No matter how hard they try to dress it up in highfalutin platitudes about rights, freedom and democracy, the nine US lawmakers who nominated the "protest movement" in Hong Kong for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize cannot disguise the fact that what they are really doing is China-bashing.

The US Congressional Executive Committee on China co-chaired by Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Representative Jim McGovern, sent a letter to the Nobel Committee, claiming the protesters were "peacefully expressing their political views". This despite the violence that leaders of the movement, including Joshua Wong Chi-fung, instigated and incited. 

Wong, Rubio's favorite foot soldier in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is founder of the now disbanded separatist group Demosisto. He was sentenced to 13 and a half months' imprisonment for organizing and taking part in an unauthorized assembly around the Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019. Rubio rolled out a red carpet for Wong in Washington in November 2016.

Thanks to his usefulness as a tool for their own political games against Beijing, Wong received a warm welcome from Washington's China-bashing politicians such as Rubio, as he openly challenged the validity of the constitutional status of Hong Kong as a special administrative region of China.

"It's time to advance our struggle to achieve the right to self-determination rather than mere universal suffrage under Chinese rule. The people of Hong Kong must challenge the legitimacy of our existing constitution," Wong wrote in an Op-Ed article he co-authored that was published in The Wall Street Journal ahead of his visit.

A year later in early 2018, Rubio nominated Joshua Wong, Nathan Law Kwun-chung and Alex Chow Yong-kang for the Nobel Peace Prize for their "peaceful efforts to bring political reform and protect the freedoms granted to Hong Kong" despite the fact the three had just been convicted of an offense related to violence which left 10 security guards injured.

That attempt having failed, the Nobel Committee was asked to award the protest movement in 2020. Now the whole violent anti-government movement that Wong has been a key orchestrator of has been nominated for the prize, despite their self-identification as Hong Kong separatists and their adoption of violence and intimidation as the key strategy to advance their political objectives. The nomination by the CECC is at odds with Alfred Nobel's will, which stated the award should go to the persons who "have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations" and "the holding and promotion of peace congresses".

It is conceivable that the Nobel Committee will dismiss the latest China-bashing move as it did in 2018. But that will not deter the likes of Rubio from continuing their agitprop campaign against China.