Smith urges DOJ probe of Tiananmen museum attack as possible Chinese repression
Congressional lawmakers urge the Justice Department to investigate a California museum's vandalism as possible Chinese government repression of Tiananmen Square commemorations.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., is urging the Department of Justice to investigate the vandalism of a California museum commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, warning that the attack may have been part of a Chinese Communist Party campaign to intimidate dissidents living in the United States.
Smith, co-chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar, R-Mich., sent a July 8 letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche requesting a federal investigation into the May 31 break-in at the June Fourth Massacre Memorial Museum in El Monte, California.
Unknown individuals entered the museum shortly before the 37th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, massacre, spray-painted walls and exhibits, damaged property, and interfered with the building’s surveillance system, according to the lawmakers.
The museum preserves the history of the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations that Chinese troops crushed in Beijing after weeks of peaceful protests. The number killed remains unknown, while the Chinese government continues to censor public discussion and commemoration of the massacre.
“The Museum preserves the irrefutable, brutal truth about the Tiananmen Massacre,” Smith said in a July 9 press release, pointing out that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has spent nearly four decades attempting to suppress that history.
Smith and Moolenaar asked the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Security Division and the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office to determine whether the vandalism was planned, encouraged, supported, or carried out by people acting on behalf of China’s communist government or in sympathy with its attempts to silence critics abroad.
If the attack was connected to the CCP, Smith said, it would represent an assault on free speech, historical memory, and Chinese democracy advocates’ safety.
“Foreign intimidation” must have “no safe harbor here,” he added.
Museum founder Wang Dan, a former leader of the 1989 student demonstrations, described the break-in as an act of political intimidation intended to frighten organizers ahead of annual Tiananmen commemorations.
“The last thing the Chinese Communist Party wants is for people to continue remembering June 4,” Wang said.
The El Monte Police Department opened a hate-crime investigation and recovered surveillance footage after the museum’s damaged cameras were restored, the dissident Chinese site Vision Times reported. Museum organizers nevertheless continued with planned events and said some vandalized exhibits would remain unrepaired as evidence of the struggle between historical memory and forced forgetting.
The museum traces its origins to a Tiananmen memorial established in Hong Kong in 2014. After authorities forced that institution to close in 2021 amid Beijing’s crackdown on dissent, organizers reopened a museum in New York in 2023 and later moved it to the Los Angeles area.
Moolenaar said the CCP regularly attempts to silence its critics inside the U.S. through what officials call transnational repression – the use of threats, surveillance, harassment, violence, or coercion by foreign governments against dissidents and diaspora communities beyond their borders.
The DOJ defines transnational repression as tactics used by foreign governments to reach into other countries to harm, threaten, intimidate, or coerce targets such as activists, journalists, religious minorities, and political opponents.
The lawmakers cited several previous California incidents in light of which, they said, federal authorities ought to examine the museum attack more closely.
Those incidents included repeated destruction and surveillance directed at Liberty Sculpture Park and dissident artist Chen Weiming, attacks and intimidation against anti-CCP demonstrators during the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, and the federal prosecution of former Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang.
As Zeale News previously reported, Wang agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal Chinese government agent after prosecutors said she received directives from Chinese officials and published Beijing-approved propaganda in the United States.
Prosecutors said Wang and an associate used a website ostensibly serving the Chinese-American community to circulate propaganda denying forced labor and genocide in Xinjiang. Her associate is serving a four-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to acting as a foreign agent.
