As reported by Reuters in an online article headlined, US Lawmakers Say Hong Kong Is Becoming Hub for Financial Crime (Nov 25), “Lawmakers in the US House of Representatives have asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to rethink ties with Hong Kong’s banking sector, saying the city has become a top location for money laundering and sanctions evasion.”
The letter to Yellen was from the bipartisan leaders of the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, a hawkish congressional body known for its extreme and unhinged views on China and which seeks a Cold War type confrontation.
The letter further states “We must now question whether longstanding US policy toward Hong Kong, particularly toward its financial and banking sector, is appropriate”, accusing the city of violations of sanctions and export controls.
First, it is not appropriate for the mainstream media to depict the highly inflammatory opinions of this committee as being factual, yet they continue to do so, treating it as an authority. This select committee quite obviously has extreme views, and more importantly, it has a track record of spreading extreme hysteria and misinformation in reference to China with the obvious goal of pushing a confrontational foreign policy. In general, it is an outstanding theme of American politics to push highly exaggerated, dramatic and false allegations in order to smear one’s opponents, often with little regard for facts. Despite this, the Western mainstream media often launders this propaganda, especially on a foreign policy level, by presenting it as “legitimate concerns”.
In reality, it is the broader bipartisan consensus of United States politics to deliberately attempt to undermine Hong Kong’s status as a global financial hub, seeking to use all manner of bad publicity in order to push negative news, which serves to question the legitimacy, credibility and safety of doing business there. One of these narratives in particular is the idea that national security actions in the city have somehow “undermined” its credibility pertaining to the rule of law, therefore creating an atmosphere for financial crimes and misconducts to arise, posing risk to businesses. This narrative is purely ideological, because it rests on the assumption that “liberal democracy” in the Western sense is the ultimate prerequisite to creating a full rule-of-law system. This thinking is then juxtaposed with the idea that Hong Kong is now subject to “China’s influence”, therefore things in the city are going backward.
Of course, this narrative is nonsensical, because 1) Hong Kong was never democratic in the way it is sometimes imagined, even under British rule, and 2) this logic conveniently does not apply to countries such as Singapore, which have even stricter national security laws. Instead, the goal is purely to undermine China and to discredit Hong Kong. With it, as is clearly embedded in the letter to Yellen, is the unspoken idea that Hong Kong as a financial center must only serve “American interests”, in this case US sanctions and export controls.
The US routinely weaponizes sanctions as a means of extraterritorial jurisdiction to force third-party countries to comply. Thus, as an international financial hub, it is assumed that Hong Kong must conduct itself according to American preferences and not those of any other country, which would be what are opportunistically defined by US politicians as “financial crimes”.
In general, Hong Kong operates one of the toughest anti-money laundering and financial crime regimes in the world which is precisely why it gained the reputation it has for business, but the idea that this is “diminishing” because of “political events” is not proven and is premised on an ideological hypothesis. Instead, is it the place of the US to tell Hong Kong who it can and cannot do business with? Is Hong Kong a special administrative region of the US, or of China? Finally, as a global financial center, if current or future US administrations decide to attempt to weaponize dollar sanctions to undermine Hong Kong, it would have a domino effect on multiple global tier banks, posing catastrophic effects for the global economy and risking a financial crash. It is thus in American interests to continue engaging with Hong Kong, but we should be wary of the fact that with the incoming US administration, ideological hardliners against China are gaining influence, and they have no qualms about tearing up global economic integration to serve their geopolitical preferences.
The author is a British political and international-relations analyst.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
