A Stuff investigation: Is the CCP suppressing protest in New Zealand?
Monday, 21 October 2024
Two human rights activists were roughed up and kicked during the visit of China’s second most powerful person to New Zealand in June. They suspected it wasn’t any random incident: that it demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party’s intolerance of dissent — not just in China, but part of a global pattern of repression. A Stuff investigation using frame by frame video analysis and facial recognition software appears to confirm their suspicions. And now police have reopened their investigation. Paula Penfold reports.
It’s June 14 and there’s a crowd of Chinese Communist Party supporters gathered outside Auckland’s Cordis Hotel, holding and waving the flag of China, to welcome Chinese Premier Li.
Human rights activist Michael Zhuang walks through that crowd, carrying the flag of Taiwan.
Zhuang’s friend and fellow human rights activist Jian Xing follows behind, filming on his phone.
His camera captures a man dressed in a coat, wearing a cap, and with his phone plugged into a charger in his pocket, filming them back.
Zhuang continues through the crowd, saying in Mandarin, “Freedom and independence for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Uyghurs and for China,” and wishing death to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Zhuang later tells Stuff he did not personally see that statement as provocative “given [Xi’s] extensive record of human rights abuses, genocide, etcetera. But it is likely provocative to the pro-CCP crowds”.
It was, as he was about to find out.
At 43 seconds into the video a man says to Zhuang, “What the hell are you doing?”
The man in the cap is now seen right next to Zhuang, still filming.
Another man is shown advancing on Zhuang, laying his arm on his shoulder, to which Zhuang responds, “Don’t touch me”.
By now five people are ringed around him, shouting.
Then the focus moves to Xing, behind the camera.
The video is interrupted as Xing’s phone is knocked to the ground.
“My camera was fallen down. I lost my glasses. Then I fall down,” Xing recalls.
He recovered his phone and captured what came next, the audio recording thud after thud as he is kicked.
The man in the cap with the phone charger is among those who appear to be delivering the kicks.
A woman’s voice is then heard on the video: “You can say whatever you want but you can’t trample on our national flag. You step on our flag, you deserve a beating.”
So much of what happened that day appears, at face value, very similar to other incidents documented internationally.
One high-profile visit, that of Chinese President Xi Jinping to San Francisco in 2023 for the APEC summit, has been analysed by pro-democracy groups and journalists explaining how the CCP extended “its intolerance of any dissent” into the United States.
They’ve reported how in many cases, “united front groups and figures were present during acts of assault, intimidation, and harassment, and some actively participated in them”.
The Chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party said: “The CCP-directed attacks on human rights activists during Secretary General Xi’s visit to San Francisco … were an outrageous violation of American sovereignty and the values we all hold dear.
“This thuggery — also known as transnational repression — has no place in America.”
In an interview with Stuff, Laura Harth of the Madrid-based human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders, explains that transnational repression is when authoritarian governments or regimes reach outside their state borders to “intimidate, harass, threaten individuals … to influence their opinion, to really control them. And it’s something we’ve been seeing increasingly over the past decades and something at which unfortunately the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party excel.
“It's also the only government that I know of that really does not only seek to crack down on high profile dissidents, high profile critics, but literally control the entire diaspora communities: control their freedom of speech, their freedom of thought, very much in the same way as it does that domestically.”
Is that what was at play in the Cordis incident?
Jian Xing complained to the police but in August they said they had not been able to identify who was responsible for the alleged assault.
“Currently we can’t take further action because there is not enough information to investigate at this time,” a police sergeant wrote to Xing at the time.
So Xing embarked on his own investigation, attempting to match frames from the video he’d filmed with pictures available online of who he thought the people might be.
He took his “evidence” to police, who told Xing in an email in September that they had reopened their investigation. They confirmed in a statement to Stuff earlier this month that they were “reviewing this case after receiving additional information”.
Xing also brought his material to Stuff.
To look at, the pictures seemed to be the same people depicted in the video.
But we wanted to take it a step further, using facial recognition technology to try to corroborate those he’d identified.
For both, the technology records “true”: a match.
So, then, who are they?
The man in the cap with the phone charger is believed to have held various senior roles in united front organisations such as the Asia-Pacific Cultural Exchange Centre and the Peaceful Reunification of China Association of New Zealand.
Watching the video of the alleged assault, Xing identifies him as one of multiple men delivering the kicks.
Our frame-by-frame video analysis suggests he is right.
Another of those who Xing has attempted to match from the video is the woman whose voice is heard saying, “You step on our flag, you deserve a beating.”
The still frames from the video match with a woman who is believed to be a senior in the New Zealand Fujian Hometown Association and in the Chinese Women’s Association.
“Those are all united front groups,” says Professor Anne-Marie Brady, an academic who specialises in China’s influence efforts. “Front organisations in New Zealand for the Chinese Communist Party.”
Both people are also frequent attendees at occasions which are supportive of — and supported by — the Chinese government.
Among many examples is the man’s 2019 attendance at the National Day military parade in Tiananmen Square for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
In 2015, he took part in a dinner welcome celebration for a delegation from the Central Committee of the Zhi Gong Party, one of eight minor political parties under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party.
The woman appears also to be in favour with China officials.
In 2019 she attended a symposium to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Macau’s return to China.
In June this year, on the night the protest incident occurred, she was present at a dinner hosted by the Prime Minister to welcome Premier Li.
“All attendees are trusted by the Chinese consulate,” said a source within the Chinese community.
So what does all this mean? People are perfectly entitled to support the governments of their home countries.
“These are the tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” says Professor Brady of the Cordis incident. “Intimidating people for their right to free speech.”
It’s important also to see it in the context of what united front work means, says Safeguard Defenders’ Laura Harth. “United front work is concerning for two reasons,” she says.
“On the one hand we have the influence work, so the attempt to influence policy, to influence narratives, to build connections, ‘friendship’ as they call it with policymakers, journalists, academics, businesspeople, anyone who can really influence the way a country thinks about its relationship with China.
“But on the other hand, and this is something that until fairly recently was a bit overlooked, there’s also their task, if you will, to kind of crack down on dissent. To not only try to set narratives but also control and censor narratives that may be counter to what the CCP sees as its interests.”
Harth says that happens both domestically within China but also overseas.
“We increasingly see some of these entities and individuals engaged in what we call overseas policing or longarm policing operations on behalf of the People’s Republic of China and the CCP.”
Harth categorises the Cordis incident as fitting within the realm of longarm policing; that irrespective of whether it was an instruction or a general adherence to a position, it qualifies as foreign interference.
“For me it certainly falls under the definition of state affiliation, which the SIS Security Threat Environment report talked about, which is a good definition especially in the absence of a foreign agents law.
“Overall we’re talking about state-affiliated individuals that may be engaging in acts of foreign interference.”
The man in the cap did not reply to Stuff’s questions about his apparent CCP links and the alleged assault.
The woman did respond, sending an email denying it was her voice heard in the video. But Stuff has compared it to other video of her filmed on the same day. The voice sounds the same.
The video filmed outside the Cordis that day should be taken seriously, says Harth.
“It’s not just a threat to specific individuals or even to specific communities, it’s really a threat to democracy and all the freedoms that we expect to enjoy.”
The human rights activists at the centre of it, Xing and Zhuang, believe what happened to them is evidence of a far bigger picture.
“This isn’t just people getting into a fight on the street,” says Zhuang. “You have a foreign state, which in this case is also an authoritarian state that does not share the values of a liberal democracy, setting up these front organisations in New Zealand supporting their cause.
“And they’ve done it to the point that they’re just so confident nothing is going to happen if they assault people who disagree with them on the street.”
Xing interprets it as a message to the entire New Zealand Chinese community.
“This is something that came straight from China.”