A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations.
Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024.
In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: “China Lies, People Die.”
Photo: Screen grab from the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP’s video via CNA
Yelling at Xie, Wu said he was trying to “paint an illusion of a prosperous China, but your hands are painted with blood.”
“You robbed Hong Kongers of the most fundamental freedom and devastated their democracy. Now in my country Taiwan, you sought to do the same,” she shouted as she was forcibly removed from the scene by a man.
The man was later identified in a press release from the protesters as “an organizer” from the school’s Greater China Society, which helped coordinate the speech on Saturday.
Local police officers intervened and admonished the member of the Greater China Society, the statement said.
Similar protests, organized by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP and Students for a Free Tibet, were also staged outside the conference hall.
Xie’s speech was delayed for 45 minutes.
The protest targeted the Chinese government for its human rights abuses and aggression in Tibet, Hong Kong, East Turkestan and Taiwan, and was aimed at Xie in particular, the statement said.
Xie was responsible for turning Hong Kong into a dystopian state during the 2019 protests and for the enactment of the National Security Law, the statement said.
He has also made thinly veiled threats of war to intimidate Taiwan, and orchestrated propaganda trips to East Turkestan to whitewash the CCP’s genocide against the Uighurs,” it added.
Wu said in a media interview on Sunday that Xie was the CCP’s commissioner to Hong Kong during the 2019 protests and when the National Security Law was implemented.
“So this was a man who is directly in charge of overseeing the CCP’s complete takeover of Hong Kong society and the destruction of their democracy,” Wu said.
“And now in his role as the ambassador, he’s making, like, thinly veiled threats of a military invasion of Taiwan,” she said, adding that, as a Taiwanese, it was her duty to speak up.
Wu, a junior at Harvard, said her parents are Taiwanese and she grew up in Hawaii.
The protest statement also quoted a Tibetan student, who asked not to be named, as saying that her family was forced to flee Tibet after “China massacred tens of thousands of Tibetans during the CCP’s military invasion and colonization of my homeland.”
“Today, in occupied Tibet, China is continuing the genocide of Tibet by ripping 80 percent of all Tibetan schoolchildren from their families and forcing them to attend colonial boarding schools where speaking Tibetan is forbidden,” she said.
Accusing Xie of being an “advocate for the genocide” of Tibetans, she said it was her duty as a Tibetan Harvard student to show the world the truth.
In a statement on the Chinese embassy Web site in the US, Xie told the US to stop “interfering with China’s internal affairs.”
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