The Protest for Empire, Not the People

Behind the Molotovs and protest art, the Hong Kong demonstrations weren’t fighting colonialism, they were protecting it.
Framed in the West as a struggle for democracy, the protests in fact advanced a deeply right-wing agenda: preserving Hong Kong’s British-imposed legal system, aligning with U.S. empire, and serving as a strategic tool to undermine China from within.

This explainer strips away the liberal romanticism and Western left confusion revealing a protest movement that openly collaborated with the same U.S. officials who attack liberation struggles across the Global South.

To equate Hong Kong’s protest movement with Palestine, Haiti, or Minneapolis is not solidarity, it’s misrepresentation and betrayal.

True liberation is measured not by the slogans shouted, but by the systems dismantled and by who, in the end, benefits.

To learn more, please check out our Hong Kong reading list from 2020: https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/hong-kong