He marched with Chinese officials, including one the DOJ linked to China’s illegal NYC police station.
He marched with Chinese officials, including one the DOJ linked to China’s illegal NYC police station.
N ew York City mayor Eric Adams attended a flag-raising ceremony yesterday that marked the 74th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, while appearing next to a hardline Chinese Communist Party official and another diplomat who visited the regime’s secret police station in Lower Manhattan.
Adams, New York governor Kathy Hochul, and other top officials in the area regularly attend Chinese-government-linked events, but the mayor’s decision to attend Sunday’s event, in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown, comes amid new scrutiny of his ties to alleged proxies for the Chinese regime.
That scrutiny has come from the arrests of two individuals whom federal prosecutors said had operated the illegal law-enforcement outpost to track down Chinese dissidents in America. Adams had attended galas hosted by the nonprofit that set up the police station and received campaign funds from one of its leaders. City Hall said that he neither knows the individuals nor endorsed their activities, and it said that he donated the money after the arrests.
But the mayor’s move to attend the flag-raising ceremony, and thereby to commemorate the founding of the country’s brutal dictatorship, shows that Adams “is doubling down on his connection with CCP-affiliated groups,” Zhou Fengsuo, a Chinese dissident and leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, told National Review, in an interview at a demonstration he organized yesterday in New York to showcase Beijing’s repression on China Day.
“That flag is a flag of repression. It’s the CCP flag of China. The day when they killed many of my compatriots on Tiananmen Square, the moment they cleared us, that’s the flag they raised there to show their victory over peaceful people,” said Zhou, who runs a nonprofit group called Human Rights in China.
City Hall did not respond to a list of questions from National Review about Adams’s participation in the event.
Adams sidestepped the evident pro-Chinese-regime slant of the event he headlined yesterday, only hailing, in a short speech, the “amazing unity” and resilience of the Chinatown community. But behind him was a banner that labeled the event a joint celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a cultural holiday celebrated in some Asian cultures, and of China Day. Numerous Chinese flags fluttered in the crowd.
After his brief remarks, Adams joined other grandees at two flagpoles. Adams raised the U.S. flag while the U.S. national anthem played, while Chinese consul-general Huang Ping subsequently raised the Chinese government’s flag, with the PRC national anthem playing.
The mayor then marched at the front of a short parade while holding miniature Chinese and U.S. flags. To his immediate right was Huang. On his left side were Greco, who is a special adviser and Asian-affairs director to Adams, New York City councilman Chris Marte, and deputy Chinese consul-general Wu Xiaoming.
Adams later tweeted about the event, referencing only the Mid-Autumn Festival. But on its webpage afterward, the Chinese consulate-general characterized the event exclusively as a China Day celebration. The website noted that Huang, in his remarks to the crowd, discussed the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation with Chinese-style modernization,” a propaganda theme frequently pushed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
It’s noteworthy that Adams marched with Huang and Wu, given their respective roles in pushing the Party’s propaganda and liaising with the now-shuttered Chinese police station.
As the Chinese regime’s top official in New York, Huang has repeatedly declared his loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, whitewashing its human-rights abuses against Uyghurs and Tibetans while also supporting its threats to launch a military assault against Taiwan.
Meanwhile, court documents and media reports tie Wu to the Chinese police station. The Justice Department’s criminal complaint in that case noted that several officials from the Chinese consulate had visited the outpost in April 2022. Wu was one of those officials, and he spoke beneath a banner that stated the name of the police station, according to the Chinese government-linked Voice of Chinese news outlet.
Greco frequently appears at public events around New York with Huang and other Chinese officials. She attended an official China Day celebration at the consulate general on September 13, as shown in a picture that Huang posted to Twitter.
In 2019, Greco and another of the mayor’s top political allies, Jesse Hamilton, traveled to Fuzhou, China, as part of what they characterized as an official delegation representing Adams, who at the time served as Brooklyn Borough president. One of the members of their delegation was Harry Lu, one of the two defendants in the Chinese police-station case.
City Hall has previously defended Greco from allegations that she has worked with CCP-linked groups, casting that criticism as racist. The New York Post recently reported that she held affiliations with a pro-CCP group and with a Chinese state-owned news outlet, allegations that City Hall denied.
But Zhou said that Adams is probably being influenced by people in his orbit with ties to the Chinese regime.
“If you look at our numbers here, we’re probably not even one-tenth of the people who gathered there, at the other [China Day] occasion, but that doesn’t mean we are not the true voice. People are just afraid, even here, to talk about it,” Zhou added, referring to Beijing’s efforts to silence dissent, even in America. “These people who are celebrating are celebrating a brutal regime.”