The United States has dismissed demands that its newly appointed diplomat to Hong Kong toe the line on what Beijing calls colluding with “anti-China forces” and “interfering with national security cases”.
The demands, called the “four don’ts requirements,” were made to Julie Eadeh, U.S. Consul General in Hong Kong, who arrived in the city in August.
“U.S. diplomats represent our nation and are charged with advancing U.S. interests globally, which is standard practice for diplomats around the world including in Hong Kong,” a senior State Department official said in a statement to The Epoch Times on Oct. 3.
Cui Jianchun, Beijing’s top diplomat in Hong Kong, met with Eadeh on Sept. 30 to lodge China’s “solemn representations on her conducts since she assumed duties", the regime’s foreign ministry’s office in Hong Kong said in a statement on Oct. 2.
The statement said that during the meeting, Cui outlined the regime’s “Four Don’ts requirements” for the U.S. diplomat. He instructed her not to meet with people she “shouldn’t meet with,” not to “collude with” what he called “anti-China forces,” not to assist or fund any activities that might “undermine stability in Hong Kong,” and not to “interfere with national security cases” in the city.
State-Backed Media
Shortly after arriving in Hong Kong in late August, Eadeh came under attack by a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-backed newspaper, Ta Kung Pao, and beginning Sept. 24, the CCP’s Central Committee office in Hong Kong reposted four of the newspaper’s articles that contain sharp criticisms of her.
The articles took issue with her
welcome reception, which
was attended by Emily Lau, a prominent pro-democracy figure and former lawmaker. Ta Kung Pao claimed Anson Chan, the city’s former second-highest official and a participant in the 2019 protests, was also present, but neither Chan nor the consulate confirmed it.
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In one article reposted by the CCP’s Hong Kong office on Sept. 27, Eadeh was labeled as a “promoter of a color revolution,” a term associated with large-scale protest movements demanding their dictators to step down.
It pointed to a six-year-old meeting involving
Joshua Wong and
Nathan Law, two of the city’s most vocal pro-democracy advocates, that took place during Eadeh’s
previous tenure as a political counselor at the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong.
In August 2019, Ta Kung Pao published a
photograph of a U.S. official—identifying her as Eadeh—talking with Law, Wong, and two other student leaders in a hotel lobby. The report claims this was evidence of “foreign interference” in the city’s mass protests. The Ta Kung Pao reports included Eadeh’s family’s information, such as the names of her young children.
Then-State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus accused Beijing of leaking the diplomat’s personal information and of acting like a “thuggish regime.”
“I don’t think that leaking an American diplomat’s private information, pictures, names of their children—I don’t think that’s a formal protest,” Ortagus
said at a press briefing in Washington at the time, in response to a question about China’s reaction to the reported hotel lobby meeting.
“That is what a thuggish regime would do. That’s not how a responsible nation would behave,” she added, without confirming the U.S. official’s identity.
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State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus speaks during a media briefing at the State Department in Washington on June 10, 2019. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times
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In a social media
statement later that day, Ortagus said that official Chinese media reports on the U.S. diplomat in Hong Kong have “gone from irresponsible to dangerous.”
“This must stop,” she said. “Chinese authorities know full well, our accredited consular personnel are just doing their jobs, just like diplomats from every other country.”
National Security Law
The meeting between Eadeh and Cui comes as the CCP continues to silence critics and deprive Hong Kong locals of their fundamental freedoms via a national security law enacted five years ago.
The vaguely worded legislation has
criminalized speech or action deemed secessionist, subversive, terrorist, or colluding with foreign forces against China’s communist regime, with punishments as severe as life imprisonment.
As of March, at least 320 people have been arrested on allegations of violating the security law, the State Department said in the latest annual
report on the city’s investment climate, released in late September. In the largest
national security trial, held in November 2024, 45 activists received sentences of up to 10 years in prison.
The CCP imposed the controversial law in 2020, in the wake of months-long protests joined by more than a million people and triggered by the city government’s plans to allow extradition to mainland China.
Tens of thousands of local residents
took to the streets almost every weekend, demanding the withdrawal of the legislative proposal that they fear would undermine the city’s autonomy as a special administrative region.
The protests were later morphed into a broader movement demanding greater democracy and freedoms in the face of the CCP’s growing control over the former British colony.
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