One can be excused for suspecting that we are still living in a sane world.  

In one of its top headlines released on Tuesday, “Trump signed law slapping sanctions on China for interference in Hong Kong”, CNBC reported: “President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he signed legislation to impose sanctions on China in response to its interference with Hong Kong’s autonomy.”

It all feels bizarre. China was punished for exercising a universally acknowledged sovereign right to safeguard national security by plugging legal loopholes in part of its territory, to be specific, Hong Kong, a special administrative region that enjoys a high degree of autonomy but comes directly under the jurisdiction of the Chinese central government.

A sane person simply cannot imagine a scenario where China, or any other country in the world, slaps sanctions on the United States for a policy adopted by the US federal government and applied to its states.  After all, the present world order is supposed to be underpinned by a non-intervention rule, a principle of international law which received official United Nations recognition when the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Domestic Affairs of States in 1965.

The rhetoric that what Washington politicians are doing is for the good of Hong Kong people is self-deceiving, and no fair-minded person takes it seriously. They intended to inflict harm on Hong Kong residents without discrimination by taking away the city’s special trade status.

The gorgeous words uttered by those Washington politicians, such as “rights”, “freedom” or “democracy”, are mere red herrings. The truth is, they are trying to protect their local proxies whose success in the special administrative region would serve US geopolitical interests. In doing so, they are taking all Hong Kong people hostage.

Washington’s Hong Kong strategy is part of its master plan for containing China. Thanks to its significance to China, the city has been treated by Washington politicians as a pawn on the political chessboard.

The ever-escalating war against Huawei and other Chinese tech giants, the rancorous trade war and now the attempt to implicate Hong Kong are all part of the grand containment strategy, which is essentially the product of the resurrection of the Cold War mentality. This mentality was in action when the Trump administration started to see China as a “strategic competitor”; and it was in full play when both the US National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy officially identified China as a “major strategic rival”.