2014 Hong Kong Protest
Hong Kong saw the formation of a new “political party,” headed by 19 year-old student Joshua Wong – a young man with no experience and no explanation as to who is funding him or backing him politically.
The party, called “Demosisto,” was described by the BBC in their article, “Hong Kong student leader Joshua Wong forms political party,” as demanding “self-determination” for Hong Kong – an ambition pushed primarily by US and British interests, not the people of Hong Kong.
Mr Wong was a leading figure in the so-called Umbrella Movement in 2014, which aimed to secure greater voting rights for the territory’s residents.
“Street activism is not enough if we want to fight for a better future,” Mr Wong told the BBC.
“We have to enter the system, create a political party and shape the political agenda, in order to drive forward our movement for self-determination.”
Although Mr Wong is too young to run for office, Demosisto will put forward candidates in Legislative Council elections in September.
The BBC is clearly and intentionally omitting obvious questions and answers regarding the new party, “Demosisto,” such as who is funding it, who is backing it, and who really is running it when clearly the 19 year-old Joshua Wong is merely a figurehead incapable of conjuring up a political party from scratch in Hong Kong’s otherwise highly competitive sociopolitical environment.
Obvious Western Proxies
Hong Kong, seized by the British in 1841 and handed back – tentatively – to China in 1997, still suffers from the influence and ambitions of both London and their hegemonic successors in Washington and on Wall Street. The latest manifestation of this influence and ambition was the “Occupy Central” movement that sprung up in 2014 among a milieu of US and British-backed agitators with direct financial and political ties to the West.
The foreign ties driving the protests were quickly exposed despite immense propaganda, denials, and deception from the foreign-funded movement’s leadership. The 2014 “Occupy Central” mobs attracted only a minority of Hong Kong’s population, before finally fizzling out in the face of not government crackdowns, but growing public backlash.
Besides Joshua Wong, other “Occupy Central” leaders including Benny Tai and Martin Lee had obvious and direct ties to the United States government, with Tai’s political and academic activity almost entirely subsidized by the US State Department, and with Lee having literally traveled to Washington just ahead of the protests to speak before the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to lobby for aid he would soon receive.
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| Image: Martin Lee in Washington D.C. in 2014, speaking before NED ahead of the “Occupy Central” protests. |
In the wake of the protests, Joshua Wong, Benny Tai, and Martin Lee would all be invited to Washington by their US sponsors to receive an award from NED-subsidiary, Freedom House.
Freedom House’s own website featured an entry for the event titled, “Freedom House marks its 75th anniversary by honoring three generations of Hong Kong democracy leaders: Joshua Wong, Benny Tai and Martin C. M. Lee.”
What is perhaps most indicative of the deceit propagated by the “Occupy Central” movement and its US sponsors is the fact that despite Martin Lee’s trip to Washington before the protests and his role during them, he and his US sponsors repeatedly claimed he was not involved in the “Occupy Central” movement – only to be recognized for his leadership role during the Freedom House event in 2015 afterwards.
In fact, the US NED itself would post a rebuttal to claims of Lee’s involvement in the protests titled, “The National Endowment for Democracy and support for democracy in Hong Kong,” in which it stated:
While Mr. Lee and Ms. Chan are leading democratic figures in Hong Kong, they are neither leaders nor organizers of the current protests; neither are they grantees of the NED.
Freedom House, however, by inviting him to recognize his leadership during “Occupy Central,” with Lee himself literally carrying one of the symbolic “yellow umbrellas” carried by the agitators during the protests onto the stage with him, thoroughly contradicts NED’s earlier denials.
Between verified funding received by Benny Tai from the US State Department, Martin Lee’s trip to Washington before the protests lobbying for assistance, and Tai, Lee, and Joshua Wong’s pilgrimage to Washington to receive their “award” for their participation in foreign-funded subversion afterwards, the notion that Wong’s new party, “Demosisto,” stands for Hong Kong’s “self-determination” is an absolute absurdity.
Hong Kong’s future, through these three men and the political fronts they lead, is clearly being determined from abroad, and more specifically, by Washington, not by the people of Hong Kong.
It would seem that the West’s return of Hong Kong to the Chinese people was done only begrudgingly, with attempts since then to maintain control over the territory through political proxies.
During the Freedom House event, all three US-backed agitators admitted that their work sought not only to influence Hong Kong, but to serve as a vector for their political movement to make its way deeper into mainland China.
In this wider sense, this means that not only is the West trying to maintain control over its former colonial holdings in Hong Kong, but is also trying to expand this control deeper into China as well. Western ambitions to encircle and contain China has been a matter of stated foreign policy since the “Pentagon Papers” were leaked in the 1970s. Considering the deep, foreign nature of the so-called opposition movement in Hong Kong, the notion of “self-determination” appears to be a parody, not a principle – hidden behind by Western political proxies like Joshua Wong, not upheld by them.
Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
