A rally on Saturday afternoon in Chicago’s Chinatown marked the beginning of a tour of 14 Midwestern cities organized by the Midwest Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party.
Acoording to rally host Tommy Xu, “The tour calls attention to the movement to quit the CCP and celebrates the fact that 54 million people have already quit the Party.”
At the Chicago rally there were speeches by Xu, Mr. Zheng and Ms. Yang.
Zheng and Yang are both Falun Gong practitioners and in their speeches they recounted the severe abuse and torture they had endured when detained by the CCP because they practiced Falun Gong.
Yang was detained three different times. The third time she was detained she was subjected to a torture in which she was forced to stand for 72 hours continuously and beaten. She learned later that some who have been subjected to the tortures she suffered “had become handicapped, some had collapsed mentally and some had died.”
Zheng recounted being kidnapped on the street and then detained in a labor camp for almost one year before a judge—without even the formality of a trial—sentenced him to seven years in prison.
In prison, Zheng endured one month locked in a “small cell,” a torture that is said to be the toughest punishment for a prisoner. After one month in the small cell, Zheng reports that “I nearly lost my sight and could not walk steadily without leaning toward the wall.”
Xu described the movement to quit the CCP as a “spiritual awakening movement” that had been initiated by the publication of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party by The Epoch Times.
He also related how more and more Chinese people who are seeking admission to the United States are using a certificate given certifying that they have quit the CCP as evidence that they are eligible to immigrate to the United States (members of the Communist Party are not allowed to immigrate to the United States).
The tour features a truck that carries slogans on both sides. In addition to Chicago, the truck tour will visit Milwaukee and Madison in Wisconsin; Minneapolis; Des Moines; Kansas City, Kansas; St. Louis; Springfield, Illinois; Indianapolis; Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, and Toledo, Ohio; and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Zheng summed up the hopes that animate those on the tour, “Let’s bury the CCP, this destructive force to the entire human race, once and for all!”