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.
The attacks were accompanied by threats such as “I’ll kill you. I’m not kidding, I will kill you,” and “Eradicate Falun Gong.”
Falun Gong, sometimes referred to as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that includes meditation and gentle exercises. It also teaches traditional Chinese moral principles, centered on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
Though initially supported by Chinese authorities, and even practiced by members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it was outlawed by former Party head Jiang Zemin in 1999, and has been severely persecuted in China ever since.
Soon after the persecution began in China, evidence emerged that the Chinese regime was also trying to suppress Falun Gong in foreign countries, including the United States.
This overseas campaign has been so persistent that in 2004, U.S. Congress unanimously passed House Concurrent Resolution 304, which demanded that Beijing “cease using the diplomatic missions in the United States to spread falsehoods about the nature of Falun Gong” and discontinue the intimidation against Falun Gong adherents at home and abroad.
But despite that resolution, a recorded phone call revealed the Flushing attacks were being encouraged by the Chinese consul general of New York, Peng Keyu. Peng boasted that their “work on the overseas Chinese community” resulted in the large crowds of hecklers.
“They came over after they fought with Falun Gong [practitioners], and I shook hands with them one by one to thank them,” Peng was recorded as saying.
John Liu meets with attackers
Falun Gong practitioners sought help from their local council member, John Liu, a current contender for the comptroller position in NYC.
“Instead of meeting with the victims—practitioners of Falun Gong, who are U.S. citizens—John Liu chose to meet with the villains who assaulted Falun Gong practitioners,” said Erping Zhang, spokesperson for the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Zhang noted that Liu had met with some of the people who had been arrested in the attacks.
“It’s quite disturbing,” he said.
Zhang said John Liu met with Falun Gong practitioners weeks later, after pressure from media reports. At the meeting, John Liu was shown a video recording of the pro-communist group attacking Falun Gong practitioners.
“I specifically asked him to condemn the violence and he refused,” Zhang said. “So it’s quite appalling that as a public, elected official, John Liu is not really representing the citizens in his district.”
Zhang said Liu has chosen to side with the attackers rather than “citizens who are exercising their U.S. constitutional rights.”
“It was a joke, a sham, I was shocked,” said Dolnyckyj, who also attended the meeting. “I was standing in front of a U.S. elected public official and telling him that I was being hit and kicked and beaten in his community, in the area that he is responsible for, by a group of people who were attacking me based on what they saw as my spiritual beliefs. And I showed him a video of it and he said, ‘I don’t see that happening here in this video.'”
Several of the attackers have since been convicted on charges such as third-degree assault or attempted robbery. Some had restraining orders imposed. Others are still being processed through the court system.
John Liu’s double standards
Three weeks after the attacks began, on the other side of Queens, a Sikh student at Richmond High School was assaulted in what was called a racially-motivated hate crime. Jagmohan Singh Premi, 18, was attacked by another student who tried to remove his patka (small turban) before punching him in the face.
John Liu publicly condemned the attack—speaking at a press conference with the Sikh Coalition and criticizing the Department of Education for not preventing such violence.
“Continuing inaction by the Department of Education in the face of repeated bias attacks in our public schools is utterly reprehensible, not only because of the bigotry and hate involved but also because the Department refuses to acknowledge the magnitude of this persistent problem,” Liu said at the time. His spokesperson, Sharon Lee, also said, “Inaction reinforces the behavior. It’s almost like they’re saying it is okay to harass fellow students.”
Avella Sees that Liu Supports Attackers
City Councilmember Tony Avella crossed districts to support Falun Gong practitioners during the attacks in Flushing, calling them hate crimes. Faced with such incidents, a councilmember’s responsibility is to reach out to the police department, hold press conferences, and encourage an investigation, he said.
“As far as I could determine [John Liu] took none of these actions,” Avella said. “If anything, I saw he was quoted as supporting the attackers.”
He said John Liu should not be in public office.
“I am actually embarrassed as member of the City Council that the city has not done more to protect Falun Gong practitioners.”
Avella is confident there is a connection between Liu’s inaction and his links to the Chinese regime. “It seemed to me, and still does, that there is a huge amount of evidence [of] influence from the Chinese Communist regime.”
CCP infiltration and inciting hatred abroad
The Chinese Communist Party’s levels of espionage are considered by intelligence agents to outstrip Cold War efforts, using overseas Chinese communities to extend CCP policies into foreign countries.
One example is the China Council, an organization controlled by the CCP Central Committee that has two purposes, according to its Web site. One is to “blend into local high-level politics,” while the other is to “influence mainstream society.”
Yang Chunlai, the head of the Association of Chinese Scientists and Engineers (ASCE), spoke at the 4th Annual World Overseas Chinese Community Association Friendship Conference in 2007, saying that, “One needn’t return to one’s country to serve one’s country,” and “We now have 1,500 members, with roughly a third of them possessing U.S. citizenship. Through our members’ relationships with friends and family members, I estimate that we can influence 500 ballots.”
According to the Shanghai Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, members of the New York Federation of Chinese Associations did “vast amounts of work” in “fighting Falun Gong.” “[They are] the backbone on which we rely for our work with overseas Chinese and diplomatic relations,” its Web site stated.
“The CCP is taking its criminal behavior and oppression of people and they’re extending that into the United States of America,” said Dolnyckyj. ” And that’s shocking—that should raise the hairs on the backs of people’s necks.”
The Epoch Times did not receive a response from John Liu’s office after repeated attempts to contact him during the past week.