TORONTO – Yellow jackets of the Falun Gong sect, green Taiwan independence flags and the multicolored banners of the Free Tibet movement appeared in Toronto on Saturday to remind China’s President Hu Jintao of nagging political issues back home.
In noisy but peaceful demonstrations of the kind that would get them arrested or worse back in communist-ruled China, protesters dogged Hu even on the tourism break on his state visit to Canada.
The 62-year-old leader was a focus for hundreds of exiles ranging from Chinese who want to go home one day to a democratic China to Taiwanese, Tibetans and Uighurs who wish to become independent neighbors of the world’s most populous country.
“We welcome you — to get China out of Tibet,” read the homemade T-shirt of one young man among some 150 Tibetans, many in traditional dress, who rallied as Hu attended lunch and then dinner with Canadian business leaders and officials.
Echoing the independence demands of the Tibetans, whose remote Himalayan region was annexed by the Chinese in 1950, a small group of Uighurs rallied under a powder blue flag with a white Islamic crescent.
The Uighurs’ home in northwestern China’s vast, oil-producing Xinjiang province was briefly known as East Turkestan after World War Two and some of the 9 million Uighurs want independence again.
Hu’s motorcade entered his Toronto dinner venue through a rear exit and avoided the raucous street protests, drawing a tart response from veteran Taiwanese activist Albert J.F. Lin.
“When you are the president of the world’s most populous country and you have to sneak in the back door, that’s a disgrace,” said Lin, whose Formosa Association for Public Affairs rejects China’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, a self-ruled island.
But Hu could not have avoided the yellow-clad adherents of Falun Gong, who draped banners in at least 10 places across the freeway from Toronto to Niagara Falls denouncing a brutal six-year Chinese crackdown on their quasi-religious movement.
On Thursday in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Canada’s Prime Minister Paul Martin urged Hu to improve human rights in China and open dialogue with Tibet and Taiwan. The Chinese leader was noncommittal in his public comments on those issues.
