Hong Kong Riots: Color Revolution Targetting All of China

by Mike Billington

[Print version of this article]

Sept. 8—Although most American and western European journalists and politicians reporting on the crisis in Hong Kong for the past three months almost always referred to “peaceful demonstrations for democracy,” any observer, even one restricted to that TV coverage, could not miss the fact that there are daily attacks on police and police stations with rocks and Molotov cocktails; fires being set across the city; the shutdown of one of the largest international airports for several days; the brutal beating of a mainland reporter and a “suspected police agent” by the “peaceful demonstrators”; and the violent break-in and trashing of the Legislative Council Building by masked, black-clad activists.

One hears open support for these violent and destructive riots, and their leaders, by leading politicians and institutions in the United States and the UK, presented proudly on Western news programs as if this were support for “democracy.” For example, Julie Eadeh, a political counselor at the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong, was photographed meeting with leaders of the demonstrations in a public place on August 8. As one China Daily journalist said, “It would be hard to imagine the U.S. reaction if a Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, or Never Trump protesters.”

The most infamous of the regime-change institutions in the U.S., the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), reports openly on its website that it has invested $1.7 million over the past three years in funding and training youth, lawyers, trade unionists, and others in methods of “civil disobedience” in defense of “democracy,” always adding the word “peaceful” and “non-violent” to maintain a cover, although no one with a brain does not recognize how absurd this is.

More important, the NED also acknowledges that it has invested $29 million over the same three years in China as a whole—much of it for Tibetan and Uighur separatist movements. It is China as a whole which is the target of the “color revolution” being orchestrated in the Hong Kong riots. Recall that the head of the NED since its inception in 1983, Carl Gershman, explained its establishment as follows:

It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. 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.

The current riots are phase two of a process which began in 2014 with mass demonstrations demanding direct election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. This was called Occupy Central, also known as the “Umbrella Revolution.” It was led by a 17-year-old student, Joshua Wong, who immediately became the darling of the NED, George Soros and the Western press and political gurus. Netflix made an hour-long documentary called “Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower,” which would make a propogandist for Stalin or Mao or Hitler blush. Wong is a key leader in the current phase as well, and was one of the leaders met by the U.S. Consulate official.

EIR Exposed the British Hand

EIR exposed the U.S./British hand behind the 2014 Occupy Central operation which shut down large sections of central Hong Kong for two months as thousands of people camped out in the main streets. The irony of the “democracy and human rights” advocates proclaiming their concern for the “rule of law” was blatant in that movement, which demanded that the population be allowed to choose the candidates for the election of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. (Of course, under British rule before the 1997 turnover to Chinese sovereignty, the people of Hong Kong had absolutely no say whatsoever in the choice of their Governor, who was always British and was always appointed in London.)

However, under the Basic Law, agreed to by China and the UK to be the governing law in Hong Kong for fifty years under the “One Country, Two Systems” concept, election of the Chief Executive was to be “by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee” (emphasis added). In other words, the demand for open selection of the candidates was explicitly against the rule of law!

The last Governor of colonial Hong Kong, Christopher Patten, intervened in the 2014 illegal shutdown of the center of Hong Kong by demanding that the UK directly step in on behalf of the lawless mob. Writing in the Financial Times on Sept. 4, 2004, Patten claimed that—

the UK has a continuing moral and political obligation to ensure that China respects its commitments to guarantee Hong Kong’s way of life [!] for 50 years from 1997.

In the current phase of the attempted color revolution, this subservience to the British Empire was explicitly adopted by some of the most radical and lawless rioters. On July 1, a gang of protesters broke into the Legislative Council building by breaking down the glass doors and windows, tore up the official copy of the Basic Law (showing their “respect for the rule of law”!), defaced the portraits of former presidents of the legislature, spray-painted the walls with their slogans—but most revealing: they hung up the British Colonial flag!

The Hong Kong Independence Party, which has been banned for openly calling for Hong Kong to secede from China, waves American flags and sings the American National Anthem on the streets during the riots.

Jimmy Lai and the Neocons

While Joshua Wong’s networks run much of the street operations on behalf of the NED and other foreign sponsors, the NED has also long supported the Democratic Party of Hong Kong, founded by Martin Lee, which campaigns for human rights and democratic reform, but within the system. He and others in his party have held seats in the legislature.

But the most direct Hong Kong sponsor of both the 2014 and 2019 phases of the attempted color revolution is Jimmy Lai. Lai made his fortune as founder and CEO of the Giordano international clothing chain, based in Hong Kong; and the Next Digital media group. He has pumped millions of dollars (both his own and, possibly, laundered covert funds from intelligence operatives) into the street operation of the color revolution. He holds court on the streets during the riots, while his paper Apple Daily became the voice of the rioters. Western media treat him like a saint.

In 2014, the South China Morning Post revealed that Lai and his aide-de-camp Mark Simon (an American from Falls Church, Virginia, who earlier had worked at the Pentagon and did an internship at the CIA), met for five hours on a yacht in Hong Kong Harbor with Paul Wolfowitz, planning the cooperation between the neoconservatives in the U.S. and the on-the-ground operations in Hong Kong. Wolfowitz was the architect of the Iraq War on behalf of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George H.W. Bush—the war President Trump properly describes as the greatest mistake in the history of American foreign policy.

Note that 2014 was also the year that the Obama Administration, together with the NED, the neocons and the Soros organizations sponsored neo-Nazi organizations in Ukraine in the violent overthrow of the elected government, which has been used to launch the anti-Russia hysteria of the past five years. This was also the era of President Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” deploying enhanced U.S. military forces in a ring around China and Russia’s Far East.

This year, Jimmy Lai has been far more open and assertive about his role as an asset of the British and their neoconservative movement in the United States. In August Lai travelled to Washington to hold highly publicized meetings with the neocon set within the Trump Administration—National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence—as well as Senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, two sponsors of a bipartisan bill before the Congress—the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act”—which would force the State Department to “assure” that Hong Kong’s “autonomy” from Beijing is being honored, or sanctions would be applied.

President Trump has flatly refused to fall for the color revolution bait in Hong Kong. In August, he was asked by reporters what he would do if Beijing took action in Hong Kong. “Hong Kong is a part of China,” he said, truthfully—a fact totally ignored by most of the western pundits. “They’ll have to deal with that themselves,” he added. Asked specifically about Xi Jinping’s approach, Trump responded: “I think President Xi of China has acted responsibly, very responsibly. I hope that President Xi will do the right thing—but it has been going on a long time.”

On Aug. 6, Jimmy Lai was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business News, where he made very clear that the target of the color revolution ongoing in Hong Kong is not ultimately about Hong Kong alone, but about China as a whole, and bringing down Xi Jinping in particular. Lai started with his normal lie that “democratic Hong Kong” is threatened by the encroachment of Beijing, which is destroying the “rule of law.” Then he let it all out—Xi Jinping is the source of the problem, he said, but Xi will not realize his supposed dream of being “dictator for life”:

He brought all the power to himself . . . but that means he brought all the accountability to himself, and now he is in big trouble. The economy is in big trouble. His own party’s power struggle is very severe. A lot of people lost their jobs. Young graduates can’t find jobs.

Lai continued his rant, referring in particular to China’s use of facial recognition technology:

Xi Jinping is the most absolutist dictatorship in all of human history. They know everything you do. If you do something wrong, they won’t allow you to open a bank account, or buy an airplane ticket. . . . People have never had such suppression. The resistance is now suppressed, but if the economy goes down, this emotion can explode. A big problem for China.

The interview was begun by Bartiromo by announcing the downgrade of Hong Kong by Fitch Ratings, the London-New York economic-hitman operation, part of the imperial color revolution team in the City of London and Wall Street. Fitch downgraded Hong Kong’s credit rating on Sept. 6 from AA+ to AA, with a negative outlook. The New York Times gloated:

The move will make it more expensive for Hong Kong and many companies closely tied to its fortunes to borrow money. But more broadly, the downgrade signals the growing belief within the financial world that the barriers between Hong Kong and mainland China are weakening, a development that could threaten the city’s longtime status as a global financial hub.

In other words, simply because Hong Kong is now part of China, and will integrate over time, means its credit rating must be cut. Fitch itself says essentially the same thing: “The gradual rise in Hong Kong’s economic, financial, and socio-political linkages with the mainland implies its continued integration into China’s national governance system, which will present greater institutional and regulatory challenges over time.”

This should not be read as analysis, but as policy from Wall Street and the City of London. The intent is to use the destabilization of Hong Kong to destabilize China as a whole. The Chinese government has in fact remained almost entirely out of the crisis in Hong Kong, leaving it to the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) to resolve. However, they have deployed Armed Police forces across the border in Shenzhen and made one-minute videos of two separate large-scale exercises in riot control, making sure the videos were widely distributed within Hong Kong. If the HKSAR is unable to contain the lawlessness, the Basic Law provides for Beijing to intervene without ending the One Nation-Two Systems structure.

An intervention by the mainland police, is, in fact, precisely what the neocons desire, with the hope to create a “bloody shirt” to stir the emotions against China, as happened in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crisis. Professor Lawrence Lau, an economist and former Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (and former Stanford University professor), made a passionate appeal in an op-ed in the South China Morning Post on Aug. 9 for the “immediate restoration of law and order” in what he described as the “worst crisis ever faced by Hong Kong.” Most importantly, he warns that the failure of “One Country-Two Systems” in Hong Kong would be a message to Taiwan to move for independence, which China has consistently declared as a red line which would be prevented militarily if necessary. American supporters of Abraham Lincoln in the U.S. Civil War can hardly object to that position.

McCarthyite Witch Hunt
Against Chinese in America

This attempted color revolution against China is taking place in the context of the most rabid McCarthyite campaign in America since McCarthy himself, this time explicitly against Chinese and Chinese Americans, especially students, scholars and scientists. FBI director Christopher Wray has instructed every university and scientific institution in the country to consider every person of Chinese descent to be a suspect for trying to steal US “secrets,” and possible subversion. Already dozens of long-standing Chinese scientists working in US cancer research labs have been thrown out of their position, with thousands more targeted, although universities have begun to fight back (see “Universities Speak Out Against Dark-Ages Witch Hunt,” by Brian Lantz here.)

At the same time, the Belt and Road Initiative, taking the economic miracle in China to the developing nations of the world, is under massive attack, claiming it is a front for Chinese “imperialism.”

Zepp-LaRouche: Live the ‘New Paradigm’

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, addressed the Hong Kong crisis in a discussion this week with the members of the institute:

This is a classic color revolution. Hong Kong should never have been the British Crown Colony. This was theft. This was the theft after the Opium Wars, and this was a blatant, illegal robbery of something which rightfully has belonged to China for millennia. So, they occupied this area for 150 years, and made Hong Kong famous for drugs, for prostitution, for all these things. And naturally, when you start to say that the laws of the mainland should apply to Hong Kong in terms of prosecution of criminals, naturally there are some liberal people who oppose that. And maybe there are mixed in some other reasons, maybe there are some economic hardships, and so forth.

That all in a certain sense is irrelevant, because once you have a color revolution, you have, first, a little demonstration about some issue, . . . and then you mix in some provocations, which clearly were there from the very beginning. Then this is being picked up by the international media, and so that is the script of Gene Sharp. This is what happened many times in the color revolutions elsewhere. This is exactly what happened in the Maidan in Ukraine. And then you have the NED admission that they spent $1.7 million to train these people. Then you have the American flag, which can only be out of the cookbook of Gene Sharp. . . . The idea is regime change, and it goes along with what happened in the campaign against Xinjiang, weapons to Taiwan, the provocations in the South China Sea, the Huawei campaign, which has everything to do with the issues raised by Edward Snowden. . . . It is the British chess game, the big chess game for Eurasia. . . .

And then comes China and says, “We want to share our experience, how we overcame poverty in the last 40 years, for 800 million people, with the aim to eradicate poverty by 2020, and we want to share that model with all of the countries of the world. We invite countries from the Third World to participate in our space programs—Bolivia, Ecuador, many others.” Now, this is completely, 100% opposite of everything the British have tried to do in containing development, to keep the dark-skinned races controlled- so it’s not such a mystery why all of this is happening.

It’s really a question of the Malthusian, murderous outlook. Just look at the quotes from Malthus—let as many children die as possible; do not find solutions for disease, because diseases are very welcome to keep the population down. It’s pretty clear.

And China is just doing something which is in cohesion with Chinese history for the last 5,000 years, for especially the 2,500 years of Confucian influence. They want to build a harmonious world. The majority of what they say, they mean: That they want to have a win-win cooperation, and a shared community for the one future of humanity—I think that that is what they want!

Now, if you turn China into an enemy, you will get an enemy, there’s no question about it! China is not going to lie down and give up. I mean, their statements have become much harsher, with the trade war. They said we will not capitulate, and the wording has become much harder. But the German proverb, “As you yell into the woods, the echo comes back”—you have a classical case: You can start World War III with anybody if you start to list the negative points and make accusations and so forth; you can turn the most peaceful person into an enemy.

And that method is what we have to oppose! Because, when the Schiller Institute was founded 35 years ago, I said this kind of foreign policy has to stop, and you have to concentrate on the best traditions of the other! You have to emphasize whatever Classical period, whatever universal contribution to world history, that is what you have to emphasize. And if you do that, and vice versa, you can create a New Paradigm, because you start to emphasize the beauty of the other, the reason of the other, the contribution of the other, and you create a completely different dynamic. And if all of this is focused on scientific principles, in science and art, then you have a basis of actually accomplishing a New Paradigm.

“New Paradigm” simply means what Lyndon LaRouche was talking about, “the Age of Reason lies in the stars.” Krafft Ehricke called it the “extraterrestrial imperative.” That human beings stop behaving like four-year-old boys kicking each other in the knee.

That is not the condition of mankind. The condition of mankind is to relate to each other like Einstein and Planck, like Schiller and Humboldt, and emphasizing and loving the creative contribution of the other. And if you do that, you develop friendship, you develop trust, you develop options for the future! It’s a completely different way of thinking, and that different way of thinking has been lost to a very large extent, because people—they’re not thinking from a standpoint of where mankind can be if we get out of this present condition, which is—just think, if the kind of education of universal education for every child, if that would be applied, the chance that you would have criminals would become less and less, because, as Nikolaus of Cusa said: Sin is not a self-subsisting evil. Sin and evil are the lack of development. . . .

So, I think it’s very clear that we have to really—I’ve said it many times—but the New Paradigm has to be present in your own mind. You have to think, how should mankind be—and live it!