NEW YORK—A man has been arrested four days after he violently tore up information stands in Flushing that were meant to highlight the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) long-running persecution of the faith group Falun Gong.
The attacker, 32-year-old Zheng Buqiu, was arrested at around noon on Feb. 15 at the crossing between Main Street and Kissena Boulevard, not far from the four information booths he had repeatedly targeted in the sabotage attempt since last Thursday.
Police have charged him with hate crime and criminal mischief in the fourth degree, an officer told The Epoch Times in the evening. Both crimes are punishable by up to one year in jail.
‘Brazenness’
Zheng, wearing a black cap and black shirt revealing tattoos covering both arms and parts of his chest, began his vandalism at Flushing’s Main Street. In one information stand in front of Golden Shopping Mall on Friday, he punched and kicked a display board imprinted with the words “truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance”—the three tenets of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong, footage of the incident shows.
He then used his two arms to topple a table before hauling the destroyed boards away. The man had also stomped on a portable speaker, breaking it into pieces. Informational booklets were left scattered on the ground, as well as metal frames that had propped up the boards.
Earlier in the day, Zheng hit another booth in front of the Queens Public Library, hurling all of its information materials to the ground and attempting to smash the table, which the volunteers tried to shield with their bodies. The man left before returning shortly after with his shirt off, ripping off a display board before volunteers stopped him from wreaking further damage.
Xu Weiguo, a volunteer who filmed part of the smashing at the mall, was sleepless that night.
“As a woman here, this is really unsettling,” she told The Epoch Times on Friday. “I’ve never seen anything like this since I came to America over 10 years ago.”
She and other volunteers see the man’s attack as part of the intimidation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party to deter them from speaking out against the regime’s human rights abuses.
“It left a lingering fear in me,” she said. That man’s “brazenness even on American soil,” she said, was “simply beyond comprehension.”
Adherents of Falun Gong have been systematically persecuted by the CCP for over two decades. Those overseas seeking to raise awareness about this issue have experienced consistent efforts by the CCP and its proxies to thwart their activities.
During the regime’s ongoing eradication campaign since 1999, an estimated millions of believers have been thrown to jail and other torture facilities, where they undergo forced labor, beating, forced feeding, and sexual abuse intended to coerce them to give up their faith. Imprisoned adherents have also been subjected to forced organ harvesting.
As the Olympic Games commenced in Beijing, New York-based Falun Dafa Information Center identified over a dozen prison camps around the Olympic venues in Beijing and cities nearby, where detention and torture are still taking place.
Zheng made several more attacks on Friday and on Monday morning. He was arrested about an hour after he knocked over an information table at the library and yanked off decorative lotus flowers lining the Falun Gong stand, which caused the adherents to alert the police.
At least six officers were present to apprehend the man, who was wearing a block hooded jacket and black cap, video footage of the arrest shows. Zheng was handcuffed and escorted into the police car.
A Call for Awareness
Yi Rong, a spokesperson for the Falun Gong Spiritual Center, expressed appreciation and relief for Zheng’s arrest. She thanked the police for taking prompt action to “restore peace to the Flushing community.”
The consistent harassment targeting Falun Gong has caused a sense of insecurity to descend upon the Chinese community, said Yi, who urged the U.S. government to enhance measures to protect the Falun Gong community so that hate crimes like this would not happen again.
Many of these volunteers standing at the booth have experienced the Chinese regime’s persecution first hand before they sought refuge in America, and they look to the U.S. government to protect their freedom of belief, Yi told The Epoch Times.
The same sentiment was also shared by state assembly district leader Martha Flores-Vazquez. At a gathering she organized on Sunday, she pointed to the table that was once toppled by the assailant, calling it “a major disrespect.”
“We do not welcome the hate crimes, we do not welcome criminal activities coming here to dismantle a table, to dismantle a culture,” she said. “This is not China, this is America.”
The information booths have been one of the principal outlets for Falun Gong adherents to inform locals and tourists about the plight of their fellow adherents in China. This has also made them a prominent target for attack.
For months in 2008, mobs of ethnically-Chinese people waved red communist flags, spat on, cursed, and physically attacked Falun Gong practitioners in Flushing who were handing out printed materials related to Falun Gong. Similar incidents have occurred elsewhere, including in Australia, Japan, and more recently in Hong Kong.
Last April, masked perpetrators vandalized six information booths in multiple Hong Kong districts around a dozen times, using knives and spray paint to damage signage at the stands. The financial loss caused was estimated to be around 30,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $3,845).
No matter what, Yi vowed that they will not be silenced.
“We have not given up our belief in mainland China, even less would we give up here,” she said.
Linda Lin contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
