US President Joe Biden’s nominee for deputy secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, has testified at a confirmation hearing that the US did not invite Hong Kong’s John Lee to last month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in San Francisco. However, the local government has said it remains an “indisputable fact” that Lee received a personal invitation.
On Friday, the diplomat was pressed as to why the sanctions-hit leader’s insistence that he was invited had not been not refuted by Washington. “We made clear to both Hong Kong and China authorities that he would not be welcome,” Campbell said. “We never intended for him to participate.”
See also: John Lee snubbed the APEC forum over ‘scheduling issues’ – what did he do instead?
The chief executive, whose absence at the high-level meeting followed a campaign to bar him from the event, was among several Hong Kong and Chinese officials hit by US sanctions over their crackdown on the 2019 protests and unrest in Hong Kong. Lee said he would be skipping the summit, which ran from November 11 to 17, over “scheduling issues.”
While Hong Kong’s finance minister Paul Chan was at the economic meeting, Lee attended an Asian Para Games forum, made community visits, had lunch with lawmakers, and spoke at a “fight crime” conference.
‘Indisputable fact’
When approached by HKFP, a spokesperson for the Chief Executive Office insisted on Sunday that a personal invite was received. “It is an indisputable fact that the Chief Executive, Mr John Lee, received from the United States an invitation addressed to him personally to invite him for the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in San Francisco from November 15 to 17,” they said.
“It was up to Mr Lee, on receiving the letter of invitation, to decide [if] he would attend personally or otherwise send a representative to attend on his behalf. Mr Lee finally decided to send the Financial Secretary, Mr Paul Chan, to attend on his behalf,” the spokesperson continued.
The spokesperson did not respond to a request to see the invitation letter.
HKFP has also requested that the US Department of State provide a copy of the invite.
In July, the Washington Post reported that the White House had decided to bar the chief executive from attending the forum. On September 26, Lee told reporters that he was still awaiting an invite: “I am still waiting for the invitation letter to be sent to me… We will attend in accordance with standard protocol.”
Last month, the US senior official for APEC, Matt Murray, told US-backed Voice of America: “There are a couple of cases where APEC leaders have been sanctioned here in the United States. And so, we have to work through those situations to make sure that they have appropriate representation in San Francisco.”
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