Hong Kong should guard against the dangers that the US and its key allies are using the city’s local national security legislation under Article 23 of the Basic Law as another battleground in their anti-China crusade. Besides demonizing the Article 23 legislation, the Western media have made many other false allegations against China. But the recent revelation by Reuters that then-US president Donald Trump ordered the CIA to launch a propaganda war against China in 2019 has dealt a devastating blow to the credibility of these unscrupulous Western media outlets. It hardly needs emphasizing that the “credibility deflation” will erode the diminishing public trust in their distorted reports and commentaries.
According to economist Jeffrey Sachs, the CIA has been trying to undermine China’s stability for years. These revelations, which exposed the CIA’s clandestine campaign on Chinese social media, show that Trump wanted to turn public opinion in China against its government. The CIA used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about the Chinese government and slammed the Belt and Road Initiative (Xinhua, CIA Operations Show US Harmful Interference in China’s Internal Affairs “Plainly Evident”: Scholar, March 14, 2024). The CIA declined to comment on the report (Emilia David, CIA Allegedly Made Fake Social Media Accounts to Troll the Chinese Government, in The Verge, March 15, 2024).
As mentioned earlier in this column, the CIA has launched cognitive warfare against China for a long period, aiming at influencing and/or disrupting individual and group cognition to gain an advantage over China. As Steve Chan has correctly pointed out, much of the current narrative prevailing in the West appears as efforts to construct and frame an “alternative reality” to justify the containment of China (Steve Chan, Bewildered and Befuddled, in Asian Survey, Sept/Oct 2023). Nowadays, the printed media, the internet and social media are probably the most powerful tools used in cognitive warfare to target key figures, niche groups and significant populations in a community.
Because some people in Hong Kong have dogmatically embraced Western liberal democratic values for years, hostile cognitive warriors find it easy to frighten them by alleging that the legislation will infringe on individuals’ freedoms and rights. As a result of such manipulation, Hong Kong residents may develop cognitive biases toward the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.
In spite of the negative narratives propagated by major Western media outlets and politicians, our think tank firmly believes that there is more to be said for the Article 23 bill than against it. The Article 23 legislation will ensure Hong Kong’s long-term stability and promote its economic development
In order to generate panic among Hong Kong residents, The Times recently published an article with the headline Hongkongers Face Jail for Keeping Old Newspapers. It claimed that anyone caught with old Apple Daily copies might be jailed for up to three years. As a result of the distorted reports, some readers might have felt a cold shudder bristle down their spines. The truth is, under the legislation, a person violates the law only when he or she possesses a publication containing seditious intent without a reasonable excuse. A publication would be considered seditious only if it incites people to commit substantive treason, secession or subversion offenses.
In response, the HKSAR government said the article was extremely misleading. The “old newspaper” farce reminds us that it is also a lie to tell half of the truth. The farce can be traced back to a recent meeting of the Bills Committee of the Legislative Council. During the meeting, lawmaker Peter Douglas Koon asked whether people would be in violation of the new legislation if they had copies of Apple Daily at home. Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung said in response that it would depend on the situation as to whether the accused had a reasonable defense.
It is also worth noting that a spokesman for the Commissioner’s Office of China’s Foreign Ministry in the Hong Kong SAR said in an open letter to The Washington Post’s editorial board that it was deeply shocked by the ignorance and double standards the Post displayed in its editorial piece titled With New Security Law, Hong Kong Doubles Down on Repression. The “warning” by The Washington Post has not triggered alarm in the city. In fact, there has been overwhelming public support for the legislation, with 98.6 percent of more than 13,000 submissions received during the one-month consultation period expressing support for the legislation.
Some Western reporters are good at using tactful means to defame the legislation under the guise of journalistic objectivity. One subtle way to launch an implicit attack on the legislation is to rely on biased “expert opinions” based on which the reports are constructed. For instance, David Pierson’s recent story on the Article 23 legislation only used the opinions of legal experts who were very critical of the legislation. Thomas Kellogg, a legal expert at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, claims that the HKSAR government is continuing to expand its national security tool kit to crack down on political opponents. The biased opinion of the Hong Kong Journalists Association has also been admitted (David Pierson, With Unusual Speed, Hong Kong Pushes Strict New Security Law, in The New York Times, March 7, 2024). It seems that Pierson’s quotation patterns help enhance the influence and visibility of the critics.
Although the opinion of Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung was also incorporated into Pierson’s article, his views were unfairly sandwiched by dissenting voices. According to Tang, the legislation has safeguards and strikes a balance between national security and human rights protection. Following Tang’s quotation, Pierson claimed that foreign businesspeople remained skeptical of the legislation, adding that it would make it harder to explain to investors the differences between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. Obviously, Tang’s opinion has been alienated from the overwhelming opposition viewpoints because the quotation patterns were tipped in favor of the critics.
Finally, remarks by the US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, on the legislation have also sent ripples of unease through the city. Burns told Bloomberg News in a recent interview that Washington has “serious concerns” about the impact of the legislation on “the right of people to dissent, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly”. Not surprisingly, Beijing accused the envoy of making irresponsible talk regarding the Article 23 bill.
In spite of the negative narratives propagated by major Western media outlets and politicians, our think tank firmly believes that there is more to be said for the Article 23 bill than against it. The Article 23 legislation will ensure Hong Kong’s long-term stability and promote its economic development.
The author is a barrister, a part-time researcher of Shenzhen University Hong Kong and the Macao Basic Law Research Center, chairman of the Chinese Dream Think Tank, and a district councilor.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
