
Western media were quick to let the world know 600,000 Hongkongers had expressed opposition to the NSL, but there was hardly a word about the more than 2.9 million and 1.7 million people who signed petitions, respectively, supporting the law and demanding that the US stop meddling in the city’s internal affairs. Those numbers suggested the majority of Hong Kong residents did not share the West’s “grave concern.”
What is more, the West showed its hypocrisy in that most if not every Western country has enacted laws to protect the security of its people. The US, in fact, has enacted more than one such law.
This raises the question: Why did the Western media and governments complain about China’s law while supporting their own? It can’t be about human rights, because it has been well documented that Hong Kong enjoys more freedom now than it did under British colonial rule.
Against this backdrop, the real reason behind the West’s “grave concern,” that of the US and UK in particular, was losing Hong Kong as a venue to intervene in China’s internal affairs. Other than Taiwan, the city was the only location left in China that allowed the West to spy on and destabilize the country. Now that it is gone, the US and UK have lost another place to destabilize China from.
After the 1989 “6/4 incident” in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square ended “pro-democracy” protests, the Chinese government required foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to report their missions, sources of funds and other information to the appropriate authorities. Unsurprisingly, Western governments complained and warned the world that China was returning to “Mao-era suppression.”
Contrary to Western news reports, however, China did not become more “repressive,” and its economy recovered quickly from the Tiananmen incident to grow at more than 9% in 1991 from an average annual growth rate of around 4% in 1989 and 1990. Since then, Western-based opinion polling organizations such as the US-based Pew Poll showed that year after year, the Chinese central government has enjoyed overwhelming popular support, estimated at more than 80%.
That finding might not be surprising because the government was, in fact, been serving the people, focusing on economic growth culminated in improving people’s standard of living, lifting more than 850 million people out of poverty, and enabling millions of Chinese to travel abroad and in their own country.
Furthermore, the Chinese central government has a history of living up to its promises, following through with appropriate policies. For example, the government is pouring in resources to fulfill its promise of eradicating poverty by 2020. That program has been largely successful in that only a minute percentage of rural residents are still mired in poverty […]
Via https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/real-reason-for-grave-concern-over-hk-security-law/
Reblogged this on Alexanders' Blog.
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