My Take | US has been exposed for funding last year’s Hong Kong protests
- The little-known but powerful US Agency for Global Media has financed protesters in the city and helped them with technical support
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”.
