Concocted storylines shape twisted Western narratives

Richard Cullen says the project to discredit SAR is censorious and ignores the fact that the city is one of the safest worldwide

Hong Kong recently enacted the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance in keeping with its obligation under Article 23 of the Basic Law. It complements the National Security Law for Hong Kong, promulgated in June 2020. This means that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region now has a measured, modern national security regime in place. All the other leading international financial centers, including New York, London, Singapore and Tokyo, depend on such regimes, regularly relying on more severe provisions than those applying in Hong Kong.

However, you will not discover this realistic, comparative perspective on Hong Kong’s new national security system being advanced within the mainstream Western media. Instead, you will find ample tilted coverage of what the HKSAR has done, delivered as stale, censorious lectures casting these reforms as fresh attacks on selectively venerated human rights (and please forget about continuous Western-supported human rights atrocities in Gaza while we explain Hong Kong’s “bad behavior”).

There are no surprises here. For around a decade, the Western media and the political class across most of the Global West have felt more rattled than usual. Accordingly, they have collaborated in marketing an intensifying “black hat” Sino perspective to try and impede China’s rise. And that also means going all-out to wind back confidence and prosperity in Hong Kong if they can — what’s bad for the HKSAR is bad for Beijing, after all.

In fact, one can discern a turning point in Hong Kong reporting. The one-day, violent upheaval in Mong Kok in February 2016 was widely and aptly reported in the Western media as a serious political riot. Fast-forward three years, however, and we discover that the immensely destructive and violent insurgency that gripped the HKSAR from mid-2019

Richard Cullen

The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law, Hong Kong University.

and extended for month after month into 2020 was emphatically labeled as “pro-democracy protests” by these media outlets. This is extraordinary. And they are still doing this today. Moreover, the appalling Hong Kong insurrection continued to be rendered invisible while the same media channels fell over themselves to condemn the seven-hour storming of the US Congress in January 2021 as an insurrection.

It is clear that Western-ratified, self-serving standpoints seriously shape much influential, Western-globalized reporting today. Journalist Caitlin Johnstone recently observed how leading media outlets, including the BBC, Bloomberg and The Washington Post, stressed, implicitly or explicitly, that Iran had begun preparations to attack Israel without provocation. This is ridiculous. Israel lately bombed an Iranian consulate building in Syria, killing 16 people. This was an exceptionally provocative act. Israel knew this, and many commentators have argued it carried out this inflammatory attack with a view to baiting Tehran to trigger a hot war against Iran into which the US could be drawn. Yet the provocation has now been largely airbrushed from Western reporting to cast Iran as the primary aggressor — incidentally increasing rather than lowering the prospect of greater warfare.

Hong Kong is undoubtedly set to face intensified, selective Western badmouthing, possibly for some years. Official Western travel advisories are now being twisted to fit within the formulated adverse narrative propagated by the Western media, never mind that Hong Kong is once again one of the safest big cities worldwide. Anyone who actually visits can see how Hong Kong enjoys safe streets today, to a degree unimaginable in many large cities in the Global West and especially in the United States.

However, the fact that the new national security laws have significantly helped displace the awful fear that stalked the streets during the insurrection will continue to be airbrushed from virtually all Western reporting about those laws. The agreed narrative, recently preached by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, claims that these laws, “could be used to eliminate dissent inside Hong Kong and applied outside its borders as part of (China’s) ongoing campaign of transnational repression”. The bottom line is, how dare the HKSAR think it is entitled — without our permission — to establish a modern national security regime like those found in other international financial centers?

Still, when we examine their application, it becomes apparent that these Western narrativecontrolling perspectives are growing more rigid, resulting in some outlandish and regularly dangerous consequences. The stage-managing power of the Western media remains immense, but the intensified use of this power is not cost-free. To begin with, the credibility of many leading Western media outlets is being devalued, step-by-step, from within.

When I first arrived in Hong Kong to work over 30 years ago, I decided within a few months that this was a fabulous city. Much has changed since then, but Hong Kong remains a fabulous city. In fact, the Western media’s discrediting project confirms that this is so. The intense, continuing nature of this endeavor is a response to the fact that Hong Kong remains, frustratingly, so remarkably resilient.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.