Open an English news website, and you'll find news about China often related to one region: Hong Kong. For television news, the same story.

What are they talking about when they talk about Hong Kong? And why are these news media outlets obsessed with this region when it comes to China?

Why Hong Kong？

Social unrest, the debate on "One Country, Two Systems" and the discussion on improving the electoral system have turned Hong Kong into a hot topic in recent years. The standpoint of some news media, especially the Western news media on these topics, is well known to all.

The BBC Chinese website even refused to use the phrase "Hong Kong's return", saying it was mainly "China's unilateral" rhetoric - even though in the previous sentence they had just quoted Article 2 of the Sino-British Joint Declaration: "The Government of the United Kingdom declares that it will restore Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China with effect from 1 July 1997."

A pure value has been attached to the Hong Kong issue by these news media sources: "anti-China" sentiment.

In contrast to some countries where social conflicts are frequent, the Chinese mainland has few of those problems. Therefore, Hong Kong, for the past few years, has become one of the few "cards" that can be played by these news media outlets to achieve their anti-China goal.

In order to attack the Chinese government, some news media organizations often use "media tricks" to construct a kind of opposition. Regarding the so-called "Hong Kong issue", what they have portrayed is an opposition between residents and the government.

How do they do it?

To understand how these news media outlets construct this opposition, let's first look at how they present the 2019 Hong Kong demonstrations.

In a nine-minute video by U.S. news website Vox, there's no footage of demonstrators violently attacking the police, which Vox called a "peaceful" march.

A video by The Economist also tells the story from the protesters' point of view, without showing any scenes of police officers being attacked. The only violent footage of protesters involves a group of them smashing heavily loaded carts into a building's glass wall. But it was deliberately edited, cutting away just before the collision.

An ABC News video also featured an interview with one demonstrator, without opinions from anyone who disagreed. The video is full of sympathy and concern for the protesters. When the video is showing demonstrators churning out Molotov cocktails to attack police officers and setting fire to a dissenting Hong Kong resident, the voiceover doesn't even briefly talk about what the violence of these protesters means for the victims.

All of these videos use many images and clips of police officers standing in groups holding shields, but they don't tell the audience exactly what the police were protecting themselves from.

This is how these news media outlets covered the "Hong Kong issue". Selective use of images, one-sided rhetoric, and intentional editing. "Calm commentary" and "real footage" tell one biased story after another.

In this narrative, the police, representing the government's law enforcement agencies, become the first to bear the brunt. With their one-sided coverage of the clashes between police and demonstrators, these media outlets managed to convince some in Hong Kong that the government is against them. For them, this has been the best opportunity to tear apart Hong Kong society and cut off its bonds with the mainland.

The opposition has been established and their goal has been hereto achieved.

Do they really care?

Hong Kong's social problems have been maliciously hyped up these past years.

Certain news media outlets have focused their firepower on antagonism and China-bashing, drowning out those important issues that got Hong Kong into its current predicament.

How to revive Hong Kong's economy and create employment? What kind of measures should be implemented to further improve people's livelihood in Hong Kong? How to fulfill Hong Kong residents' aspirations for a stable and comfortable home? How to provide more career development opportunities for young people there?

Responses to these topics were found only in the policies and statements of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, while some news media outlets have been almost silent when it comes to these real problems.

When a card game player gets a lucky hand, the player isn't excited about the hand, but the potential gains the hand represents.