HONG KONG — Mark Simon, a 47-year-old businessman from Falls Church, was until recently just another American lured by the opportunities offered by Asia’s economic boom.
Today, the portly Virginian has a dashing but, he says, “extremely unpleasant” new role at the center of a political thriller scripted by China’s Communist Party and its allies in Hong Kong. It features espionage, slush funds, U.S. plots to bring chaos to the former British colony and, Simon says, “intense lies.”
“I’m the ice sculpture in the middle of a big propaganda buffet,” said Simon, a former submarine analyst at the Pentagon who now works for Jimmy Lai, a media tycoon whose outspoken calls for democracy and criticism of China’s ruling party have long riled Beijing.
Beijing has been gunning for Lai for years, but attacks on him and other pro-democracy figures escalated sharply in the run-up to hotly contested Hong Kong elections for neighborhood councils. In the voting, held Sunday, pro-China candidates trounced the democracy camp.
The elections were mostly dominated by local issues, including the status of Filipina maids and complaints that minibus drivers play their radios too loudly. But pro-China media also homed in on Simon’s past as an intelligence analyst at the Pentagon and his current employment with Lai’s Next Media to paint Hong Kong’s leading democracy advocates as American stooges.
“This is their constant refrain,” said Christine Loh, the head of local think tank Civic Exchange and the author of a book about the role of the Communist Party in Hong Kong. If you cross Beijing, she said, “they always assume you have let yourself become the instrument of an unfriendly foreign power.”
Political donations revealed
Simon, who moved to Hong Kong in 1992 to take a job with a shipping company, surfaced as a focus of attention last month after the financial records of his boss, Lai, mysteriously popped up on the Internet. They revealed that Lai had made donations of nearly $8 million over five years to pro-democracy groups and individuals — and that Simon, as head of his private office, handled the payments.
The donations broke no laws and were tiny compared with those made to pro-China parties by Hong Kong businessmen whose identities have remained secret. Financial statements show that Lai and a few other donors gave $770,000 to Hong Kong’s Democratic Party over a 12-month period that ended in March 2010, while unidentified donors contributed $6.2 million over the same period to the Democrats’ main rival, the Beijing-friendly Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong.
China’s official government representatives in Hong Kong kept quiet, but an extensive network of party-controlled organizations mobilized for attack. The party still operates in Hong Kong as it did under British rule as an underground organization: It is not registered, and its membership is secret. It nonetheless controls newspapers, trade union groups and a host of other bodies loyal to Beijing.
Hong Kong papers run by the party and a media group owned by a pro-China businessman suggested that the money Lai donated had originated in America, citing as evidence Simon’s former Pentagon job and his position in 2005 as head of the Hong Kong branch of Republicans Abroad. This, said Wen Wei Po, a party-run newspaper, showed that Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp is led by “political agents nurtured and funded by American intelligence organs.”
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