(TibetanReview.net, Nov15’23) – As hundreds of Chinese nationals, including students from local San Francisco universities like UC Berkeley and Stanford, gathered with massive Chinese Communist Party flags to welcome their dictatorial leader Xi Jinping for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, some 30 Uyghur, Hong Kong nationals and Tibetan staged a protest to counter them to make their presence known to the visiting Chinese leader and their disapproval of his policies, reported abc7news.com Nov 15.
Chants, bullhorns and screaming took over North Access Road, as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ motorcade drove through, the report said.
The report cited Topjor Tsultrim, communications director for Students for a Free Tibet, as saying the first thing he wanted Xi to see upon his arrival on American soil was the Tibetan flag, with the protesters reminding him that his policies amounted to genocide.
“We’ve had our homeland stolen, our religion, our culture destroyed, Xi Jinping’s state policy of sanitization, the destruction of Tibetan culture, Tibetan identity,” Tsultrim has said. “For all these reasons Tibet is not free, but we will be here we will be resisting until that day when we can return to our homeland.”
On the Chinese side, Yanghua Duan, a student at UC Berkeley, was holding a massive banner that said they welcome Xi Jinping to APEC, the report said. He has called Xi his “idol”, adding he wanted to thank him and show his appreciation in person.
But the report also cited a woman claiming to be a survivor of China’s concentration camps in Xinjiang as saying she had been subjected to torture, sexual assault and had her family persecuted because she was Uyghur.