RUTHFULLY YOURS

At a ritzy gala at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco on November 15, a crowd that included America’s top business leaders twice gave Xi Jinping a standing ovation as he delivered a speech full of reassurances about his fine intentions and the state of the ailing Sino–U.S. relationship.

Next door, from the fourth floor of a parking garage, a group of masked thugs came close to killing five Tibetan activists. “Before the secret entities and the clearly pro-CCP — and what looked like a bunch of trained — men, before they came in and ambushed us and stole our banner from the fifth floor, they actually started from the fourth floor and started pulling on the banner,” said Chemi Lhamo, an activist with the group Students for a Free Tibet. She told me that she and others lost their balance and almost fell off the side of the garage. Fifteen masked men who “really marched like a unit” then came up to the fifth floor and attacked them.

That was not an isolated incident. Outside the hotel that night, and throughout the week, pro-Beijing gangs stalked and assaulted opponents of Xi, most of them pro-democracy Chinese, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and Tibetans, who had flocked to the city to protest his attendance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Estimates vary, but it appears that at least 1,000 pro-CCP demonstrators from across America were involved. The anti-Xi crowd was around 100 people, if that.

The harassment started upon Xi’s arrival at the airport on November 14 and didn’t let up until after his departure on November 17, Allen Chen, a lawyer and leader in the pro-democracy Chinese community, told me. He said that more than 20 members of his China Democracy Party were assaulted. Six suffered injuries severe enough that they had to go to the hospital. At one point, Chen was pepper-sprayed. The assailants also punched Lhamo, pulled her hair, took and threw her phone into a river, and tried to whack her with flagpoles. She told me that the attacks appeared to have been well coordinated.

During a recent hearing before the House Select Committee on the CCP, Anna Kwok, a prominent figure in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement who was also at the San Francisco protests, made a similar observation: “On protest sites, there are often five types of people: the thugs who assault, the patriots who provoke, the friendly-looking community members who cover assault with flags, the students who smile at and speak to the cameras, and those I suspect to be Chinese national-security agents who follow high-profile activists.”

Considering that and recent Beijing-linked protests, evidence for the coordination thesis is strong. November was not the first time that pro-Beijing demonstrators took to American streets. It wasn’t even the first time this year. By the time APEC 2023 rolled around, two such mobilizations had already occurred, first in March, to protest at the stopovers of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen in New York and Los Angeles, and then in August, when Taiwanese vice president William Lai transited through New York. “For pro-CCP Chinese here, they only went out on the street on two occasions,” Chen said. “One is to welcome Xi, and one is to protest Taiwan leaders.”

Chinese diplomats and Beijing-backed groups play key organizing roles in those events. The Liberty Times, a Taiwanese newspaper, reported that China’s consulates in New York and Los Angeles offered members of pro-Beijing groups hundreds of dollars each to appear at the March demonstrations. Separately, the Association for China’s Peaceful Reunification USA — a known subsidiary of the party’s United Front Work Department — advertised the demonstrations on its website, saying that buses reserved by the consulate would take members from Queens to the Manhattan hotel where Tsai was staying. Its officers also appeared at the Tsai and Lai demonstrations in New York, following them around on a bus. There were no assaults at these smaller protests.

Pro-Beijing New Yorkers appeared in photographs and videos from both the New York demonstrations this year and from those captured at APEC. Standing outside Tsai’s hotel, one of them, Fukien American Association president Chen Heng, even took an interview, telling China Daily that Tsai’s visit in March “hurts our feelings.” He and John Chan, of the American Chinese Chamber of Commerce Hong Kong, both appear to be in the Chinese consulate’s good graces in New York, as they have attended numerous events with its diplomats — joining, for example, a celebration of the PRC’s founding in September. There, consul general Huang Ping praised the local presence of overseas Chinese groups for protesting the Lai and Tsai visits, the Singtao Daily reported.

Another indication of Beijing’s role at APEC is the involvement of people affiliated with the party’s “united front” networks. Through its united-front strategy, the party mobilizes a constellation of individuals, associations, and official organs that work in concert to promote the party’s objectives among non–party members in China and abroad. This, the scholar Peter Mattis has said, often manifests as a “fake civil society” — comprising the sorts of community groups that flooded San Francisco — but is dominated by the Communist Party. These efforts are coordinated at the highest levels of the party-state system, through the United Front Work Department and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the united front’s high-level coordinating body.

In court documents filed for its recent case against an illegal Chinese-government police station that operated in Manhattan, the Justice Department outlined how these united-front entities enable the work of Chinese intelligence and security agencies. One of the two defendants, Lu Jianwang, was a member of the Fujian Province–level CPPCC. After a United Front Work Department official approached him, he allegedly worked with Fujian’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) to set up the station within the America ChangLe Association, a New York–based overseas Chinese community group, of which he was a leader. The MPS tasked Lu with feeding it information on Chinese dissidents in the U.S.

As far as planned demonstrations go, the court documents say he told the FBI that he worked with China’s consulate in New York to bring members of his group to Washington in 2015, paying them $60 each, to counter Falun Gong protesters during a visit by Xi. During the anti-Tsai demonstration in March, he was at the front of the crowd. When she made a trip to New York in 2019, America ChangLe members severely beat pro-democracy demonstrators. Five were hospitalized, Radio Free Asia recently reported.

Similarly, at least two key participants in the pro-Xi APEC demonstrations are affiliated with the CPPCC. The first is Lu Qiang, a Los Angeles–based restaurateur and travel-agency operator. He told World Journal, a newspaper for the Chinese-American community, that he had arranged hotel rooms and bus transport for 800 people — arrangements that entailed ten armed security guards for the contingent, which apparently included several local community groups. The Daily Caller found that he attended the CPPCC’s 2015 national session and has also held affiliations with the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, a united-front subsidiary. The other CPPCC affiliate is Yang Wentian of Arizona, who attended its 2019 session. This year, he led the organizing committee for a banquet in Arizona celebrating the PRC’s founding, according to Fujian’s state-run Southeast network. China’s consul general in Los Angeles, Guo Shaochun, was a guest of honor at the dinner, which received congratulatory messages from multiple united-front organs and a flower basket from Arizona’s chapter of a united-front group dedicated to ensuring China’s annexation of Taiwan.

Of course, it’s not necessarily illegal for any of these united-front actors to appear at public rallies in support of a foreign totalitarian regime, as they enjoy protections under the First Amendment. But it’s impossible to view their conduct as distinct from the party-state’s operations on U.S. soil. After all, the CPPCC, the All-China Federation, and other united-front organs are government entities.

Moreover, any explanation of how Beijing is directly implicated in the demonstrations does not by itself prove that it ordered violence as a tool of repression, even though the allegedly coordinated nature of the assaults suggests that. From public sources alone, it’s difficult to directly link the assaults to any orders from Chinese diplomats or to the prominent united-front-linked individuals I’ve noted here. In fact, in his interview with World Journal, Lu said that he urged people traveling with his convoy not to start any fights. And many of the assailants were masked.

That makes a federal investigation all the more important. “The CCP definitely did this before, and it definitely did this again. But for the evidence, perhaps only the FBI could search it, but we couldn’t gather it from his apartment,” Allen Chen said, referring to the fact that news of the Chinese police station’s existence was public knowledge for months before the arrest of Lu Jianwang and his co-conspirator.

There’s reason to believe that the government could initiate a similar prosecution here. The Justice Department, which declined my request for comment on the violence at APEC, has over the past year brought several cases against Beijing’s alleged agents, including a few people, such as Lu, with significant united-front affiliations. And in recent weeks the House select committee and the Congressional Executive Commission on China have asked Justice to review the matter.

Whatever happens on that score, some fear that the CCP struck a devastating blow against the morale of its enemies in the U.S. Lhamo spoke of a chilling effect that will prevent future instances of repression from coming to light. “How many people will silence themselves or self-censor because of the fear of speaking out?” she asked. “The cost of speaking out is such a heavy price that we have to pay.”