Last week, a number of lawmakers, including Britain’s Iain Duncan Smith, demanded they have the opportunity to serve as witnesses in the trial of Jimmy Lai Chee-ying. Lai, a former newspaper tycoon, is facing charges under Hong Kong’s national security laws and Crimes Ordinance, under which he is accused of collusion with foreign forces and sedition.
Although Lai maintains his innocence, evidence shows that he publicly met with several senior officials in the Trump administration, including then-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, then-vice-president Mike Pence, and then-national security adviser John Bolton, the latter being notorious for his regime-change politics.
The legislators in question are members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), a hysterically anti-China organization that is funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as well as Taiwan. IPAC coordinates multiple anti-China motions and stokes anti-China sentiment around the world; it also tries to derail the target countries’ relationships with China by pulling coordinated public stunts. In this case, IPAC members argue that they have been stated in Lai’s trial up to 50 times, and that they should be allowed to appear as witnesses accordingly, claiming that their exclusion from the court hearing undermines the rule of law.
The deliberate political invocation of the case forced the accused to publicly out himself and make a statement. This demonstrates a clear double standard in their thinking whereby they are dismissive of foreign collusion concerning the events in Hong Kong, yet are pushing extreme paranoia in the UK itself pertaining to all things China to the point of irrationality
Ironically, the intervention of IPAC in Lai’s court trial is not an advocacy of the “rule of law” but is in fact clear-cut proof of such bad-faith foreign collusion in the affairs of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region that has sought to undermine the very thing that IPAC swears to support through instigating unrest, chaos, and insurrection. Can we take its invention in this matter to be anything else than politically motivated opportunism and disruption? IPAC claims it wants to defend Lai against the accusations of foreign collusion, but in reality, IPAC, as cited in the court documents, is the foreign collusion, and doesn’t its intervention speak for itself?
It goes without saying that the US government-funded group has a clear-cut and explicit opposition to the National Security Law for Hong Kong to the point of claiming that it is completely meritless, advancing the argument that Hong Kong’s legal system no longer adheres to the “rule of law” and therefore claiming the proceedings are “illegitimate”. As Iain Duncan Smith said on X/Twitter, “Jimmy Lai’s case was never about the truth.” He has already made up his mind, and thus the repeated intervention of these UK and US political figures in Lai’s court case in fact constitutes contempt of court because if Lai is eventually found guilty, they have already decided they would not accept the outcome and claim that it has been politically rigged.
As a further ironic twist, it might be noted that IPAC figures played a role in the prosecution of a British parliamentary researcher who has been charged with “spying” for China under the Official Secrets Act. When the man was arrested, IPAC figures in the UK quickly publicized the incident as a means of attempting to undermine the British government’s foreign policy and embarrassing then-UK foreign secretary James Cleverly on his visit to Beijing. A statement from one of their advisers notably stated that he was a suspect because he had “nuanced” views on China, as opposed to their absolutely zealous approach and therefore McCarthyist tendency.
The deliberate political invocation of the case forced the accused to publicly out himself and make a statement. This demonstrates a clear double standard in their thinking whereby they are dismissive of foreign collusion concerning the events in Hong Kong, yet are pushing extreme paranoia in the UK itself pertaining to all things China to the point of irrationality. If it were not obvious already, IPAC is not a credible, good faith, impartial or reasoned group, and its opportunistic, politically motivated intervention in Lai’s case is only demonstrative of the foreign collusion it wishes to deny is happening. They have in the process given all the witnesses and evidence they need of their own accord. Need I say anymore?
The author is a British political and international-relations analyst.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
