WeChat becomes protest tool for Chinese in New York

Messaging app WeChat is huge in the Chinese-speaking world, its 500 million active monthly users paying bills, posting news and chatting with friends via the platform.

In New York - the city with the largest Chinese population outside Asia - another activity can be added to that glorious list: organising a political protest.

On March 8, about 3,000 mostly Chinese protesters congregated outside City Hall. They were there for Peter Liang, a 27-year-old Chinese-American cop who shot dead an innocent black man, Akai Gurley, when his gun discharged accidentally during a patrol last year.

When a grand jury indicted him just before the Lunar New Year, fury had erupted within parts of the Chinese community. Liang, some believed, had been made a scapegoat amid growing racial tensions in the United States, where two policemen were awaiting high-profile grand-jury decisions on charges relating to the deaths of two unarmed black men.

A New York police officer, in charge of maintaining order on that Sunday afternoon, said that in his 20 years on the job, he had never seen so many Chinese standing together on the street.

Representatives of the dozen or so organisations involved all denied having been the chief instigator or coordinator of the event. Credit, they said, should be handed to WeChat.

"I helped to start a WeChat group for the purpose of helping officer Liang to get justice two weeks ago. And now we've got more than 300 people in it," said Yiping Wu, who works in the financial industry.