| > The central government has been claiming foreign meddling even when there is none: they claim that the protesters went to the street because of direct monetary support by the United States, which—frankly—is insulting to the million protesters. They made similar claims during the 2014 Umbrella protest already, without any evidence of foreign meddling even until now. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/education-29723763/oslo-freedom-... It's interesting how BBC added that clarification. At the height of Occupy Central, people were mocking a pro-establishment outlet (東網) for saying that Occupy Central was planned years ahead, in contact with people from the Oslo Freedom Forum. The outlet quoted that BBC Newsnight had initially reported on it. I didn't bother correcting the people who were mocking that report, but 30 seconds on Google got me the video that clearly stated that the protest were planned years in advance with outside help. I'm not going to make judgements on whether this constitutes as foreign meddling, but it isn't exactly free from foreign involvement either. Similarly, plenty had brushed off the accusation thrown at Martin Lee, or Jimmy Lai for foreign involvement. A bit of a quick search on Wikileaks yielded plenty of communication between Martin Lee and the US reps in HK. Lai had also met the same reps, with one of his American lieutenants - the same lieutenant had stated in an American media outlet (the name slips my mind now) that he had not been in contact with the US government for 15 years, but that statement falls apart when you look at the date of the leaked cable. How much "involvement" is probably something that we won't easily find out, but it isn't to say that there's no evidence of it beyond media coverage. |