US Fanning Flames of Hong Kong Protests

By: Kayhan Int’l 

It is obvious that the U.S. is sparing no efforts to try to destabilize China, as is evident by the growing violence in Hong Kong.     
Though the Western media has called Washington’s undermining of Beijing’s sovereignty over the former British colony as "fake news,” "disinformation,” and even grounds for censorship from platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the reality cannot be concealed in view of the inherent animosity of Donald Trump towards China as is evident by the trade war.     
We’re talking about the same media that have gone silent on the hundreds of thousands of non-violent Yellow Vest protesters in France who have been demonstrating against corruption, inequality and neoliberalism for almost a year. This same media have rushed to cover and even applaud the demonstrations in Hong Kong.
And if you’ve been following the mainstream corporate media coverage, it seems like the media are just getting started too.
The protests erupted over a proposed amendment to an extradition treaty between Hong Kong, Macau, China and Taiwan.
Recently, Hong Kong Leader Carrie Lam withdrew the extradition bill that ignited the protests to begin with. But it seems now that the demonstrators are being incited by the West.
Protesters are openly calling on the United States to intervene and detach Hong Kong from China as they wave the stars and stripes of the American flag. Meanwhile, others broke into the Hong Kong state legislature and hung the colonial United Kingdom flag — a reference to the era before 1997 when the British directly controlled the island as a colony.
Yet a look at the organizations directly involved in leading the unrest and those supporting it reveals unequivocally that it originates in Washington DC – not organically from within Hong Kong itself.
As the US has plotted for decades – as revealed in the Pentagon Papers leaked in 1971 – chaos in Hong Kong is part of a much larger regional and global strategy to encircle and contain China. Hong Kong is meant to serve as a Western foothold within Chinese territory. Efforts by Washington to promote violent separatism in Xinjiang and Tibet have also been ongoing for decades.
By exposing the artificial nature of Hong Kong’s current protests, their illegitimacy can be fully exposed as well – giving the majority of Hong Kong’s population the ability to wrest control of their streets back from this foreign-funded conspiracy against not only Hong Kong, but against China to which Hong Kong once again belongs after nearly two centuries of Anglo-American domination.
China should be extra cautious and on no account allow the American conspiracy to succeed, and this requires firm steps against the breakaway island of Taiwan.

France Protests vs Hong Kong Protests

TEHRAN (FNA)- On July 18, the European Parliament issued a motion calling for a resolution over Hong Kong’s extradition bill. The motion condemned what it called interference by China in Hong Kong.

In yet another theater of absurd, the European Parliament also called for the release of “peaceful protesters” who have been detained for what it called “exercising freedom of expression.”

The “exercising freedom of expression” the European Parliament supposedly calls as “reason” for the detention of protesters - read appalling violence, assaults on police, vandalising public property and disturbing the social order - largely consists of old information that has been repackaged for political purposes. It does nothing to help resolve the Hong Kong issue.

In response to these baseless allegations, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lu Kang has urged the European Union to fulfill its commitment to the bilateral relationship. A spokesperson at the Office of the Commissioner of the Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong has also condemned the motion, saying it turns a blind eye to the appalling violence committed by the rioters. However, this is not the main focus of this write-up.

The question, however, is this: Violent clashes across France have been going on for months during which at least 24 people have lost an eye since the "gilets jaunes," or Yellow Vest, protests began in November 2018. How come we are yet to see the European Parliament issue a similar motion calling for a resolution and condemning France and the riot police for using water cannons, stun grenades and tear gas as they attempt to contain the protests?

The answer is obvious. In Brussels, some roads lead to ignorance, prejudice, hypocrisy and double standard. When media outlets in Europe give their opinion about protests in France, they are liberal. When media outlets in other parts of the western world give their opinion, they are lackeys. They urge the poor protesters to give up their rights and quest.

As for the ongoing protests in France, the same news networks and media lackeys urge angry protesters to accept the social order and reality, and stop engaging in violence. The professional propagandists even come up with solutions on how best to cope with what they call the post-truth social order in Europe.

As limited protests in Hong Kong continue sporadically, however, a chorus of influential voices in Western media and corridors of power cast the pointless violence as a battle for “democracy and freedom of expression” in which the real enemy is not the hooligans but Beijing. The result has been a growing tendency in Europe to view Hong Kong as simply one battleground in a larger conflict between China and its people, and to dismiss the legitimate concerns of Beijing over the rule of law or foreign interference as a mere smokescreen for state censorship and control.

This way of framing the violent protests in France and Hong Kong is both overly simplistic and agenda-driven. By overstating the importance of “freedom of expression” to the protesters, Brussels and its opinion-makers aim to increase internal problems for Beijing and to curtail any inclination to reach a peaceful settlement with protesters.

For some time, it has been a commonplace among certain Western governments that a rising China is the real source of opposition to their influence throughout the world, from Asia to the Middle East, Europe to America and Australia. After the failed trade war on China, prominent neoconservatives in Washington and their cohorts in Congress are also doing whatever they can to force Beijing to focus less on international trade and development, and more on its “for democracy protesters” in Hong Kong.

It is against this backdrop that Brussels claims the rights of Chinese protesters have generally been upheld in Hong Kong, and that civil rights, political rights and press freedom have steadily deteriorated. It is also against this backdrop that Beijing has strongly opposed the European Parliament's interference in the Hong Kong issue, arguing rightly that the region's affairs are China's domestic affairs.

On that note, and if there is indeed no double standard here, the European Parliament should immediately issue a similar motion to express its deep concern over the ongoing violent clashes across France, in particular, to coverage of sensitive issues on immigrants and those who have lost their eyes or those concerning the Yellow Vests.

In the prevailing environment, the international civil society should be very sceptical whenever they see motions, PowerPoint slides and figures shown by Brussels in the media that are only there to “confuse right from wrong.” Simply put, telling lies about protests in Hong King or framing the issue as anti-democratic aggression by Beijing against its own people is a tendentious move that is meant to advance several covert political goals, including setting the scene for a pre-ordained conclusion of European Parliament elections and further a great distraction from domestic troubles in Europe and France.

For whatever reason, some Western media outlets and governments never go against realpolitik. In this bizarre juxtaposition (Hong Kong protests vs. France protests), violent clashes on the Chinese island are allegedly the hallmarks of a country with weak democratic system. Quite the contrary, in France these are just "public gathering," where protesters take pride in their “robust” electoral institutions and their centuries of continuous “democratic practice”!!!

US Fueling Hong Kong Protests to Undermine China

By: Kayhan Int’l 

The western media and western regimes are trying to blow out of proportion the protests in Hong Kong, which are definitely no secessionist movement against Beijing, and merely part of the people’s right to express their assent or dissent of local laws in a sovereign Chinese territory, as it happens in all world countries, including the US and European states.

The ground realities are entirely different from the western media reports. As confirmed by independent eyewitness accounts, with the exception of a small number of self-styled "separatists,” who couldn’t exceed three hundred thousand in the largest demonstration so far in last June, the vast majority of Hong Kong residents are loyal to mainland China, and oppose the so-called "pro-democracy” protestors for disrupting, if not wrecking the society.
It is clear that the quixotic US president, Donald Trump, as part of his futile trade war with China, has resorted to mischief in Hong Kong. This is yet another attempt by the West, especially by Washington, in causing trouble to Beijing, as is evident by the recent American sale of sophisticated weapons to the breakaway island of Taiwan. It is a bid to undermine the world’s second biggest economy.
It is interesting to note that some of the groups involved in the Hong Kong protests have ties to the US-based ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ (NED), which provides significant funding to them, and is a CIA soft-power cutout that has played a critical role in innumerable US regime-change operations.
The British media, which for the past 9 years has been cheerleading the persecution and torture of Australian journalist Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks, for non-political crimes, is also unabashedly inciting the Hong Kong protesters by instilling fear in them that China will use the extradition law for non-political crimes to prosecute critics.
The fact of the matter is that, amendment to the extradition law would allow Hong Kong to surrender fugitives on a case-by-case basis to jurisdictions in mainland China, since there is no legal way at present to prevent criminals in other parts of China from escaping charges by fleeing to Hong Kong.
The roots of the current protests can be traced to the case of Chan Tong Kai. In February, he flew to Taiwan with his girlfriend, strangled her, stuffed her body in a suitcase, dumped her in a field, and flew back to Hong Kong. Though he admitted his crime, he couldn’t be sent to Taiwan because Hong Kong had no extradition treaty with the breakaway island.
In other words, Hong Kong authorities couldn’t charge Chan with a murder that took place elsewhere; so a Hong Kong court convicted him on a lesser charge and sentenced him to a few months in jail.
Outrage over the Chan case led Hong Kong legislators to draft a law that would allow extradition to any country on a case-by-case basis. Taiwan later indicated it would not seek Chan’s extradition, making the murder case moot.
In view of these competing claims, it is necessary to cast a glance at Hong Kong’s history.
Starting in the late 1700s, the British East India Company illegally sold opium to China. By the 1830s, British and American entrepreneurs became wealthy selling opium to addict millions of Chinese. When the Chinese government ordered the sales to stop, the British sent gunboats and fought the first Opium War from 1839-to-1842. The Qing dynasty lost the war and was forced to cede Hong Kong Island to the British, along with parts of other port cities. The British launched the Second Opium War from 1853-to-858, in which they seized more Chinese territory and forced China to legalize opium.
The opium wars were fought in the name of "free trade”, that is, the right of British and American drug barons to open up the Chinese market.
Selling addictive drugs to China didn’t end in the nineteenth century. For instance, in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the US forced China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to buy US made cigarettes – all in the name of opening their markets to free trade.
By the 1990s, however, when the People’s Republic of China was emerging as a major world power, Britain agreed give up Hong Kong, and in 1997 formally returned it to Chinese sovereignty with an agreement that it would maintain two different political and economic systems.
It became known as "one country, two systems”, which meant China would keep its socialist economy, while Hong Kong would remain capitalist. Beijing hoped Hong Kong could be a model for integrating Taiwan into mainland China
China has since been playing a very important role in sustaining Hong Kong’s economy by sending in large number of tourists, designating the territory as the ‘yuan hub’ and providing other economy-promoting facilities.
This has become an eyesore to the US and the West, which fears that a prosperous Hong Kong with its international connections and as a conduit to attract foreign investment and advanced technology, is in China’s interest and could help Beijing build a flourishing modern economy.
This is the reason that the US is secretly fueling protests in Hong Kong and is provocatively selling sophisticated weaponry to Taiwan in order to undermine China.
The plot will fail, since China is Hong Kong’s future and not its problem. So here is the bottom line: Hong Kong is Chinese; it’s not an independent country; and not even a breakaway island like Taiwan, which one day will definitely return to mainland China.