The Money and Support Behind the Protests

Posted by david on Sep 28, 2014 in Blog | 0 comments

Student protests against Beijing’s decision on Hong Kong’s universal suffrage in 2017 escalated into violence last Friday evening when about 150 students tried to ram their way through the cordoned off Civic Square in front of government headquarters.

The chaos, the culmination of a five-day boycott of classes by Hong Kong university and high school students, resulted in more than 2 dozen protesters and policemen injured and 12 people arrested.  Among those taken into custody was Joshua Wong, the 17 year old leader of the high school student activist group Scholarism and co-organizer of the attempted storming.  Mr Wong had achieved notoriety a couple years ago protesting against the HK government’s plan to implement school curriculum reform.

The student protests were organized independently of Occupy Central With Love and Peace, a group of radicalized pro 2017 open-nomination election activists disenchanted with the decision of the central authorities.  Several members of Occupy Central joined the students in front of the HK government, and Benny Tai, a key founder of the organization, has threatened that they may try to blockade the key Central business district next Wednesday, China’s National Day (Oct.1), to intensify their civil disobedience.

One might attribute Mr Wong’s activism to youthful idealism and naïveté and Mr Tai’s movement to shortsightedness but upon further inspection, things may not appear as they seem.  Last Thursday, Chinese language newspaper Wen Wei Po published an expose on Mr Wong’s purported connections to US government institutions, citing meetings with US Hong Kong consulate officials and clandestine donations from US sources.

The piece featured photographs leaked on the Internet along with evidence that Wong’s family was invited to stay at the Venetian Macao (owned by Las Vegas Sands) by the American Chamber of Commerce, among other instances.  Asked about the allegations by the Wall Street Journal, Mr Wong denied them as totally false while neither the American Chamber of Commerce nor the US consulate in Hong Kong was available for comment.

In its report, Wen Wei Po had also named the Hong Kong-America Center as a CIA front to exert influence in Hong Kong high schools.  The Center is headed by prominent former US diplomat and veteran China hand Morton Holbrook.  The paper suspects the CIA in helping to actively train a new generation of Hong Kong protest leaders imbued with American values and political ideals, providing scholarships to study in the US.  Needless to say, Mr Holbrook’s Center was not available for comment.

Over the summer, leaked emails revealed that Occupy Central, inspired by the US Occupy Wall Street movement, had received some HK$3.5 million from infamously anti-China media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying to help stage its unofficial referendum on universal suffrage last June.  Mr Lai owns Next Media, parent company of Apply Daily, and popular clothing company Giordano.  According to the South China Morning Post, although the correspondence did not show detailed breakdowns of how the donations were spent, they did provide advice and propaganda materials such as advertisements and billboards to Occupy Central.

The messages indicated serious misgivings about supporting the Occupy Central campaign from the executive director of Next Media, especially given Mr Lai’s already fractious relations with the central authorities, but the latter was adamant on aiding the group.  The Hong Kong Standard cited Lai as criticizing Occupy Central organizers for drafting “[no] organized plans or steps for actions” and that it “couldn’t make the cut without his help”.  In the leaked records, Mr Lai lambasted them as “idealist scholars’ who had “no strategy” and “could accomplish nothing if there was no help”.

Mr Lai’s political contributions are hardly limited to Occupy Central.  The hundreds of leaked emails also detailed Mr Lai’s donations to the Hong Kong pan-democrat bloc in Legco (Hong Kong’s legislature), totaling as much as HK$40 million going back to April 2012.  Donations went to Labour Party leader Lee Cheuk-yan, League of Social Democrats lawmaker “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung, Professor Joseph Cheng Yu-shek, leader of the Alliance for True democracy, members of the Democrats, Civil Party, and others.

Lai admitted that reports of the donations were true but declared that he had done nothing wrong.  “(A)ll the money was earned by me…It has always been clear that I am committed to supporting the pan-democrats….Every cent is given by me but not any foreign countries”.  For his troubles, Mr Lai was called into the offices of the territory’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), which is routine for formal bribery investigations.  In late August, his home was raided by ICAC officials along with those of his deputy and the Labour Party leader.

Interestingly, in the midst of the ruckus, the normally apolitical Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, in conjunction with its Hong Kong, Bahrain, Indian, and Italian counterparts, published a joint anti-Occupy Central advertisement in the South China Morning Post. The statement read: “It is regrettable to note that the organizers of Occupy Central appear to have given insufficient thought to the potential consequences their demonstration could have for the city’s economy, its businesses, its communities and people, and even those visiting Hong Kong from overseas….”