NEW YORK—In the years before leaving China, Chen Weijie relished writing one message more than any other.
On rocks, trees, and chairs, he left his penmark visible everywhere.
“Falun Dafa is good. Truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance is good.”
Mr. Chen doesn’t practice Falun Gong, the faith featuring the three aforementioned values, which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made a top priority to eradicate over the past 25 years.
But he found this “the right thing to do—and sorely needed.”
“I know Falun Gong is what the CCP fears the most,” the 35-year-old said at a rally on April 21 marking the 25th anniversary of a peaceful appeal by the group in Beijing, which took place months before the communist regime unleashed a full-scale persecution that has now killed thousands by conservative estimates.
“Whatever the CCP fears the most, this is what I want to do.”
He wrote with his left hand and often wore a mask. He also stayed away from cameras. It was his way, he said, of showing defiance to a regime in a country where uttering those very words puts one at risk of arrest and torture.
“The CCP is the world’s biggest crime syndicate,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that he cried when watching videos shedding light on the regime’s state-sponsored killing-for-organ scheme, known as forced organ harvesting. The atheist regime, he said, “tolerates no faith,” which it sees as spiritual competition due to the regime’s demand for total domination over the hearts and minds of the people.
Mr. Chen was one of over a dozen speakers at the Sunday rally in New York’s Flushing neighborhood of Queens, the city’s largest Chinatown. The anniversary event also celebrates the Tuidang movement, the grassroots efforts among the Chinese community to draw a line between them and the regime by withdrawing from its affiliated organizations such as the Communist Youth League and the Young Pioneers that people were made to join during their various stages of life, often under peer pressure or in the hope of career advancement.
The tally of people who have participated in the movement, using real names or aliases, is now approaching 430 million, according to the New York-based Tuidang Center, the host of the rally as well as an earlier parade in the city’s Asian-dominant Flushing neighborhood.
Around the world, a petition the center started in 2021 calling for an end to the CCP over its “deceptions and brutality” has gathered over 4.2 million signatures, according to its website.
Practitioners of the meditation group Falun Gong, which by 1999 numbered between 70 million–100 million, have been pushing the efforts in China, spreading leaflets and a book called “Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party,” an Epoch Times editorial series dissecting the nature of the CCP and cataloging its crimes. With the regime persecuting people it disfavors such as their own, being a part of the Party is abetting its human rights abuses, they said.
“The CCP’s very existence is a threat to the whole world,” said Falun Gong adherent Chen Jingyu. Her 55-year-old sister Chen Jinghui, a native of Changchun, where Falun Gong was first brought out to the public, was arrested in March, leaving no one to care for their parents, who are in their 80s.
Activists and freedom advocates voiced their support for the movement.
Martha Flores-Vazquez, a Democratic district leader from Queens, said that she’s gotten emotional each time she’s attended a Falun Gong rally.
“I’m not crying because I’m happy. I’m crying because we need to end the persecution. It needs to stop—families are divided, organs are harvested while people are alive,” she said in a speech, thanking the hundreds of Falun Gong adherents in the crowd for their perseverance and strength.
“I have never in my life met individuals as strong and as courageous as you are.”
Cecilia Crowley, managing director at investment company Newcomb and Associates, described those who withdrew from the CCP as “warriors.”
“It’s almost like the fish swimming upstream,” she told The Epoch Times. “But they’re peaceful warriors.”
“The oppressive influence that seeks to eliminate truth is only 75 years old,” she said at the rally, referring to the CCP.
Her husband, Fred Newcomb, an investment banker and honorary chairman for the World Human Accountability Organization of the United Nations, echoed her sentiment.
“Whether China, the United States, or countries around the world, the celebration against tyranny and oppression is always well founded and deserved,” he said in a speech.
What they are doing, he said, is in line with the spirit of America, a country founded by people who thirsted for freedom.
“I’m a citizen of a country that goes around the world fighting for other countries, putting the lives of our soldiers on the line, people who die for us and those countries,” he told The Epoch Times. “I think I feel fairly strongly about it.”
Gong Kai, who narrowly survived the now-abandoned One Child Policy as a third child, credited the software Falun Gong practitioners developed for Chinese people to circumvent the regime’s “Great Firewall,” called Freegate, for opening his eyes to the free world. By using the tool to get past the internet censorship in college, he saw that he had been “living in a fake world” for 20 years, he said.
When he was watching a video version of the Nine Commentaries in the college dorm, he said his eight other roommates dropped their video games and joined him. After finishing it, they stopped participating in the Communist Youth League activities and Party ideology classes, according to Mr. Gong.
Cai Yuanxing, a retired public servant who had worked at a Chinese state firm, formally renounced his 21-year Party membership in a pre-written speech.
“A Chinese saying goes that ‘everyone gives a shove to a falling wall,’” he said. “I want to be a part of this, to push down the CCP.”
It’s telling that communist leader Xi Jinping has made reference in recent years to breaking through the “cyclical nature of history”: the rise and fall of the rulers, he said.
The regime leader saw that “the communist party is falling,” he said. “It’s in a panic.”
“The communist party is very weak now,” he said. “All that’s left is the last straw.”
From The Epoch Times
