Wu Yingjie, former CCP Secretary in Tibet, and Tang Yong, prison bureaucrat in Chongqing, are among those sanctioned.
by Massimo Introvigne
On the eve of Human Rights Day, December 10, the U.S. Department of State announced sanctions against five Chinese individuals responsible for gross human rights violations, perpetrated in particular against Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners. Those sanctioned are prohibited from entering the United States and their assets in the country, if any, are frozen.
Tang Yong is the former deputy director of the Chongqing Area Prisons. He has been sanctioned for violating human rights of Falun Gong practitioners, which of course, the Department of State says, is also a violation of freedom of religion. In 2020, the U.S. had already sanctioned Huang Yuanxiong, director of the Wucun Police Station of the Xiamen Municipal Public Security Bureau, and in 2021 Yu Hui, former director of the Anti-Xie-Jiao Office in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, for having seriously violated the human rights of Falun Gong practitioners.
This shows that, contrary to the Chinese narrative that depicts the protest on behalf of Falun Gong as the result of the political alliance between Donald Trump and the Falun Gong media that strongly support him, it does not really matter whether the U.S. administration is Democrat or Republican. When it comes to sanctioning human rights abuses against Falun Gong practitioners, both act against Chinese officials.
The infamous Wu Yingjie, who was CCP Secretary of Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) between 2016 and 2021, has also been sanctioned for “serious human rights abuse, including physical abuse and arbitrary arrests and detentions” against Tibetan Buddhists, including monks and nuns, which again also amount to gross violations of religious freedom. Together with Wu, Zhang Hongbo, director of the Tibetan Public Security Bureau (TPSB) since 2018, has also been sanctioned.
Finally, the U.S. has sanctioned Li Zhenyu and Zhuo Xinrong and a network of entities including Dalian Ocean Fishing Co., Ltd. and Pingtan Marine Enterprise, Ltd., and over 150 vessels for using slave labor.
