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.
A 2021 report by nonprofit Freedom House found that “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.”
CCP officials “go after any voice that tries to give a voice to people who are being persecuted in China, or just says something that the CCP doesn’t like,” Browde said during a Nov. 14 interview with NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times.
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.
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