Man crashes car into Chinese consulate in San Francisco
Police shot and killed the driver, but no other injuries were reported, and official details of the investigation are sparse. But a man present at the scene said that the driver emerged from the crash yelling, “Where is the CCP?”
San Francisco police have shot and killed a driver who rammed his car into the Chinese consulate.
Official details of the investigation are ongoing. Police said they didn’t know why the unidentified man crashed through the front of the consulate, nor did they describe how many people were in the building or how the shooting unfolded. No other injuries have currently been reported.
Police arrived at the consulate shortly after 3 p.m. local time on October 9, after receiving a report that a vehicle had smashed into the building. Officers entered the premises, made contact with the suspect, and opened fire, San Francisco police sergeant Kathryn Winters said during a brief news conference. The suspect died later at a hospital despite “life-saving efforts.”
“I wish I could give you more, but this is a very complex investigation,” Winters said.
Video footage from the scene showed a blue Honda sedan inside the lobby of the consulate’s visa office and dozens of people fleeing the building. Sergii Molchanov, a 32-year-old graduate student at Stanford Medicine who was at the scene at the time of the incident, told the New York Times that about 20 people were in the waiting area of the visa office when the crash occurred.
“This guy comes out of the car shouting and saying, ‘Where is the CCP?’” Molchanov told the New York Times. He said the driver used an expletive before “CCP,” an abbreviation for the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese consulate in San Francisco issued a statement (in Chinese) saying that an “unidentified person drove violently into the document hall of the consulate, posing a serious threat to the safety of the staff and people at the scene, and causing serious damage to the facilities and property of the consulate.”
The consulate added that it “strongly condemns this violent attack and reserves the right to pursue responsibility for the incident.”
Chinese social media users have responded to the incident in shock and anger on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform. The topic has become one of the top trending hashtags as of this morning.
San Francisco has one of the oldest and most established Chinatowns in the U.S., and is home to one of the country’s biggest Chinese populations: A 2021 survey found that over 20% in the city, or about 180,000 people, had Chinese roots. While New York City has a much larger ethnic Chinese population of about 574,000 people, that figure represents just 7% of that city’s total.
This was not the first incident of violence at the Chinese consulate. In 2014, an attacker poured two buckets of gasoline onto the consulate’s front door and set it on fire, causing severe damage. A similar incident happened in 2008, when a group of people poured flammable liquid on a security gate at the back of the building and set it on fire — the same day that San Francisco supervisors heard public comment on China’s human rights record months before the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
Yesterday’s crash comes as San Francisco prepares to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit next month, where U.S. President Joe Biden said he may “potentially” meet with his Chinese counterpart, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平. Yesterday, during a meeting in Beijing, Xi told U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he hoped for a “peaceful coexistence” with the U.S.
Update: The man was identified on October 12 as Yáng Zhànyuán 杨占元, 31, from Shandong Province, China.
