By John S. Van Oudenaren
The Chinese Communist Party’s obsession with the threat of a color revolution is revealing.
On December 15 2014, police cleared Occupy Hong Kong’s last remaining protest sites, putting an end to nearly three months of pro-democracy protests. One day later, Global Times, a popular Chinese newspaper known for its nationalist bent, ran an editorial titled“To guard against color revolution, first oppose peaceful evolution.” (Yào fáng yánsè gémìng, xiān fǎn hépíng yǎnbiàn). It warns that “Hong Kong’s chaos” (xiāng luàn) signals that the threat of Western-orchestrated “color revolutions” (yánsè gémìng) has now reached China. It cautions that China must never permit “Occupy Central” (“Zhàn zhōng”) to morph into “Occupy China” (Zhàn “zhōng”), a clever play on words as the characters for “central” and “China” are the same (中- zhōng). The editorial blames the West, particularly the U.S., for stoking unrest in Hong Kong to further its own interests, and ensure obedience to a US-led cabal composed of “vassal regimes” (fùyōng xìng zhèngquán).
As Hong Kong protests raged in October 2014, state-run media alleged that a high level official at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) “had met key people from ‘Occupy Central,’ ” months before the Umbrella Revolution got underway. People’s Dailysums up China’s official attitude to the actives of NGOs such as NED, and US democracy and human rights promotion in general. It states that “the U.S. purports to be promoting the ‘universal values’ of ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights,’ but in reality the U.S. is simply defending its own strategic interests and undermining governments it considers to be ‘insubordinate.’ ” Beijing’s fear of a color revolution at home is heightened by the perception that Western interference is a globally destabilizing phenomenon. As Gideon Rachman observes in the Financial Times, “some in Beijing claim to see a sinister pattern of western meddling — stretching from the Arab world to Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela and now Hong Kong.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat