From the beginning of our protest movement here in Hong Kong, there have been claims of foreign involvement, especially from the US. I’ve looked for evidence and been told that “it’s obvious, don’t be naive”. We were to assume the involvement, based on US’ history of interference. Granted, that’s a reasonable inference.
The closest thing to evidence is the US’ National Endowment for Democracy, (a CIA front), where you can find a line item in its budget, a bit over half a million USD a year, for HK. A decent amount, but hardly game-changing. My view was that, ok granted foreign funding, but the main thrust of the movement remains local. I think that this is still the case. A couple of million dollars funding to develop an App and support the Voice of America (who listens to that anymore?) is not up with protesters on the streets, throwing petrol bombs.
Time magazine has an article about the US funding of the protests. Assuming they report accurately, sure it’s “foreign involvement-interference”. But critical to the “movement”? I doubt it.
Here’s a report of the Time info, from Alex Lo:
The closest thing to evidence is the US’ National Endowment for Democracy, (a CIA front), where you can find a line item in its budget, a bit over half a million USD a year, for HK. A decent amount, but hardly game-changing. My view was that, ok granted foreign funding, but the main thrust of the movement remains local. I think that this is still the case. A couple of million dollars funding to develop an App and support the Voice of America (who listens to that anymore?) is not up with protesters on the streets, throwing petrol bombs.
Time magazine has an article about the US funding of the protests. Assuming they report accurately, sure it’s “foreign involvement-interference”. But critical to the “movement”? I doubt it.
Here’s a report of the Time info, from Alex Lo:
Imagine how the American government would react if multiple Chinese state agencies such as Xinhua were exposed secretly helping protest groups across the United States to evade surveillance and crackdowns by law enforcement agencies.Washington would probably threaten China with war.
Roughly, though, the little-known but powerful US Agency for Global Media has been doing just that in Hong Kong. It oversees funding for various news and information operations around the world, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.About US$2 million was earmarked for the protest movement in Hong Kong, but has now been frozen as part of a general overhaul and restructuring by a new agency boss.
An ally of President Donald Trump, CEO Michael Pack didn’t specifically target the Hong Kong funding, which was apparently caught up in his management overhaul.The restructuring, though, has inadvertently exposed the US funding long denied by local protesters and pan-democrats.
According to Time magazine, the held-up funds were to have been distributed by the Washington-based Open Technology Fund (OTF), supposedly an independent non-profit, but financed by the US Congress. One cancelled project was to set up “a cybersecurity incident response team” to provide protesters with “secure communications apps” after analysing “Chinese surveillance techniques”.
