NEW YORK—Former U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Sept. 9 anti-government protests in Hong Kong were “not an internal” Chinese matter and that the United States should offer at least moral support to the demonstrators.
The retired U.S. Marine general, speaking at a Reuters Newsmaker event in New York, said the United States should generally side with those standing up for human rights, which he said included the Hong Kong protesters.
“When people stand up for those (rights), I just inherently think we ought to stand with them, even if it’s just moral,” said Mattis, who abruptly resigned as Pentagon chief in December over disagreements with President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
“This is not an internal matter,” Mattis said in remarks likely to irritate Beijing, which has denounced the sometimes violent protests and accused the United States and Britain of fomenting unrest in the former British colony.
Trump has also called on China to end the discord in a “humanitarian” way. He said a crackdown could make his efforts to end a damaging trade war with China “very hard.”
Mattis said China’s effort to pass a law to allow people in Hong Kong to be extradited to mainland China was in breach of the “one country, two systems” formula under which British control of Hong Kong was ended in 1997.
“They said it would be two systems, and the extradition law was a violation of that,” said Mattis, who is promoting a new memoir about his role in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although the extradition bill was withdrawn last week after months of unrest, the mass protests in streets and public places across Hong Kong continue, having grown into a broader pro-democracy backlash against the Chinese regime.
“We have to be careful: We don’t want to say we’re going to land the 82nd Airborne Division in Hong Kong to do this,” he said. “But morally? Yeah, I think we have to stand with them.”
In his nearly two years as defense secretary, Mattis had tried to forge a relationship with the Chinese military, worried that tense relations between the two countries could boil over into conflict.
