Name: Western media's favorite Hong Kong ‘freedom struggle writer’ is American ex-Amnesty staffer in yellowface - The Grayzone
Brand: thegrayzone.com
SKU: thegrayzone-com-24
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Western media's favorite Hong Kong ‘freedom struggle writer’ is American ex-Amnesty staffer in yellowface - The Grayzone

preview

An American man with ties to Amnesty International and key Hong Kong separatist figures has been posing online as a Hong Kong native named Kong Tsung-gan. Routinely cited as a grassroots activist and writer by major media organizations and published in English-language media, the fictitious character Kong appears to have been concocted to disseminate anti-China propaganda behind the cover of yellowface.Through Kong Tsung-gan’s prolific digital presence and uninterrogated reputation in mainstream Western media, he disseminates a constant stream of content hyping up the Hong Kong “freedom struggle” while clamoring for the US to turn up the heat on China.Whispers about Kong’s true identity have been circulating on social media among Hong Kong residents, and was even mentioned in a last December by .The Grayzone spoke to several locals outraged by a deceptive stunt they considered not only unethical, but racist. They said they have kept their views to themselves due to the atmosphere of intimidation looming over the city, where self-styled “freedom fighters” seemingly anyone who speaks out publicly against them.In this investigation, The Grayzone connected the dots between Kong and an American man who has become a major presence in Western media and at protests around Hong Kong. Our research indicates that Kong’s editors and prominent protest cheerleaders were likely aware of the deceptive ploy.The Twitter user Kong Tsung-gan () first appeared in March 2015. Kong Tsung-gan’s featured commentary about Tibet and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement.At some point, Kong changed his Twitter avatar to a black-and-white headshot of an unknown Asian person. A search of the Wayback Machine internet archive shows that this photo remained up until .Later, Kong changed his Twitter avatar to , the wife of the late Nobel Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo. who the on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and was rewarded with the by the National Endowment for Democracy – of the US government.As of August 2020, Kong Tsung-gan’s Twitter account boasts more than 32,000 followers. He during protests, posts about the Communist Party of China (CPC), the Hong Kong “struggle” to Tibet and Xinjiang, the United States to ram through sanction bills like the Hong Kong Safe Harbor and Hong Kong People’s Freedom and Choice Acts, to “find out about our freedom struggle,” Nancy Pelosi and other US politicians, , maintains an ongoing of arrests in his “#HK CRACKDOWN WATCH UPDATE,” and disseminates of protest posters.At around the time he created his Twitter account, Kong Tsung-gan published his . He has since filled his Medium with protest timelines, lists of recommended human rights books and (including a link to the ), and “first-hand accounts” of his protest experiences on the ground. In one account, Kong Tsung-gan claimed he a Band 1 government school, implying he was a native Hong Kong resident.Kong’s work by Joshua Wong, the Hong Kong protest poster-boy who has with neoconservative Republican senators like Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton.Thanks to his continual stream of content on Twitter and Medium, and his platform on the website Hong Kong Free Press, Kong Tsung-gan has become one of mainstream Western media’s go-to sources for soundbites.Since bursting onto the Hong Kong Twitter scene, Kong Tsung-gan has been quoted by a who’s who of Western corporate media outlets. He has been described as an “author” (, , ), “writer and activist” (, ), “activist and author” (),“activist” (, ), “writer, educator and activist” (), “political writer” (), “writer” (), and “Hong Kong writer and activist” in an posted by the Nikkei Asian Review.Kong has also been cited as a “Hong Kong journalist and rights activist” by and as a “rights activist and author” by , two subsidiaries of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Tasked with a to “be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States,” the USAGM around $2 million to support protests in Hong Kong in 2020.When he is not churning out commentary on Twitter and Medium accounts, Kong Tsung-gan is a at Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) and publishes books about the Hong Kong “freedom struggle,” whose .Hong Kong Free Press describes itself as an “impartial non-profit media outlet” and “completely independent.” The outlet also that it “gets full marks” from a supposed journalism ethics verification initiative called News Guard, which happens to be .HKFP editor-in-chief Tom Grundy has of rejecting article pitches from deceptive figures operating behind false identities. At the same time, Grundy has provided a regular home for Kong’s commentary.The Grayzone emailed HKFP to request a comment on Kong’s identity, but received no reply.To burnish his reputation as a reliable source, Kong Tsung-gan has furnished audio interviews to Western outlets. In July 2019, Kong Tsung-gan was on Louisa Lim’s Little Red Podcast alongside Johnson Yeung, lawmaker Eddie Chu Hoi-Dick, and former Hong Kong Chief Secretary Anson Chan.Around the same time, an American man in Hong Kong named Brian Kern at a march commemorating the Tiananmen anniversary.A close listen to both audio clips, along with an interview Kong furnished to an Italian interviewer, demonstrates that Kong Tsung-gan and Brian Kern are the same person.Listen for yourself here, or in the embedded at the top of this article:Indeed, the distinctively American voices of Kong Tsung-gan and Brian Kern are the same.So why have news outlets like Hong Kong Free Press failed to disclose that Kong Tsung-gan is a pen name for an American man? Who is Brian Kern? And why is he yellowfacing as Kong Tsung-gan?Brian Patrick Kern has been a fixture at the Hong Kong protests since they erupted in 2019. He has been the Chinese press, photographed off the walls of the police headquarters and escorting his to .Kern has even been filmed coordinating with protesters and rioters in on social media.In another video that went viral on social media, Kern was filmed at the police: “You’re a communist puppet! … Kill us all!… With your bug gun, shoot me! I’m so violent! I’m a violent rioter! Shoot me! Your communist masters will love you!”Brian Kern also writes for the HKFP as a under his own name.Clearly, Kern enjoys the spotlight, and has no apparent fear of local authorities.But few people know that Brian Kern also hides behind the persona of Kong Tsung-gan, furnishing quotes to media outlets across the West as an expert native source on the Hong Kong “freedom struggle.”Not only does Brian Patrick Kern write as Kong Tsung-gan, which he romanized to seem like a Hong Kong native; he also writes under the pen name Xun Yuezang, romanized to appear as a Chinese mainlander. Writings under both aliases are filled with warnings of the “creeping control of the Chinese Communist Party.”As Kong Tsung-gan, Brian Kern has published : Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong (Pema Press), As long as there is resistance, there is hope: Essays on the Hong Kong freedom struggle in the post-Umbrella Movement era, 2014-2018 (Pema Press), and Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the Freedom Struggle (Mekong Review).As Xun Yuezang, Brian Kern has published (Pema Press), which “tells the story of a human rights worker who disappears while crossing the border between Hong Kong and mainland China.” One reviewer , “like many debut novels, [Liberationists] a work weighed down by its own good intentions.” In the book, “Xun Yuezang” discloses that it was published under a pseudonym.No matter which alias he is employing, Brian Kern’s mission is clear: To portray the CPC as one of the world’s most dangerous evildoers.Kern’s books also are filled with clues exposing him as the man behind both Xun Yuezang and Kong Tsung-gan. Xun Yuezang dedicated the book Liberationists to Mayren “who struggled so long to be free.” Brian Kern’s is named Mayren.Liberationists was also dedicated to someone referred to simply as “Y.” Similarly, Kong Tsung-gan dedicated Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the Freedom Struggle to “Y, for the shared struggle.” The name of Brian Kern’s wife, Yatman, begins with the letter Y.Pema Press is the publisher for the work by Xun and Kong. Brian Kern’s daughter happens to be named Pema – the same name as the publisher. (It is possible Kern named both his publishing house and his daughter after , sister of the Dalai Lama, with whom he and his wife worked in the Tibetan Children’s Villages charity.)Kern’s Orientalist stunt could be compared to that of , a white middle-aged poet from Indiana who struggled to get his work published until he began submitting it to journals under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou.Unlike Hudson’s fake Chinese persona, however, Kern is a political actor posing as a native grassroots activist to spread propaganda. His ploy is therefore more reminiscent of the , in which Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old American graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, posed as a Damascus-based lesbian activist named “Amina Arraf” to gin up left-liberal support for regime change in Syria throughout 2011.Kern’s personal profile is similar to MacMaster’s as well. Both are activist-minded liberal internationalist types with PhDs in literature. But unlike MacMaster, who in academia, Kern also has a record of work in the human rights industry.Brain Kern in Minnesota and completed his in Comparative Literature at Brown University in 1996. In 1998, he at the Red Cross Nordic United World College (UWCRCN) in Norway, where he met his wife, .Cheng graduated from UWCRCN in 2002 and a Jardine Foundation scholarship to attend Oxford. In 2003 or 2004, as a university student, she with the Tibetan Children’s Villages in India on a trip and led by Brian Kern.In 2004, Cheng became a at the Hong Kong think tank Civic Exchange, which has received from the National Democratic Institute, a subsidiary of the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy. Cheng and Kern lived in London in 2007, where Kern worked for as a of their education team.In 2008, they moved to Hong Kong, where Kern began at the Chinese International School and established its .A few of Kern’s former students appear to work with him behind the cover of his false Asian identity. Several have by Joshua Wong for Kong Tsung-gan’s Medium blog, and one for one of Kong Tsung-gan’s books.Brian Patrick Kern was in public on May 24, 2020, marching with lawmaker Eddie Chu Hoi-Dick in a demonstration against China’s National Security Law.Weeks later, Kong Tsung-gan published his next book, Liberate Hong Kong: Stories From The Freedom Struggle. Hong Kong’s last British colonial governor Chris Patten &nbsp;as “a fascinating insider’s look at what has happened, which will be a defining issue for China’s place in the twenty-first century.”Did Chris Patten know Kong Tsung-gan was a made-up person?And how about Tom Grundy, the editor-in-chief of Hong Kong Free Press? Did he know that his columnist, Kong, was actually an American named Brian Kern?Below, Kern can be seen Grundy during the June 2019 Wan Chai Police station siege:This August, Kong Tsung-gan published a long-winded against China’s National Security Law in the Mekong Review, clamoring for harsh US sanctions on Beijing. While acknowledging in small print at the end of the essay that Kong was a pen name, Kern continued to insinuate that he was a Hong Kong native.“An indication of just how draconian the CCP edict is, is that I could be arrested, charged with ‘colluding with foreign forces’, and face up to life in prison just for calling for sanctions on CCP and HK officials,” he wrote.In reality, the author was not colluding with foreign forces. He was the foreign force.According to Hong Kong locals contacted by The Grayzone, Kern is rumored to have left the city.

An American man with ties to Amnesty International and key Hong Kong separatist figures has been posing online as a Hong Kong native named Kong Tsung-gan. Routinely cited as a grassroots activist and writer by major media organizations and published in English-language media, the fictitious character Kong appears to have been concocted to disseminate anti-China propaganda behind the cover of yellowface.Through Kong Tsung-gan’s prolific digital presence and uninterrogated reputation in mainstream Western media, he disseminates a constant stream of content hyping up the Hong Kong “freedom...

public

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

https://thegrayzone.com/author/max-blumenthal/

Max Blumenthal

Independent news and investigative journalism on empire || En español:  @GrayzoneES  || Videos: https://youtube.com/channel/UCEXR8pRTkE2vFeJePNe9UcQ

Western media's favorite Hong Kong ‘freedom struggle writer’ is American ex-Amnesty staffer in yellowface - The Grayzone

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS