NEW YORK—Every year a wide variety of community groups come together to celebrate the Chinese New Year in Flushing’s Chinatown. A colorful procession of floats and performers—drummers, lion dancers, celestial maidens—move through the streets. But for the last few years, a group focused only on inciting hatred has also made its presence known—and according to secretly-recorded footage, they get paid for it.
“We’re the Huasheng Marching Band,” says a man in a secretly recorded audio last week. “We get paid $100 up front when we arrive to take part, and then another $10 for food. We get paid every year. If we didn’t get paid, are we going to come out? We come and play a bit for money, then go home.”
The band accompanied the Chinese Anti-Cult World Alliance, which dressed in red and focused on harassing practitioners of Falun Gong, during the New Year parade on Feb. 13. Falun Gong is a traditional spiritual practice that has been persecuted in China since 1999. CACWA is widely suspected of having close ties with the Chinese consulate in New York, part of whose mission it is to suppress the voice of groups that are deemed dissident by the Chinese authorities.
Falun Gong practitioners, who raise awareness about the abuse, torture, and organ harvesting against them in China, are one of the major targets for China’s diplomatic outposts. The practice itself involves performing five exercises and adhering to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It is believed to have become a target by the Chinese state in the late 1990s because of the number of people practicing it, and their independence from the regime’s control.
