Press TV – August 10, 2020
A prominent Hong Kong pundit and anti-China activist named Kong Tsung-gan is in fact an American man with ties to Amnesty International and key Hong Kong separatist figures.
According to an investigation by The Grayzone, the man, who has been posing online as a Hong Kong native, has become a go-to source for Western media.
Kong employed by an American teacher, who is a ubiquitous figure at local protests, is routinely cited as a grassroots activist and writer by major media organizations and published in English-language media.
The character has been created to disseminate anti-China propaganda behind the cover of yellowface and his prolific digital presence and uninterrogated reputation in mainstream Western media has helped him to better do the job.
The content he focuses on aims to hype up the Hong Kong “freedom struggle” while at the same time he calls for the US to turn up the heat on China.
China enacted a national security law for Hong Kong earlier this month, criminalizing sedition, secession, and subversion against the mainland and allowing Chinese national security institutions to operate in the city for the first time since 1997, when Hong Kong returned from British to Chinese rule but attained semi-autonomy.
The legislation has been harshly criticized by Western countries, which allege that it harms the city’s semi-autonomous status. Beijing rejects the allegation.
The truth about Kong’s identity has been circulating on social media in Hong Kong, and even last December, The Standard mentioned a brief account about it.
Several locals, who spoke to The Grayzone, expressed their outrage over what they referred to as a deceptive stunt they considered not only unethical, but racist.
After his first appearance on Twitter under the username @KongTsungGan in March 2015, Kong tweeted mostly about Tibet and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement.
He at some point changed his Twitter avatar to a black-and-white headshot of an unknown Asian person, but later changed it to an image showing Liu Xia, the wife of the late Nobel Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo who celebrated the US wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Liu Xiaobo, a right-wing ideologue, was rewarded with the 2014 Democracy Award by the National Endowment for Democracy – the favorite meddling machine of the US government.