Chinese Communist Mob, Not in My Country

Imagine a foreign government organizing a hate-filled mob to suppress political dissent—down the street from where you live.

During a rally in Flushing, Queens in New York, a surreal turn of events has shed light on the fact that there is an unwelcome stranger in our nation's house—the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Recent news reports and publicly available recordings have shown beyond a doubt that the CCP, through the Chinese Consul General Keyu Peng in New York, has helped organize and incite an angry mob to disrupt, intimidate, and attack Chinese Americans peacefully calling for individuals to withdraw from the Chinese Communist Party.

The beginning of the attacks coincided with the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake in China. Propaganda was spread throughout the Chinese community and media with disinformation that Falun Gong practitioners were interfering with earthquake relief efforts.

I was on the scene on May 17 when the mob scene first began. During a rally to celebrate people quitting the CCP and its related organizations, a large, angry mob gathered across the street. On that day, the withdrawal count from the CCP stood at 37 million. The mob's numbers stood at approximately 500.

As police barricaded the increasingly large and angry crowd, it dawned on me that something was not right. They chanted angry slogans in Chinese, shouting and shaking their fists and making a thumbs-down sign at the speakers who spoke during the rally.

Someone threw rotten oranges, and then a glass bottle was hurled across a four-lane road and shattered about two feet from where I was standing. Some of the people's faces in the crowd were so angry, so incensed that they turned bright red. Young children stood by with their parents, imitating their hateful gestures and repeating filthy, curse-ridden chants.

I learned later that the chants were directed at the spiritual practice Falun Gong, whose practitioners have been running a service center for quitting the CCP in Flushing for the past four years. Yet this past week was the first time in those years that the service center and the people who run it have been targeted.

These Falun Gong practitioners have run the center because they understand from painful personal experience that the CCP is responsible for persecuting a nation and generations of Chinese. Falun Gong is among those groups most severely and heartlessly persecuted by the CCP, so it stands to reason they would encourage others to withdraw from such a ruthless organization.

While it might not seem surprising that a contentious issue like quitting a political party would draw an opposition group, this crowd gathered so swiftly and became so angry so quickly that even a casual observer would sense something was amiss. And in the week since that rally, strikingly similar mob scenes have occurred at or near the same area.

I have only visited China once, when I went to Beijing in 2002 to appeal for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong. I was abducted by police while walking down the street near Tiananmen Square, detained for 34 hours, and deported for being a Falun Gong practitioner. On that day in Flushing, I did not feel that I was standing on the sidewalk in my own country. I had the same sense of an irrational tyranny over the minds of men that I experienced while in captivity in China.

The people in China must struggle to think for themselves because they live under the heel of a despotic regime that cares nothing for basic human freedoms—even freedom of thought. That this spirit of mental and spiritual enslavement could reach its ugly arm into my country and strike fear and unrest into the heart of a community means that the CCP has a greater presence here than Americans might like to admit.

The CCP has always been an organization that incites violence, hatred, and murder, and this is evidenced in the history of the last 60 years.

But this is not China. In this country, the blessings of freedom do not exist to protect those who want to persecute others. The laws of the land were created to protect and defend just freedoms, such as speech and assembly and religious belief. A mob organized and orchestrated by a foreign political body has no place in this country, whether on the streets of Flushing or Chinatown or anywhere else.