In their attempts to vilify the National Security Law for Hong Kong (NSL), under which a panel of Hong Kong High Court judges on Thursday handed down a guilty verdict on 14 individuals charged with the offense of “conspiracy to commit subversion”, the apologists for the offenders splashed phrases like “pro-democracy campaigners”, “oppositional politics”, “leading democracy figures”, “former politicians”, “unofficial primary election”, “democratic political processes” and “peaceful political debate”.

All these and other similar politically-charged phrases serve one purpose: To frame the criminal case involving 47 suspects — including these 14 — as “political persecution”.

READ MORE: HK High Court convicts 14 in subversion trial

In doing so, the apologists — mostly Western politicians, government officials and mainstream media — deliberately ignored the plain facts and concealed the crucial context of the machinations that led to the criminal charges, conspicuously displaying their disingenuousness.    

The 47 individuals were charged with the offense of “conspiracy to commit subversion” for organizing, participating or facilitating the “35-plus primary election” in July 2020, which was part of a plot to subvert the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government — specifically the “Ten Steps to Mutual Destruction” project, as promoted by its chief architect Benny Tai Yiu-ting, a legal scholar, on media outlets.

As the first step in the plot, participants organized illegal “primary elections” in July 2020 to produce a group of candidates who would hopefully gain control of Hong Kong’s legislature in an election originally slated for September 2020.

They would then indiscriminately veto the government budget repeatedly to force the chief executive to step down and thereby cause a constitutional crisis, with the purposes of creating chaos and social instability, instigating violence and insurrection, triggering a “crackdown” by Beijing, and causing bloodshed that would give Western countries an excuse to intervene in Hong Kong’s affairs and impose crippling sanctions on China.

They hoped the plot would eventually succeed by forcing Beijing to concede to their demand for electoral reforms that would allow them to grab the governance power of the HKSAR and turn the city into a subversion base against Beijing.

In a nutshell, the “35-plus primary election” was a carefully planned, organized and executed subversive act. Aside from a clear-cut criminal intent — as declared in the “Ten Steps to Mutual Destruction” plan — there was also strong evidence supporting the subversion charges that convinced the judges, who ruled that the prosecution had proved the defendants were engaged in a conspiracy to disrupt the HKSAR government’s “duties and functions … with a view to subverting the state power”, which was a violation of the Basic Law, the constitutional document that underpin the governance framework of the HKSAR.

ALSO READ: Officials support trial verdict convicting 14 people of subversion

As a matter of fact, 31 defendants or more than half of the defendants in this case including Tai had pleaded guilty before the trial commenced, suggesting that they were fully aware of the existence of undeniable evidence.

The apologists invariably paid no attention at all to these glaringly obvious facts, which do not support their narrative but are crucial to their audience correctly understanding the case. They laid bare a broader objective behind their moves to defend the defendants of the case, which has driven other China-bashing machinations in recent years.

The author is a current affairs commentator.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.