Is the U.S. Secretly Egging On Hong Kong Protesters?
The mass demonstrations in Hong Kong are dramatic, indeed. And given that Hong Kong has long enjoyed a more liberal existence under British rule, protests against a more authoritarian Chinese government (at least it used to be more authoritarian) are not entirely surprising.
On Thursday, Wen Wei Po published an “expose” into what it described as the U.S. connections of Joshua Wong, the 17 year-old leader of student group Scholarism.
This isn’t the first time that Beijing-friendly media have accused foreign countries of covert meddling in the former British colony. China’s government has long been concerned that Western intelligence agencies might try to exploit the city’s relatively more open political environment to push democracy in the rest of the country. The various “color revolutions” that ushered in democratic governments across the former Soviet Union in the early 2000s, and which were partly organized by foreign-funded NGOs, heightened those concerns.
In its report on Mr. Wang, Wen Wei Po said that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is making a pointed effort to infiltrate Hong Kong schools, for example through the Hong Kong-America Center, a group headed by former U.S. diplomat Morton Holbrook that promotes H.K.-U.S. ties. It also alleged that the CIA is actively training a new generation of protest leaders in Hong Kong through sponsoring students to study in the U.S., with an aim of stoking future “color revolutions” in the city.
Behind the so-called “Occupy Central” protests … is a deep and insidious network of foreign financial, political, and media support. Prominent among them is the US State Department and its National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as well as NED’s subsidiary, the National Democratic Institute (NDI).
The U.S. has certainly promoted regime change worldwide, often by using non-governmental organizations as front groups to funnel money to dissidents who will overthrow the government.
For example, USAID has been called the “new CIA”, and FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds told Washington’s Blog that the U.S. State Department is involved in many “hard power” operations, often coordinating through well-known “Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGOs). Specifically, Edmonds explained that numerous well-known NGOs – which claim to focus on development, birth control, women’s rights, fighting oppression and other “magnificent sounding” purposes or seemingly benign issues – act as covers for State Department operations. She said that the State Department directly places operatives inside the NGOs.
Edmonds also told us that – during the late 90s and early 2000s – perhaps 30-40% of the people working for NGOs operated by George Soros were actually working for the U.S. State Department.
If this all sounds too nutty, remember that historians say that declining empires tend to attack their rising rivals … so the risk of world war is rising because the U.S. feels threatened by the rising empire of China.
The U.S. government considers economic rivalry to be a basis for war. And the U.S. is systematically using the military to contain China’s growing economic influence.
And U.S. sanctions against Russia are not having the desired effect … largely because China is picking up the slack by trading with Russia and even loaning it money.
Indeed, China, Russia, India and Brazil have formed what some top economists say is an alternative to the Western financial institutions, the World Bank and IMF. And China is challenging the petrodollar.
So it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the U.S. (and the former owner of Hong Kong, Britain) egged on democracy protesters in Hong Kong in order to try to shake up the Chinese regime.