When one group stands up and simply says, “No” to being suppressed, what effect does that have on a country long ruled by an authoritarian, communist regime?
“It’s huge,” says Tang Baiqiao, a veteran Chinese democracy activist. Tang was a student leader during the Tiananmen movement in 1989 and has been active since then. A change has taken place over the last several years because of a movement begun by practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that has been persecuted in China since 1999. That movement is called Tuidang, or “Quit the Party.”
“In the past people wanted to change specific policies of the CCP. Now it’s different,” says Tang. “Now people want it to just scram, step down from power. Fast. Tuidang shows people a very good way to do something. It’s a nonviolent form of resistance.”
The Tuidang movement began late in 2004, soon after the publication by The Epoch Times of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, known as jiuping in Chinese, first as an editorial series and then as a book.
Participants in Tuidang can use their real names or a pseudonym to declare their renunciation of the Party. Often Tuidang participants are not formal Party members, but they can add their names to the rolls of renouncers all the same. Nearly all Chinese people born after 1949 were inducted into both the Young Pioneers and the Youth League, communist mass organizations that penetrate society and disseminate Party dogma. Tuidang calls on Chinese people to cut their ties from those affiliations.
According to the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP, over 120 million people have renounced any affiliation with the Party.
“Tuidang is about noncooperation and resistance to the CCP’s violent rule. Just like the spirit of Gandhi’s resistance movement was nonviolent noncooperation. This is what Tuidang is for China. But so many dissident groups in China were cooperating with the CCP. Tuidang was the first movement that fundamentally changed the way people thought about their relationship to the CCP: completely cutting their ties from it,” said Tang Baiqiao.
Tang thinks it will eventually lead to the democratization of China.
