The US State Department’s power grabbing agency, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is spending HK$4.036 million to infiltrate Hong Kong’s social fabric this year, according to its 2025 annual report.
But it could have been more had it not been for the intervention of Tesla billionaire Elon Musk. In February last year President Trump appointed Musk to look into wastage in his administration with a new government Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk immediately took aim at USAID, the umbrella agency for NED, which he criticized as “rife with corruption” and an “evil organization that needs to be dissolved.” He also described it as a scam.
NED went into a tailspin and immediately suspended all payments to its benefactors, causing them to lay off staff and cut expenditures.
In March, NED filed a lawsuit against the US government and was granted an injunction to allow access to the HK$743 million of its previously approved funds for 2025.
However, the allocation of funds for 2025 is still short of $78 million compared to 2024 budget.
The allocation to Hong Kong includes HK$782,000 to build international solidarity for defending freedoms and the rule of law, inform international stakeholders about regional political deterioration, advocate for strategic responses through legal mechanisms, and expand its international network of supporters through outreach and media engagement.
Another HK$2.34 million is reserved to build a civil society capacity to monitor government and counter censorship of official records and democratic narratives, the organization will conduct workshops training groups and individuals in using digitally secure methods for collecting and archiving materials related to government accountability for human rights violations and preserving the historical record. And it would provide support to political prisoners and those at-risk.
It is also spending HK$907,400 to strengthen the resilience of human rights defenders and their families, foster solidarity networks and conduct community-building campaigns.
The NED annual reports once named its beneficiaries who carried out subversive acts in various countries, but the practice stopped around 2011 (riots in Hong Kong) and now the recipients of the NED handouts are hidden in a cloud of secrecy.
China is the main recipient of NED’s attacks. It said in its latest report that China continued to keep an iron grip on politics and freedoms at home while seeking to solidify its growing influence globally.
It claims that “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) escalated its repression in Hong Kong, Tibet, and East Turkestan, while exporting its model of digital censorship, transnational repression, and elite capture to neighboring countries and farther abroad.” The report further says that “NED-supported partners worked to expose CCP influence, expand independent information channels, and defend civic space.”
Looking ahead, in 2026 the NED will continue to invest most heavily in Asia, even as its most significant growth in grant making occurs in Latin America and the Caribbean. China-related programs—spanning the Mainland, Tibet, East Turkestan, Hong Kong, and China’s global influence— will remain its single largest area of investment.
“When countries can resist foreign authoritarian pressure, they become stronger partners for the United States,” the report boasts.
The first sentence in NED’s 2025 annual report is a lie that NED is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to advancing freedom and democracy worldwide. As part of the US’s Department of State drawing on public funds, it is hardly private and as for advancing freedom and democracy worldwide, NED is hellbent crippling regimes it doesn’t like in pursuit of world supremacy.
Mark Pinkstone
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
The Reporters Sans Frontieres’ (RSF) –Reporters Without Borders – low press freedom ranking for Hong Kong comes not from hard evidence but from revenge for barring one of its French reporters entering the city last year.
In November last, France Television journalist Antoine Vedeilhe was detained and deported when he tried to enter the city to produce a TV documentary on “how and why its freedoms have been curtailed,” according to his statement on RSF’s webpage. RSF highlighted the fact he was the 13th journalist to have been targeted by the territory’s authorities since the National Security Law was enacted in 2020. It did fail to note that many more were denied entry before then, implying that the vetting of journalists started only after the laws were implemented.
Each year so-called journalists are barred from entering countries, not only in Hong Kong but in the US, UK and elsewhere because they are either known activists, drug addicts, criminals or general undesirables. It is akin to allowing an undesirable person to enter your front door knowing he is going to harm you. The RSF statement said it condemns Hong Kong’s policy of weaponizing visas, a tactic long used by the Chinese regime to restrict access for foreign reporters. This “tactic” is used by every country, not only the Chinese regime, to restrict undesirables to enter a country.
Obviously, he planned mischief, which would not be allowed in any country, let alone Hong Kong. The reasons for his visit to Hong Kong were published well before the actual visit as if it was an invitation for the authorities to arrest him to fit into the script. The documentary is due for release this month.
On Thursday, RSF published its annual rankings of press freedoms, ranking Hong Kong 140 out of 180, citing as its main example the conviction and jailing of publisher Jimmy Lai, who was handed a 20-year sentence last year for treason related charges. Norway topped the list, as it did in previous years.
The Hong Kong government was quick to “strongly condemn the attempts by an anti-China organisation and foreign media to sugarcoat the criminal acts of national security offender Lai Chee-ying and to slander, smear, as well as attack the HKSAR by releasing a so-called press freedom index and presenting a so-called "award". Such despicable behaviours totally disregarded the rule of law and twisted the facts, which must be strongly condemned.”
If Jimmy Lai had committed his offences in any other country, be it the US, Australia or the UK, he would have been jailed with world-wide acclamation. But because it is Hong Kong/China and a multi-million-dollar public relations campaign carried out by his family with the help of international lawyers, he is viewed by the western media as a martyr for press freedom.
The courts proved, beyond reasonable doubt that he was guilty as charged after a 156-day trial with 2,220 pieces of evidence, 80,000 pages of documents and more than 1,000 pages of written submissions. Lai himself was given 52 days to plead his case. Nothing can be fairer than that.
In some countries, the RSF report noted, the information space has shrunk over the past 25 years due to political changes and increasingly draconian regimes, citing the case in Hong Kong which dropped 122 points “since Beijing tightened its control on the territory.” There has been no tightening controls by Beijing. The “controls” imposed by the national leadership have been to safeguard Hong Kong from the threats and attacks by foreign forces, namely the US, which is hell-bent on destroying Hong Kong to undermine the power of China.
It noted the closing down of Apple Daily (Jimmy Lai’s publication) and Stand News during the sedition investigations but failed to recognize that Hong Kong has 87 daily newspapers and 320 periodicals thriving very well. There are also about 50 foreign media organizations based in Hong Kong which report daily on local affairs.
But there is also a much more sinister aspect of RSF that merits recognition. It is partially sponsored by the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was deeply involved in the civil unrest of 2014-2020 by funding groups and organizations to raise against the Hong Kong administration. The US’s current Consul General in Hong Kong Julie Eadeh was photographed at the time conferring with the ring leaders.
With that background, RSF could hardly be an independent and trustworthy source to rank the “freedoms” of the media anywhere. The media in Hong Kong is alive and well and reporting daily events without fear or favor within the international constraints of the law.
