When a U.S. producer asked President Joe Biden ahead of a Nov. 14 meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping whether the president would raise human rights issues during their first in-person talks, a man from the Chinese delegation “instantly ... yanked the producer backward by the backpack,” according to an account by a White House pool reporter.
“She lost balance without falling and was pushed toward the door. Two White House staff members intervened, saying the producer should be left alone,” the reporter said.
The manhandling of the American reporter at the Indonesian resort island of Bali that hosted this year’s G-20 summit offered “a very small glimpse of what the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is engaged in worldwide, to silence dissident voices, to silence journalists, to silence anybody who is going to shine a light on the human rights abuses in China,” said Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, a nonprofit.
The Nov. 14 assault came less than a month after a violent scene outside the Chinese consulate in Manchester, England, prompted public outcry and raised alarm among British lawmakers.
Last month, when UK activists demonstrated against the CCP’s repression in Hong Kong, a group of men emerged from the Chinese consular building, pulling off their protest banners and dragging one protester into the compound. They pulled his hair and beat him before a police officer rescued him. According to British officials, one of the most senior Chinese diplomats, Zheng Xiyuan, participated in the scuffle.
“They systematically attack those people in Western democracies, let alone other countries around the world,” Browde said.
Referring to adherents of Falun Gong raising awareness about the communist regime’s brutal persecution of the spiritual group inside China, Browde said, “Going back in the last 20 years, we’ve had our own people, if they try and demonstrate in front of a Chinese leader or something like that, when they’re traveling delegations around the world, we’ve gotten beaten, shoved.”
Falun Gong, a spiritual practice consisting of meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, became hugely popular in China in the 1990s, with an estimated 70 million to 100 million adherents by the end of the decade.
Ignoring the Persecution of Falun Gong
The advocate noted that there was no specific mention of the persecution against Falun Gong in the White House readout of the Nov. 14 meeting between Biden and Xi.“President Biden raised concerns about PRC [People’s Republic of China] practices in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, and human rights more broadly,” according to the Nov. 14 statement.
Browde noted that Falun Gong’s popularity in China indicates that its adherents are the largest group being targeted by the CCP.
“What people don’t realize is that there were 100 million people practicing Falun Gong in China when this persecution started,” he said. “That’s more than twice the number of everyone living in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Uyghurs in Xinjiang combined. It’s an enormous population of people.
“It’s throughout China and every single province, from university professors to housewives to senior military leaders, Falun Gong was everywhere, and it is today.”
For Browde, ignoring the CCP’s abuses against Falun Gong amounts to “ignoring ... the largest population of people being persecuted in China.”
He noted that tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners inside China, despite being targets of persecution, are engaged in a “very peaceful grassroots disobedience movement to inform the public about, not only the abuses against themselves but the tyrannical history of the CCP more broadly.”
“It’s really helping Chinese people wake up,” Browde said.
The CCP has insisted that Western governments should only criticize the regime’s human rights record behind closed doors, according to Browde. But it would be “much more effective” to publicly and specifically denounce the regime’s human rights abuses, he said, although many governments may not appreciate the effect of such actions.
“That has [had] ripple effects throughout China in ways that maybe many people don’t realize,” Browde said.
“Chinese officials, Chinese police chief start worrying that they’re going to get sanctioned. And they start easing up in some cases on persecuting Falun Gong and other people inside the country.”
The advocate urged more governments to take this kind of action.
“Those kinds of specific actions are the only thing we’ve seen that Western governments have done so far that have actually had an impact on the lives of people inside China. We need more of that,” Browde said.
White House officials didn’t respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment by press time.
