As if the ongoing “trade war” wasn’t an intense enough Hybrid War against China as it is, the US might soon pass the so-called “Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act” in order to take its asymmetrical aggression even further and institutionalize it as the “new normal” for at least the next three decades.
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American lawmakers are on the path to approving the so-called “Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act” (HKHRDA) after the proposed bill passed the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees earlier this week, thus putting the US and China on a collision course that can only serve to complicate their ongoing talks on ending the “trade war“. As if that aforementioned manifestation of Hybrid War wasn’t intense enough, the HKHRDA will take this asymmetrical aggression even further through targeted sanctions against individuals (presumably all of which would be government and law enforcement officials) accused of carrying out “human rights” and “democracy” violations in Hong Kong as well as involvement in using the autonomous region as a backdoor for evading the US’ export control laws given the administrative unit’s separate trade status with Washington. China vowed to respond if the proposed law enters into force, but it’s difficult to imagine what it could do to inflict similar damage to the US’ interests like its rival is poised to do to theirs.
The HKHRDA encourages the continuation of increasingly violent and terrorist-prone actions by a cadre of Western-linked radical “protesters” and “rewards” them by collectively punishing the peaceful majority of the population by threatening to curtail the city’s special trade privileges with the US if an annual review of the “human rights” and “democracy” situation there results in American officials supposedly finding “evidence” that any of those two or export controls were violated. In other words, a statistically small number of rioters can end up holding the entire autonomous region of over 7 million people hostage because the authorities’ legal response to their illegal behavior could trigger the US’ threatened economic consequences against the whole population there. The reason for such a deliberately disproportionate reaction is to ensure that the flames of separatist sentiment continue to burn for at least the next three decades ahead of the 2047 expiration of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration that stipulated the existence of the “one country, two systems” model for half a century following Hong Kong’s formal handover to the People’s Republic in 1997.
American strategists believe that the HKHRDA is all that’s needed to catalyze a self-sustaining cycle of unrest there that would eventually lead to an outflow of wealth and educated residents (many of whom tend to be liberal-leaning wherever in the world they may be) that ultimately results in the city losing its unique socio-cultural and economic identity. This in turn would contribute to further radicalizing the most “nationalist”-inclined members of the population into potentially making an Alamo-like “last stand” to provoke the “hoped-for” (from an American perspective) Tiananmen Square 2.0 intervention that was narrowly averted for the time being by the Chief Executive withdrawing the fugitive bill and agreeing to hold talks with select members of the community. The US was expecting that course of action all along to serve as the tripwire for pressuring the EU into cutting its growing trade ties with China and sanction it, thus facilitating their return the American economic fold and improving the prospects of reviving the stalled Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on terms more favorable to those that Trump is seeking.
In addition, worsening unrest in Hong Kong could possibly serve to inspire copycat Hybrid War campaigns in the mainland’s megacities along the lines of what the author first envisaged in his 2016 forecasting exercise titled “Greater Eurasia Scenarios: China“, although that might be more difficult to pull off the longer that it takes because of the central authorities’ planned nationwide rollout of the so-called “social credit system” and other surveillance means for preemptively thwarting such Color Revolution attempts. The US is so focused on Hong Kong not just because of its potential role as a catalyst in setting off a chain reaction of challenges for the Communist Party elsewhere in the country, but also as revenge against them for “reneging” on the “gentlemen’s agreement” that was struck in the last half of the Old Cold War. Kissinger’s masterful success in wooing China to the US’ side against the USSR led to the UK being ordered to “reward” it with future control over Hong Kong with the expectation that China would then be co-opted into the US-led global system.
That plan dramatically backfired after the unsuccessful 1989 Tiananmen Square Color Revolution attempt designed to topple the Communist Party there simultaneously with the Eastern Bloc’s led to China committing itself to undermine the same US-led global system from within prior to eventually capturing control of it following the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and then climaxing during what was widely expected to be Clinton’s victory in the 2016 elections. Trump’s “surprise” win changed all of that, with the incumbent President admitting earlier this week at the UN that the liberal-globalist plot to co-opt China failed and that the People’s Republic must now therefore be contained after taking advantage of the rules within the US-led system. Against this backdrop, it makes sense why Hong Kong has become a flashpoint in the New Cold War and the US is so fiercely targeting it with Hybrid War since it regards the autonomous region as a catalyst for triggering larger chain reactions of Color Revolution unrest across the country at large but also as revenge for “reneging” on the “gentlemen’s agreement” between the two after the Tiananmen Square events.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook
