Getting in Hu’s Face

I’m on the bus back from New Haven, we’ve just pulled out of a rest area where we had a sinfully pleasant McDonald’s and Budweiser pit stop. Around one hundred Tibetans joined a thousand plus Falun Gong practitioners. Most of the Falun Gong are Chinese immigrants, though I met practitioners who flew to the US from Australia and Germany to protest Hu’s visit. Additionally there were about a thousand paid Chinese greeters grouped around the Yale campus.

Hu was giving an invitation-only talk at Yale, with almost no students in attendance. While there wasn’t the same Secret Service presence as in DC yesterday, the New Haven PD was out in full force, mostly glad clad with riot helmets and gas masks. One cop was even riding a Clydesdale, which is one hell of a big horse next to regular mounted police horses. I must say while over-deployed and over-armored, the NHPD was extremely polite throughout the day, even during some of the more trying moments.

Though I wasn’t able to get Hu yesterday at the Wardman Marriot Hotel in DC, we had high hopes for making our presence at Yale today. He made it into his talk via the one route we didn’t have fully covered with demonstrators. We were better prepared for his exit. My coworker Han Shan and myself were able to unfurl a banner that read “China Out of Tibet� in front of his motorcade as he was leaving. Though we were both pushed and shoved by NHPD officers trying to get us off the road and onto the curb, we were able to stay visible throughout the procession of Cadillac limousines containing Hu and his delegation. As I said before, NHPD was really polite and didn’t show the same vicious determination we’ve seen other police departments display in similar situations, hence our success at keeping our banner at the front of a large crowd of greeters. It would have been great to do something even more visible (we were at street level) and with a larger banner (ours was about six feet long by two feet high), it was fulfilling to do a direct action that humiliated Chairman Hu. Not getting arrested was also a plus.

Hu’s visit to the US has undoubtedly been marred by public shamings and embarrassment. He was protested by loud and visible groups of Tibetans, Taiwanese, Uighurs, and Falon Gong practitioners in every US city he visited – Seattle, DC, and New Haven. The Bush administration refused to grant him an official state visit, despite months of petitioning by the PRC government. His Rose Garden press conference was distrupted by a Falun Gong practitioner who was able to speak for almost a minute before being dragged away by the Secret Service. Hu was introduced as the President of the Republic of China [read: Taiwan] instead of the People’s Republic of China [edit: I’d also heard that it was the anthem that was introduced as belonging to the Republic of Taiwan, not Hu himself].

This is a truly embarrassing string of slights and shamings for Hu to endure in his travels abroad. Of course, this is what happens when you run one of the world’s most repressive regimes and regularly deny your citizens (and your subjugated peoples) democratic rights, religious rights, and the rights of free speech, assembly, press, and petition.

To paraphrase “The Angry Monk�, my friend Kusho Sonam Wangdu, Chinese leaders will have no peace until Tibet has freedom.

Cross posted at Tibet Will Be Free.