2 million to anti-China political parties
including $637,000 to the Democratic Party and $382,000 to the Civic
Party. Lai also gave $115,000 to the Hong Kong Civic Education Foundation and
Hong Kong Democratic Development Network, both of which were co-founded by
Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Lai also spent $446,000
on Occupy Central’s 2014 unofficial referendum.
Lai’s U.S. consigliere
is a former Navy intelligence analyst who interned with the CIA and leveraged
his intelligence connections to build his boss’s business empire. Named Mark
Simon, the veteran spook arranged for former Republican vice-presidential
candidate Sarah Palin to meet with a group in the anti-China camp during a 2009
visit to Hong Kong. Five years later, Lai paid
$75,000 to neoconservative Iraq war author and U.S. Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to organize a meeting with top military figures in
Myanmar.
This July, as the Hong Kong
protests gathered steam, Lai was junketed to Washington, D.C., for meetings with
Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security
Advisor John Bolton, and Republican Senators Ted Cruz, Cory Gardner, and Rick
Scott. Bloomberg News correspondent Nicholas Wadhams remarked on Lai’s visit,
“Very unusual for a [non-government] visitor to get that kind of access.”
Today: Hong Kong publisher and
democracy advocate Jimmy Lai met National Security Adviser John Bolton in DC.
After meetings with @SecPompeo and @VP, this is meant to send a signal to
Beijing. Very unusual for a nongovt visitor to get that kind of access.
One of Lai’s closest allies,
Martin Lee, was also granted an audience with Pompeo, and has held court with
U.S. leaders including Rep. Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Joseph
Biden.
Among the most prominent
figures in Hong Kong’s pro-U.S. political parties, Lee began collaborating with
Lai during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A recipient of the U.S.-funded
National Endowment for Democracy’s “Democracy Award” in 1997, Lee is the
founding chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, now considered part of the
pro-U.S. camp’s old guard.
While Martin Lee has long been
highly visible on the pro-western Hong Kong scene, a younger generation of
activists emerged during the 2014 Occupy Central protests with a new brand of
localized politics.
Joshua Wong meets with Sen.
Marco Rubio in Washington on May 8, 2017.
Joshua Wong was just 17 years
old when the Umbrella Movement took form in 2014. After emerging in the protest
ranks as one of the more charismatic voices, he was steadily groomed as the
pro-West camp’s teenage poster child. Wong received lavish praised in Time magazine,Fortune,
and Foreign Policy as a “freedom campaigner,” and became the subject
of an award-winning Netflix documentary called “Joshua: Teenager vs.
Superpower.”
Unsurprisingly, these puff
pieces have overlooked Wong’s ties to the U.S. regime-change apparatus. For
instance, National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute
(NDI) maintains a close relationship with
Demosisto, the political party Wong founded in 2016 with fellow Umbrella
movement alumnus Nathan Law.
In August, a candid photo
surfaced of Wong and Law meeting with Julie Eadeh, the political counselor at
the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong, raising questions about the content of
the meeting and setting off a diplomatic showdown between Washington and
Beijing.
This is very very
embarrassing. Julie Eadeh, a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK
protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if Chinese
diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or
Never Trump protesters.
The Office of the Commissioner
of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong submitted a formal complaint
with the U.S. consulate general, calling on the U.S. “to immediately make a
clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in Hong Kong, stop
sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong
Kong affairs and avoid going further down the wrong path.”
The pro-Beijing Hong Kong
newspaper Ta Kung Pao published personal details about Eadeh,
including the names of her children and her address. State Department
spokesperson Morgan Ortagus lashed out, accusing the Chinese government of
being behind the leak but offering no evidence. “I don’t think that leaking an
American diplomat’s private information, pictures, names of their children, I
don’t think that is a formal protest, that is what a thuggish regime would
do,” she
said at a State Department briefing.
But the photo underscored the
close relationship between Hong Kong’s pro-West movement and the U.S.
government. Since the 2014 Occupy Central protests that vaulted Wong into
prominence, he and his peers have been assiduously cultivated by the elite
Washington institutions to act as the faces and voices of Hong Kong’s
burgeoning anti-China movement.
In September 2015, Wong,
Martin Lee, and University of Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai Lee were honored by
Freedom House, a right-wing soft-power organization that is heavily funded by
the National Endowment for Democracy and other arms of the U.S.
government.
Just days after Trump’s
election as president in November 2016, Wong was back in Washington to appeal
for more U.S. support. “Being a businessman, I hope Donald Trump could know the
dynamics in Hong Kong and know that to maintain the business sector benefits in
Hong Kong, it’s necessary to fully support human rights in Hong Kong to
maintain the judicial independence and the rule of law,” he said.
Wong’s visit provided occasion
for the Senate’s two most aggressively neoconservative members, Marco Rubio and
Tom Cotton, to introduce the
“Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act,” which would “identify those
responsible for abduction, surveillance, detention and forced confessions, and
the perpetrators will have their U.S. assets, if any… frozen and their entry to
the country denied.”
Wong was then taken on a
junket of elite U.S. institutions including the right-wing Heritage
Foundation think tank and the newsrooms of The New
York Times and Financial
Times. He then held court with Rubio, Cotton, Pelosi, and Sen. Ben
Sasse.
In September 2017, Rubio, Ben
Cardin, Tom Cotton, Sherrod Brown, and Cory Gardner signed off on a letter to
Wong, Law and fellow anti-China activist Alex Chow, praising them for their
“efforts to build a genuinely autonomous Hong Kong.” The bipartisan cast of
senators proclaimed that “the United States cannot stand idly by.”
A year later, Rubio and his
colleagues nominated the
trio of Wong, Law, and Chow for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.
Honored to have met Joshua
Wong, a student leader who led a big protest demanding universal suffrage in
Hong Kong.
Washington’s support for the
designated spokesmen of the “retake Hong Kong movement” was supplemented with
untold sums of money from U.S. regime-change outfits like the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED) and subsidiaries like the National Democratic Institute
(NDI) to civil society, media and political groups.
As journalist Alex Rubinstein
reported, the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, a key member of the coalition
that organized against the now-defunct extradition law, has received more than
$2 million in NED funds since 1995. And other groups in the coalition reaped
hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED and NDI last year alone.
While U.S. lawmakers nominate
Hong Kong protest leaders for peace prizes and pump their organizations with
money to “promote democracy,” the demonstrations have begun to spiral out of
control.
Protests Become More
Aggressive
After the extradition law was
scrapped, the protests moved into a more aggressive phase, launching “hit and
run attacks” against government targets, erecting roadblocks, besieging police
stations, and generally embracing the extreme modalities put on display during
U.S.-backed regime-change operations from Ukraine to Venezuela to
Nicaragua.
AJE in position to cover HK
protesters' "hit and run strategy."
Here's William Engdahl on Otpor!, the CIA-backed Serbian group that trained thousands of youth activists in countries around the world in color revolution swarming tactics: https://archive.org/stream/FullSpectrumDominanceTotalitarianDemocracyInTheNewWorldOrderFWilliamEngdahl/Full%20Spectrum%20Dominance%2C%20Totalitarian%20Democracy%20in%20the%20New%20World%20Order%20-%20F%20William%20Engdahl_djvu.txt … https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1160897474648825857 …
Here's William Engdahl on Otpor!, the CIA-backed Serbian group that trained thousands of youth activists in countries around the world in color revolution swarming tactics: https://archive.org/stream/FullSpectrumDominanceTotalitarianDemocracyInTheNewWorldOrderFWilliamEngdahl/Full%20Spectrum%20Dominance%2C%20Totalitarian%20Democracy%20in%20the%20New%20World%20Order%20-%20F%20William%20Engdahl_djvu.txt … https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1160897474648825857 …
The techniques clearly
reflected the training many activists have received from Western soft-power
outfits. But they also bore the mark of Jimmy Lai’s media operation.
In addition to the vast sums
Lai spent on political parties directly involved in the protests, his media
group created an animated video “showing how to resist police in case force was
used to disperse people in a mass protest.”
While dumping money into the
Hong Kong’s pro-U.S. political camp in 2013, Lai traveled to Taiwan for a
secret roundtable consultation with
Shih Ming-teh, a key figure in Taiwan’s social movement that forced
then-president Chen Shui-bian to resign in 2008. Shih reportedly instructed Lai
on non-violent tactics to bring the government to heel, emphasizing the
importance of a commitment to go to jail.
According to journalist Peter
Lee, “Shih supposedly gave Lai advice on putting students, young girls, and
mothers with children in the vanguard of the street protests, in order to
attract the support of the international community and press, and to sustain
the movement with continual activities to keep it dynamic and fresh.” Lai
reportedly turned off his recording device during multiple sections of Shih’s
tutorial.
One protester explained to The
New York Times how the movement attempted to embrace a strategy called,
“Marginal Violence Theory:” By using “mild force” to provoke security services
into attacking the protesters, the protesters aimed to shift international
sympathy away from the state.
But as the protest movement
intensifies, its rank-and-file are doing away with tactical restraint and
lashing out at their targets with full fury. They have thrown
molotov cocktails into intersections to block traffic; attacked
vehicles and their
drivers for attempting to break through roadblocks; beaten
opponentswith truncheons; attacked a
wounded man with a U.S. flag; menaced a
reporter into deleting her photos; kidnapped and beat a
journalist senseless; beat a mainland
traveler unconscious and prevented paramedics from reaching the
victim; and hurled petrol
bombs at police officers.
Clear version of Hong Kong
protesters beating up Chinese reporter for @globaltimesnews with American
flag
A Hong Kong protester
continued to attack Chinese reporter for @globaltimesnews with American
flag
even as Paramedics finally freed him from the crowd and tried
to rush him to hospital
The charged atmosphere has
provided a shot in the arm to Lai’s media empire, which had been suffering
heavy losses since the last round of national protests in 2014. After the mass
marches against the extradition bill on June 9, which Lai’s Apple Daily aggressively
promoted, his Next Digital doubled
in value, according to Eji Insight.
Meanwhile, the protest leaders
show no sign of backing down. Nathan Law, the youth activist celebrated in
Washington and photographed meeting with U.S. officials in Hong Kong,
took to Twitter to urge his
peers to soldier on: “We have to persist and keep the faith no matter how
devastated the reality seems to be,” he wrote.
Law was tweeting from New
Haven, Connecticut, where he was enrolled with
a full scholarship at Yale University. While the young activist basked
in the adulation of his U.S. patrons thousands of miles from the chaos he
helped spark, a movement that defined itself as a “leaderless resistance”
forged ahead back home.
No comments:
Post a Comment