Chinese state-run media made much of a tiny rally held in Los Angeles on Sunday to oppose the Hong Kong protest movement and accuse it of using violence to achieve its ends.
China’s Xinhua news service described the rally as a spontaneous outpouring of disgust with the Hong Kong protests from Chinese people living in California. The article never referred to the participants as “Chinese-Americans,” although one of the sponsors was the Chinese American Federation, a non-profit founded in 2005 by “more than 120 Chinese American associations and business coalitions” to “promote and strengthen the contact among organizations and business enterprises in Chinese American communities.” According to Xinhua:
“Hundreds of Chinese held a peaceful rally Sunday morning to support Hong Kong as an indisputable part of China and oppose violence in the special administrative region,” Xinhua declared:
Waving placards saying “No Riots in Hong Kong” in Monterey Park, an East Los Angeles suburban city, the participants, including white-collar workers, business owners and students, all expressed concern and said the violence by radical protesters in Hong Kong over the past weeks should by no means be tolerated.
“In America, you can not touch a policeman. That’s number one important. Those protesters in Hong Kong must stop attacking policemen, reporters and other tourists,” Jessica Hu, chairperson of U.S.-China Economic & Cultural Organization, told Xinhua.
“You have problems? You want to complain about something? It’s okay. But you need to sit down first,” Hu said.
The Hong Kong policemen “need to be strong,” she added. “If not, all will be hurt.”
Hu’s husband Steven Fk, standing by her, said he and Hu talked about the turmoil in Hong Kong every day and the escalating violence has worried both of them.
Fk said the protesters’ anti-social and violent actions had stepped out of the line, as similar attacks, if happens in the United States, could not be tolerated.
“If you grabbed a policeman’s weapon here, you will be killed on scene. If you tried to occupy the airport, you will be arrested here. You must understand the Hong Kong policemen are very nice. Maybe they are too nice,” said Lu Qiang, owner of local Chinese restaurant Shanghai Lander Palace, who has lived in Los Angeles for over 20 years.
Lu, who was one of the rally organizers, called on the Chinese government to rebuff demands for “Hong Kong independence” from “extremists.”
Another organizer, president Shao Wen of the aforementioned Chinese American Federation, accused the protesters of attempting to “kidnap Hong Kong in order to achieve ulterior political goals.”
“We firmly uphold the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ principle and firmly uphold the rule of law in Hong Kong, the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ for all Chinese people,” Shao declared.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) last week described a campaign of “information warfare” waged by China against the Hong Kong protest movement, an effort that grew sufficiently obnoxious in the online realm to prompt Google, Facebook, and Twitter to take down hundreds of accounts linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
The campaign’s major objectives included painting the Hong Kong demonstrators as violent extremists and claiming Chinese people are widely disgusted by their activities. Meanwhile, the Communist Party is making sure citizens of China are not exposed to news that contradicts the official Party narrative, using tactics such as searching the phones of visitors for words and images about the protests. According to RFA:
The checks are believed to be part of a concerted campaign to ensure that no unedited news of the Hong Kong anti-extradition protests is able to reach residents of mainland China, as Beijing tries to promote its view of the protests as an attempt by foreign powers to stage a “color revolution” in China far beyond its borders.
U.S.-based legal scholar Teng Biao said the administration of President Xi Jinping has succeeded in suppressing any form of free speech in mainland China in recent years.
“The Chinese government completely suppresses freedom of speech by shutting down accounts and deleting posts for the slightest thing,” Teng said.
“Many people have been detained for something they posted online, sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges like incitement to subversion or picking quarrels and stirring up trouble, or have just ‘disappeared’,” he said. “Meanwhile, the 50-cent army cooks up fake news online.”
Beijing is making a big push to increase its social media footprint on Western social media services that Chinese citizens are not allowed to read. According to RFA:
RFA’s Cantonese Service reported earlier this week that a top news organization run by the ruling Chinese Communist Party has hired two specialist social media and data management firms to boost their Facebook fans and followers on Twitter.
The China News Service, the second largest state-owned news agency in China after Xinhua, is run by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, which was absorbed into the United Front Work Department—the external influence and outreach agency—of the Chinese Communist Party in 2018.
Two official procurement documents seen by RFA for Twitter and Facebook specialists respectively offered contracts worth up to 1.3 million yuan each to companies that can boost their follower counts on those platforms by more than half a million.
“China is copying Russia and has set up a large number of accounts on Facebook and Twitter to pump out anti-protester propaganda filled with factually untrue statements and pictures,” professor Victor Shih of the University of California San Diego told Politico last week.
Politico noted one aspect of these fake social media accounts that tipped off investigators was that the owners could directly access Facebook and Twitter without using virtual private networks to get past the firewall that prevents ordinary Chinese citizens from seeing them. The fake accounts created posts that denounced Hong Kong demonstrators as rioters and blamed them for violence, just as the rally organizers in Los Angeles claimed.
The UK Independent described the Chinese Communist Party’s version of the Hong Kong crisis, expressed through its state news organizations and social media accounts, as “a small violent gang of protesters, unsupported by residents and provoked by foreign agents, is running rampant, calling for Hong Kong’s independence and tearing China apart.”
“This narrative almost certainly reflects that of the country’s leaders, including Xi Jinping, and it is fueling misunderstanding – and, increasingly, anger – among the Chinese public. That could, in turn, raise pressure on the government, increasing the risk of an overreaction or miscalculation based on limited or inaccurate information,” the Independent noted.
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