For six months, The Washington Post has been looking into the Chinese Communist Party’s war on the anti-CCP, anti-Xi protesters who came out in force during Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco in November 2023.
Xi, the Chinese dictator, had come to the city to pretend to negotiate something with the ostensible U.S. president.
Post reporters Shibani Mahtani, Meg Kelly, Cate Brown, Cate Cadell, Ellen Nakashima, and Chris Dehghanpoor scrutinized “more than 2,000 photos and videos from Students for a Free Tibet, the Hong Kong Democracy Council, the China Democracy Party, observers, social media and live streams; as well as interviews with more than 35 witnesses, U.S. officials and analysts; text messages from American security guards working with Chinese diplomats, messages shared in Chinese diaspora WeChat groups, medical reports and police reports obtained by The Post” (“How China extended its repression into an American city,” September 3, 2024).
Mahtani et al. also used facial recognition software to help identify troublemakers. Some of the most violent evildoers, though, “were wearing face masks, sunglasses and hats that obscured their faces and could not be identified.”
The Post reporters acknowledge that in preparing their own lengthy and detailed report, illustrated by many videos of the CCP thuggery, they relied on a joint report published in July 2024 by Students for a Free Tibet and the Hong Kong Democracy Council.
Both sides?
Although there was “aggression from both sides,” it was the pro-CCP side that instigated the most extreme violence, which was “carried out by coordinated groups of young men…. Anti-Xi protesters were attacked with extended flagpoles and chemical spray, punched, kicked and had fistfuls of sand thrown in their faces.”
The Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles paid for the pro-CCP thugs’ hotels and meals “as an incentive to participate,” and at least four Chinese “diplomats” from the LA and San Francisco consulates were among the pro-CCP protesters. That’s more than enough cause to kick all Chinese “diplomats” anywhere in the country out of the country.
Plus: “Chinese diplomats hired at least 60 private security guards to ‘protect’ Chinese diaspora groups gathered to welcome Xi, according to seven people involved in the arrangement.”
In response to the Post’s questionnaires about the doings in San Francisco, spokesmen for the Chinese consulates in Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles unanimously urged the Post and everybody else to “stop hyping up falsehoods” about what had happened. Really, say they, it was Xi’s welcoming committees—i.e., the pro-CCP thugs—who were getting targeted by the anti-CCP activists.
These kinds of blatant lies are standard in Chinese propaganda.
Bury and extinguish
“From Australia to Europe and across North America, [the Chinese Communist Party] mobilizes surrogates to ostracize, intimidate, surround and silence the activists,” says Glenn Tiffert, a historian of modern China. “The tactics differ, the goal is the same: to isolate, bury and extinguish so that it alone monopolizes the field.”
