The hybrid war, being
conducted against China by the United States and its gaggle of puppet states
from the UK to Canada to Australia, has entered a new phase. The
first stage involved the massive shift of US air and naval forces to the
Pacific and constant provocations against China in the South China Sea and the
Taiwan Strait. The second stage was the creation of disinformation about
China’s treatment of minority groups, especially in Tibet and west China. That
this propaganda campaign has been carried out by nations such as the US, Canada
and Australia who have the worst human rights records in the world with respect
to their indigenous peoples, subjected to centuries of cultural and physical
genocide by those governments, and who refuse to protect their minority peoples
from physical attacks and discrimination despite their human rights laws,
shocks the conscience of any objective observer.
But not content with that,
the propaganda was extended to China’s economic development, its international
trade, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, its Silk and Belt Road
Initiative, its development bank, and other facilities and trade initiatives,
through which China is accused of trying to control the world; an accusation
made by the very nation that threatens economic embargo or worse, nuclear
annihilation, to anyone, friend or foe, who resists its attempt to control the
world.
The
fourth phase is the US attempt to degrade the Chinese economy with punitive
“tariffs,” essentially an embargo on Chinese goods.
That
the objective is not better trade deals but to bring China to its knees is the
fact that the negative effect of these tariffs on American consumers, farmers
and manufacturers is considered secondary to the principal objective.
Last year it moved to a fifth
phase, the kidnapping and illegal detention of Meng Wanzhou, the Chief
Financial Officer of China’s leading technology company Huawei, in
synchronicity with a massive campaign by the USA to force its puppets to drop
any dealings with that company. Meng Wanzhou is still held against her will in
Canada on US orders. Chinese have been harassed in the US, Australia and
Canada.
The latest phase in this
hybrid warfare is the insurrection being provoked by the US, UK, Canada and the
rest in Hong Kong, using tactics designed to provoke China into suppressing the
rioters with force to amplify the anti-Chinese propaganda, or pushing the
“protestors” into declaring Hong Kong independent of China and then using force
to support them.
Mitch McConnell, an important
US senator implicitly threatened just such a scenario in a statement on August
12th stating that the US is warning China not to block the protests and that if
they are suppressed trouble will follow. In other words the US is claiming that
it will protect the thugs in black shirts, the shirts of fascists. This new
phase is very dangerous, as the Chinese government has time and again stated,
and has to be handled with intelligence and the strength of the Chinese people.
There is now abundant
evidence that the UK and US are the black hand behind the events in Hong Kong.
When the Hong Kong Bar association joined in the protests the west claimed that
even the lawyers were supporting the protests in an attempt to bring justice to
the people. But the leaders of that association are all either UK lawyers or
members of law firms based in London, such as Jimmy Chan, head of the so-called
Human Civil Rights Front, formed in 2002 with the objective of breaking Honk
Kong away from China, such as Kevin Lam, a partner in another London based law
firm, and Steve Kwok and Alvin Yeung, members of the anti-China Civic Party who
are going to meet with US officials next week. Kwok has called for the
independence of Hong Kong in other visits, some sponsored by the US National
Security Council and has called for the US to invoke its Hong Kong Policy Act,
which, among other things mandates the US president to issue an order
suspending its treatment of Hong Kong as a separate territory in trade matters.
The effect of this would be to damage China’s overall trade since a lot of its
revenue comes through Hong Kong. The president can invoke the Act if it decides
that Hong Kong “is not sufficiently autonomous to justify it being treated
separately from China.”
In tandem with Kwok’s call
for the use of that Act, US Senator Ted Cruz has filed a Bill titled the Hong
Kong Revaluation Act requiring the president to report on “how China exploits
Hong Kong to circumvent the laws of the United States.”
But it seems the anti-Chinese
propaganda campaign is not having the effect they hoped. The New York Times ran
a piece on August 13 stating, “China is waging a disinformation war against the
protestors.” Embarrassed by US consular officials being caught red-handed
meeting with protest leaders in a hotel in Hong Kong last week and blatant
statements of support for the protestors from the US, Canada and UK as well
attempts to treat Hong Kong as an independent state, the US intelligence
services have now been forced to try to counter China’s accounts of the facts
by declaring anything China says as disinformation.
The US and UK objectives are
revealed in this statement from the article,
“Hong Kong, which Britain
returned to Chinese rule in 1997, remains outside China’s firewall, and thus is
sitting along one of the world’s most profound online divides. Preserving the
city’s freedom to live without the mainland’s controls has become one of the
causes now motivating the protests.”
This statement flies in the
face of the Basic Law, expressing the agreement between the UK and China when
the UK finally agreed to leave Hong Kong. We need to be aware of what the Basic
Law says. Promulgated in April 4 1990 but put into effect on July 1, 1997, the
date of the hand over of the territory to China, the Preamble states:
“Hong Kong has been part of
the territory of China since ancient times; it was occupied by Britain after
the Opium War in 1840. On 19 December 1984, the Chinese and British Governments
signed the Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong, affirming that the
Government of the People’s Republic of China will resume the exercise of
sovereignty over Hong Kong with effect from 1 July 1997, thus fulfilling the
long-cherished common aspiration of the Chinese people for the recovery of Hong
Kong.
Upholding national unity and
territorial integrity, maintaining the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong,
and taking account of its history and realities, the People’s Republic of China
has decided that upon China’s resumption of the exercise of sovereignty over
Hong Kong, a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will be established in
accordance with the provisions of Article 31 of the Constitution of the
People’s Republic of China, and that under the principle of “one country, two
systems”, the socialist system and policies will not be practised in Hong Kong.
The basic policies of the People’s Republic of China regarding Hong Kong have
been elaborated by the Chinese Government in the Sino-British Joint
Declaration.
In accordance with the
Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, the National People’s Congress
hereby enacts the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of
the People’s Republic of China, prescribing the systems to be practised in the
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, in order to ensure the implementation
of the basic policies of the People’s Republic of China regarding Hong Kong.”
Hong Kong is a part of China. That is the essential fact set out in the
Basic Law agreed to by the UK as well as China. It is an administrative region
of China. It is not an independent state and never was when Britain seized it
through force and occupied it.
So the claim that the protestors are
trying to preserve something that never existed, freedom from China’s control,
since Hong Kong is subject to China’s control, is bogus. The fact that China
permitted Hong Kong to retain its capitalist system confirms this. The fact
that China can impose socialism 50 years after or sooner if certain conditions
are met, also confirms this.
The pretexts for the riots, the first being a proposed extradition
law between the mainland and Hong Kong which is similar to those that exist
between provinces in Canada and states in the USA, the second being the claim
that China’s insistence on its sovereignty over the territory somehow overrides
the limited autonomy granted Hong Kong and threatens that autonomy, are without
any foundation.
One could easily split Canada
into pieces based on such bogus arguments or again split up the USA, or even
the UK as London sees its rule of Ireland, Wales and Scotland being challenged
by nationalist groups. And we know very well what violent protests will bring
in swift suppression of such forces if the central governments feel threatened,
especially by the violence we see used by the black shirts in Hong Kong. We saw
what happened in Spain when the Catalans attempted to split from Spain. The
leaders of the movement are now in exile. We saw what the US is capable of
against demonstrators when it shot them down at Kent State when students were
demonstrating peacefully. These things are not forgotten. We know how the
British will react to renewed attempts for a united Ireland.
China is facing attacks on
several fronts at once and it will require wisdom, endurance and the strength
of the Chinese people to defend their revolution and rid themselves of colonial
and imperialist domination, once and for all. Those who carry British and
American flags in the protests in Hong Kong, reveal who they are. They are not
the future of China. They are the living embodiment of a dead history and dead
ideas, zombies of the past.
The
views of the authors do not necessarily coincide with the opinion of the
editorial board.
Electronic
analytical journal New Eastern Outlook 2010-2019 Republishing of the articles
is welcomed with reference to NEO.