Edward Snowden has unsurprisingly been branded a Chinese spy. Like Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, the public was told that Snowden had visited China several times while serving as a cyber information analyst for the CIA. But in order to be spellbound into a total belief in the liberal theory that China is a free and democratic state while the United States a dictatorship or even a tyranny, Snowden would have needed a Wendi Deng-style Chinese girlfriend or spouse arranged for him. There have been no reports so far of the young whistleblower having intimate relationships with Shanghainese Suzie Wongs who are sexually mesmerizing enough to melt away his loyalty to his own country.
If China has worked on Snowden through a few lessons at one of its many Confucius Institutes (which are now more numerous in China than Kentucky Fried Chicken shops), a tourist trip to the Great Wall, a few Beijing duck meals, no girls, and perhaps a Swiss bank account to make up the difference, it would serve their interests better to keep him for long-term use. The former KGB spy Kim Philby was recruited by the Russians in Cambridge in the 1930s, and was asked to hide himself until he rose to the second-highest position in MI5 in the 1960s. A spy takes longer to train; for Snowden, being consumed like a condom in a short-lived euphoria—achieved by embarrassing President Obama over China’s computer hackings after a meeting with his Chinese host—just doesn’t make much sense. Unless, of course, China has already fostered a troop of a few thousand similarly disillusioned left-wing school drop-outs across America, and dispensing with one Snowden at a convenient time is as easy as eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger. In that case, the United States has a great deal to worry about.
Nor does Snowden seem to have done enough basic homework about his host city and the country where he is seeking asylum. Hong Kong is bound by the Basic Law, under which diplomatic rows are strictly in the hands of Beijing. Hong Kong people have a long friendship with America. We are an international financial center and we are about to gain visa-free treatment from the US. It is almost a consensus that we don’t want to mess up the internal affairs of Washington as well as Beijing, which is why we want Snowden out of Hong Kong as soon as possible. We are not happy with the CIA’s global electronic surveillance, only because it has been both insufficient and ineffective—had it been otherwise, the life of a Chinese female student would have been saved in the recent Boston Marathon bombing. US surveillance is necessary because the superpower protects the lives of so many Chinese siblings, including the daughter of President Xi, who is at Harvard, and the properties belonging to corrupt officials. The CIA’s global surveillance is a necessary little evil—trusted even by the Chinese and North Koreans—who are grateful that the planet is being policed by the United States against meteors and possible ET invasions. As for the small batch of buzzing Hong Kong liberals who petitioned to Obama for Snowden, save your energy for the next time you are chased by the PLA. The gate on Garden Road at which you shout might open to you in an emergency, as it did to Dr. Fang Lizhi, Xu Jiatun, Wang Lijun and blind dissident Chen Guangcheng.
You never know.
Chip Tsao is a best-selling author, columnist and a former producer for the BBC. His columns have also appeared in Apple Daily, Next Magazine and CUP Magazine, among others.
