Not taking a side here, just pointing out the fact that the tactic was known and used well before the Crimean events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_King...

The current difference is that now it's happenning during a live broadcast, and the actions are being tried to be justified (as "justice") through existing legal frameworks.

That's one of the ways Empires grow their periphery regions. Another way is when an Empire spreads its culture and abundance to orbiting regions, so that inhabitants of the periphery get a personal interest in becoming the part of the Empire and bringing a change to their governing bodies to align with the metropolis.

> The current difference

Just as a point of comparison (not justifying russia or the US), the region of donetsk (and crimea) was supermajority ethnically russian, and by the time the US overthrew the hawaiian kingdom, ethnic hawaiians were a minority within the (mostly imported) population, so in the case of both russia and the US's actions the majority of local populace gained political power in the aftermath of the takeovers:

https://www.hawaiiankingdom.org/info-census1890.shtml

By comparison if you consider HKers ethnically distinct from mainland chinese (on cultural bases), the situation is dramatically different.

fair point, my reference to "the current difference" was more about the ongoing Crimea situation rather than the HK situation, I should have been more clear in that regard. I still believe that in the HK case there's a vested interest of certain political elite (rather than economic) strata to be aligned with Beijing.

is this not just propaganda by another name?

Seems to me that everyone wants to cast their war as a just war [0]. If that means deniable approaches or false flag operations [1] then so be it. In particular I found this excerpt from [1] ironic in the context of your comment:

> Russo-Swedish War

In 1788, the head tailor at the Royal Swedish Opera received an order to sew a number of Russian military uniforms. These were then used by the Swedes to stage an attack on Puumala, a Swedish outpost on the Russo-Swedish border, on 27 June 1788. This caused an outrage in Stockholm and impressed the Riksdag of the Estates, the Swedish national assembly, who until then had refused to agree to an offensive war against Russia. The Puumala incident allowed King Gustav III of Sweden, who lacked the constitutional authority to initiate unprovoked hostilities without the Estates' consent, to launch the Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

We can define propaganda in contrast to psychological warfare. Whereas psychological warfare is the dissemination of cultural products by a military to the population of a foreign adversary in pursuit of a strategic objective, propaganda is the dissemination of cultural products by a government to their own people in the pursuit of strategic objectives. This definition serves the discussion of propaganda in the broader context of warfare well.

Where in your classification would you place outlets like RT or Voice of America then?

That would be considered propaganda. I was too strict by claiming propaganda can only be done to a government's own citizens.

In contrast a good example of psychological warfare would be when Russia organized a protest and an attendant counter-protest in Texas that were made to appear "organic."[0] So the difference between the two is that one proudly has an official "Russia" label on it and the other is clandestine.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-pag...

So you might consider acts such as arresting journalists for accessing public databases as a form of legal warfare, where the strategic goal is to incapacitate any sort of democratic activity in Hong Kong, and abusing the legal system to criminalize the behavior of democracy activists ex post facto can then be considered a sort of "weapon" in an extremely broad sense of the word.

Some classification of these new forms of interventions:

Ukraine is more hybrid warfare.

HK is more lawfare.

Chinese maritime disputes is more gray zone warfare.

In all cases, the goal is to establish a truth on the ground independent of political posturing. Of course, someone can call your bluff on it!

IMO the political posturing is paramount. Ultimate goal is to provide an sufficient truth calibrated to deter bluff calling. Fundamentally most countries don't want to or have capability to intervene, so the purpose is to give competing parties a credible "out" with manageable political cost, i.e. reduce bluff calling to angry letters / sanctions versus hard military retaliation. Gain objective while deter / mitigate the most unwanted responses.