A woman takes a walk at the Tsim Sha Tsui area in Hong Kong on July 20, 2020. (Photo: Xinhua)

By this time even the most naive of observers should have no difficulty visualizing the thread running through all the jaw-dropping activities of the opposition camp in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region over the past several years.

That thread links the "Occupy Central" movement or "Umbrella Revolution" in the autumn of 2014, the yearlong violent anti-government campaign since June last year — tellingly titled "Black Revolution" — and now the on-going "35+plus" bid to manipulate the upcoming September election to seize control of the local legislature and so stymy the policies of the SAR government.

It is a thread that can be traced back to anti-China forces in the West, which have designed and masterminded all these agitations and violent campaigns behind the curtain.

The visualization of this thread makes it obvious that they are all part of the United States' anti-China games. Like the President's Executive Order on Hong Kong Normalization, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 and the Hong Kong Autonomy Act of 2020, they all serve the same purpose.

They are all intended to help the local proxies of Western anti-China forces gain control of Hong Kong for the sake of the West's geopolitical benefits. It is a strategy that has been employed in many other places around the world to instigate various "color revolutions".

Thus, bizarre though the response is, few observers, if indeed any at all, have been surprised that Western politicians are seeking to punish China for exercising the universally recognized sovereign right to safeguard national security by introducing a relevant law in Hong Kong, a special administrative region which is granted a high degree of autonomy but comes directly under the jurisdiction of the Chinese central government.

Or that Western politicians have desperately attempted to smear the national security law for Hong Kong under the pretext of defending "rights", "freedom" and "democracy", the usual red herrings that they employ to give a veneer of righteousness to their ignominious aims.

Thanks to its significance to China, Hong Kong has been treated by the West as a pawn on the geopolitical chessboard at the expense of Hong Kong people as well as the thousands of multinational companies operating in the international financial center and the hundreds of thousands of expats who have chosen to live in the city and see it as their home.

The rancorous maneuvers against Hong Kong, the ever tightening squeeze on Huawei and other Chinese tech giants and the protracted trade war are all part of the West's containment strategy against China.