“We all know that a physical fight has to involve both sides. But as we told him clearly, we did not physically attack Yongyao. He attacked us,” Derek Wang said.
The Sing Tao report also did not quote anything the practitioners involved in the incident said. It did quote an unnamed witness who claimed Yongyao was beaten.
“The reporter neglected everything we told him in his report. We were very shocked when we read the story,” Derek Wang said.
The article closed with a quote from an unnamed Vietnamese-Chinese who criticizes Falun Gong’s presence in Chinatown.
According to Sherry Zhang, the spokesperson for Falun Gong practitioners in the San Francisco area, the Sing Tao article also used photos to give an inaccurate depiction of what happened.
The Sing Tao report had two photographs. One showed the man who attacked practitioners lying on the ground. The other showed the police speaking with the practitioners.
“They tried to picture us as if we were fighting each other, which was not true. It was simply one person beating up the other two. It’s very easy to tell who is right and wrong,” Zhang said.
Zhang said there have been nine similar attacks against Falun Gong practitioners over the past eight months in San Francisco, noting “They’re not random attacks. They’re very selective, and they’re only targeting practitioners of Falun Gong.”
“We’re asking the District Attorney in San Francisco to seriously investigate these crimes. They are not random attacks. They are organized and they show a pattern,” Zhang said.
A Pattern
Sing Tao has a history of reporting that favors the CCP’s take on things in relation to Falun Gong and other groups persecuted by the Chinese regime.
According to Lucy Zhou, the spokesperson for Falun Gong in Canada, Sing Tao had 18 editions in 2001 that published Chinese Communist Party propaganda about Falun Gong verbatim.
According to an April 2004 article in Canada’s National Post, “A week had hardly passed after Sept. 11, 2001, when Canada’s Chinese-language Sing Tao Daily … printed an inflammatory article entitled ”Radical Religions Advocate Destroying the World,“ which parroted Beijing’s equating of Falun Gong with the Branch Davidians, the American group that David Koresh indoctrinated in Waco, Tex., until his clash with police in February, 1993, led to the death of 86 people, 17 of whom were children.”
In 2007, in connection with a controversy over whether Falun Gong practitioners in Vancouver, Canada, would be allowed to continue protesting opposite the Chinese Consulate, the lawyer Clive Ainsley complained a Sing Tao report on the issue was “pure fiction from top to bottom.”
A review by The Epoch Times of reporting on Tibet by Sing Tao found a consistent pattern of reporting that parroted the CCP’s line on events unfolding in Tibet.
Sing Tao’s pattern of reporting reflects the paper’s ownership.
The journal China Brief in a 2001 report, “How China’s Government Is Attempting to Control Chinese Media in America,” states that Sing Tao Daily is one of a group of Chinese-language papers “either directly or indirectly controlled by the government of Mainland China.”
In the late 1980s, Sing Tao newsgroup’s owner, Sally Aw Sian ran into financial troubles, “and found a financial solution in the form of aid from the Chinese government,” according to China Brief.
