NEW YORK—An extraordinary scene played out in comptroller candidate John Liu’s city council district in May 2008.
A young man pushes his way into an angry crowd to rescue his lone friend. The chants of “traitor” ringing in his ears disturb him as he hears his friend being denounced as a political enemy.
“I started to pull him out—which seemed to anger some of people in the mob,” said Zenon Dolnyckyj. “They began to hit and kick and punch both of us. My friend ended up with a bloody ear and I was kicked in the back of the legs, kneed in the ribs, and punched and kicked in the back.”
The street had been transformed into an attack zone, a place where citizens like Dolnyckyj were confronted with the raw edge of Chinese communism.
“That was really, really unsettling,” he said.
Starting on May 17 last year, crowds of ethnic Chinese—on some days numbering in the hundreds—amassed regularly on Main Street, Flushing, a neighborhood in one of the most diverse and progressive cities in the world—and John Liu’s council district.
They had a singular purpose—to surround, heckle, threaten, and assault anyone identified as a practitioner of Falun Gong.
