Prof Donald Low lashes at claims that Hong Kong demonstrators were provoked by foreigners to go against the extradition bill

Senior Lecturer and Professor of Practice at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Prof Donald Low took to his Facebook on Wednesday (12 June) to lash out at those who said that Hong Kong demonstrators were “instigated by foreigners and foreign agents to oppose the extradition bill”.

The Professor was referring to the ongoing protest in Hong Kong where people have have taken to the street since Sunday to voice their opposition to the Extradition Bill.

In his post, Prof Low said that no one would protest on the streets under uncomfortable weather for something that they don’t believe in, solely because they were asked by the Chinese authorities to do so.

If that is not all, Hongkongs are also not “unusually naïve or stupid” to blindly march to the streets “at the behest of American or whatever foreign agents”, he said.

He also said that some people might think that “foreigners created a ideological, media and cultural environment in Hong Kong” and this resulted its citizens to “instinctively suspicious of China and distrustful of its authorities”.

This is because they think that the protestors were influenced by “American or liberal western values” to take such a drastic step.

“If that’s the argument, isn’t the real problem the fact that the Chinese system and its authoritarian proclivities are so unattractive to Hongkongers that even an America (or the west generally) in supposed decline can wield more cultural and political influence in a predominantly Chinese society?” he wrote.

Prof Low added, “If so, the problem doesn’t lie with imagined foreign agents. It lies with you and the authoritarian system you have in China, and which Hongkongers fear will increasingly be imposed here.”

Regardless of what anyone thinks of the extradition bill, for the Chinese authorities to think that Hongkongs would take this matter to the streets purely due to “western propaganda is the sort of paranoid conspiratorial thinking that cognitive psychologists warn people against”.

“And for the nationalistic Chinese press to even suggest it belies a deep insecurity and an instinctive tendency (honed over several decades of blaming the West when things don’t go China’s way) of scapegoating and demonizing foreign devils,” he lambasted.