For over two weeks now, organized mobs have harassed Falun Gong practitioners in Flushing, New York.
For over one week, we have known that those mobs have been incited by the Chinese Consul General for New York, Mr. Peng Keyu, yet Peng has not been expelled.
The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) released a tape on May 23 of Peng talking with one of its investigators. In that tape, Peng is heard admitting that he "encouraged secretly" the participants in the mobs.
He says he "has always gone to them [those taking part in the mobs] and thanked them personally."
Peng also says he "ran other things on the scene."
Several sources have reported to The Epoch Times that members of Peng's mob are getting paid—the rates are said to range from $50 to $100 a day. No one other than the Chinese regime would have any interest in paying out these large sums of money, and so one can safely assume that the encouragement Peng has been handing out is more than a handshake.
As a Consular official, Peng is under an obligation not to interfere with the internal affairs of the United States, and yet here he is enthusiastically admitting to the WOIPFG investigator that he helped organize a mob. Even if Peng's mob existed simply for the sake of expressing a point of view, his actions in bringing it onto the streets of Flushing would be inappropriate.
But Peng's mob does not exist for the sake of exercising the free speech Americans hold dear. Its purpose is to take away from peaceful American residents the safe enjoyment of their rights to the freedoms of belief, speech, and assembly.
Since Peng set his mercenaries in motion, if a Falun Gong practitioner walks the streets of Flushing wearing a yellow T-shirt, he risks being beaten. If he holds up a sign encouraging Chinese to withdraw from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he may be cursed or spat upon. If he gathers with dozens of other practitioners in a peaceful assembly, hundreds of those Peng has "encouraged" may surround them, insult them, and threaten them with death.
Peng might have worked with the Triad to import illegal immigrants or heroin into New York. He might have set up prostitution rings in Chinatown. But these crimes, as serious they would be, are run-of-the-mill criminality with which any state must deal.
What Peng has done in Flushing is in principle far more serious than such felonies. He has worked to take away from Americans their rights as guaranteed by the Constitution.
Engagement Turned Upside Down
Once Peng's actions were known, one might have expected the U.S. State Department to have quickly declared Peng persona non grata, which is the language diplomats use when they give someone the boot.
But the State Department and the entire federal government have been curiously silent about Peng's Flushing misadventures.
Imagine, just for the sake of a thought experiment, that the Consul General of Paraguay had encouraged several hundred people to carry Nazi flags and to try to prevent Jews in Manhattan from acts of peaceful assembly or speech.
Does anyone imagine that this hypothetical Paraguayan would be back on the pampas before a single day had passed?
Why, oh why, then, is Peng still with us? Why isn't he back in Beijing trying to avoid getting made the head of the Western Xinjiang sanitation district, or whatever fate is in store for a Communist Party flunky who messes up as badly as he did when he spilled the beans to the WOIPFG investigator?
For starters, there are about 1.4 trillion reasons—the most recent estimate of the amount in dollars of U.S. debt held by China.
Here one sees clearly the U.S. China policy turned on its head. Since Richard Nixon "opened" China, we have been told that by "engaging" with the CCP, we were hastening the day that democratic institutions would take root in China.
But our trade with China has not been done under accepted international standards. It has been done under the rules acceptable to the CCP, rules that include slave labor, the theft of the West's intellectual property, an artificially undervalued yuan, the effective barring of Western companies from success inside China's own markets, and much more.
The West has been playing a rigged game and has been losing, with the staggering U.S. trade deficits with China a sign of how badly things have gone off course.
Intelligent critics of the U.S. China policy, such as Ethan Gutmann or, more recently, James Mann, have been explaining that by our engaging with China, we make more likely that the CCP will change our democratic institutions than that we will change its totalitarian ones.
And on the streets of Flushing, we see that happening: The Chinese Consul General for New York is organizing mobs to take away the rights of Americans, and the United States feels helpless to object—because expelling the Consul General of the nation that bankrolls the U.S. economy is not something to be done lightly.
Standing on the Sidelines
There are consequences to the failure of the United States to act that go beyond the erosion of its fundamental principles.
The events in Flushing are being broadcast back into China and used there to help justify the ratcheting up of the persecution of Falun Gong. The Chinese regime is once more seeking to convince the Chinese people that Falun Gong is an "enemy" of China and is encouraging its security forces to intensify the persecution.
There are very likely Falun Gong practitioners being tortured tonight who have been arrested since this ridiculous farce in Flushing began. One can't say that if the United States had acted vigilantly to protect itself, these practitioners would have escaped detention.
The failure of the United States to act has assured that Peng's propaganda show could continue without interference. To the mainland Chinese audience, the U.S. acquiescence in Peng's mob may look to be something more.
The mobs in Flushing are seeking to silence Falun Gong practitioners, but in targeting Falun Gong, the Chinese regime in fact aims to kill two birds with one stone. The regime also seeks to distract Chinese from the truth about how its handling of the Sichuan earthquake lead to a huge, unnecessary loss of life.
The regime does not want the Chinese people to learn what this paper, for instance, has reported about the failure to warn the Chinese people of predictions of the earthquake by China's own seismologists, or how CCP corruption led to buildings that collapsed under the stress of the earthquake, or how CCP mismanagement lead to a very ineffective response to the disaster.
In making things up about Falun Gong, spreading lies, and encouraging hate, the CCP is acting the way it always does in a crisis: Find someone on the "outside" to target as an enemy.
But this time the CCP is doing something new. For the first time, it is using these tactics outside China. In acting this way, the CCP is testing the United States to see if it will bow to the power of the Chinese regime.
If the United States were to expel Peng, that action would focus attention on what Peng has sought to hide. The expulsion would raise questions about why Peng was no longer acceptable to the United States, and so would encourage the Chinese people to look beyond the propaganda tricks with which Peng has sought to delude them.
Expulsion would also make clear that the United States will not accept the Chinese regime's bullying and will not acquiesce in the trammeling of American freedom.
But the United States stands on the sidelines in Flushing. When will the United States act to recover its dignity?
Feeds