Over ten million people have renounced the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—a landmark for a changing tide of conscience in China, as well as a window into the most populous nation's internal affairs and its relations with the rest of the world.
On Saturday, April 22, over 100 people gathered in Portsmouth Square in San Francisco's Chinatown to celebrate and announce to the world the latest progress of what is known in Chinese as the Tuidang movement, or quitting the [Chinese Communist] Party.
The movement began shortly after the November 2004 publication of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party by The Epoch Times , a series of editorials that exposes the history and nature of the CCP.
Speakers at the rally addressed several concerns, including current and past atrocities in China, as well as trying to open up people's eyes to the true nature of the CCP.
To those in the crowd who still clung to communism, speaker Adam Leining, a volunteer with the World Organization for Human Rights, noted, "Even the Party leaders in China do not believe in communism anymore, and they are looking for a new solution."
This movement of party renunciations is seen as a genuine threat by the party leadership, according to Hao Fengjun, a former police officer who defected from China to Australia last year.
In a speech he made in New Zealand in March, Hao said, "When The Epoch Times published this series of editorials, a website for quitting the CCP was set up. Meanwhile, I was still working for the 610 Office [the agency in charge of persecuting Falun Gong and other groups in China] in the Tianjin police station. At that time, we monitored this website 24 hours a day because there were people quitting the CCP at any moment through the Internet."
He continued, "All those who quit the CCP are sentenced to 3 years in labor camps. At that time, there were nearly 20-30 people arrested every day" in Tianjin. Hao further noted that in China, people can be sent to labor camps without trial.
"If this has had a small impact on the CCP, they would not waste so much effort in monitoring Internet activities all day," Hao said. "The Chinese communist regime is very scared and terrified."
Nine Commentaries' Facts Spark CCP Withdrawals
Youzhi Ma, an editor for the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times , explained in an interview after the rally that the main reason for people quitting the party is "the Nine Commentaries. Once Chinese people read the Nine Commentaries, then they know that it is the truth about the Communist Party, how evil it is, and it also reminds a lot of people what has happened in the history of recent China."
Mr. Ma further explained, "It connects all the facts together and they reach a conclusion of what the Communist Party is, which has been rather detrimental to China and the Chinese culture. That is a natural conclusion for the Chinese people if they can connect everything and get to know what the Communist Party is. And once they know that, then it's also a natural enlightenment that we have to get rid of the Communist Party. Not those people, but the Communist ideology."
One speaker, Eric Huang, an engineering manager in Silicon Valley, explained after the rally how the efforts from those outside of China are helping the Chinese people towards freedom: "We all know the CCP controls China by two means: one is fear and guns, the other is the controlling of information and their propaganda. Right now, we use email, we use faxes, we use telephone calling, and we use Internet breakthrough technology, all sorts of tactics to let the Chinese people know."
Huang added, "I believe that we are already breaking apart its information control and propaganda part, so I think that's good enough. All we have to do is break one leg, and the other leg is not enough to hold up the CCP."
Huang also noted, concerning media coverage of this and other human rights issues in China, that "the controlling interests of the foreign media are balancing, in a sense, how much they can talk about without jeopardizing their business opportunities in China."
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