Beijing slams US senators for ‘malicious’ bill targeting Hong Kong trade offices

Beijing’s foreign affairs arm in Hong Kong has “strongly condemned” a group of US senators for pushing what it calls “malicious legislation” that seeks to strip the city’s trade offices in the United States of their special privileges and potentially force their closure.A spokesman for the Commissioner’s Office of the Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong said the senators’ move exposed their “deep-rooted ideological prejudice” and “Cold War mentality”.“Any attempts to smear Hong Kong’s freedom and human rights, or to discredit the successful implementation of ‘one country, two systems’ are mere wishful thinking and are doomed to fail,” the spokesman said in a statement on Saturday.Earlier this week, several US senators pushed to introduce legislation targeting Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices, which they said “now operate on behalf of Beijing”.They said the trade offices were originally granted special privileges because Hong Kong was treated as autonomous.The HKETO Certification Act, led by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, requires the US State Department to determine whether special privileges and exemptions granted to Hong Kong trade offices should be withdrawn, and their operations terminated because of what they described as “Beijing’s dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy and its campaign of repression against Hongkongers”.