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For context: Vivian Kong is an olympic fencer who won a Gold medal in epee fencing. At first Hong Kong activists celebrated her victory on behalf of the city only to quickly turn on her after her pro-China views were revealed. She wrote her master’s thesis strongly criticizing the 2014 and 2019 HK protests for being misguided and detrimental to the city.
From the wikipedia page: In her thesis, titled “Occupy Central and Its Effects on Hong Kong Election Reform”, Kong argued that the Chinese Communist Party’s “patriots-only” electoral overhaul of Hong Kong, which greatly reduced directly elected seats and vetted all political candidates for their “patriotism”, corrected the city’s trajectory.[16] She wrote that “anti-Chinese disrupters” twisted the concept of “one country, two systems” and exploited elections to enter the political system, which resulted in a constitutional crisis.[16] According to Kong, the protests revealed that the people of Hong Kong held misconceptions about the “one country, two systems” constitutional principle, which include a tendency to place international human rights covenants over the Hong Kong Basic Law, and an over-emphasis on “two systems”.[16] She was critical of the pro-democracy protests, writing that “Hong Kong’s chaos and illegal acts in recent years to pursue so-called genuine universal suffrage had already posed a threat to national security” and that the use of protests to “threaten” or bargain with authorities was because Beijing had compromised on occasions.[16] Kong dismissed “genuine universal suffrage” in Hong Kong with international standards as a “psuedo-proposition”, citing a UN position that it is each country’s right to choose how to conduct elections.[16]
