Since its creation in 2000, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) has taken Sinophobia to new heights. This was no mean feat in a country already infamous for its brutality toward China and its cruelty toward the Chinese people.
After its traders profited from opium in the 19th century, the United States sided with the United Kingdom when China tried to stamp it out. Once the British had extracted humiliating concessions from China (Treaty of Nanking, 1842), the US followed suit (Treaty of Wangxia, 1844).
Within the US mainland, things were no better. Throughout the 19th century, the US subjected its small Chinese population (dubbed “the yellow peril”) to discriminatory practices (including the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882, which clamped down on the rights of Chinese people living in the US and denied entry to others).
Although the hostility is more subtle these days, it is no less sinister. In 2023, for example, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, signed SB264 into law, a measure that bans property ownership for people from “countries of concern”, including China. According to the advocacy group APA Justice, 33 states have enacted or proposed similar bans on property ownership by Chinese people.
Moreover, in the seats of learning, Chinese scholars are being ostracized, denied promotions and even accused of spying, which is why they are increasingly packing their bags.
The CECC is stuffed with McCarthyite clones who want to ensure that China’s current leaders face the same levels of hostility as their forebears. These clones spend their time maligning China and highlighting its alleged shortcomings, without giving the Communist Party of China any credit for the country’s huge progress in recent years. As America’s star fades, their hope, however delusional, is that their propaganda can help to frustrate China’s progress.
The CECC’s mandate requires it to monitor legal developments and human rights in China, and then publish annual reports to justify its existence.
On Dec 20, therefore, the CECC issued its “2024 Annual Report”. It contained what the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government called “malicious smearing remarks about multiple areas in the HKSAR,” (and, it could have added, also about China as a whole).
Although the report runs to 315 pages and has a veneer of fact-based authenticity, it is the exact opposite. It is a mishmash of distortion, dogma and drivel which, given the CECC’s leadership, should surprise nobody.
Whereas its chair, Representative Chris Smith, is notorious for his grandstanding (including nominating Joshua Wong Chi-fung, Nathan Law Kwun-chung and Alex Chow Yong-kang for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, despite their criminal convictions for a violent assembly that injured 10 people in 2014), its co-chair, Senator Jeff Merkley, has tried to harm the rule of law by seeking the imposition of punitive sanctions on 29 Hong Kong judges (including British nationals) handling national security cases.
If the CECC expects to be taken seriously, it is remarkable that it should have chosen veteran bigots as its frontmen.
Indeed, not content with threatening Hong Kong’s legal system, Smith and Merkley have also tried to harm its economy, sponsoring legislation that seeks the closure of Hong Kong’s three economic and trade offices in the US.
Anybody familiar with the CECC’s Hong Kong reportage over the years will have discerned a familiar pattern. It professes concerns about particular issues and then proposes measures, often business-related, that will harm the city’s people. The only possible explanation is that the CECC considers the weakening of Hong Kong to be an effective way of hurting China, with its people being “collateral damage”.
Even though, for example, 45 individuals were convicted of conspiring to subvert State power after plotting to wreck the political system and endanger the “one country, two systems” policy, the CECC oozed sympathy for them. If nothing else, this was proof positive that it was supportive of the attempts made to cripple Hong Kong in 2020, in which its government was complicit.
The president-elect, Donald Trump, will shortly be establishing the Department of Government Efficiency. It will be co-headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who plan to cut public spending and downsize the bureaucracy. Musk says he can find $2 trillion in savings, and what better way to start than by axing the CECC
Although the media magnate, Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, is on trial for allegedly violating national security, the CECC sought to deify him. Having called him a “champion of press freedom”, its report elevated him to “faith-based conscientious objector”. This flew in the face of the evidence presented at trial and will do nothing to dispel the impression that he was a US proxy all along (many people will never forget his unprecedented red-carpeting by the US political establishment on his Washington visit in 2019, culminating in a meeting with the then vice-president, Mike Pence, at the White House).
Moreover, even though Hong Kong’s Safeguarding National Security Ordinance 2024 (SNSO) is, unlike its Western counterparts, human rights heavy (it incorporates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) and is largely based on the UK’s National Security Act 2023, the CECC decried its “chilling effect”. If it thought this, its silence on the related British legislation is deafening. By denying the SNSO its proper global context, the CECC has exposed its own hypocrisy.
The CECC also claimed that “civil rights are no longer protected, despite the traditional pomp displayed by wig-bedecked Hong Kong judges”.
If this allegation had any shred of truth, Hong Kong would not, on Oct 23, have been ranked 23rd out of the 142 jurisdictions surveyed in the World Justice Project’s 2024 Rule of Law Index (the world’s leading source of original, independent rule of law data). As Hong Kong was rated ahead of the US (26th), nobody should be surprised that the CECC has suppressed any reference to the index’s findings.
Whenever the US and its allies act against people abroad who allegedly threaten their national security, it is portrayed as legitimate self-defense (as in Palestine). However, when Hong Kong does the same thing, it is a different story. Although it is using such tools it has at its disposal to try to protect itself from criminal fugitives conspiring to destabilize it from their Western bases (arrest warrants, monetary bounties, asset freezes, etc.), the CECC depicted the plotters as “victims of transnational repression by the Hong Kong Government”. If anybody doubted they were US agents, the CECC comments have confirmed their status.
When the CECC claimed Hong Kong was now “nearly indistinguishable” from cities on the Chinese mainland, it was scraping the bottom of the barrel. If this were true, it might have been expected to indicate which mainland cities deploy the Common Law system, have Australian and British judges adjudicating in their top courts, and allow foreign lawyers to appear in their criminal trials. However, as the slur was baseless, it could not point to any.
At a time, moreover, when the US is itself trashing the rule of law and making a mockery of human rights, it is mind-boggling that the CECC should have the audacity to point fingers at China.
The US president, Joe Biden, has, for example, not only debased the country’s legal system by arbitrarily granting pardons to his son and 37 death row prisoners but also provided Israel with the wherewithal to kill over 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza (including at least 13,000 children).
He also presides over a debased legal system from the top down. For example, the country’s foremost judges are appointed not because of their judicial qualities, but because their political views satisfy a majority in the US Senate. This would be unthinkable in Hong Kong, where judges are chosen by an independent commission on the basis of their ability, credentials and character, with politics being irrelevant in the selection process.
The CECC has lost all sense of direction and has become a national embarrassment. With the US facing record debt ($36 trillion and rising), it can no longer afford to maintain such useless entities. Instead of spreading myths about other places, its personnel should be told to concentrate on problem-solving at home.
The president-elect, Donald Trump, will shortly be establishing the Department of Government Efficiency. It will be co-headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who plan to cut public spending and downsize the bureaucracy. Musk says he can find $2 trillion in savings, and what better way to start than by axing the CECC.
The author is a senior counsel and law professor and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
