Highlight: Civil Disobedience in China - Falun Gong Bulletin Ep 03

You know, just like Amy Yu's mother was arrested for talking to people on the street about Falun Gong, an interesting question to think about is, what would you do if you had no freedom of speech? It's a very weird question to ask in the United States, where we have a Bill of Rights, we have a number of media, independent media, right? So you have a number of ways to get your voice out and voice heard. This is not true in China, of course. And this is also a question that millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been trying to answer for 20 years under the brutal persecution. And the answer that they came up with started one of the largest civil disobedience campaigns in world history. And so if we take a step back, we look at kind of the global precedent for civil disobedience or peaceful resistance to brutal persecution. You see, you know, MLK is a good example in the U.S. dismantling Jim Crow laws with peaceful resistance protests, you know, rallying people. Gandhi in India got India's independence through peaceful means. And so, you know, changing the hearts and minds through peaceful means is something that Falun Gong practitioners have been doing for decades in China. And what's interesting is how this kind of started, because it's actually the largest information network, sort of independent journalist network by number in China, getting information to the Chinese people, and also getting information out of China, such as about COVID and other things we can talk about. So it's very important movement. This network inside China, Falun Gong practitioners happen very organically. So essentially, what happened is, in the beginning, you know, 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in 99, one out of every 13 people, government's promoting it overnight, kind of totally reversed, right? Brutal persecution that starts with massive propaganda campaigns. So one day, they're promoting the practice saying it's good for out, the next day, they're saying it's evil, these people are evil, they're doing all this stuff. So obviously, when you're caught in that, what do you do, right? You're like, well, that's not true. Like I practice Falun Gong, my mom practices Falun Gong. And it's a good, it's a good thing. And how do you tell people? Because the second you go outside, or the second you try to do anything, go appeal in Tiananmen Square, go, you're thrown in a van, and you get you're getting these long prison terms, you're not heard from again. And so Falun Gong practitioners kind of organically started figuring out, okay, well, I'm going to make a sticker or a banner. And I'm going to go and I'm going to, you know, place that in my town. So people can see Falun Dafa is good. That sort of organically grew, and it could be a really old practitioner or young practitioner, they started at home, like on a home printer, printing out flyers, like on a piece of paper like this. And then in the dead of night, going around to their neighborhood and kind of dropping it on doorsteps and letting them know here, like, this is how we're going to debunk the propaganda against Falun Gong. They're lying to you. This is not true, right. But then over the years, what's interesting is that the type of material that Falun Gong practitioners have disseminated in China has kind of grown in the kind of the network become a little bit more sophisticated. Today in China, Freedom House says there's about 20 to 40 million active Falun Gong practitioners participating in this kind of network within China to let their fellow citizens know the truth. And there's about 200,000, estimates about 200,000 of these material production sites. So somebody might have a few printers at home, and they're kind of producing for many, maybe a few practitioners. So this is obviously at risk of Falun Gong practitioners' own lives, because the CCP wants to know where these sites are, and they'll raid them, and then they'll arrest people and often brutal torture more so for the people that are running these sites. If we take a step back, I think it's important to give a broader view of sort of some of the material that Falun Gong practitioners are actually disseminating both inside and outside of China now through this network, this 20, 40 million Falun Gong practitioner network in China. So again, it started just about kind of debunking the lies of the propaganda of the CCP. But then it kind of grew, and now you have about six types of information that Falun Gong practitioners are disseminating. The first is the lies, as I said. Second is a book we'll talk about called The Non-Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party, which relates to the Tuidong Quit Chinese Communist Party movement, which is very important, which talks about kind of the history of the CCP. It actually gives Chinese people the real history of the CCP and all the evil things they've done. Third is actually how to jump the firewall. So Falun Gong practitioners actually created a couple different types of software to break through the Great Firewall. And it's the number one software used not only just by CCP, it was used in Arab Spring for Chinese citizens to actually find out real information from the West. Obviously, not just about the persecution of Falun Gong, but anything that the CCP is lying about. The fourth is actually COVID information, which isn't necessarily about Falun Gong, but both getting information out about COVID, like one of the earliest reports about Fengming in China, getting the COVID information, what's really going on in Wuhan, or information within China about whether they're lying to you, or these lockdowns, or these different things. The fifth is human rights documentation. So a lot of the information, Minghui, for instance, gets from on the ground sources in China, helps solidify things like Amy Yu's mother's case is a good example. Obviously, that one's easily traceable. It's Amy Yu, then her father calls. But a lot of times, these are like kind of undercover. Practitioners can't know their identities, but they're finding out, was there a death and tracing it and figuring out and reporting that back to the West. A lot of the lists that, for instance, our organization will provide to the government of who's responsible for organ harvesting or torture, those lists are coming from those networks. So they're doing that. And then the last, Falun Gong practitioners letting the Chinese people know actually how the CCP is being viewed by governments internationally. So the international sanctions that are happening, we talked about recently in the show, maybe some of the laws that are being passed, because the CCP is obviously posturing to the Chinese people. Everyone thinks we're great, and that's obviously not true. So it's all this information that the Chinese people have no access to. So why is this important that Falun Gong practitioners have started this network and continue this network? It's important for a few reasons. I think if you use the juxtaposition to the Nazi crimes, and how all of society was sucked into those crimes against humanity, China is very similar in that if you look at who's responsible for the crimes against humanity against Falun Gong practitioners and others, it's all of society. It's the police, it's the 610 office, it's the doctors, it's the prison guards, it's the court systems. All these people are involved in crimes against humanity that they know is wrong. And so when Falun Gong practitioners actually expose that on a local level, for instance, this idea of local shaming, so let's say you're a prison guard, or you're that guard that was complicit or torturing Amy Yu's mother, local Falun Gong practitioners may find out that person's name and their neighborhood, and they may start disseminating flyers specific to that person. This person's doing this to a 65-year-old woman. And that local shaming has helped, sometimes in small pockets, small degrees, to kind of lessen the persecution in those jails when that's exposed. But that's more of like a practical point of view. There's actually a larger point of view around the fabric of Chinese society being ripped apart through the persecution of Falun Gong. One out of every 13 people practicing Falun Gong, 100 million, it was a real big deal. When the persecution of Falun Gong happened, it was like a civil war, right? It's very much reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party campaigns in the past, where you're turning father against son, neighbor against neighbor, boss against their worker, sister against sister. You're tearing people apart because you're actually making them choose something they can know is wrong or may not know is wrong. For instance, in colleges, the entrance exams could have questions about Falun Gong. Your job may ask you something about that. So you're not even able to say, if you think the sky is blue, you have to say it's red in China, right? Because that's what they do. But even worse than that, they suck the Chinese people into needing to report on Falun Gong practitioners. Reporting on Falun Gong practitioners means that person could be killed. So it's like the whole society is being sucked into this. The Chinese people had no access to overseas information. These networks kind of helped the Chinese people start to see the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party. So for the Westerners that are listening, it's so hard to put ourselves in that position because it's almost like they have a different reality in China. They're under a different reality. They have no access to information other than what the CCP says. They started making Chinese people think over these 20 years, does the CCP really good? Do I really want to be a part of this? Am I going to really side with these people that are doing these evil acts that they're lying about? Is that who I am? It led to this book, The Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party, which exposed the methods, the history of how the Chinese Communist Party took power, and all the deaths. To us in the West, we probably know a lot about the Cultural Revolution or you can research it. It's not like that in China. Chinese people, a lot of them don't even know that people died in Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. That was very recent, let alone what happened in the Cultural Revolution or what Mao did and all those things, let alone the Falun Gong. So they don't have a reality. When they started learning about the true origins of the Chinese Communist Party, they obviously knew that it was sort of this parasite on the Chinese people. It wasn't this glorious thing, to use the CCP's words. What's important about that is it started a movement called Tuidang, which is basically called Quit the Party. You could call it very symbolic and very meaningful, a global movement, which is helping Chinese Communist Party members or Chinese people around the world renounce the party. In China, you're born into the party, so you might be part of the Young Pioneers, or Communist Youth League, or actually the Chinese Communist Party, which has a kind of formal membership. But you may not really want to join. It's just like you have to in society. Your workplace, everyone joins. This idea of Tuidang is the idea that people will actually renounce it. They'll say, I don't want to be a member. I don't actually agree with the CCP. Over 400 million people have done that. Those three organizations, so not just Chinese Communist Party, because 400 million is more than actually is in the Chinese Communist Party. What that's done is show the world that the CCP actually doesn't have the support in China that people think. We've seen a couple instances during the zero COVID of some protests here and there. The issue in China is that none of those people have access to information for each other. But what Tuidang shows is that massive amounts of people within China don't support the Chinese Communist Party. Actually, a lot of that information was because of the information that Falun Gong practitioners have helped disseminate or the software to jump the firewall. How that impacts the West? It impacts the West in a lot of ways. Fang Bing is a really good example. Fang Bing is a Falun Gong practitioner who in February, and maybe even earlier of 2020, used the software that Falun Gong practitioners developed. He was able to get on YouTube within China and post videos to the West of what was really happening in Wuhan. Remember some of those videos, bodies on the streets, crematorium lines. It was crazy. But that was at a time when the CCP was lying and denying things, and it's not that bad. One of the first whistleblowers was this Falun Gong practitioner using that network created by Falun Gong practitioners to overcome the censorship in China. That gave the West a lot of information about what was really happening, probably helped inform some of the policy decisions around shutting borders and different things. Fang Bing hasn't been heard from in almost three years now. That act is a good example of those networks benefiting the West. You can look now, and there's a lot happening in China around when they ended zero COVID and infection rates. Getting real information out of China is almost impossible. These networks through Minghui, through Falun Gong practitioners are essential to learning about what's really happening on the ground in China. When we look at the largest disobedience group maybe in history, 20 to 40 million citizen journalists, you could say, in China of Falun Gong practitioners, it doesn't just impact China, it impacts the whole world. I think as we can see the people in China not supporting the Chinese Communist Party, if they don't stand for the CCP, maybe the CCP will no longer stand. I think we're starting to see a lot of changes. We'll keep everyone updated on some of those updates, especially with the COVID situation, if the information comes out from those networks. Other than that, thank you for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.