Why US Progressives and "Socialists" Support the Far-Right Hong Kong Protesters

Operation Hong Kong - Why US Progressives and "Socialists" Support the Far-Right Hong Kong Protesters

Leftists across the United States, who self-identify as “progressives” or “democratic socialists,” (aka  白左 - Bái zuǒ in Chinese) have been swept up in an embrace of the Hong Kong protests, seduced by the titillating images of youth resisting the police amid calls for democracy. But the longer the protests drag on, the more uncomfortable they should feel. The protesters and their wealthy supporters among Hong Kong oligarchs hold regular meetings with Trump’s arch-conservative Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Christian-Zionist Vice President Mike Pence, and they have been praised for their efforts by hard-right Republican Senator Marco Rubio and erstwhile Trump whisperer Steve Bannon. In other words, the most reactionary figures in American politics, people who have worked assiduously to crush struggles for freedom and grassroots democracy by working-class people of all colors, ethnicities, and creeds in the United States and Europe. These forces who have also propped up with billions of dollars of financial aid and arms sales, the racist Apartheid regime in Israel and the misogynistic Salafist regime in Saudi Arabia, are the biggest fans of the Hong Kong demonstrators. You can be sure that those meetings would never happen if the protesters were actually attacking the rule of multinational corporations in the economy of Hong Kong, that has made life for workers so miserable, or challenging how US global hegemony drives the concentration of wealth in both Hong Kong and the US. You would expect, at least, that some American leftists would question the purposes of the Hong Kong protesters who raise up the British Union Jack and American flags, chant the Star-Spangled Banner and ask for Trump to come and liberate them. But you would be wrong.

Equally odd is the front-page coverage of the demonstrations in Hong Kong by the Washington Post and the New York Times on a daily basis. Those are the same corporate newspapers which maligned the efforts of Occupy Wall Street in New York and largely ignore the Yellow Jackets in Paris in their demands for government accountability; newspapers that patently refuse to report or condemn the terrible police violence used to suppress those protests in a manner which is no different than seen in any other regime they accuse of being authoritarian. The injuries and deaths suffered at the hands of police and private security in the suppression of minority communities, workers movements, peace activists, or those protesting against the prison industrial complex in the United States through strikes and protests have been downplayed or completely ignored by those newspapers when they occur in the so-called Western democracies. Why is it that the Hong Kong protests demand such focused attention from the Western mass media and why do progressives and democratic socialists jump on the band-wagon?

In a normal world, we would find honest progressives and knowledgeable socialists starting to feel a bit queasy about this phony Hong Kong story-line, like indigestion that sets in after consuming a spoiled meal. But these “leftists” prefer to drown that sick feeling by swallowing the most elaborate and duplicitous fictions as an intellectual antacid.

It is certainly the case that there are many youths who feel frustrated with their lives in the neo-liberal/neo-colonial economy of Hong Kong and are easily persuaded that their ennui is the fault of the central Chinese government in Beijing rather than the multinational investment banks who have remade Hong Kong to enrich their own coffers. But, their feelings are universal throughout the world and are not peculiar to Hong Kong. Unlike what we see in the US, France, Greece and elsewhere in the "developed world", however, the Hong Kong authorities and police have been restrained to a fault, if not indulgent, allowing protesters to run wild on the streets, create havoc in business districts and disrupt travel at an international airport, something that would have been stopped immediately in any of the “developed nations” who would quickly label such disturbances a threat to public safety and national security.

Professor Martin Jacques of the University of Cambridge describes the hypocrisy in the Western media in a manner that few others would dare,

“The Western Media has been hypocritical. In a way condoned the violent behavior of these groups. For example, the occupation of the airport was never clearly condemned in the British media or the Western media. Why not? They would never tolerate that happening for example in London at London Heathrow. So why is it not acceptable in Britain, but acceptable in Hong Kong?”

Certainly you would expect American leftists to be openly critical of how the US media highlights only the size of the “pro-democracy” or more aptly named “pro-colonial and pro-American” demonstrations in Hong Kong while placing a virtual blackout on the large crowds that have assembled to support China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong and the beleaguered police who have been viciously attacked by thousands of black-shirted and masked vigilantes. You would expect them at least to refer to how the corporate media is intentionally ignoring how they vandalize businesses and terrorize the public on the streets and in public spaces. The confrontations initiated by the protesters, which include attacks and assaults against the police and innocent bystanders, are portrayed as heroic actions by brave pro-democracy advocates even in the “leftist” media. But the protesters rampaging through the streets of Hong Kong are equipped like a battalion of fascist brown-shirts reminiscent of the stormtroopers who attacked Jewish businesses and communities during Nazi Germany’s infamous Kristallnacht. The images of protesters engaged in vandalism and the destruction of public property have been censored by Facebook and Twitter and dismissed as part of a Chinese disinformation campaign against the “pro-democracy” movement.

Western leftists who support the protests should be asking, why is it that the protesters refuse to take on the billionaire class which has made Hong Kong, the most expensive place in the world to live, and destroyed the lives and well being, of its youth? In contrast, right across the Bay, the youth in Shenzhen participate in a vibrant and innovative makers culture where protests such as seen in Hong Kong would be unthinkable, not because of state oppression, but because there is no such feeling of alienation as Hong Kong youth experience.

Rather than question why the Hong Kong protesters avoid targeting the real source of oppression in their quasi city-state, perhaps it is better to ask, why would they bite the hand that feeds them? In fact, the protesters have colonized minds and identify with their oppressors while disparaging their own ethnic identity and using racist slurs to refer to Chinese from outside Hong Kong, all the while refusing to discuss the corruption in Hong Kong society and the domination of the Hong Kong economy by multinational corporations and home-grown Hong Kong oligarchs and billionaires. The real issues that progressives should be concerned with go unaddressed by the Hong Kong protesters. Their ire instead is directed against Beijing, in a manner that is perfectly in line with the demands of right-wing and neo-liberal US strategists bent on the destabilization and containment of China.

The Hong Kong protesters paint China as a totalitarian state which is suppressing them through the imposition of the extradition bill. Contrary to what is suggested in the Western media, the bill was not promulgated by Beijing. It was initiated by the Hong Kong authorities and is subject to implementation by the independent Hong Kong judiciary not the central government in Beijing. Anyone who bothered to actually study this allegedly “authoritarian” extradition bill would find out that it is a common-sense law that would send heinous criminals to Macao, Taiwan or the People’s Republic of China for prosecution in the jurisdiction in which their crime was committed. The assumption is that somehow China treats criminals worse than the United States, which has an extradition bill with Hong Kong. Hong Kong, however, is a part of China, and the extradition bill is an internal affair of the Chinese nation. There really is no dispute on this point. Yet the protesters have no problem with the extradition agreement with the United States, whose criminal justice system is one of the most corrupt in the world. In point of fact, there is probably a better chance of getting a fair trial, and getting out of prison alive, in China.

Yet most self-avowed leftists in the US still cling to this bogus Hong Kong democracy movement, even after indisputable evidence has shown that these violent demonstrators have received ideological education and funding from the CIA surrogate National Endowment for Democracy (NED), logistical training from fraudulent neo-liberal human rights outfits like the Oslo Freedom Forum, media support from people like the media oligarch Jimmy Lai, known as the Rupert Murdoch of Hong Kong and a close pal of DC neocons like John Bolton, and have been backed by a motley assortment of right-wing crazies within the dispensationalist Christian movement and the Falun Gong cult. The backing that the protesters receive from the entire American political spectrum speaks to the unity of the anti-China agenda from left-wing progressives through to ultra-right-wing religious fanatics.

Blindness in leftist journals, such as the democratic socialist Jacobin and the progressive The Nation, journals that report with some objectivity about other issues, continue to praise the protests in their writings even though they should know better. They need to go no further than the US mainstream media to find out that their arch-enemies among the neoliberal Democrats and neo-conservative Republicans are pushing this Hong Kong “democracy” narrative. We must ask ourselves, why it is that progressives and many socialists turn a blind eye to the far-right political forces and moneyed interests both in Hong Kong and abroad which have been instrumental in organizing, financing and popularizing the protests?

You would think that those who consider themselves to be on the left would be able to at least note in passing the serious contradictions surrounding this supposedly democratic uprising, with its studied silence on class issues, the role of US militarism in destabilizing East Asia, climate change, social injustice or just about any significant issue that the left claims it is concerned with. These Hong Kong protesters, in a highly predictable and choreographed manner, demand an American-style Trumpian democracy. If they were in the United States, the American left would ignore them completely.

In addition, the attempt by many on the left to justify, or ignore, the systematic violence of the protesters flies in the face of the avowedly non-violent proclivities of the mainstream US left. There is ample documentation to show that the protesters have launched violent, premeditated attacks on police to try to provoke them to respond with force. It is so extensive that it can only be ignored through a complete lapse of political will and journalistic ethics.

The response of the liberals and progressives in the Democratic Party

Even as China puts forth the most progressive national agenda of any major country, with a deep commitment to the elimination of poverty and massive investment in green energy and basic science, has created a universal health care system for 1.4 billion people with a healthy life-span longer than in the US, builds millions of subsidized housing units for its lower-income citizens and has built a sophisticated and efficient high speed rail system that spans the entire country, American progressives like presidential candidate Bernie Sanders can hardly find a single positive thing to say about “authoritarian” China. Sanders bends over backward to blame American decay on a mythical China and has no problems with making blatantly racist generalizations about China that he would never make about Hispanics or African Americans, accepting and promoting without question the stereotypes that Chinese steal from other nations, oppress their national minorities and practice aggression against their neighbors.

Sanders, like Trump, is demagogically playing to an audience of disenfranchised and disaffected voters by scapegoating China. Sadly, the racist tropes that Sanders engages in are constantly foisted on China not only by the reactionary US media but by the supposedly independent alternative media. Yet, the Western democracies, who are far more guilty of the actions they attribute to China, are seldom held to account in the same fashion.

Sanders is merely another example of a concerted effort at the highest levels across the American political spectrum, to cast China as the devil incarnate, the source of all US problems and world tensions. Mainstream Democrats have always seen China as a bête noire, a free-fire zone where they can make comments that they would not be able to make about other nations. China has become the opposite of Israel in American politics. Whereas no serious criticism can be made of Israel’s sadistic and racist policies towards the Palestinians, so also nothing positive can be said about China, no matter what its achievements.

The unparalleled cynicism of Anti-Chinese Leftists

Even some socialists in the United States who advocate a revolutionary and radical agenda swallow the Hong Kong “democracy” carnival hook, line, and sinker. For example, wsws.org (World Socialist Website) of the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party, which advocates a revolutionary Marxist platform, and features credible critiques of the abuses of capitalism, does an about-face when it encounters Hong Kong and adopts an anti-Chinese pose that could have come from the Wall Street Journal or the National Interest. But this is to be expected of the Trotskyist media which has long been a fifth column in the anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.

For example, Peter Symonds’ article “Hundreds of thousands again take to Hong Kong’s streets” in WSWS is a complete whitewash of the Hong Kong protests that leaves out any details about the role of American, Taiwanese and Hong Kong oligarchs in funding, and then hyping in the media, the protests. Rather, the protests are disingenuously portrayed as reflecting the concerns of the working class (which they in fact entirely ignore) and being the victims of “police violence” when it has been unequivocally shown that the violence has been overwhelmingly on the part of the protesters who are seen in multiple videos acting like well-oiled paramilitary units trained to make trouble.

Ironically, the corporate mouthpiece CNN was better able to detail the manipulation of the protesters and the media by the right-wing oligarch Jimmy Lai in their broadcast “Why pro-democracy troublemaker Jimmy Lai is the only Hong Kong multi-millionaire standing up to China” (August 28, 2019) than were the pseudo-Marxist revolutionaries at WSWS.

Has the ideological rot in the United States reached so deep that even those who feign to denounce imperialism and call for revolution must nevertheless hold up the imperialist anti-China flag? It leads one to wonder, what is the true agenda of those who call themselves progressives and socialists?

There are a few important factors to keep in mind. First, there is a hidden racist bias against Chinese, and against Asians in general, among many leftists in the United States that makes it easy for them to fall into line with the racist tropes promoted by the far right. Leftists, progressives, and socialists would be up in arms if it were suggested that they are racist, or culturally biased, but the evidence is there. They prefer to lionize socialists in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa but have minimal interest in promoting the great social, cultural and economic advances made by socialist China.

Many leftists are unabashed supporters of Cuba which has sustained 60 years of US embargo and containment but find China unpalatable, even though China was subject to a similar thirty-year embargo by the US. It was only because of the ignoble US defeat in Vietnam that the People’s Republic of China was finally recognized by the US in 1979. China has also been a firm ally and supporter of Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Venezuela since its Bolivarian Revolution. Moreover, the Marxist-Leninist system of governance in both Cuba and China are nearly identical-but China is not a topic of interest. It was only during the disastrous Cultural Revolution that some elements within the US Left waxed poetic about the Chinese revolution, but when China started to earnestly build socialism with all its twists and turns, they immediately jumped ship.

A look at the pseudo-leftist news reports of Democracy Now hosted by the vaunted progressive Amy Goodman is most revealing. Her program is packed full of tales about Palestine and Latin America, but there is hardly a word about China or for that matter Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan. So ingrained is this indifference to Asia among the left in the United States and their fear of saying anything positive about China that they are totally unaware of it. It is for this reason that the upper-middle-class crypto-leftists who support Palestine and Cuba somehow feel inoculated against racism when they single out China for opprobrium.

The standard refrain used in this context is, “China is more capitalist than America.” But that facile trope does not reflect the reality of the mixed economy based on the principles of market socialism that the Chinese have pioneered. China’s political economy is driven by socialist ideals promulgated by the Chinese Communist Party, not the neo-liberal ideology of Western capitalism. Moreover, China has Marxist academies at every major university (something inconceivable in the West) and has many extremely articulate and thoughtful scholars of socialism and its political economy. Yet they are never cited by the West’s pseudo-left. Just take the case of Wen Tiejun, an advocate for ecological civilization and organic farming in China who has published many thoughtful books and is an excellent speaker. His “New Rural Reconstruction Movement” could be an inspiration to the United States. Yet he is totally unknown, shut out of the American discourse.

There is a deep Western bias in the “think left; live right” ideology embraced by white upper-middle-class socialists in the United States. They embrace Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges as their gods, but they refuse to recognize that their feet are made of clay, that they base their critique in a made-in-Europe Western tradition and that they are, as a result, blind to other traditions.

The marginalization of Mao Zedong by the Western intellectual left is critical to maintaining this bizarre state in which Western Imperialism is condemned but only Western political theories can be used to critique it. The American “left” today treats Mao’s work as a marginal genre, appropriate only for peasants in mountain redoubts and a pale shadow far from the sacred canon consisting of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and Howard Zinn. They cannot see, or even conceive of, the originality and complexity of Mao Zedong’s analysis, which is anything but derivative but proposes new horizons by dint of its integration of Marxism and a complex Chinese tradition of political philosophy.

The ignorance of Mao is no accident. It is of a piece with the disdain of the Western left for all Chinese writings on political philosophy, from the “Great Mean” to “Zhuangzi” to Kang Youwei’s “Datongshu,” that argue for a just and fair society. The party line for the Sinophobe left is that social justice and equality were invented at the time of the French revolution by Westerners who then introduced their enlightened views on capital and class to the benighted world.

Most certainly it has never crossed their minds that the French Revolution was influenced by Confucianism, especially the concepts of meritocracy in government, or the separation of church and state. And they are completely ignorant of the fact that much of China’s current political discourse is based on the deep historical knowledge and experience of the Chinese nation and its people over three millennia of continuous history. Although the covers of the publications of the Chinese Communist Party may not have the radical chic we find on the covers of Naomi Klein’s books, anyone who actually reads them will find a sophistication of analysis beyond anything that American political parties, including those on the left, offer.

Interestingly, the Western right-wing is more honest with itself, explicitly identifying China as a competing civilization. It is a xenophobic, small-minded and reactionary perspective, but it is a fact that the Chinese traditions of Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, not to mention the innovations in socialism undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party over the last hundred years, offer a parallel, and in, many respects superior, tradition to that found in the West. Chinese civilization is a clear and present challenge to an increasingly xenophobic, narrow-minded and narcissistic Western civilization.

To look too closely at the Chinese leftist tradition would be dangerous because it might lead American leftists to the disturbing realization that the Chinese leftist tradition is rooted in a legacy of local self-governance, the role of the intellectual in the community, and a sustainable and non-expansionist vision of society. The Western left, by contrast, is contaminated at many levels by the legacy of colonialism and imperialist thinking, even as its leaders decry that tradition.

What then are the real reasons democratic socialists and progressives support the anti-China, pro-Western Hong Kong demonstrations? Is it simply naivete? Have they been bamboozled by the anti-China corporate propaganda mill and lost all of their ability to think critically and independently?

No, that is too facile an explanation. The simple fact is that democratic socialists and progressives are part and parcel of the capitalist political system and the imperialist program of global hegemony. They serve as a “leftist” or “socialist” cover for American exceptionalism and indispensability. They herald the corrupt system of bourgeois democracy as the paragon of universal human rights, one that only requires a bit of tinkering in order to once again represent the needs of the people. In fact, they have become the epitome of an imperial left, social imperialists who talk about socialism at home but practice imperialism by uniting with its practitioners abroad. Left intact by the American leftists, who focus on a few bad apples and avoid fundamental critiques of American and Western democracy, is the whole system of the militarized, surveillance state that runs roughshod over the rights of people at home and that demands subservience abroad. Hence they unite with reactionaries in Hong Kong and elsewhere in their support of bogus “pro-democracy” color revolutions which only serve to promote US imperialism.

Only when the American left starts to engage with China on its own terms, starts to actually consider the complexity and the effectiveness of Chinese reforms, starts to study the long Chinese tradition of governance, will we have a true dialogue. Unfortunately, if the American left started to engage in such an honest and constructive project, their leaders would see those fellowships at Harvard start to dry up and the chances to make money from the publication of their fluffy books go up in smoke.