(TibetanReview.net, Apr22’24) —Five protesters, including Tibetan and Taiwanese Americans, of whom three were students, were escorted out while a sixth one staged a walkout on Apr 20 morning to disrupt the Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng’s speech at Harvard University. They were protesting against China’s stance on Tibet, Hong Kong, East Turkestan, and Taiwan and accused Xie of being an advocate for policies that bordered on genocide, reported the thecrimson.com Apr 22.
Xie was delivering the opening address for the Kennedy School’s China Conference — an annual student-run event organized by the Greater China Society — when protesters stood up one at a time, shouting and holding Tibetan flags and banners reading “China Lies, People Die,” the report said.
Two Taiwanese-Americans and two from Tibet held up banners inside a conference hall, said the Taiwanese CNA news agency Apr 22.
Xie’s speech was delayed for 45 minutes as a result of the protest, the report said.
The thecrimson.com report said the protest, which was organized by Students for a Free Tibet and Coalition of Students Resisting China, delayed Xie’s address and included roughly 35 protesters who stood outside the Kennedy School with Tibetan flags and signs denouncing “colonial boarding schools” in Tibet.
Those protesting outside the school were stated to include both Harvard students and local residents of the Boston area, with Tibet, Hong Kong, East Turkestan, and Taiwan being issues on which they were protesting.
The reported quoted Cosette T Wu, 25, co-founder of Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP and the first protester to interrupt the talk, as saying Xie’s past actions stood “in direct contradiction to our values and Harvard’s values.”
“These types of viewpoints should not have any place in the Harvard community,” Wu has added. “We are not going to allow somebody who has had such a huge goal in advocating for a genocidal government and enacting such significant human rights abuses.”
The report also quoted Tsering Yangchen, 26, co-president of the Boston chapter of Students for a Free Tibet, as saying in a press release that her “family escaped Tibet because China had massacred tens of thousands of Tibetans during the CCP’s military invasion and colonization of my homeland.”
“Xie Feng is an advocate for the genocide of my people and, as a Tibetan Harvard student, it’s my duty to show the world the truth,” Yangchen has added.
“I believe we were successful,” she has added. “We made our voices heard.”
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Harvard University Police Department spokesperson Steven G Catalano has written in a statement that HUPD officers escorted out five protesters after they refused to stop disrupting the talk. Three of the protesters escorted out by officers were Harvard students, and HUPD intends to share the students’ names with their respective schools, he has made it clear.
The sixth protester, who walked out during Xie’s speech, was not logged by HUPD, Wu has written in a message.
The protestors’ press statement said the Apr 20 protest targeted the Chinese government for its human rights abuses and aggressions in Tibet, Hong Kong, East Turkestan, and Taiwan, and were aimed at Xie in particular, according to the CNA report.
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An online press release issued by the Chinese embassy in the US said Xie warned Washington to stop “interfering with China’s internal affairs,” during his conference opening address.
“Applying salami tactics or crossing red lines on issues bearing on others’ core interests is just like racing cars on a cliff’s edge, where a crash is almost inevitable. If the US side keeps interfering with China’s internal affairs and damaging China’s interests on issues related to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Xizang [Tibet] and the South China Sea, how could the two sides ever put a floor under the relationship, no matter how many guardrails there may be?” China’s official chinadaily.com.cn Apr 22 quoted Xie as having said.
Incidentally, Indians have for years been accusing China of nibbling at their country’s territory from across occupied Tibet by employing what they call the “salami slicing tactic”.