In 2019, the government of the People's Republic of China sanctioned the NED in response to the passage by the U.S. Congress of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The Chinese government stated that the NED and CIA worked in tandem to covertly foment the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, and that NED acted as a U.S. intelligence front. NED was one of several U.S.-based NGOs sanctioned by the Chinese government; others included the Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute. China also already tightly restricted the activities of foreign NGOs in China, particularly since 2016, and the NGOs sanctioned by China typically do not have offices on the mainland; as a result, the sanctions were regarded as mostly symbolic. NED grant recipients in Hong Kong included labor advocacy and human rights groups such as the Solidarity Center and Justice Centre Hong Kong. The Chinese government said that the sanctioned organizations were "anti-China" forces that "incite separatist activities for Hong Kong independence; a U.S. State Department official said that "false accusations of foreign interference" against U.S.-based NGOs were "intended to distract from the legitimate concerns of Hongkongers." Michael Pillsbury, a Hudson Institute foreign policy analyst and former Reagan administration official, stated that the Chinese accusation was "not totally false."