The US involvement in the HK “Democracy Now” movement.

Here, in this article, we look at the United States involvement with HK. We [1] study how the United States uses Hong Kong to exert pressure on China for trade and geopolitical advantage. We also [2] take a look at the various people “behind the scenes” that are pushing for American involvement, for their own personal gain. Finally, [3] we study the role that the American media plays that the stereotypes that they cultivate in order to manipulate Americans. This is perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the USA / China involvement in Hong Kong that you will find on the internet.

For starters, you the reader should recognize that global politics are often complicated, and convoluted. People will say one thing and then do the other. That there are forces, all with their own agendas, manipulating, jockeying, and vying for positions of power and advantage. All of this takes place on a canvas that is painted by the media. Often, a picture that doesn’t at all resemble what is actually going on behind the scene.

Or has everyone forgotten the "Trump is going to prison for conspiring with Russia to steal the election" narrative from the mainstream media from 20016 though to 2019?

The HK / USA / China issue is typical in geo-political posturing. It is like an onion. It really is.

You look at the onion, and you see the outside as portrayed to you. Much like how you observe the news media reporting. Then, you peel away the first layer. There you see the actions, and turmoil behind the scene. Your eyes will often burn. Because the truth what is going on was unknown to you. You then peel away the second layer, and find out just how deep all this goes.

You continue deeper and deeper.

You peel each layer away, one by one. And then finally you reach the true truth of the matter and take a good hard look at what is involved. In this particular situation, there are nine (x9) levels or layers of this “onion”. Ah, yes, and in this article we will investigate each one.

Here, we will proceed forward and address this issue in all of it’s complexity. We will move forward from the outside inward, and study each layer in relative detail.

The layers in this issue are;

• News media reporting and bias.
• Constructed and cultivated stereotypes.
• The actual physical events.
• The people who caused the events.
• The people who are driving the events forward and pushing.
• The people who provide financial support, training, and logistics.
• The rise of the risks involved.
• Reactions and the casualties of war.
• The root effects; the trade relationships between the USA, HK and China.

As such, we will begin here…

News media reporting and bias.

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 believable considering [1] the carefully managed narrative of the US government. As well as [2] the mainstream American media apparatus. Yeah, I get it. Even VP Mike Pence repeats this ludicrous narrative. But come on! Do you really think that the world believes this? After Syria? After Libya?

What? You think that the Chinese will believe that you are sincere?

This GIF pretty much sums up how it looks like to the rest of the world…

I believe that the Hong Kong protest is influenced by the US.

The rioters are well-trained, organized and commanded, knowing what  to do and when to do it, they have a united uniform, they know where the  cameras are and they know how to disable them, they know how to fight  against tear gas. 

The violent protests are not simply targeting the  extradition law amendment bill, but also aiming to throw Hong Kong into  disarray, to drag down the SAR government. 

- Ty Yang (Hong Kong , China) 

You think that they do not have informants? You think that HK is independent and immune from Chinese mainland observation? You think China doesn’t have cameras, video surveillance, wiretaps on telephones, and are not monitoring their insurgents?

Of course they are. And of course, they know full well what is going on. They know.

Keep your hands off Hong Kong! 

US has no authority to lecture China on  our own sovereign territory. How can US warmongers like Mike Pence even  have the legitimacy to talk about HK, when the US is still illegally  militarily occupying Syria with their US bases. Syria gave no permission  for the US to build bases in Syria. How can the US think they have any  god-given right to smack to China? 

-  MrBudha888 (China)  

And we shouldn’t take their (apparent) lack of action on these matters as a weakness. Instead, we should consider it with the upmost caution. They do not make decisions based on what they see on CNN. They make their decisions off other criteria.

So it would be the height of follow to assume that the Chinese are simpletons, backwards, inept, and foolish. They are not. They know the game, and how it is played. They have over 5000 years of political intrigue, and they most certainly will not base their decisions off of what they see on the news.

The suspicion of US manipulation behind the scenes is gaining traction in the online world. 

The US has gained notoriety for using subterfuge to interfere with other sovereignty's affairs. 

It's not like the world is oblivious to that. 

- Joseph Kuan (US) 

This reporting has been very “black and white”.

They report that the protests are some kind of organic “pro-democracy” expression of young idealistic grassroots youth. That they only want “freedom”, American style “democracy”, and a “slice of the American pie”. They just do not want to be considered Chinese, and they certainly don’t want anything to do with mainland China.

Oh. If only it were TRUE…

However, a look beneath the surface of this oversimplified, made-for-television script reveals the truth.

It’s all a stack of cards. It’s all an illusion. It’s all a manipulation. It’s all a line and nonsense. And the Chinese are all well-aware of this.

US is everywhere in other countries' affairs! What a joke!
  
Nothing will distract China from focusing on economic development and  raising the standard of living for the 1.4 billion Chinese people.
  
The US should do the same, concentrating its resources and energy to  improve American people's lives. There is so much more to be desired for  the most advanced country of the world. 

- Miyya Z (China) 

The truth is that there is a small but extremely vocal and well-funded, ferociously anti-Chinese network behind the demonstrations. They hate China. They really, seriously do.

But, it’s more than just hating China.

They hate America as well. They also hate Britain. They are so filled with hate that you would think that they were members of the American terrorist groups Antifa, and BLM. I mean, after all, they look like them, they act like them, and they use the exact same strategies as their American counterparts, the Antifa.

What? You think the Antifa and BLM love America? That’s what you think?

But they will cover up and hide their hate. Most of the time they will put on masks and pretend to be something else. They will act nice and courteous, and seem and appear reasonable. Anything to obtain their goals.

Frangfang (Hong Kong, China)

The US is linking the current situation in Hong Kong to the US-China  trade negotiations, using Hong Kong as leverage to pressure compromise  from China. Such 'bargaining', in essence using Hong Kong as a 'trading  chip', would be a gross insult to the Hong Kong people. 

And their goals are simple ones. It’s what every dictator and tyrant wants. They want their own fiefdom; they want Hong Kong as their own, and then they want to join the rest of the world as global oligarchs.

And America plays along.

This network has been cultivated, funded, and trained with the help of millions of dollars from the US government. (Read on to see the funding amounts, the agencies, the American officials involved, and other particulars.) Not to mention a particularly vocal progressive globalist Washington-linked local Hong Kong media tycoon. (Jimmy Lai with dreams of his own nation, and a near religious cult of followers.)

Constructed and cultivated stereotypes.

The way that the events are portrayed in Hong Kong is to fit the appetite for the American news-consuming audience. In particular, to appeal to the emotions of two especially and diametrically opposed groups;

• The Progressive, Liberal Democrat Marxists.
• The Traditional, Conservative Republicans.

Let’s start with the appeals to the liberal democrat progressive Marxists in America. Look at the progressive media show DemocracyNow! (DN!) as one example. It is a prominent media outlet on the “progressive” end of the spectrum. They have been quite busy “reporting” on all the protests in Hong Kong. They report on them as if they are part and parcel of the same kinds of Antifa and BLM protests in the United States. So, of course, they would report on everything. Right?

From April through August 28, there  have been 25 brief accounts (“headlines” as DN! calls them, each  amounting to a few paragraphs) of the events in Hong Kong and 4  features, longer supposedly analytic pieces, on the same topic.  Transcripts of the four features are here, here, here and here.  

There is not a single mention of [1] possible US involvement or the meetings of the various leaders of the protest movement with [2] Pompeo, [3] Bolton, [4] Pence, or [5] the “Political Counselor” of the US Hong Kong consulate. It’s almost like they ignore the news that doesn’t fit their narrative. Imagine that!

And this silence on US meddling is true not only of most progressive commentators but also most conservatives.

On the Left when someone cries “Democracy,” many forget all their  pro-peace sentiment. And similarly on the Right when someone cries  “Communism,” anti-interventionism too often goes down the tubes. 

In fact on its August 12 program, DN! managed a story taking a swipe at Russia right next to the one on Hong Kong – and DN! was in the forefront of advancing the now debunked and disgraced Russiagate Conspiracy Theory.

Yes, on the other side of the political spectrum, is an appeal to American conservatives.

Protesters in Hong Kong waving the American flag and singing the American National anthem as they advocate for democracy. Wow! pic.twitter.com/CKyFstud22 

— Kaya Jones (@KayaJones) August 12, 2019

Displays of pro-American “jingoism” in the streets of Hong Kong have been like catnip for the international traditional conservative right. Conservatives LOVE to hear that people are throwing down the chains of Marxist socialism and embracing liberty and freedom. Even though they are actually calling for “democracy”, instead.)

Conservative Joey Gibson

Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson recently appeared at an anti-extradition protest in Hong Kong, live-streaming 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.

Personally, I like to refer to these narratives a “two dimensional”, “black and white”, “cardboard cutouts”. It’s a simplified narrative useful for emotional manipulation of large groups of simple-minded people.

The actual physical events.

Throughout the summer of 2019 the world has watched as protests shook Hong Kong.

A man in Taiwan murdered his girlfriend and then fled to Hong Kong. The Taiwan government wanted HK to extradite him to face justice. To facilitate this (and other similar cases), an extradition bill was proposed and about to be signed, when suddenly all Hell broke loose.

It turned out that (apparently, out of the blue), a large number of Hong Kong residents didn't like the idea of being forcibly extradited to another country to face legal charges.

As early as April they began as peaceful demonstrations which peaked in early June, with hundreds of thousands, in protest of an extradition bill.

That bill would have allowed Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China, to return criminals to Taiwan, mainland China or Macau for crimes committed there – after approval by multiple layers of the Hong Kong judiciary.

In other words, if you commit a crime in Taiwan and flee to Hong Kong, the Hong Kong police would no longer provide you with a safe-haven. They would return you back to the Taiwan where you committed the crime.

Ai! This was considered an assault in "freedom" and "liberty".

In the wake of those enormous nonviolent demonstrations, Carrie Lam, CEO of Hong Kong, “suspended” consideration of the extradition bill, a face-saving ploy. To make sure she was understood, she declared it “dead.”

The large rallies, an undeniable expression of the peaceful will of a large segment of the Hong Kong population had won an impressive victory. The unpopular extradition bill was slain.

But that was not the end of the story.

The protests continued.

They… continued.

They continued, even after their goals were met.

They continued, even after the head of the HK government admitted to bowing down to the demands of the protestors. Yes, it’s true. A smaller segment continued the protests. (The Hong Kong police at one point estimated 4,000 hard core protesters.)

They pressed on with other demands, beginning with a demand that  the bill be “withdrawn,” not simply “suspended.” Well, it's all a matter of terminology. By “suspension” is every bit as terminal as death by “withdrawal.”  The most recent news confirms that Corrie Lam has now formally withdrawn the bill.

But even at that, the protests are continuing by this group of hard-core radicals.

They still continued to protest.

The people who initiated, inflamed or caused the events.

On the surface, it seems very simple. An extradition bill was up for ratification. Protests against the ratification were initiated, and the bill was withdrawn. Victory, right?

Nope.

Radical elements are pushing for more protests. These are violent protests, and they pull at the heartstrings of American democrats who can see their faces behind the black-hoods and face masks of the protestors, as well as American conservatives who get "goosebumps" when they see their American flags being waved along side for calls for freedom and democracy.

Who are the public people who are getting everyone all riled up and agitated on both sides of this issue (oh, yes, there are two sides to this issue. Even though the mainstream America only shows one side.)?

As the summer passed, two iconic photos presented us with two human faces that captured two crucial features of the ongoing protests; they were not shown widely in the West. They are, apparently, not considered to be “newsworthy” enough for the American viewing public.

Fu Guohao

First, Fu Guohao, a reporter for the Chinese mainland newspaper, Global Times, was attacked, bound and beaten by the radical protesters. This occurred during their takeover of the Hong Kong International Airport.

FuGuohao, a reporter for the Global Times, a nationalistic Communist Party-run newspaper, has become an overnight sensation. He is being hailed as a hero on Chinese social media after he was tied up and beaten by protesters as Tuesday’s demonstrations at Hong Kong’s airport descended into violence. 

- Chinese Reporter Assaulted at Hong Kong Airport 

When police and rescuers tried to free him, the protesters blocked them and also attempted to block the ambulance that eventually bore him off to the hospital.

• Protestors fought the police.
• Protestors blocked the ambulance.
• Protestors bound, taunted and tortured Mr. Fu Guohao.

The photos and videos of this ugly sequence were seen by netizens across the globe even though given scant attention in Western media.

Where were the stalwart defenders of the press in the US as this happened? As one example, DemocracyNow! (DN!) was completely silent as was the rest of the US mainstream media.

Fu’s beating came after many weeks when the  protesters threw up barriers to stop traffic; blocked closure of subway  doors, in defiance of commuters and police, to shut down mass transit;  sacked and vandalized the HK legislature building; assaulted bystanders  who disagreed with them; attacked the police with Molotov cocktails; and  stormed and defaced police stations. 

Fu’s ordeal and all these actions shown in photos on Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, a paper leaning to the side of protesters, gave the lie to the image of these “democracy activists” as young Ghandis of East Asia.

The South China Morning Post is based in  Hong Kong and its readership is concentrated there so it has to have some reasonable fidelity in reporting events; otherwise it loses credibility – and circulation. 

Similarly, much as the New York Times abhorred Occupy Wall Street, it could not fail to report on it.

Joshua Wong

A younger generation of political HK activists emerged during the 2014 Occupy Central protests with a new brand of localized politics. It is a brand that appealed to the American conservative (anti-Chinese) Right.

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 that is what he is. He is the face of the American conservative foreign branch.

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. 

• National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI)

To find out a little bit more about this “shadowy” and “well funded” machine for causing protests, turmoil, and discord in other nations, read this…

It’s a bit long. You can skim over it, or ignore it as you wish. It’s just some really interesting background information on how front organizations, funded by the United States government, can be used to create proxy protests, and turmoil for American geo-political advantage.

 “They’re meddling in our politics!” That’s the war cry of outraged  Clintonites and neocons, who seem to think election interference is  something that Russians do to us and we never, ever do to them.

 But meddling in other countries has been a favorite Washington  pastime ever since William McKinley vowed to “Christianize” the  Philippines in 1899, despite the fact that most Filipinos were already  Catholic. Today, an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies engage in political  interference virtually around the clock, everyone from USAID to the VOA,  RFE/RL to the DHS—respectively the U.S. Agency for International  Development, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the  Department of Homeland Security. The last maintains some 2,000 U.S.  employees in 70 countries to ensure that no one even thinks of doing  anything bad to anyone over here.

 Then there is the National Endowment for Democracy, a  $180-million-a-year government-funded outfit that is a byword for  American intrusiveness. The NED is an example of what might be called  “speckism,” the tendency to go on about the speck in your neighbor’s eye  without ever considering the plank in your own (see Matthew 7 for  further details). Prohibited by law from interfering in domestic  politics, the endowment devotes endless energy to the democratic  shortcomings of other countries, especially when they threaten American  interests.

 In 1984, the year after it was founded, it channeled secret  funds to a military-backed presidential candidate in Panama, gave  $575,000 to a right-wing French student group, and delivered nearly half  a million dollars to right-wing opponents of Costa Rican president  Oscar Arias—because Arias had refused to go along with our  anti-communist policy in Central America.

 A year later, it gave $400,000 to the anti-Sandinista opposition in  Nicaragua and then another $2 million in 1988. It used its financial  muscle in the mid-1990s to persuade a right-wing party to draw up a  “Contract with Slovakia” modeled on Newt Gingrich’s Contract with  America; persuaded  free marketeers to do the same in Mongolia; gave nearly $1 million to  Venezuelan rightists who went on to mount a short-lived putsch against  populist leader Hugo Chavez in 2002; and then funded anti-Russian  presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine in 2005, and the  later anti-Russian coup there in 2014. 

 What all this had to do with democracy is unclear, although the NED’s  role in advancing U.S. imperial interests is beyond doubt. Rather than  “my country right or wrong,” its operating assumption is “my country  right, full stop.” If Washington says Leader X is out of line, then the  endowment will snap to attention and fund his opponents.

 If it says he’s cooperative and well-behaved, meaning he supports  free markets and financial deregulation and doesn’t dally with any of  America’s military rivals, it will do the opposite. It doesn’t matter  if, like Putin, the alleged dictator swept the last election with 63.6  percent of the vote and was declared the “clear”  winner by the European Union and the U.S. State Department. If he’s  “expanding [Russia’s] influence in the Middle East,” as NED President  Carl Gershman puts it, then he’s a “strongman” and an “autocrat” and must go.

 America’s own shortcomings meanwhile go unnoticed. Meanwhile, the  NED, as it nears the quarter-century mark, is a bundle of  contradictions: a group that claims to be private even though it is  almost entirely publicly funded, a group that says democracy “must be indigenous” even though it backs U.S.-imposed regime change, a group that claims to be “bipartisan” but whose board  is packed with ideologically homogeneous hawks like Elliott Abrams,  Anne Applebaum, and Victoria Nuland, the latter of whom served as  assistant secretary of state during the coup in Ukraine.

 Historically speaking, the NED feels straight out of the early 1980s,  when Washington was struggling to overcome “Vietnam Syndrome” in order  to rev up the Cold War. The recovery process began with Ronald Reagan  declaring at his first inaugural, “The crisis that we are facing today  [requires] our best effort, and our willingness to believe in ourselves  and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to believe that  together with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now  confront us. After all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are  Americans.”

 The U.S. was apparently not just a nation, but something like a  religion as well. Additional input for the new NED in 1983 came from  spymaster William Casey, CIA director from 1981 to 1987, who, after the  intelligence scandals of the 70s, had swung around to the view that  certain covert operations were better spun off into what the British  call a “quango,” a quasi-non-government organization. “Obviously we here  should not get out in front in the development of such an  organization,” he cautioned, “nor do we wish to appear to be a sponsor or advocate.” It was a case of covert backing for an overt turn.

 Others who helped lay the groundwork were:

 Neoconservative ideologue Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the UN, famous for her argument  that “traditional authoritarian governments” should be supported  against “revolutionary autocracies” because they are “less repressive”  and whose UN aide Carl Gershman would become NED president and serves to this day.

 Human rights Democrats who believe that America’s job is to enforce  democratic standards throughout the world, however idiosyncratic and  self-serving they may be Old-fashioned pluralists who maintained that the power to succeed  existed in different groups’ working separately toward a common goal, in  this case, spreading democracy abroad .

 The result was an ideologically lethal package that assumed whatever  Americans did was democratic because God is on our side, that  old-fashioned CIA skullduggery was passé, and that the time had come to  switch to more open means. “We should not have to do this kind of work  covertly,” Gershman later explained.  “We saw that in the 60s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We  have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment  was created.”

 In the interests of pluralism, the NED adopted a quadripartite  structure with separate wings for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the  AFL-CIO, the GOP, and the Democrats, each working separately yet somehow  together.
 Pluralism helped tamp down debate and also shore up support on  Capitol Hill. Liberal Democrats were initially skeptical due to the  NED’s neocon tilt. Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr. tried to kill  it in 1985, and The Nation magazine complained  a few years later that the group served as little more than “a pork  barrel for a small circle of Republican and Democratic party activists,  conservative trade unionists, and free marketeers who use endowment  money to run their own mini State Department.”

 But when the House voted unexpectedly to defund the agency in 1993,  beneficiaries sprang to its defense. Major-league pundits like George  Will, David Broder, and Abe Rosenthal “went into overdrive,” according  to The Nation, as did the heavy hitters of the Washington Post editorial  page. Vice President Walter Mondale, a member of the NED board of  directors, worked the phones along with Lane Kirkland, George Meany’s  successor as head of the AFL-CIO.

 Ronald Reagan wrote a letter, while Senators Richard Lugar, Orrin  Hatch, and John McCain pitched in as well. So did prominent liberals  like Paul Wellstone, John Kerry, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, and Carol  Moseley-Braun. These people normally couldn’t bear to be in the same  with one another, but they were of one mind when it came to America’s  divine right to intervene in other nations’ affairs.

 The anti-NED forces didn’t stand a chance. Twenty-five years later,  the endowment is again under attack, although this time from the right.  

Gershman started the ball rolling when, in October 2016, he interrupted  his busy pro-democracy schedule to dash off a column in the Washington  Post accusing  Russia of using “email hackers, information trolls and open funding of  political parties to sow discord” and of “even intervening in the U.S.  presidential election.” Since there was no question whom Russia was  intervening for, there was no doubt what the article amounted to: a  thinly veiled swipe at a certain orange-haired candidate.

 Never one to forget a slight, Trump got his revenge last month by  proposing to slash the NED budget by 60 percent. The response was the  same as in 1993, only more so. Uber-hawk Senator Lindsey Graham  pronounced the cut “dead on arrival,” adding: “This budget destroys soft power, it puts our diplomats at risk, and it’s going nowhere.”

 Gershman said  it would mean “sending a signal far and wide that the United States is  turning its back on supporting brave people who share our values,” while  Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin moaned  that the administration was guilty of an “assault on democracy  promotion.” The ever-voluble Democratic Congresswoman Nita Lowey accused  the administration of “dismantling an agency that advances critical  goals.”

 “The work our government does to promote democratic values abroad is  at the heart of who we are as a country,” added Senator John McCain.  America is democracy, democracy is America, and, as history’s first  global empire, the U.S. has an unqualified right to do unto others what  others may not do unto the U.S. Only a “Siberian candidate,” “a traitor,” or “a Russian stooge” could possibly disagree. 

- The National Endowment for (Meddling in) Democracy  by Daniel Lazare 

Julie Eadeh

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.

• Julie Eadeh

People, it’s pretty obvious that Washington D.C. is involved in the HK protests, when you have photos of the protest leaders meeting with American presidential aides!

This is very very embarrassing.  Julie Eadeh, a  US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders.  It  would be hard to imagine the US reaction if Chinese diplomat were  meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump  protesters. pic.twitter.com/JfiU2O2HZq 

— Chen Weihua (@chenweihua) August 8, 2019

Of course, this kind of nonsense won’t be tolerated by China.

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.”

So the United States wants to get involved in Chinese affairs.

Well, then be prepared for some “push back”. The pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao doxxed Eadeh. They published personal details about Eadeh, including the names of her children and her address.

But, Washington, D.C. is not used to “push back”.

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. 

Totally ignoring the already issued formal protest from China.

Aside from the official American government protests bout the doxxing, the leaked Mariott photo underscored the close relationship between Hong Kong’s pro-West movement and the US government.

• There is ample proof that the United States government has been coaching, and supporting the protests in Hong Kong.

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.

This has continued a pace.

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.  

• Freedom House

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.”

• Marco Rubio
• Tom Cotton

Wong was given the “royal carpet treatment”. He 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. 

• Heritage Foundation
• Nancy Pelosi
• 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.”

• Ben Cardin
• Sherrod Brown
• Cory Gardner

A year later, Rubio and his colleagues nominated the trio of Wong, Law, and Chow for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. 

Honored to have met Joshua Wong, a student leader who led a big protest demanding universal suffrage in Hong Kong. pic.twitter.com/sSb46j7zIX

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) November 18, 2015

Washington’s support for the designated spokesmen of the “retake Hong Kong movement” was supplemented 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. 

• National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
• National Democratic Institute (NDI)

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.

Other groups in the coalition reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED and NDI last year alone.

The people who are driving the events.

 25th August 2019 – (Hong Kong)  The National Endowment for Democracy (NED)  has funded the 2014 Occupy Central in the past but many have begun to  wonder if the Americans did indeed have a hand in the latest  anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong.  Numerous meetings between  pro-democracy political activists,  representatives from NED and  top  government officials have left us wondered if NED has funded the  frontline protesters . 

We have mentioned earlier in our previous article that,  there are in principle two factions of protesters, the genuine  protesters (90%) and the frontline protesters (10%).  Only the 10%  frontline protesters are potentially funded by the Americans as the   mass of Hong Kong protesters fit naturally into their agenda.

 What is NED? NED is a U.S. non-profit soft power organization that was founded in 1983 with the stated goal of promoting democracy abroad.  In principle, NED is a grant-making foundation, distributing funds to  private non-governmental organisations for promoting democracy  abroad. NED does not directly fund any political party, as this is  forbidden by law. According to NED, it funds election monitoring and  also civic education about voting, such as student-led  “get-out-the-vote” campaigns.

 However, according to American Conservative, in 1984, the year after it was founded, it channeled secret  funds to a military-backed presidential candidate in Panama, gave  US$575,000 to a right-wing French student group, and delivered nearly  half a million dollars to right-wing opponents of Costa Rican president  Oscar Arias—because Arias had refused to go along with our  anti-communist policy in Central America. 

- Is United States involved in the current civil unrest in Hong Kong via its National Endowment for Democracy (NED)? 

The protesters’ stated goals remain vague. No one now knows what exactly they are protesting for.

Joshua Wong, one of the most well known figures in the movement, has since put forward a call for the Chinese government to [1] “retract the proclamation that the protests were riots,” and [2] 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. 

Hey! This kid is doing really well for himself. He's getting millions of dollars from various political American movements. He was up for the Peace Prize, and has his own Netflix documentary. Pretty good for a a young unemployed Hong Kong millennial. It's nice to see where all our campaign donations and tax dollars goes to.

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 conservatives do, members of the US far-right have embraced the protest movement as their own, and even personally joined their ranks.

Which brings us to the second key photo of importance. It is much more important to US citizens. It clearly shows a “Political Counselor” from the US Consulate General in Hong Kong with radical anti-government protestors at the HK Marriot hotel.

The official was formerly a State Dept functionary in the Middle East – in Jerusalem, Riyadh, Beirut, Baghdad and Doha, certainly not an area lacking in imperial intrigues and regime change ops.

That photo graphically contradicted the contention that there is no US “black hand,” as China calls it, in the Hong Kong riots.

In fact, here the “black hand” was caught red-handed, leading Chen Weihua, a very perceptive China Daily columnist, to tweet the picture with the comment:

“This is very very embarrassing. … a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if a Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump protesters.”

And that photo with the protest leaders is just a snap shot of the ample evidence of the hand of the US government and its subsidiaries in the Hong Kong events.

Perhaps the best documentation of the US “black hand” is to be found in Dan Cohen’s superb article of August 17 in The Greyzone entitled, “Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob violence.”

The article by Cohen deserves careful reading; it leaves little doubt that there is a very deep involvement of the US in the Hong Kong riots.

Of special interest is the detailed role and funding, amounting to over $1.3 million, in Hong Kong alone in recent years, of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), ever on the prowl for new regime change opportunities.

Perhaps most important, the leaders of the  “leaderless” protests have met with major US political figures such as  John Bolton, Vice President Pence, Secretary Pompeo, Senator Marco  Rubio, Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel, Nancy Pelosi and others, all of whom  have heartily endorsed their efforts. 

This is not to deny that the protests were home grown at the outset in response to what was widely perceived as a legitimate grievance. But it would be equally absurd to deny that the US is fishing in troubled Hong Kong waters to advance its anti-China crusade and regime change ambitions.

People! China is a serious, serious nation. They do not mess around. If you think that they will not take this meddling as some kind of physical attack, then you are living in a fantasy world. They WILL take action. You all just have no idea what it will be. Nor will you know when they will take action.

The people who are activating the events.

As has been demonstrated so far, there are various individuals who are playing the "global high-power" politics role in all this. This includes American Senators, Congressmen, and various American sponsored "freedom" organizations. 

But there are also others. Other people who have their own personal interests for "stirring up the pot". Here we look at others, who have a bigger personal stake in all of these protests.

Jimmy Lai

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. 

Sinophobia - definition of Sinophobia by The Free Dictionary

Sinophobia synonyms, Sinophobia pronunciation, Sinophobia translation, English dictionary definition of Sinophobia.  n. 1. Fear of or contempt for China, its people, or its culture. 2.  Behavior based on such an attitude or feeling. Si′no·phobe′ n.  Si′no·pho′bic adj. 

Though Western media has depicted the Hong Kong protesters as the voice of an entire people yearning for freedom, the island is deeply divided. This August, a group of protesters mobilized outside Jimmy Lai’s house, denouncing him as a “running dog” of Washington and accusing him of national betrayal by unleashing chaos on the island. 

#HongKong tycoon Jimmy Lai criticized as conspirator behind violence in HK pic.twitter.com/B9PFgtK2YP 

— CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) August 11, 2019

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. 

John Bolton

Jimmy Lai has been working with President Trump's national security advisor John Bolton in how to work with China.

In this relationship, it is obvious that both Jimmy Lai and John Bolton want to take a very hard-line with China. As such, we can well expect John Bolton to sabotage any tariff agreement between Xi Peng and Donald Trump.

Personally, I believe that for there to be any kind of mutually-beneficial trade relationship and agreement between the USA and China, John Bolton would have to step down from being an advisor to Donald Trump.

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.” 

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.”)  

The transformation of Hong Kong’s economy has provided fertile soil for Lai’s brand of demagoguery. As the country’s manufacturing base moved to mainland China after the golden years of the 1980s and ‘90s, the economy was rapidly financialized, enriching oligarchs like Lai.

Left with rising debt and dimming career prospects, Hong Kong’s youth became easy prey to the demagogic politics of nativism. 

Many protesters have been seen waving British Union Jacks in recent weeks, expressing a yearning for an imaginary past under colonial control which they never personally experienced. 

In July, protesters vandalized the Hong Kong Liaison Office, spray-painting the word, “Shina” on its facade. This term is a xenophobic slur some in Hong Kong and Taiwan use to refer to mainland China.

The anti-Chinese phenomenon was visible during the 2014 Umbrella movement protests as well, with signs plastered around the city reading, “Hong Kong for Hong Kongers.”

支那(Shina) is Japanese word for China that became  derogatory during Sino-Japanese War. Post-War Japan gov ban its use in  Kanji form (Chinese characters) in official document. Yet some people in  Hong Kong and Taiwan use it to insult people from Chinese mainland.  It=“Chink” in Eng https://t.co/Oe8LCXgak8

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) July 22, 2019

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.

Edward Leung

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.”

Andy Chan

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.

"I ask President Trump to bring full-scale of sanction on to Hong Kong. The sanctions brought on China must [be] brought on Hong Kong because China can escape sanctions through Hong Kong. I would like to take the chance to reiterate my advocacy again: to revoke the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act passed by the United States Congress. It allows Hong Kong to enjoy a special status apart from China. However, it turns out to be a back door of the free world that could be accessed and manipulated by China. Moreover, over 70% of foreign direct investment goes in to China through Hong Kong. Hong Kong is the main window that China obtains U.S. dollars from. Therefore, shut it down."

-Andy Chan

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. 

It is a very small group. With only a handful of members. While the party lacks a wide base of popular support, it is perhaps the most outspoken within the protest ranks, and has attracted disproportionate international attention as a result.

Chan has called for Trump to escalate the trade war and accused China of carrying out a “national cleansing” against Hong Kong. “We were once colonized by the Brits, and now we are by the Chinese,” he declared.

The risks if this manipulation cannot be constrained.

Such xenophobic propaganda is consistent with the clash of civilizations theory that Jimmy Lai has promulgated through his media empire. It is useful. It has a proven record of success, and is useful to obtain his objectives at this time.

“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.

• Mark Simon

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.”

Today: Hong Kong publisher and democracy advocate  Jimmy Lai met National Security Adviser John Bolton in DC. After  meetings with @SecPompeo and @VP, this is meant to send a signal to Beijing. Very unusual for a nongovt visitor to get that kind of access. pic.twitter.com/6rvqsGJzru

— Nicholas Wadhams (@nwadhams) July 10, 2019

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.

• Martin Lee
• Nancy Pelosi
• Joseph Biden

Among the most prominent figures in Hong Kong’s pro-US political parties, Martin 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. 

These latest groups of protests are not about HK law. They are about armed militarized conflicts against the HK government. They choose not to work with the government, instead they want to embrace violence.

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. 

AJE in position to cover HK protesters' "hit and run strategy." 

Here's William Engdahl on Otpor!, the CIA-backed Serbian group that  trained thousands of youth activists in countries around the world in  color revolution swarming tactics: https://t.co/jvCk2QBNhK https://t.co/I8oGScbpsS pic.twitter.com/a3JZzGwDb9

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 13, 2019

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. 

As I have repeated stated in this article, it seems like the protestors want the police and military forces to engage them. Per this quote in the use of "mild force", it seems obvious that this is their strategy.

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.

A Hong Kong protester continued to attack Chinese reporter for @globaltimesnews with American flag  even as Paramedics finally freed him from the crowd and tried to rush him to hospital  pic.twitter.com/AIULKRW76t

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) August 13, 2019

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. 

• Nathan Law

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.

By A Political Junkie Global Research, August 18, 2019 Viable Opposition 14 August 2019

While there has been growing coverage of the unrest in Hong Kong, there has been minimal coverage of what may lie behind the pro-democracy protests.  

As you will see in this posting, it is entirely possible that a Washington-based and Congressionally funded institution is responsible, at least in part, for the lack of calmness in Hong Kong.

American involvement in the affairs of other nations is well established. It should come as no surprise to anyone that America would fund and instigate protests and violence in China’s backyard. For more information, go to this posting on the National Endowment for Democracy or NED, America’s instrument of democratic promotion around the world, that is, democracy American style.  NED was founded in 1983 during the Reagan Administration with the following Statement of Principles and Objectives:

“Democracy involves the right of the people freely to determine their own destiny. 

The exercise of this right requires a system that guarantees  freedom of expression, belief and association, free and competitive  elections, respect for the inalienable rights of individuals and  minorities, free communications media, and the rule of law.“

While NED touts itself as a “private” foundation, in other words, it is independent of government. That could not be further from the truth.  Here’s what NED has to say about itself that belies its true character:

“NED is a unique institution. The Endowment’s nongovernmental character gives it a flexibility that makes it possible to work in some of the world’s most difficult circumstances, and to respond quickly when there is an opportunity for political change. NED is dedicated to fostering the growth of a wide range of democratic institutions abroad, including political parties, trade unions, free markets and business organizations, as well as the many elements of a vibrant civil society that ensure human rights, an independent media, and the rule of law.

This well-rounded approach responds to the diverse aspects of democracy and has proved both practical and effective throughout NED’s history. Funded largely by the U.S. Congress, the support NED gives to groups abroad sends an important message of solidarity to many democrats who are working for freedom and human rights, often in obscurity and isolation….

From its beginning, NED has remained steadfastly bipartisan. Created jointly by Republicans and Democrats, NED is governed by a board balanced between both parties and enjoys Congressional support across the political spectrum. NED operates with a high degree of transparency and accountability reflecting our founders’ belief that democracy promotion overseas should be conducted openly.”

Despite its proclamation that it has a “nongovernmental 
character”, NED receives its funding through an annual appropriation from Congress through the Department of State making it little more than another mouthpiece for Washington’s agenda.  NED promotes Washington’s global agenda through direct grants to more than 1600 non-governmental groups that are working for “democracy” in more than 90 nations around the world.

Let’s look at NED’s activities in Hong Kong for 2018 according to its website.  Here are the projects that were funded over the period from 2015 to 2018.

Notice that the 2018 funding to the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs was granted to “facilitate engagement on Hong Kong’s growing threats to guaranteed rights”.  

That certainly sounds like promoting democracy to me. NED spent a total of $1,357,974 on grants to organizations that were promoting freedom, democracy and human rights in Hong Kong over the period from 2015 to 2018.  

Unfortunately, we don’t know what NED spent on promoting democracy in Hong Kong in the time frame prior to 2015.  While, in the grand scheme of what Washington spends this is not a great deal of money, it is the principle of what Washington is attempting to create in Hong Kong that is of concern.  

This is a very clear example of meddling in the internal affairs of China and Hong Kong, actions that will only serve to anger China who is the also the recipient of a great deal of NED’s attention.  

It is also key to remember that there are likely other taxpayer-funded programs through which Washington is attempting to influence what happens in Hong Kong.

In my opinion, this tweet by the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner is a dead giveaway to the source of the unrest:

Video from Hong Kong shows pro-democracy protesters waving American flags and singing the American National Anthem.  Demonstrations have shutdown the city's airport for a second consecutive day and put the entire Chinese city on edge. pic.twitter.com/ZrYE5DzZYU 

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) August 13, 2019

While the ideals of democracy are admirable and desirable, Washington’s version of democracy is tainted by big money and has developed into a system where politicians are for sale to the highest bidder.  

Meanwhile, the Chinese themselves are not falling for this (same old, same old) lie…

huaqiao (Expat in China)

The rioters are trying to force the police to act and then certain  foreign media will report it as "police brutality" while ignoring the  rioters' assault against the police. This is a planned, deliberate act  to show the world China's system is not working.

But the fact is China's  system is working and is the envy of many nations, but certain "free  world" countries cannot accept that. The value of "democracy" is  overstated and these rioters show the effect of being overdosed with  "democracy" and act senselessly. 

This is not the democracy that most of the world wants.  

Long-term Congressional meddling in other nations internal affairs through its funding of the National Endowment for Democracy is little better than the nation reengineering exercises undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency since the end of the Second World War.

Reactions and serious attempts to control the situation

This situation is in the process of being resolved. Much of what is going on is behind the scenes, but we can get some glimmerings of the various events.

Point One

As of 10 September 2019, the United States president Donald Trump tweets out that he no longer needs the services of John Bolton. John Bolton, the national security adviser.

So, obviously Bolton has been fired. (paraphrasing) “I told Bolton I no longer need his services. I disagreed with many of the suggestions that he has made.”

The president is saying he asked for Bolton’s resignation; it was not Bolton’s idea. So now people are trying to speculate, “What is this about?” He’s the national security adviser, and there are any number of things it could be and there’s no way of knowing. We just have to wait. It will come out at some point.

Oh, I’m sure it will. Though, I’d be really surprised if they would address the truth. Which is the fact that he has been working personally with the key super-billionaire oligarchy opposition forces in Hong Kong against China, and against any resolution to the China – USA trade disputes.

The Friggin' idiot. That's not his job. His job is to assist President Trump, not to oppose his efforts. No matter how impassioned he might feel about Neocon-ism.

As I have previously stated, John Bolton is a war-hawk and a neo-con from the “deep state”. He has opposed every effort that Trump has made to negotiate with China, North Korea, and Iran. In his world view these are all dictatorial nations and America must stand firm in opposing them in every way possible.

Trump loves meeting with these people because he’s got dreams of ending disagreements with these people, bringing peace and tranquility to the humanity of earth. Bolton doesn’t see eye-to-eye with any of that. It could also be about troop withdrawals in Afghanistan. You know, there are factions in the White House that want to get us out of there. It’s been announced that we’re getting out of there. We’ve been over there for I don’t know how many years, and some people say we don’t even know why we are still there.

Bolton would not want to pull out of Afghanistan. Bolton would not want to withdraw from any presence in places like Syria. So it could well be that this is just the culmination of systemic policy differences that have led to this.

Bolton has a reputation as a hardliner, doesn’t take any guff, is not one of these touchy-feely, politically correct guys. He’s a war hawk and fully supports all eight (x8) proxy wars that the United States is currently mired in.

“Let’s try to make ’em like us. Let’s find out why they don’t like us and change.” That’s not Bolton. He don’t care that they don’t like us. We just gotta beat ’em. We gotta pummel ’em.

That might not be appropriate at this time when dealing with China. China is a serious, serious nation that would absolutely take meddling in their own affairs very, very seriously.

Point Two

On Wednesday 4SEP19, President Trump reached out to China’s President Xi in a tweet:

“I know President Xi of China very well. He is a  great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a  good man in a ‘tough business.’ I have ZERO doubt that if President Xi  wants to quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem, he can do it.  Personal meeting? ”

-Donald Trump

So what is Donald Trump saying?

• That’s he’s ready to stop the HK protests if Xi Peng negotiates.
• Or, perhaps that China can use their military to enter HK.

Point Three

China has begun arresting American advisors to the protestors and their aides to the protest movements in HK. You see, China does not mess around. They know who all these players are, they know the funding sources, and have surveillance cameras everywhere. If you want to stir up a hornets next, do not allow yourself to get stung.

China has identified all the leadership of these protest groups, and their subordinates. They have since followed them and watched them. They have all been under observation. They have filmed these advisors instructing the protestors in behavior, and strategy.

Then, independently they have targeted these individuals and collected them in public near the protests. It's all on film. 

What?

You haven’t heard about this? You mean it’s not reported on the American mainstream media? Imagine that!

Here is a video of a “so called” reporter instructing the HK protestors on how to behave. It’s all on video, and how the HK riot police comes after him and carts him off for “processing”. The video praises the HK riot police for nabbing these “instigators”, and claims that 53 CIA-related advisory staff have been arrested.

They say he’s CIA, but he’s really probably a member of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or the National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) . All American front organization that receives Federal Funding for the purposes of disrupting the stability in other nations.

Here’s some of the arrests. The video shows three Americans arrested and being detained. I am sure that there are many more.

The point is that China knows full well what is going on and THEY DO NOT PLAY AROUND. China is a serious nation that does not pretend that everyone is playing on the same playing-field.

The root effects – trade renegotiation with China.

Anonymous (Italy)

This sudden chaos without major motivation is indeed a sign of  interference. As a foreigner, I am Italian and married to a local, I do  fully support Chinese mainland on this matter. People in Hong Kong that  are doing this are ignorant and do not even know their own history.  

It began as a promise to the American people. Donald Trump, if elected would renegotiate trade with the Chinese in such a way that it would be a two-way street to mutual respect and fairness.

When things were looking favorable, suddenly everything went to sh@t. There were rumors that some of the negotiators were hard-line deep-state plants that informed the Chinese to wait Donald Trump out. That he would not be reelected.

So the negotiations stalled, and Trump put full pressure on China. Simultaneously when he raised tariffs on Chinese goods 30%, protests broke out in Hong Kong. It appeared that the pressure was enormous on China, and (according to the United States media) China was really suffering.

• 30% tariffs
• HK protests
• Banning Huawei
• Diplomatic pressure on Europe

But, you know what? It’s all a big lie, or at the very most, an exaggeration. China wasn’t suffering like the American mainstream media reported.

Ah, it’s partially true. But, not as bad as most Americans believed. China’s exports are not 90% to the USA and 10% to the rest of the world. Nope. Its actually 11% to the Untied States. And 89% to the rest of the world. So China has dealt with it.

Meanwhile, the tariffs has pretty much put the global economy into a malaise and it has backfired and hit the American consumer. It will need to be resolved before the 2020 elections or else it is potentially feasible that it will effect the elections.

And China’s reaction?

Nothing. Ride it out. Don’t go on the offensive. Don’t go on the defensive. Let things sizzle for a while and ride it out. They realize that the present Trump strategy is to force China to agree to a range of demands.

• Implement “democracy” in China.
• Stop the reeducation of radical Muslim separatists.
• Allow Tibet independence.

China said no, and won’t do anything. They want favorable trade but not at the risk of their national identity and global sovereignty.

The idea that liberal or Western-style democracy and the country’s  long-term stability are incompatible is deeply entrenched in the Chinese  mind. Most Chinese believe that the current level of maturity in  Chinese society does not allow for a “one man one vote” system. It is  broadly accepted that China will disintegrate if it recklessly adopts  Western-style democracy.

-   The construction of the Singapore Model in Mainland China       

How would you feel, if China demanded that;

• America implemented Communism?
• Integrate Muslim extremists in key leadership roles in government?
• Allow California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arazona and Texas to be an independent nation?

It’s all pretty silly. It’s obscene and an insult.

Well, that’s how the Chinese feels. They have plenty of trade relationships with other nations. Contrary to what the mainstream American news say, and they are healthy and chugging away just fine. You see, China realizes that they can under-price any American company on the global stage.

And so, they are just waiting everything out.

Thus the worst effects of the trade war backfired and are now squarely on the shoulders of America. John Bolton, of course is all happy about this. But there are far other considerations than the John Bolton Neocon narrative, and Donald Trump has a nation to take care of.

So, Donald Trump is regrouping and removing the Neocon planks from the trade demands and will continue to work with China on resolving this.

The end results…

• The Trade war will end.
• The HK protests will end.
• Things will continue much as they had, only there would be more favorable trade terms for the United States.

Let’s see how correct my fortune telling ability is, shall we? Maybe I’m right or maybe I’m wrong. We will see. Eh?

CIA agent arrested directing the HK riots

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/5lcA5Huc8PiGYPb0pWE47w

Anyways about the video. He's going on in English about the "rule of law" and then switches in Cantonese. Anyways, his goose is cooked. 

Once HK passed the insurrection law which permitted the arrest of agitators who forment revolution, regardless of nationality, and extration ot the mainland for lengthy prison sentences and organ harvesting… everything changed. 

For months, if not years, the Chinese have documented everyting on video, and then seized the computers and technical data form the foreign newspapers operating inside of HK. 

So it's over for this cat. He doesn't have a hope in Hell. In China, there isn't any court negotations between attorneys. Instead, they look over the documentation and evidence and assign punishment(s).

BTW. I don't know if I told you this. But a lot of retired men in HK and China participated in the protests because if they did so, they would get a $200 USD check. Well, of course, they all started to deposit it in their own individual bank accounts. Right? Guess what happened?

Every account that has a $200 USD deposit during a specific time period is assumed to be a paid-for-riot paycheck. So every person who got that money… young and old… suddenly has their social security balance set to zero and frozen for the rest of their life.

Finally, we conclude with a decent editorial

US fooling no one with claims of innocence in HK: Opinion

By Ian Goodrum

For no particular reason I’ve been thinking of Claude Rains in Casablanca lately. You remember him; the Moroccan police captain who is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling in Humphrey Bogart’s establishment during a raid, only to be handed his winnings without missing a beat.

You might wonder at the relevance of that famous movie moment. I’ll explain.

Amid ongoing violence and turmoil in Hong Kong, Chinese media outlets have brought up a few relevant facts: That “pro-democracy” opposition heads had met with politicians in the United States, protest leaders had been in contact with State Department officials and major figures like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi have issued statements supporting the demonstrators. With all this in mind, it’s been suggested the US has been inflaming tensions in the city and encouraging escalation in an already heated environment.

To wit, the Claude Rains moment: Members of the diplomatic corps were “shocked, shocked” by this news. Why, it’s unthinkable that the US, that bastion of democracy and freedom, would ever attempt to interfere in the affairs of another country! China was called a “thuggish regime” for even bringing this up — naturally, the “free press” was all crickets when it came time to do their purported jobs and speak a little truth to power.

Safe to say none of these faux-outraged government functionaries or their lapdogs in the media bothered to ask a Libyan what they thought of the idea. The NATO intervention there in 2014 turned the African country with the highest standard of living into a disaster zone, complete with open-air slave markets.

They wouldn’t have asked an Iraqi, either. I’m sure the families of the million-plus people killed by the US military since 2003 would have a few things to say about their invaders’ good intentions.

Or a Haitian. Or a Syrian. Or a Venezuelan. Or a Honduran. Or an Iranian. The list goes on.

The truth is US “diplomacy” has never been that innocent, and everyone knows it. State Department personnel — in league with military and intelligence agencies — have spearheaded countless interventions since the turn of the 20th century, destroying countries or political formations they saw as counter to US interests. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and especially after the Cold War began, this meant subverting communists or socialists and materially supporting anti-communists and fascists.

Among the best-known examples of this skullduggery are the hundreds of assassination attempts on Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro — none successful; he died at 90, probably laughing at the US as he went — and the overthrow of democratically elected Chilean Marxist Salvador Allende. The US loved democracy so much in the latter case they replaced Allende with a military dictator. These and many other interventions were overseen by the same sort of “diplomats” who now act offended at the notion they may be doing something untoward in Hong Kong.

But things are a little different now. These clandestine activities used to be the sole purview of the Central Intelligence Agency, and when word got out the US’ definition of “liberty” really meant “not being communists”, quite a few people were furious. So in a long process which began in the 1970s, the CIA delegated its regime change responsibilities to a host of organizations, each given a degree of separation with some legalese and clever accounting.

Though the Agency remains a potent force for subversion — and you would have to be truly naïve to think their cloak-and-dagger era is over — the interventional landscape has been somewhat diversified, with a host of non-governmental organizations taking the place of traditional spies. The National Endowment for Democracy, the largest among them, has of course given a great deal of money to “pro-independence” forces in Hong Kong. Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.

Allan Weinstein, an early leader of one such think tank, admitted it outright when he said “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” While this makes US influence operations easier to track, it also gives them a veneer of respectability among the general public. It’s a bigger deal when a government agency is funding rebellious elements in another country; much less so if it’s some “non-governmental” cutout with a bit of plausible deniability.

When news of CIA activity broke in the past, it was big news. That was bad for optics. Somewhere along the way, powerful government figures and capitalists realized by doing all their influencing in the open — and with a media that had long since stopped pretending to question motives — the scandal brought by secrecy would go away. This has worked wonders on a browbeaten population fed a steady diet of propaganda. It turns out if you’re told every other country on earth is inferior to yours, you’ll start thinking intervention is great for everybody else.

Some people normally skeptical of official US narratives look back on this sordid history and conclude it’s a thing of the past, the stuff of ancients. But what’s changed between then and now? Why would any empire stop consolidating its influence if it had the ability to continue? In fact, the US’ capacity for interference has only grown more sophisticated since the end of the Soviet Union. With that country’s dissolution in 1991, the world lost a counterweight against imperialism — and logic dictates things would get worse rather than better in an era of unilateral hegemony.

So the question remains: Why would the US’ well-established, well-funded campaigns of subversion suddenly cease? Well they wouldn’t, of course. There’s an equally bizarre notion from otherwise right-thinking people that intervention stops at certain countries’ borders. This is patently ridiculous. If it can happen in Venezuela, Iran, Libya, Cuba or Syria, it can happen in Hong Kong — a geographically small Chinese territory with longstanding ties to the West. It is, in fact, perfectly positioned as a pressure point for the rest of China.

And it’s not just a question of economic or political systems anymore. The US doesn’t trust anyone, even its own imperial allies; recall that the National Security Administration had German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone tapped for years. There’s no telling how they’re keeping tabs on other NATO members. Because the US has the largest economy and military many times over, however, leaders who might otherwise speak out against this treatment stay silent. Yet the idea of US benevolence still has a hold on the world’s imagination. I encourage anyone on the fence to think about it this way: If this is how the US treats its friends, imagine what it tries to do to its enemies.

And make no mistake, the US considers China an enemy. It says so in official statements and policy briefings, and academics and journalists uncritically launder these claims for a mass audience on their enormous platforms. No matter how many times China says it wants peace and to handle its own affairs, the myth of the “China Threat” persists — stoked by US “diplomats” and their lackeys in the press.

These inflammatory statements serve a twofold purpose. On a personal level, they attract attention to the authors’ work and better position them for career advancement. More broadly, they further US interests and provide cover for narratives that wouldn’t get consideration by the public if they came straight from the military-intelligence apparatus. It’s a win-win for everyone — except the US’ victims.

None of this is to say that things in Hong Kong are perfect, or that everyone in the city was happy as a clam before the State Department and NED came along. Severe inequality plagues the city, and must be addressed for the government to enjoy continued support from the people. But bad actors take advantage of existing negative sentiments and amplify them, turning issues that could be handled peacefully into profound existential crises.

This playbook has worked for decades now, undermining countless sovereign governments whose existence ran counter to the interests of the United States; it’s the height of foolishness to think it can’t happen here.

The author is a copy editor with chinadaily.com.cn.

28NOV20 Update

It is pretty well established that the CIA has been well involved attempting a “color revolution” inside of Hong Kong as part of the Trump Trade Wars of 2017 – 2020. There are all sorts of articles on this subject. Here’s a worthwhile read…

• Writer reveals CIA funding for the HK Protests

A secret high-level committee of Hong Kong senior activists worked with Western agents from the CIA to coordinate and amplify the leaderless protests against the fugitive law amendment last year, Nury Vittachi claims in his book The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong.

Vittachi, a veteran journalist and a columnist for The Standard, accused the CIA of funding anti-government activities in the SAR. He said Hong Kong protesters have received practical training in street-protest strategy and media control from members of the professional revolution industry since January 2013.

The book named three US-based groups - the Oslo Freedom Foundation, the Albert Einstein Institute and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies - which were directly involved in last year's social unrest.

He added that public records had shown that the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA's regime-change arm, had sent HK$170 million to the mainland or Hong Kong since 2014 to "advance the cause of democracy."

https://lnkd.in/dwnSU-S

Other (really great) Links

• Is United States involved in the current civil unrest in Hong Kong via its National Endowment for Democracy (NED)?
• ‘Hands Off Hong Kong’ – the Cry That Seldom Is Heard -Ron Paul
• 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.
• Five questions, answers on what is happening in Hong Kong

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Some Fun Videos

Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.

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