Has the Hong Kong Protests been Part of the US Pivot to Asia?

The Russian government accuses her US contemporary of plotting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests...

First, here is a spectacular coverage of the rally by a drone (source vox)

Next, the alleged orchestration from the US government. From the Wall Street Journal

Russian state news outlets have begun airing reports casting the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong as a U.S.-organized plot, echoing previous Russian coverage of similar demonstrations that have cropped up far closer to home.

The coverage reflected the Kremlin's contention that pro-democracy protests in Moscow and Kiev in recent years amounted to Western schemes designed to undermine the Russian government, as opposed to bona fide outpourings of popular discontent.

On Monday, when the demonstrations in Hong Kong dominated headlines around the world, Russia's main news broadcast on the state-controlled First Channel skipped the story. State-controlled NTV aired a brief report on the protests and little more. But by Tuesday, state-controlled channels—the primary source of news for the vast majority of Russians—were presenting the Hong Kong protesters as agents of a U.S.-organized revolt just like their counterparts in Kiev.

"According to the Chinese press, the leaders of the movement received special training from the American intelligence services," the anchor on state-owned Rossiya 24 said during a segment on the Hong Kong protests.

Later in the day, the anchor on state-controlled First Channel introduced the report from Hong Kong by suggesting the U.S. was behind the protests. "Beijing has said the protest organizers are linked to the American State Department," the anchor said. The Chinese government, however, hasn't explicitly made such an accusation.

Are these connected to the US imperial policy known as the “pivot to Asia” or the encirclement strategy or the setting up of military bases surrounding powers that have been opposed to the US hegemony? 

The Business Insider gives us some clues (bold mine) 

But China still has a military presence on the island. The protest movement is driven by concern over the mainland rolling back Hong Kong's autonomy — but in terms of hard power, Beijing has already established some crucial facts on the ground.

Beijing has had its military Hong Kong from the moment Great Britain handed the island over to China in 1997 — Beijing sent 21 armored personnel carriers and 4,000 soldiers carrying assault rifles into the territory the morning of the handover.

China has been making efforts to build up its military infrastructure in Hong Kong, including Beijing's approval of a controversial naval port in Victoria Harbor this past February. But from a purely strategic perspective, Beijing's garrison of Hong Kong might serve more as a statement of Chinese sovereignty than as a real base of operations.

We'd never know what the Chinese government's strategic perspective is.

Nevertheless, Daniel McAdams at the Lew Rockwell Blog sees more US fingerprints (bold mine)

Nevertheless, it seems Washington may have decided to execute that pivot after all — while keeping its other foot precariously planted in the Middle East and Europe. But it appears the pivot has begun in an unexpectedly aggressive manner: a US-backed full frontal assault on Chinese rule in Hong Kong.

A student protest in Hong Kong has finished its first week, taking on all the appearances of the numerous US-backed color revolutions that have unseated governments with which Washington has a beef from Georgia to Ukraine to Egypt and beyond. The protesters demand that existing portions of the Basic Law agreed upon when Hong Kong was handed back to China from former British imperial control be changed to allow sooner direct election of the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

As with previous color revolutions, protesters represent a tiny minority of the actual population yet they claim to speak with the voice of “the people.”

These voices of the people again seem to have been trained by Washington, however.

As the Moon of Alabama blog has pointed out, the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy — AKA “regime-change central” — has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into stoking the regime change flame in Hong Kong. For example, in 2012 alone the US government sent half a million dollars to support these regime-change movements in Hong Kong. Here is the grant listing:

National Democratic Institute for International Affairs
$460,000
To foster awareness regarding Hong Kong’s political institutions and constitutional reform process and to develop the capacity of citizens – particularly university students – to more effectively participate in the public debate on political reform, NDI will work with civil society organizations on parliamentary monitoring, a survey, and development of an Internet portal, allowing students and citizens to explore possible reforms leading to universal suffrage.

In addition, Joshua Wong, the 17 year-old leader of main student group Scholarism has beenaccused of maintaining close US government ties, including regular meetings at the US Consulate in Hong Kong.

The US Consulate and other US government bodies also fund the Hong Kong-America Center, which is run by a former US diplomat and brings Chinese students to the United States to “study” about democracy (and perhaps how to launch a color revolution?). The Ford Foundation, long associated with the US Central Intelligence Agency, is also a major sponsor of the organization’s student exchange programs.

As pointed out by color revolution observer Tony Cartalucci, leaders of the main Hong Kong protest group, Occupy Central, have long ties to US government regime change money.Writes Cartalucci:

Occupy Central’s self-proclaimed leader, Benny Tai, is a law professor at the…University of Hong Kong and a regular collaborator with the NDI-funded Centre for Comparative and Public Law (CCPL)…

Recent events in Hong Kong follow a pattern of US-engineered regime change operations, where naive students and other youth are encouraged to be the public face of protests, which start out preaching non-violence only to be very soon shunted aside by far more radical elements who provide the real muscle behind the regime change. This happened in Egypt, with the US-sponsored April 6 Movement, it happened in Syria with the initial peaceful protests soon taken over by armed (and also US-backed) radicals, and it happened in Ukraine, where the Maidan protests soon gave way to violent, armed groups sporting neo-nazi tattoos and radical ideologies.

If the pattern is repeating in Hong Kong, we will soon see an uptick in violence, meant to provoke authorities into a crackdown. This will be followed by strong condemnation from the United States government, which urges foreign authorities to refrain from what US police routinely do during such situations: exercise extreme violence. US sanctions may follow if the situation can approach terminal velocity.

And, because Color Revolutions 2.0 have adopted extreme violence as a critical element, look for a great deal of bloodshed. Finally, some observers have said that the Chinese government would never let this situation get out of hand. Don’t be fooled. The exercise is well practiced. The sclerotic Chinese authorities will likely not see what has hit them. Nobody expects regime change.

Remember, the HKMA have already raised “risks” concerns on their economy from “rising interest rates” due to “historic credit growth”. This means the ongoing protests may serve as a trigger for her domestic bubble to burst as her economy goes into a standstill. 

And bursting of Hong Kong’s bubble will ricochet to the mainland thereby aggravating China’s struggling debt burdened economy that may lead to the mainland’s economic and financial disaster.

If this has been part of the covert “low intensity conflict” being waged by Washington’s war mongers, then they may be underestimating the catastrophic impact from a possible Hong Kong-China economic collapse, which is likely spread not only to the region but to the world.

Given the vulnerability of the global markets and economy to risks, an escalation of Hong Kong’s protest may lead to the global Black Swan event.

More importantly, if the Chinese government will be convinced that the US has a hand on these, then we may expect more indirect reprisals via increased heated confrontations in South China Sea thereby increasing risks of war.

Nonetheless, the US has an indirect hand in the inflation of Hong Kong’s bubble, as I recently noted “Interest rate increases would only expose on the massive malinvestments spawned, nurtured and accumulated from the US Fed’s zero bound rates which has been imported by Hong Kong’s economy and financial markets via the US dollar peg.”

And Hong Kong’s property bubble has been part of the protesters agenda which reveals how bubbles weigh on social stability.

From another Wall Street Journal article: "another frequent gripe among Hongkongers, and especially young residents, is that property prices are too high and are inflated by money from mainland Chinese investors"

Bubbles lead to social instability and become fertile grounds for manipulations from external political forces