Singapore FM: Western Press Biased Against China on HK Protests

Posted by on Oct 5, 2014 in Blog | 0 comments

Couldn’t agree more with Singapore Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam’s assessment:

There has been much anti-China bias in Western media’s reporting on Hong Kong’s situation, said Singapore’s foreign minister K. Shanmugam, as he sought to offer another perspective on the current stand-off between Occupy Central protesters and the authorities that is now entering its eighth day.
Speaking to Lianhe Zaobao in an interview published on Saturday,  Shanmugam said that western media reports have made Beijing out to be “denying democracy” and acting to infringe on freedoms that have made Hong Kong so successful.
The truth, he said, is that Hong Kong did not have democracy during 150 years of British rule.
Beijing’s proposal for Hong Kongers to elect their leader from a vetted list – what the tens of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong are currently amassed against – is actually much more than what the British had ever offered.
Before the handover to China in 1997, neither the British rulers nor the Hong Kong media thought Hong Kong needed democracy, he pointed out; universal suffrage was also not included in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, the agreement that cemented the terms of the handover.
“The Western media does not report these facts,” he said.

….

Shanmugam said that it must be asked if the average Hong Konger is prepared for the trade-offs of a protracted stand-off with Beijing.
“There needs to be clear understanding that China has acted in accordance with the Basic Law,” he said, referring to Hong Kong’s mini Constitution that enshrines the “one country, two systems” principle.
“If Hong Kongers want a change from the Basic Law – they have to recognize that Hong Kong is part of China, and there are some things China will accept, and some things which are red lines for China.”
“And there needs to be a clear understanding of Hong Kong’s extreme reliance on China for jobs and (its) livelihood,” he said, adding: “There needs to be a clear understanding of China’s largesse towards Hong Kong even as an anti-China mood is stoked up.”

– The Straits Times