A group of 35 lawmakers from the UK, EU and US have called on their nations to block investors from funding companies they have been trying so hard to demonize China based on fake human rights abuses against Uygurs in Xinjiang. 英國、歐盟和美國的 35 名立法者呼籲他們的國家阻止投資者資助他們一直在努力用侵犯新疆維吾爾人假信息妖魔化的中國公司.
Sum up the hypocrisy 總結虛偽
Video: Singtao Newspaper San Francisco – Beijing Winter Olympics big chess game. 1-25-22
美國加州星島日報時事觀察集結號 ：北京冬奧是盤大棋.
主持 ：梁建鋒
主講：趙佐榮 教授(澳洲)
https://youtu.be/L8MXbrAhtos
Video: Kids knows, but many adults don’t know 孩子們也知道，但許多成年人卻不知道
https://vimeo.com/669896594
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/645300406693288/?d=n
Decline of the U.S. Empire – Bin Laden, Trump, and the American Empire 美帝國的衰落 – 本拉登、特朗普和美帝國 by Walden Bello 1-13-2022
Friends, We’ve been cursed, or blessed, by living in “interesting times.” I We face a host of interconnected crises which are almost too painful to enumerate.: the white supremacist authoritarian assault on representative democracy, great power and potentially nuclear confrontations over Ukraine and Taiwan, climate chaos, nuclear arms races, and the pandemic.
These, in turn are fueled and impacted by the decline of the U.S. empire with its disruptions, disorientations and new openings and opportunities.
I’ve been privileged to know and work with Walden Bello since the 1970s. He was a leading opponent of the Marcos dictatorship and played a leading role in ousting massive U.S. military bases in the Philippines. He’s now running for Vice-President in the Philippines. Walden , is among the best, most compassionate, and committed analysts I know. He was awarded the Just Livelihood (alternate Nobel) Prize, and among other books, wrote the very helpful Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right.
Please take the time to read his article on the decline of the American Empire, initially written for Foreign Policy in Focus. You’ll find it clear, accessible and on point.
For Peace, Justice and the Climate,
Joseph
Bin Laden, Trump, and the American Empire
What we can learn from the 20 years between the 9/11 attacks and the January 6 coup attempt.
WALDEN BELLO
January 13, 2022 by Foreign Policy In Focus
The end of 2021 and the beginning of a new year is a convenient time to take stock of the causes of America’s decline.
This past year saw both Washington’s inglorious exit from Afghanistan after 20 years in the country that had served as the launching pad for its direct military intervention in the Middle East and an historic insurrection at the very heart of the empire. Add to this the absolute lack of traction for President Biden’s recent “Democracy Summit” in contrast to Beijing’s surefooted diplomacy, the erosion of an already weak U.S. economy by COVID-19 followed by uncontrolled inflation, and the deepening of the country’s informal but very real civil war—and it is hard to avoid the sense that we are indeed at the end of an era.
The U.S. wasted trillions on fruitless military adventures, but the main economic consequence of the Middle East wars was to boost China’s economic ascent at its expense.
Serving as the bookends of this era were two individuals that stamped their personalities on it: Osama bin Laden at the beginning and Donald Trump at the end.
Varieties of Imperial Decline
Ever since Paul Kennedy wrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historians and others have tried to discover the universal elements of the phenomenon he called “imperial overstretch.”
This might, however, be a futile enterprise. Tolstoy said that all families are unhappy but each of them is unhappy in its own way. The same thing might be said of the end of empires. All empires end, but each exits in its own distinct unhappy fashion.
Bankrupt at the end of the Second World War and facing spiraling financial and political costs as independence movements challenged their hegemony from East Asia to Africa, the British chose to cut their losses and liquidate most of their holdings, passed the task of ruling to indigenous elites, and largely left the defense of global capitalism to the Americans.
The French chose to hang on despite defeat in Indochina and a bloody stalemate in Algeria and could only be persuaded to give the latter independence when renegade military men threatened to take over the government itself to continue the empire. The Soviet Union was largely dissolved by a domestic reform effort that ran out of control, though defeat in Afghanistan made a not insignificant contribution.
Like the ascent to the zenith of empire, the descent from it does not follow a predetermined path but one that is shaped by contingencies, many of them surprising and unexpected.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the U.S. had staved off the economic challenge of Japan and seen the political and military challenge posed by the Soviets dissipate. Moreover, it seemed to have thrown off the “Vietnam Syndrome” with its victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. The American Empire appeared to be experiencing a second wind.
At this juncture, the choices for maintaining the empire boiled down to two. One, identified with the Democrats, favored the U.S. ruling via a multilateral economic order undergirded by the supremacy of its corporations and a liberal global political order propped up by unchallenged American military power and promoted by the “soft power” of liberal democracy. The other was championed by neoconservatives largely ensconced in the Republican Party who claimed the “unipolar” status of the United States provided a unique opportunity for reordering the world to the lasting advantage of the United States both strategically and economically—and demanded unilateral action to bring that about.
The debate between these two visions of the imperial future dominated American politics during the eight-year reign of the Democrats presided over by Bill Clinton.
Under the succeeding Republican administration of George W. Bush, US power was primed to do just what the neoconservatives wanted. It was, however, not predetermined that the Middle East would be the prime target of their global push to reorder the world. Tension with China was high in the first months of the new administration, with the Pentagon, in fact, identifying Beijing no longer as a strategic partner, as the Clinton administration did, but as a strategic rival. A new Cold War could have been launched at that juncture, with a China that was much, much weaker militarily and economically relative to the U.S. than it is now.
What made the difference in the fateful calculations of the neocons was one man: Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden’s Historic Role
Bin Laden puts paid to those historians who belittle the role of personality in history. For what he did, probably without intending it, was direct U.S. military power to Afghanistan and the broader Middle East with his attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
Bin Laden hoped to create a hundred Islamic insurgencies by boldly baiting the Great Satan, much like Che Guevara hoped to create more Cubas in Latin America with his guerrilla experiment in Bolivia. Bin Laden failed in bringing about the purifying Islamic revolutions he sought, but he was wildly successful in a way he had not intended. For his move gave the American neocons the opportunity for the military action they had devoutly wished for to enable them to consolidate their new unipolar order.
Desire did not, however, end up with the object of desire, for the terrain in which the U.S. chose to wage an “exemplary war” to teach the rest of the world to get out of the way of America’s hegemonic mission turned out to be populated by people, Afghans and Iraqis, who were no pushovers.
Bush II got the war he wanted but not the outcome he sought. Instead of his legions coming back home in triumph, they were plunged into what quickly became a quicksand from which they could not be extricated for two decades, and then only in shame and defeat under a Democratic administration in 2021.
The Economic Consequences of the Forever Wars
Being pinned down in what critics called the “forever wars” in the Middle East had momentous political and economic consequences for the United States. Washington set aside its definition of China as a strategic rival and sought instead to enlist Beijing as an ally in its “war on terror.” China obliged, but devoted most of its efforts to economic diplomacy to gain markets and cultivate good relations with countries in the Global South, a contrast with Washington’s bellicose behavior that did not go unnoticed.
The U.S. wasted trillions on fruitless military adventures, but the main economic consequence of the Middle East wars was to boost China’s economic ascent at its expense.
With China reaffirmed as a political ally, the U.S. transnational corporations that had promoted the entente with China in their search for cheap labor during the Clinton presidency accelerated the transfer of their manufacturing processes to China, making the 16 years of the Bush II and Obama administrations a period of irreversible deindustrialization. Thousands of factories closed down in the industrial heartland in the Midwest and Northeast and at least 2.5 million high paying manufacturing jobs were lost to what some economists called the “China Shock.”
China’s rise to industrial prominence was not, in other words, predetermined. Bin Laden’s baiting the U.S.—and Washington taking the bait—was a major reason why the China-TNC alliance continued and gathered force during the Bush II presidency instead of being sidelined by strategic concerns about China that were prominent both at the Pentagon and the neocons during Bush’s first months in office.
Alternative Routes from Capitalism’s Crisis of Profitability
If the U.S. being bogged down in the Middle East and China’s benefiting from this were not predetermined, some would claim that the broad contours of economic change, at least in the U.S., were but the unfolding in time of contradictions already present at the heart of the premier capitalist country.
True, already in the 1970s and 1980s, the rate of profit had plunged from its postwar high of 16 percent in the early 1950s to around 6 percent. True, accessing cheap labor in the global South, where wages were a fraction of those in the United States, was certainly seen as a key solution. Still, breaking the social democratic compromise between labor and capital undergirded by Keynesian technocratic economics, where social peace was the quid pro quo for relatively high wages and limited profits, was no easy, largely predetermined process.
Even before China came into the picture in the 1990s, two “superstructural” factors were decisive in conditioning the way capital would respond to the crisis of profitability, one that would clear the way for the massive migration of U.S. jobs there.
The first was political in nature. The showdown between Ronald Reagan and PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, in 1981 became the key battle for U.S. labor’s future, and Reagan’s victory, like Margaret Thatcher’s triumph over the miners in Britain, made the rest of management’s campaign to break unions a mopping up operation. As in Britain, had the AFL-CIO come out in full support of the PATCO strike and had the air controllers won, it is conceivable that the right’s offensive to destroy labor’s power could have been slowed down, if not stopped, and neoliberalism’s triumph could have been averted or, at the least, been much less thorough. The political consequences of concrete class struggles can never be underestimated.
The other critical condition for capital’s triumph in the 1980s and 1990s was ideological in character. With the 1970s U.S. economy stuck in the “stagflation” whose underlying cause was the crisis of profitability, a revived classical market economics centered at the University of Chicago came to the rescue. Neoliberalism faulted state intervention as the central cause of U.S. economic stagnation, and capital, politicians, and academics united in a common cause for sweeping deregulation.
This political and ideological coalition was not, however, inevitable. Had the Democratic Party remained faithful to its New Deal roots and social democratic academics put up more of an intellectual fight, neoliberalism’s rise could have encountered more resistance that, at the least, could have made its hegemony more fragile, a point to which we will return later.
In any event, it was the virtually unopposed neoliberal counterrevolution that made possible the corporate capture of public policy in the 1980s and 1990s, a development that set the stage for the large-scale transfer of American factories and jobs to China over the next two decades. Moreover, with their assertion, more by fiat than by proof, that market forces had “determined” that the U.S. competitive advantage no longer lay in manufacturing, the neoliberals not only promoted deindustrialization but, equally significant, the wholesale “financialization” of the U.S. economy.
Financialization was a process that involved focusing on the financial sector as the cutting edge of the economy owing to the greater returns on investment it offered compared to industry; promoting debt-driven consumption as the engine of growth; and converting workers from wage-earners to “shareholders” in U.S. corporations, thus reconciling labor and capital.
This “new” American economy created by neoliberalism was alleged to have entered a “mature” phase of permanent prosperity known as the “Great Moderation” in the 2000s. It fell apart with a vengeance with the financial crisis of 2008, which ushered in years of stagnation and high unemployment that gutted the economy of what dynamism it had left.
By the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, China, while still just the world’s second biggest economy, had clearly displaced the U.S. as the center of global accumulation, accounting for 28 percent in global growth in 2019, more than twice the share of the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund.
Trump and the Crisis of the Imperial Order
But endless wars and the unraveling of the financialized U.S. economy are insufficient to explain the drastic decline of the empire from “unipolarism” to severe dislocation in less than two decades. One must bring into the equation the unfolding of what I have called the informal civil war in the United States. Central to explaining this cancer eating at the heart of the American political system was the evolution of white supremacy as a political and ideological force.
While the Republican Party had exploited the racial insecurities of the white population successfully since the late 1960s through the so-called “Southern Strategy” and racist dog whistle politics, it was not predetermined that white supremacy would become the dominant stream in conservative, right-wing politics that would subordinate and fuse with other streams such as cultural and religious conservatism, anti-liberalism, and populist disdain for scientific expertise.
Again, this was not inevitable. A key contribution to the expansion and consolidation of white supremacy was the defection from the Democratic Party of large sections of its white working class base—the pillar of the once solid “New Deal Coalition” put together by Franklin Delano Roosevelt—as “Third Way” Democrats from Clinton to Barack Obama legitimized and led in promoting neoliberal policies that had such a damaging consequences on the jobs and income of workers.
The Democratic Party leadership’s surrender to neoliberalism has been well analyzed by Thomas Piketty, who noted that the base of the party from the 1960s on increasingly became composed of people with relatively high levels of education—professionals, academics, intellectuals, and even managers. The relatively well educated leadership of the party increasingly responded to the interests of these like-minded followers, resulting in many in the old union, working class base being steadily alienated from them.
Increasingly, what Piketty terms the “Brahmin Left” in the Democratic Party represented by the Clintons and Obama found a coincidence of intellectual and material interests with conservatives traditionally ensconced in the Republican Party. Their common agenda came to be espousal of neoliberalism, with the difference that the Democrats favored neoliberalism with “safety nets.” This ideological convergence assured that while the independent left would be loud in its denunciation of neoliberalism, the dominant political response to neoliberalism would not come from the left but from another quarter when the right conjuncture emerged.
That conjuncture came with the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2008. Its volatile mix of high unemployment and high inequality provided an indispensable context for white supremacy’s breaking out to become the driving force of the politics of the white population, a development that took liberals and others by surprise.
Still, it could not have turned into the virulent, destabilizing movement it became were it not for one man. This brings us again to the role of personality, a factor that at certain historical junctures can become decisive. It was a volatile opportunist with weak ties to either the Republican establishment or Democratic establishment who elevated white supremacy from one of several streams of American right-wing politics to its hegemonic status.
In the 2016 elections, Donald Trump smelled an opportunity that a Democratic leadership tied to Wall Street ignored. By tying the crisis created by deindustrialization, financialization, and neoliberalism to anti-migrant rhetoric and dog whistle anti-black appeals in a boisterous, redneck-captivating style, he was able to break through to the white working class that had already given signals earlier that it was ripe to be mobilized along racial lines.
The culmination of that process was the January 6 insurrection, a battle that Trump lost which may actually serve as a prelude to his winning the war, just as the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 prefigured Hitler’s gaining power in 1933.
A Third Wind?
As the era 2001 to 2021 comes to an end, the American empire continues to be dominant, but its pillars have been severely eroded.
Its ability to discipline the rest of the world has been shattered by its defeat in Afghanistan. Its credibility even among its western allies as a reliable partner is at an all-time low. Its economy may still be the largest in the word, but it is no longer the center of global capital accumulation and confronts the prospect of its unraveling accelerating—especially now that the $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” social and climate public spending bill that was supposed to be its program for revitalization faces uncertain approval in a deeply divided Congress. Meanwhile white supremacist politics has become the hegemonic force in the politics of the white population, creating not only deep polarization but an existential threat to the world’s oldest democracy itself.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S. empire seemed to have a second wind, appearing to have put the “Vietnam Syndrome” behind it and its economy apparently gliding into a prosperous maturity. As events proved, that illusory second wind was short lived.
A third wind is, of course, a theoretical possibility. But while we should be wary of deterministic projections, how such a rejuvenation can take place is much, much less evident today. Each empire descends from the zenith in its own unique way, but if there is one path that is broadly similar to that being trodden by the United States, it is that of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Like the Ottomans then, the United States now is a very sick empire, faced abroad by powerful challenges to its hegemony, eroded by economic stagnation, shorn of ideological legitimacy, and torn apart internally by a civil war in all but name.
© 2021 Foreign Policy In Focus
WALDEN BELLO
Walden Bello is the co-founder and current senior analyst of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South and the International Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, in 2003, and was named Outstanding Public Scholar of the International Studies Association in 2008. His books include: “Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right” (2019) and “Capitalism’s Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity” (2013).
Video: What the US Really Wants from Southeast Asia 美國真正想從東南亞得到什麼
https://vimeo.com/669665218
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/644958626727466/?d=n
The US attempts once again to “pivot” to Asia – and Southeast Asia in particular – but talk of “engaging” with the region is a smokescreen for yet another push to either co-opt and turn the region against China or divide and destroy the region to spite China. 美國再次試圖“轉向”亞洲 – 尤其是東南亞 – 但談論與該地區“接觸”是又一次推動要么拉攏該地區反對中國，要么分裂並摧毀亞洲的煙幕。 地區與中國抗衡.
Focus on nations like Laos and Cambodia – already reaping the benefits of moving out from under the shadow of generations of Western imperialism – are targets of Washington for being pulled back in and subjugated. 關注像老撾和柬埔寨這樣的國家 – 已經從幾代西方帝國主義的陰影下獲得了自由 – 是華盛頓被拉回和征服的目標.
Jessie Tong: Thoughts on the New Year
When we were young, we pined for the new year,
Now we dread it.
One year passes after another,
And now we are in our twilight years.
On looking back,
60 years passed in the twinkling of an eye,
We were innocent in our childhood,
Idealist in our adolescence,
Hardworking in our youth,
Struggling in our middle years,
Formed our characters in our strongest years,
Resting in our retirement years.
The new year is soon upon us,
Treasure every year,
Nurture yourselves,
We don’t ask to live for a hundred years,
We ask to live in peace.
Video: US-Funded regime change “NGOs” Panic as Thailand Prepares New NGO Transparency Law 隨著泰國準備新的非政府組織透明度法，美國資助的政權更迭“非政府組織”恐慌
https://vimeo.com/669460869
https://youtu.be/Vi14foXoZN4
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/644705370086125/?d=n
Thailand is passing a new NGO law that will require greater transparency from nongovernmental organizations. However, these organizations are resisting the bill despite wide public support for it – clearly because they have much to hide.
I discuss how many of these “NGOs” are in fact funded by foreign governments and engaged in sedition – how they have actively covered up their funding and their true agenda while posing disingenuously as “independent media” or “human rights” organizations.
New York Times: Some members of Congress have strangely good timing when it comes to stock investments. By David Leonhardt 1-24-22
Selling at the right time
In an academic paper published a few years ago, an economist named Serkan Karadas highlighted a suspicious pattern: Members of Congress earned higher than average returns on their stock investments.
The findings suggested that at least some Congress members were profiting off their jobs. With inside knowledge about forthcoming policy changes or economic developments, the members could buy stocks shortly before they rose in price or sell them shortly before they fell.
There have been several high-profile examples in recent years that seem to fit that pattern. In each case, the members say they did nothing inappropriate:
Tom Price, a former Georgia congressman (and later Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services), repeatedly traded health care stocks, including a discounted purchase through a special offer from an Australian drug company.
Representative John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat, bought several cannabis stocks while promoting bills favorable to the industry, as Judd Legum of Popular Information reported.
Several senators — including Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat; and Kelly Loeffler and Richard Burr, both Republicans — sold stocks after receiving a private briefing on Covid-19 weeks after the discovery of the first case in China.
Similarly, Senator David Perdue, a Georgia Republican who was an active trader while in the Senate, bought shares in companies that stood to benefit from the pandemic, like Pfizer and Netflix.
The wife of Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, bought stock in Gilead Sciences, which makes a Covid antiviral drug, in the pandemic’s early weeks.
In all, members of Congress and their immediate families bought more than $260 million worth of assets and sold more than $360 million last year, my colleagues at DealBook have reported. Karadas’s research found that many of the outsize stock gains in recent years flowed to high-ranking Republicans.
‘A huge conflict’
A bipartisan group of Congress members is now trying to put a stop to these trades. They have proposed bills that would require Congress members to place their holdings in a blind trust, operated by somebody else. A separate bill would bar members and senior congressional aides from buying and selling individual stocks.
The bills’ sponsors include Senators Jon Ossoff, Mark Kelly, Jeff Merkley and Representative Abigail Spanberger, all Democrats, and Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Chip Roy, both Republicans.
“It is a huge conflict of interest for someone to be trading in, say, pharmaceutical stocks at the same time as making policy for pharmaceutical companies,” Merkley, who represents Oregon, told NPR.
Spanberger told The Washington Post that she and Roy, who are sponsoring a bill together, were both “disgusted” by the current situation. “If placing limitations on how we can buy and sell stock makes it so that someone trusts us a bit more — Congress doesn’t have a great approval rating — I think that is a quote-unquote sacrifice we should make,” said Spanberger, who represents a swing district in Virginia.
For now, the bills seem unlikely to become law, partly because they lack the support of Democratic leaders. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, has argued that members of Congress deserve the same freedom as other Americans to buy and sell stocks. “We are a free-market economy,” Pelosi said last month. Members of Congress “should be able to participate in that.”
Critics respond that Congress members are different from everybody else, because of their access to sensitive information. The critics also argue that people who enjoy the privilege of serving in Congress have a responsibility to put the public trust above their own financial interests; if they would rather not do so, they can join the private sector.
Michelle Cottle, a Times Opinion writer, wrote that Pelosi’s position seemed “a wee bit out of touch” given many Americans’ economic frustrations. Helaine Olen of The Washington Post has written: “Neither bill demands major financial sacrifice. But it’s still asking too much for some.”
Congress did tighten the rules on itself in 2012, through a law known as the Stock Act. It prohibits members from making trades based on privileged information and requires them to disclose any trades within 45 days. But the law has failed to prevent problematic trades — much as early critics of it, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, predicted.
Why? Proving that a specific trade stemmed from a specific piece of information is so difficult that prosecutors have never brought charges based on the law. And dozens of members and their aides have ignored the disclosure requirement, according to the publication Insider. The standard first-time fine for failing to report a trade on time is only $200.
All of which suggests that members of Congress will continue to profit from their access to sensitive information, unless they eventually pass a new bill that restricts trading.
Related: Three top Federal Reserve officials have resigned in the past year after being criticized for their trades. “The conduct is beyond reprehensible,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, a watchdog group, told me. The Fed has since tightened its rules.
Video: US Color Revolution in Hong Kong / Under the surface, a very different HK story BY Michael Edesess 美國經濟學者目擊反修例暴亂、美國顏色革命揭破與西方報道不一樣真相！
https://vimeo.com/669384035
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/644589393431056/?d=n
反修例風波嘅真相不應被掩蓋，西方一面倒嘅表述亦不應為呢場暴亂定性，希望好似Michael Edesess的聲音可以被更多人聽到！
US Color Revolution in Hong Kong
The widely reported narrative that Beijing tried to impose a law to snatch dissidents from Hong Kong in 2019 was never true
Peaceful demonstrators quickly fled the protests as they realized something dark, violent, and well-organized lay just below the surface
The media simply relayed stories and numbers they were given by one side, failing to do their jobs to investigate and report
The allegation that “police brutality” was the issue was simply false: Hong Kong is a low-crime city with good relations between citizens and law enforcement
THERE ARE TWO STORIES about what happened in Hong Kong in 2019.
One, portrayed in Western media, says Beijing broke its “one country, two systems” promise and encroached on the freedoms of Hongkongers, who bravely responded with massive pro-democracy protests that were met with police brutality.
The other says that organizers of violent riots were funded by the U.S. to pay rioters and special consultants who taught them how to make the compliant Western press write that they were pro-democracy protesters fighting against repression and police brutality.
Guess which one is true.
EYEWITNESS EVIDENCE
Unlike the multitude of offshore armchair commentators expressing their views on the violent social upheaval that began in June 2019, I lived in Hong Kong through that period, as did Nury Vittachi, whose eyewitness investigative journalism I will discuss.
We each saw, directly, what was happening.
NEW YORK TIMES FEATURE
On October 14, 2014, an op-ed was published in The New York Times titled, “Hong Kong’s Pop Culture of Protest,” by Vittachi, a Sri Lanka-born journalist living and writing in Hong Kong since 1987.
The op-ed celebrated the protest known as the “Umbrella Movement” that was under way in Hong Kong at the time. Vittachi explained that the protest was about “rejecting the influence of Beijing over Hong Kong’s next election.”
I visited the central site of that protest at that time, and I, too, felt the celebratory atmosphere. Protests in two of the busiest areas of Hong Kong, the business district known as Central, and Nathan Road, the main thoroughfare in the Mongkok district, had filled the streets and brought traffic to a standstill. The double-decker buses that traverse Nathan Road, near where I lived – as many as hundreds per hour – had found ways around the blockages and were otherwise carrying on as usual, as if they were genially accommodating the protests.
The 2014 protest was well-organized and well-led, with large numbers of expensive tents. Image by Underbar DK/ Wikimedia Commons
When I visited the protest site in Central, I marvelled at its vast expanse of colourful upscale tents, of the type you find at Patagonia. They were shelters for the huge number of protesters camped out there.
My first thought was, “When this is over, perhaps the city planners will realize what a boon to the city it would be to turn this downtown area into a pedestrian mall.”
I also thought for a brief moment, “I wonder how they pay for all these tents? They aren’t cheap.” Hong Kong is a rich city, though most of its residents aren’t.
CONFUSED MESSAGE
Another thought that occurred to me was that if someone didn’t know who the leader of this movement was, they would think it was John Lennon, because his picture was everywhere and his song, “Imagine,” filled the air.
This was curious because the protests were presumably anti-Communist, but Lennon himself described the song as “virtually the Communist Manifesto,” with its dreams of ending private property and religion.
THE BACKGROUND
In 1842, Hong Kong island was seized by force during the Opium War from China by Britain. Additional territory was added to the city later, with the largest part area-wise, the New Territories, being annexed in 1898 by a 99-year gunboat-lease agreement with China. Therefore, it seemed appropriate to China to request the entire city back at the end of that lease in 1997.
A waxwork reconstruction of the 1984 meeting between Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher at a Shenzhen visitor attraction. Picture by Brücke-Osteuropa/ Wikimedia Commons
An agreement was struck in the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 for the territory to be handed back to China in 1997. That event was subsequently called “the handover.”
In the joint declaration, China agreed that Hong Kong would be governed by a doctrine of “one country, two systems,” in which it would keep its form of government, legal systems and policies including its free speech and press traditions for at least 50 years following the handover.
This agreement was to be elaborated in a Hong Kong mini-constitution known as the Basic Law, negotiated by a committee of Hong Kong and mainland China officials.
UNDEMOCRATIC PAST
One provision of the Basic Law was that Hong Kong’s chief executive – its top official – would be elected by universal suffrage, something that had never happened when the British were in charge. Although 92% of Hong Kong’s population are Chinese, the chief executive under the British was an unelected British official appointed by the Queen.
The actual wording of the provision is as follows:
“The method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and in accordance with the principle of gradual and orderly progress. The ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.”
Hongkongers had agitated after the handover for realization of that provision. In August 2014 Hong Kong’s civil service finally promulgated a process by which the chief executive would be elected. The election would be by universal suffrage, but the nominees would be screened and vetted by a 1,200-strong committee of Hongkongers, much the same committee that had been electing the chief executive since the handover. The majority of that committee were representatives of Hong Kong business communities. Since they did a lot of business with the mainland, it was believed – generally correctly – that they tended to have mainland sympathies, or to be “pro-Beijing.”
UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE REJECTED
Many Hongkongers who had been participating in peaceful pro-democracy protests over the years – including Vittachi – interpreted this as a failure to adhere to the promise of free elections, though it was definitely not in violation of the Basic Law’s actual wording. Vittachi, a widely-read journalist in Hong Kong, gave rise to a viral meme by saying that the proposal to vet the nominees amounted to a “choose your own puppet” election.
The pan-democrats – the pro-democracy faction – rejected the offer.
The unfortunate result, from Hong Kong’s perspective – and from everybody else’s, it turns out – was that the chief executive continued to be elected by that 1,200-strong committee, not by universal suffrage.
NEED FOR EXTRADITION LAW
Hong Kong was behind other jurisdictions in the passing of an extradition law recommended by the United Nations Model Treaty on Extradition, which “urges all States to strengthen further international co-operation in criminal justice” and “urges Member States to inform the Secretary-General periodically of efforts undertaken to establish extradition arrangements.”
Most jurisdictions worldwide had extradition treaties with most other jurisdictions worldwide, but Hong Kong had few.
As Vittachi noted, “Britain had signed extradition treaties with numerous countries with utterly abysmal human rights records, such as Iraq and Zimbabwe. America had signed deals with the Congo, Myanmar and El Salvador, among others.”
MURDER MOST FOUL
When a Hong Kong man murdered his pregnant girlfriend during a joint holiday in Taiwan, and then escaped back to Hong Kong, he could not be tried for murder as Hong Kong criminal law does not apply in Taiwan.
A gruesome murder in Taiwan — Chan Tong-kai did not deny that he had killed Poon Hiu-wing (left); Police pictures
Neither could he be extradited due to that lack of a legal framework. This prompted Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam to take care of unfinished business by proposing an extradition law for Hong Kong in February 2019.
But the Hong Kong protestor inclination was to view this as a way for Beijing to snatch political protestors and try them in the mainland. (This inclination was fuelled by the fact that there had been incidents of Hong Kong booksellers who sold books critical of high-level mainland political figures being snatched, though it was not known how this happened or who did it.)
The proposed law would allow nothing of the sort, but it was seen nonetheless as another threat to the one country, two systems model.
SCARE STORIES
As a result, after scare stories about the proposed law had circulated widely, a massive peaceful protest took place on June 9. The protest leaders told the international media that a million people had participated in the march, and the international (i.e., Western) media dutifully printed that without checking. But any systematic count would have revealed that the number of marchers was far less.
It was, nevertheless, a massive turnout. Chief Executive Carrie Lam responded by welcoming the peaceful protest. But after more such protests, she responded to popular sentiment and withdrew the bill.
UTTER CHAOS
In spite of the withdrawal of the bill – to cover the next six months very, very briefly – the protests continued, then descended into utter chaos.
A violent faction became prevalent, commandeering the streets, invading, trashing and desecrating Hong Kong’s legislature (called Legco), hurling petrol bombs and bricks pried loose from Hong Kong’s streets at police and eventually shooting arrows, some flaming, and launching the bricks and bombs using catapults.
Shockingly violent incidents began on June 9, 2019 and continued for months, with almost all of Hong Kong’s MTR stations damaged, and huge amounts of damage to people and property. Image by Studio Incendio/ Unsplash
The protestors swarmed into Hong Kong’s metro stations and broke everything they could. They demolished Hong Kong’s world-class malls and stores and businesses that had any perceived relationships to mainland people or even to Mandarin speakers (Hong Kong’s spoken language is Cantonese while Mandarin is spoken on the mainland).
They killed one innocent bystander, set another on fire and beat up many who disagreed with them. They wounded many police officers, some severely.
In the end, they took over two university campuses, where they occupied bridges over heavily trafficked highways and threw large objects down on the traffic, set up weapons manufacturing stations, and battled police.
POLICE BLAMED
The rioters blamed the police, claiming “police brutality.” They spread rumors that police had killed a number of protestors, perhaps thousands.
Through all this, the Western press continued to call the riots “pro-democracy protests,” and the cause of those protests suppression by Beijing.
The much larger group of peaceful protesters drifted away from the demonstrations and no longer participated. Most of the erstwhile leaders of that group, called the pan-dems or pan-democrats, did not roundly condemn the rioters, not even when they presented their absurd “five demands, not one less!” which included the non-negotiable demands that they all be granted amnesty and that their protests not be called riots.
One of Vittachi’s readers made the Dave Barry-like comment: “They are literally rioting to protest against being defined as rioters,” he said, amazed. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
SCALES FALL FROM OUR EYES
In his book, “The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong,” published in December 2020, Vittachi explained what happened.
Anyone with an interest in what has been happening in Hong Kong should read it, whether they have the least predisposition to agree with it or not.
Although nearly everybody in the United States will vehemently deny this, and say that it is propaganda from Beijing, it is obvious that it has much more than a grain of truth in it.
It is the truth.
PETROL BOMB TRAINING
Vittachi, in his role as a peripatetic journalist in Hong Kong for over 30 years, has cultivated a large number of followers and contacts, many of whom send him emails and messages and serve as his extended eyes and ears.
These people include financial executives as well as ordinary Hong Kong wives and mothers, students, and other contacts. Vittachi maintains “offices” at various coffee shops around the city where he meets with people to chat and get local opinions and observations.
He teaches courses at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the largest university in the city and was able to visit it during the last and final and most intense battle in November 2019, when the rioters occupied the campus and were surrounded by police.
The view from inside the burned-out Polytechnic University shows seven black-clad men guarding the entrance bridge. The world was told that the students were occupying the university, but out of about 1,600-occupiers, only 46 had any connection with the university. Picture by Nury Vittachi
There, he says, “I watched men train younger people how to do a long run-up and then release their missiles at ‘about 42 degrees’ so that they flew in a graceful curving arc, smashing into a pillar in the distance. In another area, masked archers were practicing the use of high-technology bow and arrow sets. Over in the swimming pool area, men were experimenting with different substances for Molotov cocktails to see which spread the furthest and burned for the longest period.”
THE REAL STORY
His network of ordinary Hongkongers and informers at high levels brought him the real story. The protestors were neither students nor at the universities but hired rioters.
When the occupiers of Hong Kong Polytechnic University finally gave up and filed out and surrendered to the police, it was found that of about 1,600 occupiers, only 46 had any relation to the university.
CASH WAS FLOWING
“Adults, youths, school children, and even domestic helpers have told me that they have been offered cash in significant amounts – sometimes thousands of Hong Kong dollars – to join the protests. Teachers tell me children from their schools, kids who were clearly under 18, were offered HK$300 each (that’s about US$40) to bulk up the numbers at protests. They just needed to turn up in black and do some shouting, throw a few bricks and that sort of thing.”
Who was paying them? “This year alone,” says Vittachi, “the U.S. has budgeted $643,000 (HK$5 million) for pro-U.S. anti-China activists in Hong Kong through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA’s regime-change arm – but other large sums are being sent through other groups. These include the Open Technology Fund, which presents itself on its website as a non-profit independent organization but is a U.S. government-led operation to boost protester organizations’ communications capabilities.”
REVOLUTION CONSULTANTS
You don’t believe this? But it should be obvious. The United States has been funding government destabilization efforts in many countries for 70 years – and worse. Why should it be different now?
Part of the money was used to pay professional protest consultants, some of them from Serbia who were experienced from their anti-Milosevitch work, to teach protesters how to stage their activities so that journalists and photographers are led to photograph lone protesters being wrestled to the ground by police, feeding allegations of “police brutality.”
THE AFTERMATH
The stories the protesters told the Western media were almost all lies, but the Western media sopped them up.
Police brutality was not the cause of the riots. Police killed no one and harmed very few, considering the level of violence of the rioters. Vittachi noted that “The most recent Police Service Satisfaction Survey at the time was the one taken just last year, in 2018, in which 84% of respondents were either ‘quite satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the overall service performance of the police. Furthermore, 79% of respondents were either ‘quite confident’ or ‘very confident’ in the police.”
In any other city around the world, the military would have been called out to deal with that level of violence: but Hong Kong’s circumstances meant that the job was left to the local police. Image by Oscar Chan/Pexels
The United States should have such a police force. Referring to the way the story was reported by the Western media, Vittachi says: “Hong Kong police had instantly and miraculously been transformed overnight from one of the best-loved police forces in the world to the most brutal police force in the world.”
RIOTERS HOPED FOR BEIJING TANKS
The Hong Kong police, overwhelmed by the rioters, mostly stood back and let things happen, to preserve order as best they could in a very crowded city with substantial fire hazard from the Molotov cocktails that the rioters were throwing – even in underground MTR stations – and to avoid causing any deaths or serious injuries. Remembering Beijing’s brutal crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989 – an event that was annually commemorated by Hong Kong’s protest movement – there was a fear that Beijing would have to step in to quell the riots, and such a crackdown would occur again.
In fact, that was probably what the rioters – and their U.S.-based handlers – hoped for.
BEIJING’S SURPRISING PATIENCE
But instead, Beijing took a velvet-glove approach. The Hong Kong Basic Law had specified that:
“The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies.”
This would not be much different from security laws in many other countries, including the US, Australia, and numerous others.
But the Hong Kong government had not been able to enact such a law when it tried in 2003 due to the protest movement and suspicion of Beijing. Now, Beijing simply imposed such a law, and the Hong Kong government has been enforcing it strictly, applying it to those persons in Hong Kong who provided encouragement, aid and support to the violent riots and coordinated with foreign powers, most specifically the US.
This may not have been the endgame that anybody wanted, but at least Beijing didn’t crack down violently.
REPORTER’S REGRET
Vittachi now regrets that he didn’t support accepting Beijing’s half-a-loaf offer of democratic election of Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2014. I had written in 2016 that Hong Kong’s democracy seekers needed to go slow, but the recommendation was not taken.
“That was the key moment,” Vittachi says, “when Hong Kong could have moved towards being a Western-style democracy. But we missed it.”
And this is true. With the aid of the United States, Hong Kong was shifted from the path of greater – if not perfect – democracy to the path, at least for the time being, of less democracy.
Thanks a lot for the help.
Vittachi says of his long history of marching for Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” ideal, “We were marching not against China, but in favor of China being its best self.”
Michael Edesess is an economist and mathematician. An adjunct associate professor and visiting faculty member at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he is also managing partner and special advisor at M1K LLC, and a research associate of the Edhec-Risk Institute.
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