Why Chinese officials imagine America is behind unrest in Hong Kong

THERE IS SOMETHING depressing about the Chinese government’s claim that foreign “black hands” are behind the protests in Hong Kong. For the claim is both nonsensical and, in mainland China, widely believed. It is a fresh lesson in the power of disinformation to see decent, patriotic Chinese sharing tales of the CIA paying gullible Hong Kongers to join marches or smuggling in foreign rioters on late-night flights (a rumour sourced to a driver at Hong Kong airport, in the version that Chaguan heard).

There is something positively alarming about signs that, at some level, Communist Party bosses believe the black-hands story. Neither evidence nor common sense supports the tale’s central charge that outsiders tricked or provoked as many as 2m Hong Kongers into joining marches. The accusations began while the protesters were still overwhelmingly peaceful, focused on a planned law that would send suspects from their city’s Western-style justice system into Communist-controlled mainland courts. To propagandists in Beijing, no free will has been marshalling those students and pensioners, doctors in hospital scrubs and black-suited lawyers, off-duty civil servants and parents with pushchairs. Instead the protesters are at best dupes, and at worst foreigner-loving race traitors, ashamed of being Chinese.