Hong Kong protesters hurl petrol bombs at volunteers trying to clear roadblocks and shoot arrows at police
© (L) Athit Perawongmetha / Reuters; (R) Stringer / Hong Kong Police Force / AFP
RT | November 17, 2019
Demonstrators in Hong Kong attacked common citizens who attempted to free the roads from barricades amid a new round of clashes with police.
A fierce street battle erupted outside the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) on Sunday, as protesters threw bricks at police, which responded with tear gas and water cannons. The officers were trying to remove the barricades erected by the demonstrators earlier this week, and urged them to stop placing metal spikes on the roads in hopes of piercing the police vehicles’ tires.
A sergeant with police media liaison office was shot in the leg with an arrow during the standoff. The protesters have been previously filmed using bows and arrows against the law enforcement, as well as javelins, homemade catapults and slingshots.
The protesters earlier attacked a group of citizens who were clearing the roadblocks and debris outside the PolyU. A man and a woman were hospitalized with head injuries in result of the attack.
Similar scuffles occurred near the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), where black-clad, masked rioters threw bricks and petrol bombs at the volunteers, who were removing the makeshift barricades.
The residents, many of whom are alumnae of these universities, have answered online calls from pro-government politicians to help clean the streets. Some of them told the South China Morning Post that protesters have gone “too far” when they switched from rioting downtown to seizing campuses and blocking major roads, including the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, which connects the Hong Kong Island with the rest of the city.
Around 50 Chinese army soldiers joined the volunteers to dismantle the barricades near the Hong Kong Baptist University, marking the first time when Beijing’s troops have left their barracks since the start of the protests this summer. The soldiers were unarmed and wore no protective gear.
Opposition lawmakers quickly claimed that China violated Hong Kong laws, which bar Beijing from deploying its military in the city unless local authorities request help. Hong Kong’s Security Secretary John Lee, however, said that the move was legal, since the soldiers were not on a military mission, but performing voluntary community service instead.
Western Media ‘Clearly Complicit’ as Death Toll, Violence Climb in Hong Kong Protests
Sputnik – November 15, 2019
With violence in Hong Kong progressing throughout the week, Chinese state media is warning demonstrators that they are now “at the edge of doom” – possibly signaling an upcoming deployment of the People’s Liberation Army to quell the unrest.
Though the Hong Kong Education Bureau canceled classes in the semi-autonomous city until Monday “for the sake of safety,” many students with nowhere else to go have remained on campus, and a select few at Hong Kong Polytechnic University used their free time to conduct petrol bombing practices in a dry school swimming pool.
Hours prior, tear gas was fired at black-clad demonstrators near the university’s southern entrance.
At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a Specialized Crowd Management Vehicle, along with “minimum necessary force,” was used as violence in the area “reached a deadly level,” according to the Hong Kong Police Force. Video from the scene showed that students not only hurled bricks, but had also built combat contraptions, such as a catapult that launched petrol bombs.
“The leniency Hong Kong judges have so far demonstrated toward the offenders … has also served to encourage terrorist acts,” an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times said on Tuesday following increased violence earlier this week that was highlighted by demonstrators lighting a 57-year-old man on fire and the police shooting a protester.
KJ Noh, a peace activist and scholar on the geopolitics of Asia and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch and Dissident Voice, joined Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear on Thursday to discuss the escalation in violence and explain the hypocrisy he sees within Western media’s reporting of the demonstrations.
Noh argued to hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou that if these protests were happening in the US, the “fascist blackshirt tactics” of demonstrators would be labeled “hate crimes” and “terrorism.”
The peace activist pointed out that a 70-year-old man who hospital officials believe was hit in the head with a brick while cleaning protest-related rubbish lost his life late Thursday evening.
Speaking at the BRICS summit in Brasilia, Brazil, on Thursday, Chinese President Xi Jinping voiced his support for the Hong Kong Police Force’s efforts against “violent criminals” who “seriously trampled on the rule of law and social order.”
“Stopping the violence and restoring order is Hong Kong’s most urgent task at present,” the president said, as reported by Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
Noh asserted that the “BBC and the other Western media are clearly complicit, both in supporting, encouraging and valorizing this violence” by demonstrators “while at the same time erasing the true savagery that is happening before our eyes.”
US Behind Hong Kong Protests Admits US Policymaker
By Tony Caralucci – 21st Century Wire – September 10, 2019
The US continues to deny any involvement in ongoing unrest in China’s special administrative region of Hong Kong. However, even a casual look at US headlines or comments made by US officials and policymakers – makes it clear the unrest not only suits US interests, but is spurred-on almost exclusively by them.
The paradoxical duality of nearly open support of the unrest and denial of that support has led to headlines like the South China Morning Post’s, “Mike Pompeo rebukes China’s ‘ludicrous’ claim US is behind Hong Kong protests.” The article claims:
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said it is “ludicrous” for China to claim the United States is behind the escalating protests in Hong Kong.
Pompeo rebuked Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, who had claimed violent clashes in the city prompted by opposition to the Hong Kong government’s controversial extradition bill were “the work of the US”.
However, even US policymakers have all but admitted that the US is funneling millions of dollars into Hong Kong specifically to support “programs” there. The Hudson Institute in an article titled, “China Tries to Blame US for Hong Kong Protests,” would admit:
A Chinese state-run newspaper’s claim that the United States is helping pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong is only partially inaccurate, a top foreign policy expert said Monday.
Michael Pillsbury, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland the U.S. holds some influence over political matters in the region.
The article would then quote Pillsbury as saying:
We have a large consulate there that’s in charge of taking care of the Hong Kong Policy Act passed by Congress to ensure democracy in Hong Kong, and we have also funded millions of dollars of programs through the National Endowment for Democracy [NED] … so in that sense the Chinese accusation is not totally false.
A visit to the NED’s website reveals an entire section of declared funding for Hong Kong specifically. The wording for program titles and their descriptions is intentionally ambiguous to give those like US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plausible deniability.
However, deeper research reveals NED recipients are literally leading the protests.
The South China Morning Post in its article, “Hong Kong protests: heavy jail sentences for rioting will not solve city’s political crisis, former Civil Human Rights Front convenor says,” would report:
Johnson Yeung Ching-yin, from the Civil Human Rights Front, was among 49 people arrested during Sunday’s protest – deemed illegal as it had not received police approval – in Central and Western district on Hong Kong Island.
The article would omit mention of Johnson Yeung Ching-yin’s status as an NED fellow. His profile is – at the time of this writing – still accessible on the NED’s official website, and the supposed NGO he works for in turn works hand-in-hand with US and UK-based fronts involved in supporting Hong Kong’s current unrest and a much wider anti-Beijing political agenda.
Johnson Yeung Ching-yin also co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post with Joshua Wong titled, “As you read this, Hong Kong has locked one of us away.”
Wong has travelled to Washington DC multiple times, including to receive “honors” from NED-subsidiary Freedom House for his role in leading unrest in 2014 and to meet with serial regime-change advocate Senator Marco Rubio.
It should also be noted that the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum also sits on the NED board of directors.
This evidence, along with extensively documented ties between the United States government and other prominent leaders of the Hong Kong unrest reveals US denial of involvement in Hong Kong as yet another willful lie told upon the international stage – a lie told even as the remnants of other victims of US interference and intervention smolder in the background.
The direct ties and extreme conflicts of interest found under virtually every rock overturned when critically examining the leadership of Hong Kong’s ongoing unrest all lead to Washington. They also once again reveal the Western media as involved in a coordinated campaign of disinformation – where proper investigative journalism is purposefully side-stepped and narratives shamelessly spun instead to frame Hong Kong’s ongoing conflict in whatever light best suits US interests.
What’s worse is big-tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google purging thousands of accounts attempting to reveal the truth behind Hong Kong’s unrest and the true nature of those leading it. If this is the level of lying, censorship, and authoritarianism Washington is willing to resort to in order for Hong Kong’s opposition to succeed, it begs one to wonder what this so-called opposition is even fighting for. Certainly not “democracy” or “freedom.”
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Author Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher, writer and special contributor to 21st Century Wire.
Hong Kong: Anglo-America’s Struggling Foothold in China
By Joseph Thomas – New Eastern Outlook – March 22, 2017
Prominent American propagandist Howard French recently published a lengthy editorial in the Guardian titled, “Is it too late to save Hong Kong from Beijing’s authoritarian grasp?,” in which he attempts to buttress an otherwise categorically false narrative surrounding an alleged indigenous struggle for democracy and independence within Hong Kong.
French attempts to hold China accountable for backtracking on an agreement made with Britain over the return of its own territory taken from it by force in 1841. He also attempts to portray Beijing’s crackdown on US-UK subversion in Hong Kong as “authoritarian,” never making mention of the extensive funding and meddling both the United States and the United Kingdom are engaged in within Chinese territory.
The article documents only one side of the so-called “independence” movement in Hong Kong, sidestepping any critical analysis of the colonial background of the ongoing political crisis or the neo-colonial aspects that shape current events even now.
The lengthy piece was paid for by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a Washington D.C.-based front that collaborates with the New York Times, PBS, NPR, Time Magazine and other mainstays of US propaganda. These are the same media outlets that helped sell the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as US-led attacks on Libya and US meddling in Syria beginning in 2011. By supporting French’s work, they now help sell to the public a narrative that undermines Chinese sovereignty an ocean away from American shores.
The entire editorial, its contents, author and the special interests that paid for it as well as its placement in the Guardian, represent a continued and concerted effort to maintain an Anglo-American foothold in Hong Kong, part of the last vestiges of Western hegemony within Chinese territory.
The Truth About Hong Kong
Had Howard French penned an honest account of Hong Kong’s recent political crisis, he would have included the extensive, some may say exclusive, control the United States and the United Kingdom exercised over an otherwise fictitious and impossible pro-independence movement. Quite literally every leader of the so-called “Umbrella Revolution” is either directly funded and directed by the US and/or UK government, or possesses membership within an organisation, institution or front funded by Anglo-American money.
The notion that a teen-aged Joshua Wong was single-handedly defying Beijing is preposterous even at face value. He was but one cog of a much larger, well-documented foreign-funded machine aimed at stirring up conflict within Hong Kong, undermine Beijing’s control of the territory and infect Chinese society as a whole with notions of Western-style “democracy.”
Just months before the 2014 “Umbrella Revolution,” one of its leaders, Martin Lee, was literally in Washington D.C., before members of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), pleading for material and political support for upcoming demonstrations. Toward the end of that same year, and despite NED denying Lee was a protest leader, Lee would find himself in the streets of Hong Kong leading the protests from the front shoulder-to-shoulder with Benny Tai and Joshua Wong.
Ironically, after the protests diminished and were finally pushed off the streets by both local police and impatient residents, Lee, Tai and Wong would be invited to Washington D.C. for a special event organised by NED subsidiary, Freedom House, dubbed, “Three Hong Kong Heroes.” The three protest leaders, having attempted to shake off accusations of being Washington puppets, or even protest leaders altogether, would take to the stage with yellow umbrellas in hand.
Howard French, and others attempting to persuade Western audiences of their version of events in Hong Kong omit these critical facts regarding the foreign-funded and directed nature of the “pro-independence” movement. They do so intentionally, with French himself being a 2011 Open Society fellow, Open Society being one of several fronts the US has channelled money through in support of subversion in Hong Kong.
In reality, there is nothing “pro-independence” about the movement in Hong Kong. It is simply the latest in a centuries-long attempt by Western powers to project geopolitical hegemony into Asia and more specifically, upon China itself.
French’s lengthy lament regarding China’s “authoritarianism” captures what may possibly be frustration that Washington and London’s tricks no longer work, and the more “Umbrella Revolutions” they attempt to organise against Beijing, the more familiar the Chinese public will be with them and subsequently, the more determined they will become to frustrate them.
Additionally, China’s influence over Hong Kong and even across Asia as a whole, is stronger, more sustainable and continuously expanding versus waning Western influence. Spectacular political stunts like the “Umbrella Revolution” attempt to leverage global public opinion over which the US media still maintains considerable influence, but ultimately such strategies have been confounded by Beijing and are, in the long-term, unsustainable.
Hong Kong represents a past, strong bastion of Western colonial power, now struggling to maintain itself even as a minor regional foothold. Despite the efforts of manipulators like Howard French and media platforms that lend themselves to his disingenuous narrative, footholds like Hong Kong will continue to diminish until the last remnants of the West’s colonial past are all but swept from modern geopolitics and permanently assigned to the pages of history.
YSEALI: America’s Quiet Colonisation of Southeast Asia
By Joseph Thomas – New Eastern Outlook – 21.09.2016
The US State Department’s Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) claims on its official US government website to build “the leadership capabilities of youth in the region and promotes cross-border cooperation to solve regional and global challenges.”
It not only consists of US-based educational and professional “fellowships” for Southeast Asian participants, but also a funding component to help alumni establish foreign-funded organisations posing as “nongovernmental organisations” (NGOs), enhancing the already large presence of US-funded organisations operating across Asia in the service of American interests.
Under an initiative called, “Generation: Go NGO!,” YSEALI claims:
This is an opportunity for young NGO leaders to advance their professional skills and competencies with the aim to grow, scale, and take the organizations they work for, or those they founded, to new heights.
From developing baseline metrics to creatively pursuing financial and in-kind resources to assertively applying social media to advance mission, this workshop will bring together individuals from across ASEAN to learn and collaborate on ways to build capacity, message, and impact.
Beyond this, YSEALI also conducts other workshops across Southeast Asia to help prepare what is essentially a parallel political establishment that serves not Southeast Asian institutions or the population, but the US State Department and the corporate and financial interests it represents, quite literally an ocean and continent away.
One such activity was conducted by the US Embassy in Cambodia, called the “First Model Prime Minister Debate” organised by the US Ambassador’s Youth Council, Phnom Penh.
In essence, the US State Department is preparing an entire generation of impressionable young people, raised on American-style consumerism and hooked into US-based social media platforms like Facebook, and moulding them into a client political bloc they will eventually assist into power, just as they have attempted to do in Hong Kong recently with US State Department-funded “Umbrella Revolution” leaders winning several seats in local legislative elections and as they have already done in Myanmar through Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NDL) with her minister of information quite literally trained by US-funded organisations in neighbouring Thailand before assuming his post.
Using children and young adults through what appear to be benign overseas scholarships and work opportunities, as well as through events across Southeast Asia organised by US embassies appears at first disarming and scaled back from the sort of subversion the US has typically engaged in over the past several decades (i.e. 1953 Operation Ajax: Iran, 1973 Chilean coup d’état, or the violent 2011 Arab Spring).
Yet despite its apparent benign nature, it represents precisely the same end result; a US backed government, representing parallel institutions that answer not to the people they are put in power over, but instead represents those foreign interests that cultivated, funded and directed them into power from abroad.
YSEALI’s activities are fundamentally inappropriate, undiplomatic and constitute an intentional and direct threat to the sovereignty and self-determination of the entire region of Southeast Asia. Were China or Russia conducting such activities in the United States, it is likely a coordinated government and media campaign would be mobilised to counteract it, and possibly even legislation passed to stop it all together.
Likewise, ASEAN should consider revising rules, regulations and legislation governing foreign-funded organisations masquerading as “NGOs” and limiting foreign missions to the region and each respective nation to diplomatic activities only.
Funding from foreign governments for allegedly “nongovernmental” organisations is in itself a contradiction in both terms and in principle. And the idea of a parallel political system created in the US embassy and composed of Southeast Asian youths “built” by US efforts somehow representing or resulting in “democracy” or “self-determination” is an obvious and intentional misrepresentation by the US State Department.
Not only should local governments across Southeast Asia counter these efforts through restricting or ending them altogether, they should create their own programmes to develop their nation’s next generation of political and business leaders, infused with local principles, values, cultural ideals and reflecting the best interests of the people and nation they will eventually assume positions of power over. Self-determination is not a right the US or the “international community” it poses as leader of will grant freely to the nations of the world it presumes dominion over, it is a right that nations must fight for, earn and protect proactively.
Hong Kong’s “Localists” Made in Washington
By Joseph Thomas – New Eastern Outlook – September 5, 2016
Western media rejoiced over the meagre gains made in recent polls by what they described as “anti-China activists” of the “localist” movement, political groups in Hong Kong who advocate “independence” from China.
In the UK, former colonial administrator of Hong Kong, the BBC would report in their article, “Hong Kong election: Anti-China activists set to take LegCo seats,” that:
A new generation of anti-China activists have won seats on Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo), preliminary results indicate.
Among them is Nathan Law, one of the young leaders of the mass pro-democracy demonstrations of 2014, who is now on course to win a constituency seat.
It is the first taste of real political power for the young protest leaders.
But pro-Beijing politicians will retain a majority of seats, partly because of the electoral system.
What the BBC conveniently omits is that while pro-Beijing politicians will retain a majority of seats “partly because of the electoral system,” anti-Beijing politicians made their gains almost entirely because of US-funding and support. This includes Nathan Law himself, poised to take a constituency seat, showered with awards by the US State Department for his role in US-backed protests in 2014.
Ironically, in an attempt to add further gravity to these minor electoral gains, the BBC hailed what they called a “record voter turnout” of 58%, while BBC reporters just last month claimed a 60% turnout for Thailand’s charter referendum “undermined the legitimacy of the result.” The only difference being that gains made in Hong Kong favoured Western interests, while gains made in Thailand favoured the Thai people at the expense of Western interests.
The BBC’s politically-motivated bias is easily explained as the layers or rhetoric are stripped away and the foreign networks that created and are currently supporting Hong Kong’s supposed “independence” movement are exposed.
The BBC and other Western media organisations portray the recent polls as a continuation of the so-called “Umbrella Revolution.” In this respect, they are partially right.
What they are omitting is that the 2014 protests were organised and carried out by US-funded opposition groups, representing a slim minority of Hong Kong’s population and were eventually moved off the streets when Hong Kong residents themselves lost patience over the protest’s disruptive behaviour.
Months preceding the 2014 protests, two of the movement’s leaders were quite literally in Washington D.C. lobbying the US State Department for support ahead of the planned protests. The US State Department’s own National Endowment for Democracy (NED) would admit in a statement titled, “The National Endowment for Democracy and support for democracy in Hong Kong,” that:
(Benny Tai, Joshua Wong and Martin Lee stand to Freedom House president Mark Lagon in Washington D.C. during a ceremony celebrating their role in the 2014 Hong Kong protests.)
After the protests ended, NED’s subsidiary Freedom House would even invite Martin Lee to an event titled, “Three Hong Kong Heroes,” which also included protest leaders Joshua Wong and Benny Tai. Lee would shuffle onto stage with an umbrella prop in hand, a virtual admission to his leadership role in the protests and confirmation that the NED’s previous statement was intentionally false.
NED would also deny providing funding to the movement, despite the fact that each member of the movement’s senior leadership were documented grantees of the NED and its various subsidiaries including Freedom house and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).
Toward the end of the 2014 protests, Western media organisations began making partial admissions that indeed the US was funding various segments of the movement’s leadership. Dan Steinbock in an October 2014 article in the South China Morning Post would enumerate the various confirmed accusations and concluded, “perhaps efforts at foreign interference are not entirely unfounded.”
Considering this, claims that Hong Kong’s “anti-China activists” represent “democracy” or “localism” when they represent foreign interest, not those of the Hong Kong’s residents, nor source their support “locally,” are at face value contradictory.
It is also particularly ironic that this strain of political opposition predicates itself on establishing “independence” when in reality it seeks to return Hong Kong back under the influence of Anglo-American hegemony. This is particularly obvious considering the repetitious calls from such groups for “One Country, Two Systems,” the parting demands the British colonialists themselves tabled as a condition to returning the seized territory back to the Chinese.
Nathan Law —America’s, Not Hong Kong’s Candidate
The BBC made particular mention of Nathan Law, chairman of “Demosisto,” a political party that sprung forth from the US-funded “Umbrella Revolution.” According to the BBC, he was expected to win a constituency seat, but what the BBC fails to mention is his ties to the US State Department and the alarming conflicts of interest this poses considering his potential role in Hong Kong’s governance.
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(Nathan Law, left, embraced by US State Department NED chairman Carl Gershman.) |
The US State Department’s NED “World Movement for Democracy” website in a post titled, “Democracy Courage Tribute Award Presentation,” would write in regards to the award presented to Nathan Lee:
The Umbrella Movement’s bold call in the fall of 2014 for a free and fair election process to select the city’s leaders brought thousands into the streets to demonstrate peacefully. The images from these protests have motivated Chinese democracy activists on the mainland and resulted in solidarity between longtime champions of democracy in Hong Kong and a new generation of Hong Kong youth seeking to improve their city. The Hong Kong democracy movement will face further obstacles in the years to come, and their idealism and bravery will need to be supported as they work for democratic representation in Hong Kong.
Nathan Lee would even pose for pictures with NED chairman Carl Gershman, apparently unconcerned of the immense conflicts of interest invited by such compromising associations.
The BBC’s coverage of Hong Kong’s recent legislative elections attempts to spin inroads made by foreign interests as “localism” and “democracy” taking root in the former British colonial holding. While the BBC alludes to Beijing’s influence preventing further gains by the opposition, its intentional omission of which foreign interests are propping up the opposition reveals systemic and intentional bias in the BBC’s reporting. Such bias is echoed across Reuters, CNN, AP and AFP as well.
Democracy, in theory, is supposed to be the expression of the people. Hong Kong is part of China, thus those participating in its political process should represent Chinese interests. An opposition party that spends its time in Washington D.C. and maintains its growing networks through foreign cash do not represent China or the Chinese in a wider sense, and certainly not Hong Kong and its residents in a more local sense.
Foreign interests working through collaborators resembles a dictatorship from abroad more than anything resembling a “democracy” of the people, even if such a dictatorship drapes itself in public polls, elections and street mobs. That before, during and after the “Umbrella Revolution” each and every leader is tied to foreign interests, completely undermines the narrative that they represent “democracy” rather than the foreign interests transparently directing (then rewarding) them every step of the way.
Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas.
Western Democracy Crusaders are Foes of Democracy
The World Seen Through a “Progressive” Western Keyhole versus a Panoramic Lens
By John V. Walsh | Dissident Voice | January 18, 2015
One of Castro’s closest comrades, the Argentine-born guerilla Che Guevara, had been in Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed the coup against Arbenz. Later he told Castro why it succeeded. He said Arbenz had foolishly tolerated an open society, which the CIA penetrated and subverted, and also preserved the existing army, which the CIA turned into its instrument. Castro agreed that a revolutionary regime in Cuba must avoid those mistakes. Upon taking power, he cracked down on dissent and purged the army. Many Cubans supported his regime and were ready to defend it. (Emphasis, jw)
Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War
The stark choice that confronted Castro and Guevara is faced by every nation seeking independence from the U.S., a far more powerful nation with enormous resources in terms of “soft” power, economic power and military power. The more open the society, the more opportunities for CIA-engineered regime change. This was the lesson Arbenz learned in 1954 and Mossadegh before him in 1953, lessons that brought so much pain, death and destruction to their peoples in the decades to follow.
Judged by that outcome, the Castros made the right decision and as a result have presided over a healthy, educated and secure people. The drawback was that the Empire isolated Cuba economically, stifling the possibilities of more development and a higher standard of living. The Empire wants nations charting an independent course to be politically open to the regime change schemes and NGOs of the West but economically closed, shut off from more advanced economies. It is as simple as that.
For some defiant states the sort of regime change operation used against Mossadegh and Arbenz may be the only option which the United States has. This is certainly the case for China and Russia. All out war on these countries is out of reach – although the U.S. is trying to change that. The modus operandi of the Empire for the moment is to put Russia and China on the horns of tried and true dilemma. Open up politically, permit the development of forces that favor regime change – or remain less open and face criticism, especially criticism from Western governments and Western intellectuals, including the “progressive” or liberal intellectuals. This is crucial because “progressives” are the very people who – until Obama – were most likely to oppose imperial warfare – both military and economic. The Democracy Crusade is designed to neutralize them.
This criticism from the West is one lever, and an important one, that is used to force a society to be more open in its governance than its survival permits. Let us be clear. Without a rapacious West at the doorstep, the possibilities of openness and democracy are much greater in scope. Conversely, the more rapacious the West, the more restricted are the possibilities for a besieged nation if it wishes to survive and prosper with its sovereignty intact. Without sovereignty there can be no democracy. Rule conditioned on approval by a foreign source or by a puppet regime is never self-rule. So it is never democracy.
It follows that the best way to crusade for openness and democracy is to work against Western interventionism, whether that interventionism takes the form of armed attack, economic sanctions or the work of NGOs like the NED (National Endowment for Democracy). This is absolutely crucial to understand. A criticism of a besieged country will increase the pressure on that country and hence lead to a decrease in political openness. Paradoxically, this is true even if the criticism is one that calls for more democracy.
The recent events in Hong Kong are but the latest example of this dynamic. There the NED had long been actively involved in promoting “democracy,” along with other U.S. NGOs and the U.S. Consulate, with its staff of 600. These forces recruited very young “activists,” with high school students at the forefront. (A Chinese friend of mine noted with disgust that easily manipulated high school students were also in the forefront of the Cultural Revolution.) The movement sought elimination of the screening of candidates by a committee of 1,200 Hong Kong residents for the next election of the CEO, a position akin to governor. The composition of the committee was open to negotiation. (It went unmentioned in the West that there was no election when Hong Kong was a colony of the UK. The governor was appointed by the Queen – period. It also went unmentioned that there is a similar sort of “screening” of candidates in the U.S., with the major parties serving in the role of screeners. If you do not believe that, ask the Greens or the Libertarians or Ralph Nader.) Most importantly the leaders of the movement and their U.S. backers made no secret of their hope that the disturbances in Hong Kong would spread to the mainland and provoke a movement against the Chinese government. They are advocates of regime change in China as are their mentors at the NED.
What has the current government of China, led by its Communist Party, done for China? It has led China out of colonial domination by the West. It has forged a level of economic development with a rapidity unseen before in all of human history. It has ended poverty for 600 million people and continues on the quest to raise millions more out of poverty. For the world it has meant a power, China, which is sufficiently strong to provide a multipolar world. That in turn means that the countries of the world have an alternative to Western domination, which has been the fate of most of the world for hundreds of years. Russia and Iran, for example, can trade with China when the West slaps sanctions on them. As a result at this moment there is the possibility of genuine decolonization (or de-neocolonization, if you will) – after centuries of the planet’s domination by a small fraction of the world’s population.
In short, the current government of China is the agent of the most stunning defeat of Euro-American colonialism that the world has seen to date. After all the Chinese are almost one-fifth of humanity. One would think that this fact would be part of the evaluation of Western progressives when they looked at the Hong Kong affair. With few exceptions it was not. And this is a big problem. The world is going through a major upheaval as colonialism and neo-colonialism are suffering major defeats. That upheaval, that shift, is a lens through which Western “progressives” should look at the world. They rarely do. In failing to do so, they see the world through the ideological eyes of the West, that is, “the 1%“ at the top of the heap (or at least the 10%) if one may put it that way. China has achieved what the West hates most. It is relatively closed politically to the intrigues and machinations of the West – but economically open. This is the recipe for sovereignty and development.
The difference between the two views is the difference between looking at the world through a panoramic lens, with history in the background, and looking through a keyhole. In the latter case of tunnel vision one may only see a patch of grey through the keyhole, whereas a mighty elephant stands beyond the door.
Afterthoughts: Old China Hand. One “progressive,” and an “Old China Hand” to boot, even charged the minority on the Left with “neocolonialist” attitudes when they criticized him for siding with the NED in Hong Kong. He claimed that the dissidents in Hong Kong were too sophisticated, too “smart,” to be taken in by the NED, NID, U.S. Consulate officials and other detritus with whom they regularly consort.
But what about the cases where we now know that the CIA et al successfully deceived the population – sufficiently to overthrow an anticolonial government, as with Mossadegh or Arbenz or Allende? Does Old China Hand mean to say that the people of Iran or Guatemala or Chile were “stupid”? And is that not neocolonialist arrogance? No, Old China Hand is defending tunnel vision, the view through the keyhole, not the people of Hong Kong. And if ever there were an unwitting agent of neocolonialism, it is sadly the likes of Old China Hand.
John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com.
New Snowden leak reveals US hacked Chinese cell companies, accessed millions of sms – report
RT | June 23, 2013
US government has been hacking Chinese mobile operator networks to intercept millions of text messages, as well as the operator of region’s fibre optic cable network, South China Morning Post writes citing Edward Snowden.
More information on National Security Agency activity in China and Hong Kong has been revealed by SCMP on Sunday, shedding light on statements Snowden made in an interview on June 12.
“The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Snowden was quoted as saying on the SCMP website.
In a series of reports the paper claims Snowden has provided proof of extensive US hacking activity in the region.
The former CIA technician and NSA contractor reportedly provided to the paper the documents detailing specific attacks on computers over a four-year period, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still being monitored remotely. SCMP however did not reveal any supporting documents.
The US government has been accused of a security breach at the Hong Kong headquarters of the operator of the largest regional fibre optic cable network operator, Pacnet. Back in 2009, the company’s computers were hacked by the NSA but since then the operation has been shut down, according to the documents the paper claims to have seen.
Pacnet’s network spans across Hong Kong, China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Singapore and provides connections to 16 data centers for telecom companies, corporations and governments across the region.
The whistleblower has also allegedly revealed the US had viewed millions of text messages by hacking Chinese mobile phone companies. That is a significant claim since the Chinese sent almost billion text messages in 2012 and China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile network carrier.
In his very first leak to the media, Snowden had already exposed the scale of the American government spying operation on its domestic mobile network operators. He later revealed that the US and the UK possessed technology to access the Blackberry phones of delegates at two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009.
In a third article, SCMP claims that the US on a regular basis has been attacking the servers at Tsinghua University, one of country’s biggest research institutions. The whistleblower said that information obtained pointed to hacking activities, because it contained such details as external and internal IP addresses in the University’s network, which could only have been retrieved by a security breach.
Tsinghua University is host to one of Chinas’ six major backbone networks, the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) containing data about millions of Chinese citizens.
$200 million loan from China due to arrive in National Bank of Egypt
Al-Masry Al-Youm 03/09/2012
The National Bank of Egypt said that the US$200 million loan recently granted by the China Development Bank will arrive in the country within days.
The interest rate due on the loan is up to 3.75 percent above Libor rates, which is the central lending price of British banks for a pay period of eight years, including a three-year grace period.
Sharif Elwi, vice-president of the National Bank, said that the loan marks the beginning of Egyptian cooperation with Asian markets in light of worsening economic conditions in Europe.
China has allocated $20 billion to finance projects in Africa, and the National Bank began loan talks with the China Development Bank five months ago, Elwi explained. He denied that the government had pressured the National Bank to broker the deal due to Egypt’s declining international credit rating.
National Bank leaders plan to visit Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Malaysia this October to present investment opportunities in Egypt to potential backers there.
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