Reflections on the Hong Kong Riot and the Disintegration of the Soviet Union: Interview with John Ross

ABSTRACT

The simultaneous combination of provocations by rioters in Hong Kong, the trade aggression against China by the United States (US), an international propaganda campaign of lying about China’s anti-terrorist policies in Xinjiang, and sales of US weapons to the Taiwan region shows the type of “hybrid war” being waged by the US to try to block China’s national development. In this interview, John Ross, former Director of Economic and Business Policy for the Mayor of London, and senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of Renmin University of China, shares with us his unique perspective on such a “hybrid war,” with the conclusion that only the Communist Party of China (CPC) can defend China against these attacks, which is the fundamental lesson of international experience of all similar attacks carried out by the US, whether against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Germany, Japan or other countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Hybrid war
• Hong Kong riot
• Sino-US relations
• the disintegration of the Soviet Union
• Communist Party of China

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

John Ross is currently Senior Fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. From 2000–2008 he was Director of Economic and Business Policy for the Mayor of London. He was also an adviser to multinational companies. He is the author of numerous articles on the Chinese and international economies including “Why the Economic Reform Succeeded in China and Will Fail in Russia and Eastern Europe,” and “Deng Xiaoping and John Maynard Keynes.”

Zixu Liu is an assistant researcher at the Academy of Marxism, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Notes

1 See BBC News, Putin Deplores Collapse of USSR. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4480745.stm.

2 Calculated from IMF World Economic Outlook Database. Accessed July 16, 2019. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2019/01/weodata/index.aspx.

3 Calculated from World Bank, World Development Indicators. Accessed July 16, 2019. https://databank.worldbank.org/reports.aspx?source=world-development-indicators#.

4 See Ross (2015) for detail.

5 This was summarised in Ross (2013) that was originally published in Russian in 1992.

6 See the letter sent by an ordinary citizen in Hong Kong to The Observer website: “Letter from a Hong Kong Citizen: A Statement by My Son Worries Me a Lot” (in Chinese). Accessed July 16, 2019. https://www.guancha.cn/wutaitai/2019_08_02_512013.shtml.