NDP statement pushes imperialist stance demonizing new Hong Kong security law
Written by: Aidan Jonah & Daniel Xie
On August 28, the Federal NDP released a statement titled “Liberal government must act quickly to protect Canadians and support Hong Kongers: NDP.” In the statement, the New Democrats follow the imperialist line on the new National Security Law implemented in Hong Kong. The particular line they are pushing is of the “pro-democracy protesters” narrative.
The NDP’s statement severely misrepresents Hong Kong’s National Security Law as leading to “persecution and arbitrary imprisonment. The problematic insinuation is that the existence of laws governing a nation’s national security is unreasonable.
The NDP: A home for leftist imperialists
Yves Engler’s book “Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada” showed how the Canadian left, and the NDP have a long of supporting imperialism and militarism. The NDP leadership failed to condemn the US-backed coup attempt against Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro in early January 2019. At the end of the month, the NDP leadership did push for Canada to maintain relations with Venezuela.
However, in a CBC article it was revealed that “An NDP official speaking on background [said] that the party condemns the actions of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, calling him a thug, but would not cut ties with the leader and would continue to recognize his government.”
The NDP released another statement almost three months later, the NDP pushed a both-sides narrative, while de-legitimizing elections held in 2018, by calling for the government to “hold free and democratic elections.”
It also stated “Canada must continue working with its local allies to find a peaceful and democratic solution.” By doing so, it pushed the false narrative of Canada as a peacemaking country, rather than one actively assisting Guaido, led by former Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland.
Even when the NDP does oppose imperialism, as in the Christo-fascist coup against Evo Morales during late 2019, their leader Jagmeet Singh took four days to craft a simple statement condemning the coup. James Wilt noted that the statement failed to explain whether the NDP believed that Morales should be able to run in future elections.
Wilt went further:
“This silence from the NDP is a cowardly betrayal of immense proportions. To many, it is not a surprising one given the NDP’s history of complicity in imperialism such as twice voting to bomb Libya and refusing calls to condemn a similar coup in Haiti when Jack Layton was leader.
The NDP has also supported Canada’s training of the fascist-infiltrated Ukraine army, and complained that new military spending is not being released quickly enough.”
While MPs such as Matthew Green and Niki Ashton do take some solid stances on foreign policy, they are the exception, rather than the norm.
Even leftist candidates in the Green Party federal leadership race have been embracing sinophobic narratives of an “evil China” which needs to be sanctioned and opposed.
Hong Kong’s Not-so-well-known history
It is important to understand the history around Hong Kong.
The British declared a colonial war on China in 1839, in retaliation for their refusal to allow opium to be consumed for non-medical usage. By 1842, Britain had forcefully occupied Shangai, and China was forced to surrender. As a result, they were forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking, which ceded control of Hong Kong to Britain.
After further colonial attacks on China, a 99-year “lease deal” was agreed upon in 1898, where control of the already colonized land of Hong Kong was officially given to the British.
In 1997, Britain handed Hong Kong back over to China. In the terms of the handover, Hong Kong was promised the continuation of its existing freedoms and separate legal jurisdiction for 50 years under the "one country, two systems" pledge from Beijing. However, China is no longer obliged to grant Hong Kong autonomy after 2047, at which point it could be fully re-integrated.
There is an important misconception however. Just because China is not supposed to re-integrate Hong Kong until 2047, this does not mean that China is obligated to allow for HK’s secession from China in the period before re-integration formally begins.
Now, to the National Security Law itself, which was welcomed in early July by Cuba, on behalf of 52 other countries, including Venezuela, Palestine and Nicaragua, at the 44th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
(IMAGE OF LIST)
Hong Kong National Security Laws are not Autocratic, nor do we have moral authority to critique them:
There are four categories of offences in the HK National Security Law:
Secession
Subversion
Terrorist Activities and;
Collusion with a foreign country or external elements to endanger national security
What is noteworthy about the Hong Kong National Security Law is that at the end of the day, when framing it in the context of the threat of secession and sedition by foreign and treasonous elements, it can be seen that even western democracies like Canada have harsh sedition laws, making these laws not uniquely autocratic by themselves in suppressing dissent.
The criminal code for instance offers harsh punishments for various offenses seen as threatening National Security, this includes:
Life imprisonment for those convicted of treason. Treason, as stipulated in the criminal code, signifies attempts to assist enemies in time of war or attempts to murder the Queen.
Up to fourteen years of prison for the convicted if they are found to have incited desertion and mutiny among the armed forces subjects and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Up to fourteen years of prison sentences for publishing and distributing seditious material or calls for the Canadian armed forces to act in a seditious manner. Seditious manner is defined here as distributing material that “use, without the authority of law, of force as a means of accomplishing a governmental change within Canada”.
In Canada we have laws that give out harsh punishments from fourteen years to life for treason or the perceived threat of treason in favor of an enemy to Canada. How is China totalitarian in handling its own perceived threats to its own power or perceived attempts at destabilization when our own government hand out harsh punishments for the very same threats of treason and destabilization as well?
In fact, some of the offenses to be dealt with harshly, such as violent actions carried out as a means to achieve seditious goals for an foreign power deemed as a threat, the Chinese government is dealing with themselves with regards to the protestors based on their perceptions of Demosistō, guided by their interactions with the US government.
HK Security Law target secessionist US-backed opposition and efforts to reimpose neocolonialism on Hong Kong:
Many of the figures targeted by the Hong Kong Security Bill, which includes members of the Demosisto party, were targeted under reasonable suspicion of sedition against the Chinese government in order to impose neocolonialism on Hong Kong under the facade of independence.
The group began to turn into reality through the Umbrella Coalition. The coalition, launched against the now-defunct extradition law, consisted of a variety of civil society, media and political groups. The Grayzone reported that they were supplemented with untold sums of money from US regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and subsidiaries like the National Democratic Institute (NDI).
Journalist Alex Rubinstein reported that the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, a key member of the coalition that organized, has received more than $2 million in NED funds since 1995. Other groups in the coalition reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED and NDI in 2018 alone.
An episode of The News with Rick Sanchez on Russia's RT TV network in July 2014, disclosed that six organizations are taking money from and working with NED.
They are the HK Institute of Human Resource Management, the HK Confederation of Trade Unions, the HK Journalists Association, the Civic Party, the Labor Party and the Democratic Party, whose founding chairman is Martin Lee.
They are all members of the Civil Human Rights Front, a coalition which the Hong Kong media, including the South China Morning Post and Hong Kong Free Press, say was the organizer of the anti-extradition law demonstrations.
Jimmy Lai, the billionaire magnate and founder of nativist news network Next Digital and its tremendously popular paper, Apple Daily was a vociferous supporter of these protests. Lai bankrolled these protests, providing all the funding needed for protesters.
Journalist Dan Cohen reported that:
“Leaked emails revealed that Lai poured more than $1.2 million to anti-China political parties including $637,000 USD to the Democratic Party and $382,000 USD to the Civic Party. Lai also gave $115,000 USD to the Hong Kong Civic Education Foundation and Hong Kong Democratic Development Network, both of which were co-founded by Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Lai also spent $446,000 USD on Occupy Central’s 2014 unofficial referendum.”
Joshua Wong rose to become one of the most well known spokepersons for the burgeoning movement. In 2015, US government funded think-tank, Freedom House, honoured Wong, Martin Lee, and University of Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai Lee. This momentum was used to create a new political party, Demosistō.
Demosistō and Washington
As reported by the Grayzone, opposition figures such as Demosisto founder Joshua Wong, among many others on the “Hong Kong Democracy Council”, which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, played a key role in escalating the new Cold War.
Allen Weinstein, a former acting president of NED and one of the authors of the study that led to its creation, said in a 1991 interview that "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
Demosistō was founded by Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and other Umbrella Movement organizers in April 2016.
National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) has maintained a close relationship with Demosistō.
While the general party policy was unclear, the party specifically promised to hold a referendum, in 2026, on whether Hong Kong would separate from China. This clashed with the terms of HK’s 1997 handover from Britain to China.
During September 2019, Joshua Wong and several prominent opposition figures traveled to Washington in September to lobby Congress to “take action” to destabilize the Chinese government. They worked with hawkish politicians within the US government such as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to lobby U.S. lawmakers to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.
While on the surface it’s used as a gauge on how autonomous Hong Kong is from China, autonomy is tied to how much it toes the line on America’s foreign policy—if Hong Kong does not agree to these demands, the US will impose sanctions on China.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act ties autonomy to whether the bill requires the U.S. government to see if Hong Kong enforces sanctions imposed by the United States” against North Korea and Iran, along with any other country that Washington deems “present a threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States. In addition, the legislation also requires the U.S. government to closely scrutinize whether Hong Kong enforces U.S. export control laws and trade policy in relation to China, aiming to “safeguard United States businesses in Hong Kong from economic coercion and intellectual property theft.”
In return, Hong Kong opposition lobbyists have worked with Washington to “strengthen the bill” by removing the requirement for protesters to be “peaceful” in order to apply for U.S. visas without obstruction. This provision makes it abundantly easier for violent protesters to flee to the U.S and it effectively signifies that the US would tolerate violent, xenophobic, acts against mainlanders and the development of bombs by the opposition as long as it advances it’s interests.
After the security bill passed, the US Congress was forced to freeze $2 million in planned payouts to HK protest groups and shut down US Agency for Global Media, the shell group that funneled the money.
Demosistō folded just a day after the new Hong Kong Security Law was passed.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act supported by the US-backed secessionists effectively makes Hong Kong a client state of the US in support of its corporate and geopolitical interests; this attempt to reduce Hong Kong to a client state of the US is opposed by even 80 per cent of the anti-government protestors, whom support the current one country two systems policies.
When framing the security bill in the context of the twin threats posed by the escalation of the New Cold War and the neo-colonialization of Hong Kong that is opposed by even the vast majority of anti-government protestors, it can be seen that the Chinese government had reasonable ground to use the security law on the basis that secessionist organizations such as Demosistō would serve to destabilize Hong Kong’s internal politics to ensure it kowtows to US interests.
Not autocracy, but protection of national security
Not only is the Hong Kong Security Law not particularly uniquely autocratic even when framed against treason and sedition laws in Western democracies, but we have no genuine moral high ground to criticize China’s response. We ourselves have laws against terrorists, such as Bill C-51, that gives CSIS unlimited power in conducting surveillance on suspected terrorists and even gives them the power to oppress Aboriginal rights and Title of indigenous peoples in Canada. We participate in the Five Eyes surveillance program against China, which has worked with CSIS to spy on Canadians on foreign soil.
We may accuse China of being excessively harsh in dealing with a US-backed movement seeking to enforce the Pivot to Asia, but our own government routinely suppresses violently anti-colonial movements seeking genuine decolonization as seen by the RCMP’s repression of Wet'suwet'en protestors opposing the Costal Gaslink protests. To refer to China as evil when we carry out unjustifiable forms of state repression against indigenous activists fighting for self-governance and our own citizens is totally unjustified.
Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news site founded in 2019. He has written about Canadian imperialism, federal politics, and left-wing resistance to colonialism across the world for Canadian Dimension, Palestine Chronicle, the Orinoco Tribune and Dissident Voice. He is a second-year Bachelor of Journalism student at Ryerson University, who was the Head of Communications and Community Engagement for Etobicoke North NDP Candidate Naiima Farah in the 2019 Federal Election.
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