Hong Kong and the Audacity of the U.S. Part of a “Destabilization War” with China
People
often ask and hint at the similarities between the Hong Kong protests
and the French Yellow Vests. The former started on 31 March and are
approaching their 19th week – the Yellow Vests (YV) have celebrated last weekend their 40th
week of protests. As of recently some voices of Macron-infiltrates into
the YV movement – or Fifth Columnists – have suggested that the YVs may
support the Hong Kong protesters in solidarity for freedom….
Well, that
didn’t go down well with the highly educated and well informed YV. Many
of them actually felt insulted by the Macronites – ‘for whom does this guy [Macron] take us?’
– And right they are. There is not a shred of comparison between the
two movements, except that they are protests – but for widely different
reasons, and serving widely different agendas. The YV can in no way be
associated with the Hong Kong “protests” – which are equal to US funded
Color Revolutions.
We, the YV
leaders said, are fighting against an ever more totalitarian French
government that is ever more stealing our legitimate income in the form
of all sorts of taxes and keeps a minimum wage on which ever-more French
families cannot survive. Life is unaffordable on a regular workers
pension. The Macron Government is creating poverty, by shifting the
financial resources – the few that are left, from the bottom to the top.
– That’s what we are fighting and protesting against. We want a
fundamental change in the French economic structure and the French
leadership. You see, all of this has nothing to do with the Washington
funded Hong Protests that are directed on Washington’s behalf by Hong
Kongers against the Government of Mainland China.
It couldn’t be
clearer. The French Yellow Vests know what they are fighting for. The
Hong Kong protesters, most of them, follow a few leaders under false
pretenses against their country, against Beijing. Granted, many of the
protesters are pro-westerners, they sing the US National Anthem, and
wave the British flag – the flag of their former colonialists.
Actually, funding to destabilize Hong Kong in the future has already
started at the latest in 1994, 3 years before the official Handover of
Hong Kong by the UK to the Beijing Government. Way before the official
date of returning Hong Kong in 1997 to the Peoples Republic of China
(PRC), the US built up a network of Fifth Columnists in Hong Kong.Washington pours millions into creating unrest in Hong Kong, similarly as in Ukraine, when the US State Department financed the preparation of the 2014 coup at least 5 years ahead at the tune of US$ 5 billion, according to Victoria Nuland’s, Deputy Secretary of State, own admission, directly and through NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, an “NGO” which it isn’t. It is rather the extended or soft arm of the CIA, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department for their ‘regime changing’ activities around the globe.
In 1991, The Washington Post quoted a NED founder, Allen Weinstein, as saying
“a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.Couldn’t have been said better. We see the results all over the world.
Precisely this
has happened in Hong Kong and is going on until this day – and probably
way beyond. The US will not let go. Especially now that most people who
have at least a limited understanding on how these western
manipulations work, comprehend and see for themselves who is sowing the
unrests. Take the 22-year-old student and western hero of the 2014
Umbrella Revolution, Joshua Wong, trained programmed
and funded by the US State Department / NED / CIA. He is again a main
player in the current protest movement. Wong is the on-the-ground boy
for the local media tycoon, Jimmy Lai, who has spent millions of his own money in the 2014 “Occupy Central” protests (Umbrella Revolution).
The oligarch
uses his funds widely to finance protest leaders and protest groups. He
also created his own National Party, with significant xenophobic
connotations. Yet Mr. Lai is very close to the Trump Administration and
met, along with many of his protest leaders, with the US envoy in Hong
Kong, as well as with National Security Advisor John Bolton – and other US officials. On July 8, Mr. Jimmy Lai met US Vice President Mike Pence at the White House.
Lai has full
support of the US Government to fire-on and promote these protest
groups. Yet, if asked, the protesters have no precise plan or strategy
of what they want. The island is largely divided. By far not all
protesters want to separate from the mainland. They feel Chinese and
express their disgust with Jimmy Lai’s radical anti-Beijing propaganda.
They call him a traitor.
Mr. Lai was born in 1948 in mainland China, in an impoverished family
in Canton. He was educated to fifth grade level and smuggled to Hong
Kong in a small boat at age 13. In HK he worked as a child laborer in a
garment factory at about the equivalent of US$ 8 per month. In 1975 he
bought a bankrupt garment factory for a pittance and created Giordano,
producing sweaters and other clothing for mostly US clients, like J.C.
Penny, Montgomery Ward and others. Mr. Lai today is openly criticized
even by his own people as a conspirator behind the violence of the HK
riots, or protests, as he prefers to call them.
The protests
started with a ‘controversial’ extradition law – which, by the way,
exists between most States in the United States, as well as between
nations in Europe and to a large extent internationally. Therefore, this
is nothing unusual. Yet, its importance was blown out of proportion by
the western media and by Mr. Lai’s own local media to distort the
picture. A minority, of course, would like their full independence from
China which is totally against the agreement signed between the UK and
Beijing at the so-called 1997 Handover.
A few days
ago, the US sent a couple of war ships into China waters at Hong Kong.
They had the audacity to ask Beijing to grant them the right to dock at
Hong Kong harbor. Beijing, of course, refused and warned Washington – do
not meddle in our internal affairs. Of course, Washington has no
intention to heed China’s advice – they never do. They have been
inoculated with the view that the exceptional nation calls the shots.
Always. Nobody else should even dare to contradict them. Period.
On July 3, The China Daily pointedly reported“The ideologues in Western governments never cease in their efforts to engineer unrest against governments that are not to their liking, even though their actions have caused misery and chaos in country after country in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Now they are trying the same trick in China.”
The US tactics
in Hong Kong, may be combined with Trump’s trade war, with the
Pentagon’s greater presence – mainly new military bases and navy
presence in the Indo-Pacific region – Obama’s (in)famous Pivot to Asia
which prompted Obama to order 60% of the US Navy fleet to the South
China Sea.
All of this
and more are part of a destabilization war with China. Washington is
afraid of China’s rising economic power in the world, of China’s
monetary system, that is based on economic output and on gold, not fiat
money like the US Dollar and the Euro and other currencies following the
western turbo-capitalist system; and Washington is afraid of losing its
dollar hegemony, as the Chinese yuan is gradually taking over the
dollar’s role as world reserve currency.
Hong Kong was
basically stolen by the Brits in 1842 at the heights of the Opium Wars.
Under pressure of the British military might, China ceded Hong Kong
under the Treaty of Nanking, signed on 29 August 1842. Hong Kong became,
thus, a Crown Colony of the British Empire. In 1898, Hong Kong’s
Governor Chris Patten and Prince Charles agreed on a 99-year lease and
pledged to return Hong Kong to China in 1997.
After 155 years of British colonial oppression of the people of Hong
Kong, it was time to normalize the status of Hong Kong as what it always
should have been, namely an integral territory of China. The “One
Country, Two Systems” agreement of 1997, returned Hong Kong to the
People’s Republic of China, but the parties agreed to leave the
capitalist system in place for 50 years. The agreement also stipulated
that all intervention and colonial claims on Hong Kong were supposed to
end. Full sovereignty was to return to China. What’s happening now –
US-UK fomented riots to seek independence of the island, is in total
disregard of the 1997 Handover Treaty.The US inspired and funded protests are destined to challenge the HK-China sovereignty clause, by mobilizing public opinion that wants full “freedom” – i.e. independence from China.
The 50 years
of the usual abusive capitalist continuation, would allow the
imperialist US and UK to maintain economic control over Hong Kong and
thereby exert economic influence over the PRC. How wrong they were! – In
1997 Hong Kong’s GDP constituted 27% of the PRC’s GDP – today that
proportion shrunk to a mere 3%. China’s rapidly growing level of
development, especially the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which the
west chose to literally ignore until about a year ago, has become a
vital threat to the US corporate world.
What the US and UK – and the rest of the West – is particularly
interested in is HK’s special banking position in the world. Through
Singapore and Hong Kong, Wall Street and key European banks, in cohorts
with their not so ‘ethically-clean’ and often fraudulent HSBC partner,
pretend to control and influence Asian economics – and especially
attempt to prevent China to take over the Asian financial markets. Hong
Kong has the most liberal banking laws, possibly worldwide, where
illegal money transactions, money laundering, shady investments in the
billions can be carried out and nobody watches. Maintaining HK as long
as possible with this special nation status and wielding influence and
control over PRC’s financial markets is one of the western goals.But little does the West understand that China and other eastern countries, plus Russia, India, Pakistan, have already largely detached, or are in the process of detaching from the dollar economy and are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Let’s face it, the SCO comprises about half of the world’s population and controls about one third of the globe’s economic output.
Therefore, the SCO members do no longer depend on the western financial markets and monetary manipulations. In fact, Shanghai has in the last decades grown to become China’s financial hub with way more importance for China than Hong Kong. So, it is very unlikely that China will crack down on Hong Kong for the protests. There is too much political capital to be lost by interfering. The West and Hong Kong protesters may as well riot themselves into rot.
But if China gets tired of these incessant western provocations and really wants to put an end to them, the PRC could take over Hong Kong in less than 48 hours, abridge the 50 years of western capitalism and make HK a full-fledged province of China, no privileges, no special status, just a part of sovereign China. End of story.
*
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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.
Peter Koenig is an
economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and
environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World
Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of
environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe
and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT;
Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image is from Jimmy Lai from Wikimedia Commons
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Peter Koenig, Global Research, 2019
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