Mark Pinkstone/Former Chief Information Officer of HK government

The Americans are all over us as if there was no tomorrow. The House of Representatives, the congress, has declared the past few weeks as “China Weeks” dedicated to degrading Hong Kong/China as much as possible on the world stage. It is showing signs of panic.

Last week alone congress passed a US$1.6 billion fund to be used for anti-China propaganda over the next five years. Earlier in the week it moved to close down all Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices in the US, and the week before that the administration issued two advisory notices, one to dissuade American tourists from visiting Hong Kong and the other to dissuade businesses setting up in Hong Kong.

The reasons for this backlash are totally unfounded. What has Hong Kong done to deserve such treatment? Nothing! Hong Kong is a small pimple on China’s bum, minding its own business without breaking any trade barriers.

The only conclusion one can draw is that the Americans are in panic overdrive due to the perceived threat by Hong Kong/China to the US hegemony, which is not their intention at all. Whereas the US dominates the world with the threat of war, China, on the other hand, walks with an olive branch lifting countries out of poverty through its Belt and Road Initiative. The offer by China for world peace is exactly the opposite to the US’s quest for world supremacy through war.

The US’s massive spend on China propaganda will not be found in the country’s main stream media (MSM) due to its control by the US Department of State. (DoS), but in small specialist, obscure publications such as Responsible Statecraft. The Bill HR1157 “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund” can easily be found on the internet. The legislation authorizes more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years to, among other purposes, subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese “malign influence” globally. In other words, the US Department of State is paying off the media to print what it says.

The Global Engagement Centre of the DoS is already spending large sums subsidizing media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to disparage Hong Kong/China and the new injection of cash will surely supercharge its efforts.

But the US politicians are their own worst enemy as far as propaganda is concerned. For example, chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) , John Moolenaar, said in a debate on the Decoupling from Foreign Adversarial Battery Dependence Act that there was “indisputable evidence” that two CCP-aligned battery makers were deeply connected with forced labour and ongoing genocide in China. The “indisputable evidence” came from the very dubious Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which has become the Australian mouthpiece for the Five Eyes intelligence group lead by the US with Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain as its members. ASPI said that battery projects in Australia were sourced through forced labour of Uyghur and other Turkic ethnic groups in China.

Moolenaar completed his tirade with:” We cannot be dependent on our foremost adversary and we must ensure the CCP can never profit from its genocide and human rights abuses.”

And they are still harping on forced Uyghur labour in Zhenjiang, a myth impregnated in the minds of the west, but which could not be proven by the UNHCR. This argument is becoming rather tiresome, but for the Americans, if a lie is told repeatably enough it becomes believable.

Earlier, congress voted to eliminate the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices (ETOs) in New York, Washington and San Franciso and at the same time the administration advised possible investors in Hong Kong not to do business in the Special Administration Region (SAR) because of stringent national security laws. But the laws in Hong Kong are no more stringent than that the US. In fact, the US is imposing its own laws on US businesses in Hong Kong by advising that any businesses operating in Hong Kong face conflicting jurisdictional requirements and liability in connection with (US-imposed) sanctions compliance efforts. “Failure to adhere to US sanctions can result in civil and criminal penalties under US law,” a statement by the Department of State read.

The administration also issued another advisory warning that visitors to Hong Kong could be jailed for the most trivial offences under the national security laws. This is pure poppycock as tourism figures reveal. In the first six months of this year, Hong Kong received half a million visitors from the US, up 86.2 per cent for the same period last year.

The propaganda tug-o-war between the two super powers has been initiated by the US, with China merely taking a defensive line to rebut US criticisms; to remain silent would be to acquiesce.




Mark Pinkstone

** The blog article is the sole responsibility of the author and does not represent the position of our company. **