China, Hong Kong August 17, 2019
Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing
nativism and mob violence
Hong Kong’s increasingly xenophobic protests are devolving into chaos with
help from US government regime-change outfits and a right-wing local media
tycoon with close ties to hardliners in Washington.
By Dan Cohen
President Donald Trump tweeted on August 13 that he “can’t imagine why” the
United States has been blamed for the chaotic protests that have gripped
Hong Kong.
Trump’s befuddlement might be understandable considering the carefully
managed narrative of the US 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 US 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.
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 US
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 US
far-right have embraced the protest movement as their own, and even
personally joined their ranks.
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.
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 US 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.”
‘Stop unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women!’
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 US 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 US 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.”
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 US 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 US to intervene. Images and videos have
surfaced of HKNP members waving the flags of the US and UK, singing the Star
Spangled Banner, and carrying flags emblazoned with images of Pepe the Frog,
the most recognizable symbol of the US 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 colonised by the Brits, and now we are by
the Chinese,” he declared.
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.
‘British colonial past gave us the instinct to revolt’
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 USD to the Democratic Party and
$382,000 USD to the Civic Party. Lai also gave $115,000 USD 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 USD on Occupy Central’s 2014 unofficial referendum.
Lai’s US 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 US 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, DC 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.”
One of Lai’s closest allies, Martin Lee, was also granted an audience with
Pompeo, and has held court with US leaders including Nancy Pelosi and former
Vice President Joseph Biden.
Among the most prominent figures in Hong Kong’s pro-US political parties,
Lee began collaborating with Lai during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
A recipient of the US government-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-US 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.
Teenager Vs. Superpower, with help from a bigger superpower
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 United
States government’s regime-change apparatus. For instance, National
Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) maintains a
close relationship with Demosistō, 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.
The Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong
Kong submitted a formal complaint with the US consulate general, calling on
the US “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 US 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 US government.
Just days after Trump’s election as president in November 2016, Wong was
back in Washington to appeal for more US 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 US assets, if any… frozen and their
entry to the country denied.”
Wong was then taken on a junket of elite US 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.
Washington’s support for the designated spokesmen of the “retake Hong Kong
movement” was supplement with untold sums of money from US 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 US 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.
From the “Marginal Violence Theory” to the mob violence reality
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 US-backed
regime-change operations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Nicaragua.
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-US 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 opponents with truncheons; attacked a wounded man with a
US 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.
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 US
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 US patrons thousands of miles from the chaos he helped
spark, a movement that defined itself as a “leaderless resistance” forged
ahead back home.
dan cohen
Dan Cohen
Dan Cohen is a journalist and co-producer of the award-winning documentary,
Killing Gaza. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print
dispatches from across Israel-Palestine, Latin America, the US-Mexico border
and Washington DC. Follow him on Twitter at @DanCohen3000.
