President of Peru José Jeri this week vowed that he will not resign from his position amid the ongoing scandal over his undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman known as “Chifagate.”
“One would resign if one had something to hide, and I have not lied to the country, I have not done anything illegal. I will not allow anyone to distort the facts about me, which is why I will voluntarily attend the Oversight Committee and make myself available to the Prosecutor’s Office,” Jeri said during an interview with Peru’s Canal N.
“I did not lie to the country. Rather, the situation is being exploited to attack the presidency beyond my mistake, which I have already acknowledged, and also to affect the electoral process, which I have a duty to ensure is budgeted, transparent, and impartial,” he continued in another part of the interview.
Jeri is the eighth president Peru has had in the past ten years. He took office on October 2025 after the Peruvian Congress impeached his predecessor Dina Boluarte, a highly unpopular leftist former president, citing a “permanent moral incapacity.”
Jeri was the head of Congress at the time and assumed the presidency after Boluarte’s impeachment, since she had not appointed a vice president. Boluarte herself took office on December 2022 at a time when she served as vice president for Pedro Castillo, a Marxist who unsuccessfully attempted to stage a coup and dissolve Congress and the judiciary. Castillo was impeached and arrested, then sentenced to 11 years in prison in November 2025.
Over the past weeks, Jeri, who has only been in office for roughly three months, has been embroiled in an ongoing scandal known as “Chifagate” that broke after it was recently revealed that, in the late night hours of December 26, he held a clandestine meeting with Chinese businessman Zhihua Yang at a “Chifa,” a local slang term for a Chinese-Peruvian restaurant. The Argentine outlet Infobae described Yang, who reportedly owns the restaurant where the encounter took place, as an individual linked to Nicanor Boluarte, brother of Dina Boluarte, who is presently undergoing a probe on corruption allegations.
Footage published by local and international outlets showed Jeri exiting from an official vehicle wearing a white hoodie and entering the restaurant escorted by security personnel. The private meeting was not logged by the Peruvian presidency, instantly raising questions and speculation about transparency and possible conflicts of interest involving Jeri and the Chinese businessman — particularly after local outlets reported that Jeri and Yang may have allegedly discussed a proposed $30 million contract for installing security surveillance cameras in 8,000 public transportation buses.
Jeri personally confirmed to reporters that the meeting was not registered by the presidency but denied any improper motives behind the encounter, claiming that the meeting was in response to an invitation to coordinate the upcoming February 1 “Peru-China Friendship Day.” Yang also denied having “requested favors” from Jeri during the encounter through a statement in which he claimed that “various malicious statements” allegedly sought to create a narrative “about acts of favoritism or corruption between him [Jeri] and myself.”
In response to the scandal, the Peruvian president published a pre-recorded video last week apologizing to Peruvian citizens for his unregistered meeting with Yang and “admitting his mistake,” admitting the way he entered the restaurant wearing a hood “led to suspicion and doubts about my behavior.”
Hours after the video was published, local outlets revealed that Chinese national Ji Wu Xiaodong met with Jeri at the Peruvian presidential palace three times between December 2025 and January 2026 — despite the Chinese man presently living under house arrest for his links to an illegal logging organization known as “The Hostiles of the Amazon.”
This week, the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office announced the start of a preliminary probe on the encounters between Jeri and his Chinese contacts. The revelation of Jeri’s encounters with the two Chinese men prompted the nation’s congress to present three motions of censure against the Peruvian President in his capacity as head of the parliament.
Jeri reportedly attempted to downplay the controversy over his encounters with Ji by claiming that the Chinese man “does not speak much Spanish.” However, court documents published by local television revealed that Ji testified before a 2022 hearing against illegal logging that he is “fluent in Spanish and works as a translator registered with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
Peru is slated to hold a presidential election on April 12, with a prospective runoff election scheduled for June 7 should no candidate obtain enough votes to win in the first round. José Jeri’s term is slated to conclude on July 28 at a time when he will be succeeded by the winner of the upcoming election. As of December, there are 36 different presidential candidates hoping to become president. Jeri is not running in the election.
Jeri reportedly said during the Canal N interview that he “acknowledged his mistake” in holding those meetings but asserted that some people “want to take advantage of the situation to complicate the electoral process next April.”
The Peruvian president also stated that he no longer has any communication with Zhihua Yang since the scandal broke out under grounds that “directly or indirectly” attempts have been made to undermine the presidency.
“I’ve eaten at the Chinese restaurant several times, I’ve been to the store several times, it’s a normal habit to go eat there,” Jeri said.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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