Australian police have arrested a 30-year-old man in connection with an assault on protestors against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Canberra, Australia.
“We’re not ready yet; we understand the defendant is an illegal immigrant at the moment,” said Chan, who also appeared via video link from Sydney.
ACT Police expect to apply for a criminal justice visa on Zhao’s behalf.
Assault on Canberran Human Rights Advocate and CCP Critic
The alleged assault occurred at the same time a group of Falun Gong advocates was running a human rights rally to raise awareness of the CCP’s persecution of the group in China at the Floriade flower festival in Canberra, Australia’s capital.Nancy Dong, the human rights advocate and CCP critic who was allegedly attacked by Zhao, told The Epoch Times she had returned to her car and found two Chinese men graffitiing the Chinese signage on her car that read, “End the evil CCP.”
Dong began to record the two men with her phone before one of them snatched it and proceeded to assault her.
“This young man then grabbed my neck with his elbow, lifted me up, and threw me to the ground. He then started to kick and punch me. I almost fainted from the fall, and I lost the ability to resist his attack,” Dong alleged.
The alleged altercation led to bruises on Dong’s arms and injuries to her lower body that forced her to require the use of crutches to be mobile.
Despite being a victim herself, Dong said she felt sorry for those who attacked her.
“These young people are about the same age as my child[ren],” she told The Epoch Times. “I feel so bad to see that the CCP has educated young people to be so vicious and brutal.”
Arrest Comes As Overseas Chinese Protest against CCP
The incident comes amid a growing wave of activism against the Chinese regime, which has seen protests against the CCP pop up in China and abroad.In Sydney, over 100 protesters from all different backgrounds, ethnicities and political views came together, citing a sense of duty they felt to speak for their brothers and sisters back in China who do not enjoy the same extent of freedom to speak their minds.
Shouting slogans like “Xi Jinping, step down, CCP, step down,” the protesters rallied in front of Sydney’s Town Hall to decry the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader Xi Jinping on Saturday night as those concerned about China’s lack of freedoms and human rights gathered to remember the tragedies unfolding over the last three years in China under the far-left CCP’s so-called “zero-COVID” virus elimination policies.
One of the protest organisers, an international student from Shanghai, Laura Nguyen, who was supported by the socialist group Solidarity, said that people gathered at the rally were “different on the political spectrum.”
“Yet, we’re standing here for the same reason: human rights, freedom, and democracy,” she said.
Another young feminist activist, who goes by the alias “Horror Zoo” for safety reasons, told The Epoch Times that she and her friends were attending the rally to call for freedom and democracy.
“Even though the CCP has already lifted the lockdown restrictions, lots of protesters and activists are still in prison, and the CCP is still in power. And so I feel I have the responsibility to come here and speak for the Chinese people who don’t have freedom, don’t have democracy,” she said.
She said that the mass backlash against the CCP’s rule in China in recent weeks reveals that “the CCP is very evil.”
“The CCP is a dictatorship; they only care about their power; they want to lock the people in their homes. When we see that the rest of the world has already learned to live with COVID-19, but China still keeps this policy, this means that this is not for protection from COVID; this policy is for restricting people, for locking people in a cage. This is the CCP,” she said.
