The sanctions that Washington imposed on 24 officials from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong on Wednesday, following changes to the special administrative region's election system endorsed by China's top legislature last week, are but a brutum fulmen.

Although more of the chest-thumping that, to a certain degree, is intended to meet the needs of domestic politics in the post-Trump era, it is no coincidence that the expansion of the list came ahead of the talks in Alaska between senior Chinese and US officials.

Yet it is a silverback display that is wasted on China, as it is not a country that flinches in the face of intimidation.

Tam Yiu-chung, Hong Kong's sole delegate to the National People's Congress who is on Washington's new "hit list", said he would not be daunted by the sanctions and would continue to make contribution to the country and the HKSAR in good faith.

While Tam was responding to the new "sanctions" in his personal capacity, he spoke for everyone else in a sense.

The 24 officials on Washington's expanded sanctions list were accused of having "reduced Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy". Obviously, Washington and its allies define Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy as corresponding to that of an independent country and measure it against their own metric.

But that ignores the fact that Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China, whose high degree of autonomy is defined by the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, in accordance with China's Constitution. By virtue of China's sovereign power over the SAR, the NPC has the constitutional right and responsibility to determine the region's political structure, including its electoral system.

Washington and its allies in the West have tried to camouflage their repeated interference in China's internal affairs and their bullying of Chinese officials under a cloak of empty rhetoric.

But they cannot fool the world with their platitudes championing "democracy", "freedom" and "civil rights", which are nothing more than virtue signaling. This is evidenced by the fact that 70 countries called for non-interference in China's internal affairs in a joint statement issued at the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council.

That Western powers condoned a crackdown on the Catalan independence movement in Spain while constantly attacking China for its efforts to stop subversives from making Hong Kong an operational base to subvert the country demonstrates their hypocrisy and double standard.

The NPC's decision to improve Hong Kong's electoral system is its prerogative. The US is whistling in the wind if it thinks it can dictate what it can and cannot do.