China’s Genocide–Denying Envoy Celebrates the Return of Tibetan Antiquities by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg

It’s part of every Chinese diplomat’s job to push odious propaganda, but why do American officials continue to meet with them?

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg sent his team this month to meet with one of the worst offenders for a ceremony celebrating the return of Tibetan Buddhist antiquities to the People’s Republic of China.

As I’ve reported here several times before, Beijing’s top envoy in New York, Huang Ping, whitewashes the Chinese Communist Party’s campaigns against Uyghurs and Tibetans. The State Department has called the policies targeting the former a genocide, in recognition of Beijing’s intent to eliminate the Uyghur ethnicity in whole or in part. And, considering China’s continued occupation of Tibet, it’s particularly relevant that the Manhattan DA’s office is handing over Tibetan Buddhist artworks.

Over the weekend, Huang posted a video to X hailing the “police-citizen relationship” in Ürümqi, a city in the Xinjiang region, where the atrocities against the Uyghurs are ongoing. There, he wrote, “people can take photos with the police in a happy atmosphere.” The video showed one such scene in what appeared to be a market. The issue with this is that security forces in Xinjiang are predominantly tasked with guarding the prison camps into which hundreds of thousands have been arbitrarily detained. Huang regularly posts content of a similar nature intended to whitewash CCP repression.

Yet New York officials just can’t help highlighting their work with him.

On April 18, officials from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office attended a ceremony at the Chinese consulate general in Manhattan to mark the handover of 38 ancient Chinese antiquities back to the country’s authorities.

Bragg, who did not attend the ceremony in person, sent Matthew Bogdanos, the official who leads his office’s antiquities-trafficking unit. There, Bogdanos took part in the ceremony with Chinese deputy minister of culture and tourism Li Qun.

In speeches during the ceremony, Huang, Bogdanos, and Li hailed New York’s cooperation with China on efforts against antiquities-trafficking, according to a summary posted by the consulate general. Huang said that he hopes that “more far-sighted” people in the U.S. will foster cooperation with China. Bogdanos, meanwhile, said that “cultural heritage has the power to bring people together and eliminate differences.”

None of this is necessary. While Bragg’s office maintains that it is merely complying with a U.S.–Chinese agreement on the return of stolen antiquities, there’s no requirement to produce fodder for China’s propaganda organs.

Beijing’s gauzy talk of cooperation and friendship sounds uncontroversial, but the very fact that U.S. law-enforcement officials are stepping foot inside its consulate general for a photo op is a disturbing development.

The day that Bragg’s team hosted a similar event last year, federal prosecutors unsealed charges against a man who had allegedly worked with officials from Huang’s team to surveil and harass Beijing’s opponents on the East Coast. The previous month, the Justice Department unsealed a case against two men who had allegedly set up a secret Chinese-government-run police station in Manhattan; senior consular officials from Huang’s team had visited the outpost.

While the federal government is calling out CCP repression and prosecuting alleged Chinese agents who colluded with the consulate, Bragg’s team is posing for photo ops with the envoy in charge.