A recent Washington Post article ran under the headline “How China extended its repression into an American city.”  

In the September 6, 2024 piece, the Post alleges that during the 2023 APEC summit in San Francisco, Chinese American community groups and leaders welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping, reputedly under the direction of the Communist Party of China (CPC), violently attacked anti-China groups who turned out to protest Xi”s visit. 

This, the Post states, was all part of a Chinese governmental shadowy plot of transnational repression, directing those within “diaspora groups” to quash dissident anti-China voices overseas. But the exact opposite is true.

In fact, it is the billionaire-owned Washington Post that is quashing the free speech of ordinary Americans in support of the Washington establishment’s dangerous new Cold War agenda. 

What really happened   

Let’s examine what really occurred during the APEC summit, the funding sources behind anti-China groups like the Hong Kong Democracy Council and Students for a Free Tibet named in the article, and the Post’s unprecedented use of facial recognition technology to identify and target leaders in the Chinese American community.

As an eyewitness to a confrontation between the Xi welcomers and the anti-China groups, I saw the exact opposite of what the Washington Post is alleging. The anti-China protestors were the most organized and highly trained group I have ever seen.

All these photos and videos that they produced? We did nothing to them, but they charged into our lines, threatened us and created chaos. Then, at the peak of the confrontation, they started filming on their smartphones and narrating as they did so, lying outright and falsely claiming that we attacked them. They timed the video to make it look like they were spontaneously videoing. 

If you combine that with the mainstream media taking the anti-China side and the Washington Post’s use of facial recognition, you see an incredibly sophisticated information operation specifically designed to provoke even peaceful welcomers while the mainstream media reframes events to support a preconceived anti-China narrative.  

In other words, this was a highly sophisticated and coordinated operation that fits a pattern used by the US establishment. It skillfully combined resources, technology and sophisticated training of a relatively small group of provocateurs to attempt to create a large propaganda victory.  

There were a number of different confrontations between the Xi welcomers and the anti-China protesters. Here, we’ll examine two examples closely.

The airport bridge incident 

One incident occurred at a bridge near the road that Xi was expected to take to the airport to depart back to China. Xi welcomers were lined up on the bridge railing facing the road and were waving Chinese flags. 

The anti-China protesters came later and walked onto the bridge carrying their own Hong Kong and Tibetan flags. Then, they suddenly turned and charged into the Xi welcomers from behind, trying to push the welcomers aside and seize their position on the bridge railing.  

Here’s a photo of that charge taken at that moment: 

You can see the Xi welcomers were taken completely by surprise, as the anti-China protesters charged into their ranks from behind. 

There was a young Tibetan female dissident who aggressively pushed her way through our lines. The Tibetan woman aggressively pushed our people aside, all the time yelling, “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” as she was physically pushing her way through us. 

They were very expert at playing the victim while actually being the aggressors, especially while they were recording video. It looked clearly rehearsed. 

The young Tibetan activist woman eventually pushed past all of us and got to the front of the bridge railing, away from her own people, so she positioned herself to be surrounded by us. This was perfect for their videos.

She kept yelling, “Don’t touch me!” the whole time pretending to be the victim,  i.e. that of a young woman fenced in by her political opponents, a great propaganda video for their side.  

The anti-China protesters were instigating the clash, waiting until the two sides were locked together facing each other, then started to videotape on their phones while dictating a clearly fraudulent, prepared script that claimed the Xi welcomers started the confrontation, even though the welcomers were actually taken by surprise and ambushed from behind.

The confrontation continued until the police finally came, perhaps an hour later, and separated the two sides. 

Fake “Yellow Emperor”

Another incident was captured on videotape by the anti-China protesters themselves and posted on Radio Free Asia:

If you look closely, you first see a Xi welcomer (wearing a red scarf) down on the ground with another man – an anti-China protester – on top of him, while other Xi welcomers (wearing red items) try to pull him off. Then a larger man in a yellow Chinese emperor costume charges in and punches a smaller Xi welcomer.  

This is followed by anti-China protesters trying to forcibly seize the Chinese flags away from some Xi welcomers, followed by the larger man in a yellow costume again charging in.

The Xi welcomers wearing red items and holding Chinese flags are pushed up against a railing behind them and can’t retreat, and the anti-China protesters keep moving in on them, very similar to the situation on the bridge to the airport road.

Hong Kong terror comes to America 

The tactics used by the anti-China protesters at the 2023 APEC summit were far more sophisticated than any normally used by either the left or the right in the United States. 

However, these tactics are consistent with the tactics used in the 2019 Hong Kong riots, which consisted of 10 months of violent rioters attacking anyone who did not agree with them.  

One of the groups that attacked the Xi welcomers, the Hong Kong Democracy Council, was among the organizations that boosted the 2019 rioters in Hong Kong and who were funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, which has been accused of having links to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The anti-China protesters simply brought those tactics here to the US. The South China Morning Post documented the riots in their nine-minute video summary, “A year of anti-government protests in Hong Kong”: 

The tactics used in this demo were basically a version of what occurred in Hong Kong in 2019, only without the thousands of rocks, umbrellas and firebombs (Molotov cocktails) that they used in Hong Kong. But the lies, choreographed and taped provocations, and the aggressors faking being the victims are the same game.

The mainstream media here, like the Western media in Hong Kong, was a weaponized accessory to this violence: completely biased, framing the rioters as peaceful protesters, ignoring evidence to the contrary, and acting as a propaganda multiplier for their violence.  

Nury Vittachi’s book, “The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong,” documents these tactics in great detail: 

Who were the Xi welcomers? They were the Chinese American community – a good number of them senior citizens – with no history of violence or aggression, who came to welcome the president of China meeting with the president of the United States, and who hoped for peace between their new and old countries.  

The anti-China protesters were mostly young people. Would a group including many senior citizens attack a bunch of young people? It doesn’t make sense. 

This is journalistic malpractice, not to mention extreme hypocrisy on the part of the Washington Post. It is doing exactly what it was accusing these innocent seniors of doing: supporting transnational rioters from Hong Kong and Tibet to silence Chinese American citizens who are exercising their free speech. It did so using unethical, police state-like methods, including the use of facial recognition technology. 

Chinese Americans who came out have said that they are now worried about exercising their speech because of the spotlight that the Washington Post article has put on them. This type of media lynching does not merely silence Chinese Americans, it puts a target on their backs. 

Chinese and Asians have already been subjected to terrible physical attacks because of anti-China propaganda. This will intensify it, creating real dangers not only for Chinese Americans but for all Asian Americans. 

Repressive methods, repressive goals 

One of the most important and astounding points of this story is how the Washington Post developed the report.  

The Washington Post deployed facial recognition technology to surveil, identify – and slander – Chinese American community members exercising their free speech. Facial recognition technology is a faulty, imperfect biometric that is largely banned by courts. It is what experts call a forensic without science.

The Washington Post itself published an article in 2019 claiming facial recognition is unreliable as it can contain bias and errors. Chinese and African men are likely to be misidentified 100 times more than whites. 

In fact, many countries, states and cities, including San Francisco, have banned the use of facial recognition technology by their government departments. It is completely banned in the EU. 

In particular, in San Francisco, it was banned precisely to prevent the abuse that the Washington Post engaged in its article: to prevent forces of repression from using it to identify – and target – people at large gatherings legitimately exercising their constitutional rights. 

It is chilling that the US mainstream media is facilitating quasi-police state actions in pursuit of a one-sided anti-China agenda. The Post also never reported that the only one arrested on the scene by the San Francisco police and charged with numerous counts of serious felonies for beating and seriously injuring a member of the Chinese American community was one of the anti-China demonstrators.  

New McCarthy era

This is all part of a new McCarthy period in America, cracking down on all forms of dissent and silencing free speech. Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy persecuted dissident Americans during Cold War 1, the establishment is now doing the same in today’s new Cold War 2.  

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi recently urged the FBI to investigate Code Pink as agents of China for protesting the genocide in Gaza. In September 2024, three members of a Black Socialist group, the Uhuru 3, were accused of being Russian agents and put on trial for protesting the Ukraine war.

Young university students are being arrested and banned from returning to university for protesting the Gaza war. And Chinese American scientists were arrested under Trump’s “China Initiative,” which may be reinitiated soon. 

These are dangerous, repressive times to be an American. The crackdown has the makings of an all-out war against free speech and dissent, sparing no individual, group or media platform that puts forth a perspective different from Washington’s official line.  

This totalitarian approach, silencing opposition groups to manufacture consent, history shows is often a precursor to war or harbinger of fascism, or both. 

To combat this, we should stand together and oppose this with all our efforts. And we should call out corrupt media that seeks to oppress citizens and destroy our rights. If we do not stand together, we will all be picked off individually.  

Michael Wong is a former national vice president of Veterans For Peace and currently serves on its national board. He is a co-founder of Pivot To Peace and co-chair of the Veterans For Peace China Working Group.

He has been published in the anthologies, “Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace,” edited by Maxine Hong Kingston, “A Matter of Conscience,” by William Short and Willa Seidenberg, and in “Waging Peace in Vietnam,” edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty.

He is also featured in the documentary film, “Sir! No Sir!” about the Vietnam-era GI anti-war movement and is a retired social worker with a Master of Social Work degree.