Canberra, Australian Parliment house: Australian citizen Jane Dai, with daughter
Fadu, holding a family portrait which includes her husband Cheng Yong Chen who
was killed by the Chinese government for practicing Falun Gong.
Professor Sen Nieh
has been with the Catholic University of America, Washington DC since 1983. He
has received the lectureship award of United Nations’ Development Program
and honorary professorship awards from 3 universities in China. He gave the following
speech at a seminar, “Communism and Human Rights in China,” in Stockholm,
Sweden.
The faith-based groups in China, basically, include religions and
belief systems. The most recognized religions in China include Buddhism of different
sects, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Catholicity, Islam, etc. The belief
systems, or ways of life, include the traditional Confucianism and some qigong
groups made known in recent years, such as Falun Gong.
In the past 56 years
(1949 – 2005) of rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), hundreds of millions
of members of faith-based groups have faced the most serious violations of human
rights and suppression of freedom in Chinese history. The persecution of each
of the aforementioned groups can be a subject for a semester-long college course
and can easily be documented into several volumes of thick reports. With the limited
space allocated I can only touch briefly on the persecution of some of the groups,
and provide a summary and perhaps offer some hope.
Why Persecution?
The
5,000-year long tradition of Chinese culture was primarily based on the “faith”
of people of all walks of life. Confucianism was the part of the traditional Chinese
culture that focused on “entering the mundane world”; Buddhism and Taoism,
on the other hand, represented the part of the traditional Chinese culture that
focused on “leaving the mundane world”.
Influences of Confucianism,
Buddhism, and Taoism have penetrated all aspects of Chinese peoples’ lives
in the past two thousand years. They offer a very stable moral system, ethical
values, and spiritual pursuit. Collectively, they provide the basis for sustainability,
peace, and harmony of the Chinese society.
Originating from Europe, the
philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) completely contradicts traditional
Chinese culture and belief. The CCP believes in atheism, namely no God, no Buddha,
no Tao, and no supernatural beings. In their eyes, the faith-based groups are
major obstacles to this party’s pursuit of dictatorship and a challenge to
the legitimacy of its ruling.
Eradicating Traditional Religions and Belief
Systems
Ever since the CCP took control of China it started to root out
the three traditional religions or belief systems: Confucianism, Buddhism, and
Taoism.
It destroyed temples, burned scriptures, and forced monks and nuns
to return to secular life. By the early 1960s, the three religions or belief systems
were mostly destroyed. During the 10-years of Cultural Revolution (1966 –
1976)
it became even worse, what was left of the traditional religions, belief systems,
and all other remaining faith-based groups experienced the darkest time and the
greatest catastrophic destruction.
For example there were 1,000 beautiful,
colored, glazed Buddha statues in Longevity Hill in the Summer Palace in Beijing
city. During the Cultural Revolution, the “red guards” destroyed them
all, leaving no complete statues.
In addition to physical damages, the
CCP had a special way to destroy religions, namely sending the underground CCP
members to infiltrate religion directly and subvert it from within. In mid-1970,
the Vice-President of the Buddhist Association in China, Mr. Zhao Puchu was found
to be a CCP member, an atheist and not a believer of Buddha Shakyamuni.
Persecution
of Christians
Since the communists gained power in 1949, the Christians
in China were forced to join the so-called “3-Self Church”, to break
away from “imperialism,” to be patriotic to the communist regime over
Christ, and to actively join in the war fighting against the US in Korea. The
top leader of the 3-Self Church, Mr. Wu Yaozong, once stated in public, “I
do not believe in the miracles Jesus had performed. I have discarded them all.”
How can a person, who does not believe in miracles, in heaven, in Jesus Christ,
be a genuine Christian? How can a CCP member serve well as a leader of Christians?
Over the years, the communists in China confiscated tens of thousands of
churches and temples, forced Christians, Catholics, Buddhist monks and nuns, etc.,
to study Communism, Marxism-Leninism, and brain-washed most true believers. In
some areas in China, they even forced nuns to get married and young monks to join
the military. Various groups of Christians, Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, etc.
in China were largely disintegrated under violent suppression by the CCP. Many
leaders were detained, jailed, tortured, or killed; the followers were forced
to return to secular life or turned into “illegal” groups, the so-called
underground House Churches.
According to a recent report of comprehensive
surveys of more than 200 cities in China, it is estimated that there are about
60 million Christians of Underground Churches in China today. Over the half-century
of the CCP’s ruling, 2.7 million (or 1 out of 22) Christians have been arbitrarily
detained, 440,000 plus were sent to the forced labor camps or the so called “re-education”
camps, 1.1 million were fined large sums of money, 20,000 plus were tortured until
permanently injured, and more than 10,000 were persecuted to death.
Persecution
of Falun Gong
During the last decade, many qigong groups were cracked down
upon by the communists in China. Since July 1999, the communist regime led by
the former president Jiang Zemin, started its brutal persecution of a large qigong
group of 100 million practitioners, Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa), which is based
on the belief of “Truth, Compassion, Tolerance”.
[Professor Sen
Nieh then read an excerpt from the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, first
published by The Epoch Times in November 2004].
“Ms. Zhang Fuzhen,
about 38 years old, was an employee of Xianhe Park, Pingdu City, Shandong Province,
China. She went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong in November 2000 and was later
abducted by the authorities.
According to people with knowledge of the case,
the police tortured and humiliated her, stripping her naked and shaving her whole
head. She was asked repeatedly to give up the practice of Falun Gong and her belief
of Truth-Compassion-Tolerance but she refused. They tied her to a bed with her
four limbs stretched out, and she therefore was forced to relieve herself on the
bed. Later, the police gave her an injection of an unknown poisonous drug. After
the injection, Zhang was in so much pain that she nearly went insane. She struggled
in great pain on the bed until she died. The whole process was witnessed by the
local officials of the 6-10 Office (a Gestapo like office created to persecute
Falun Gong practitioners).” [End of excerpt]
Ms. Zhang was only one
out of hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners who have suffered the
cruelest methods of torture. Torture methods include electric shocks with 1 to
10 or more electric batons of 10,000 plus volts, burning with cigarettes; beating
breasts and genital areas, rape and gang-rape of female practitioners, locked-up
in dungeons filled with sewage for days or weeks, wearing straight jackets, injection
of poisonous drugs, confinement in mental hospitals, etc.
This on-going
persecution has directly affected 100 million people and indirectly affected 300
plus millions (or a quarter of the population).
Millions of families were
broken, adults were wandering and suffering on the streets (to escape arrest),
children and senior citizens were left unattended at home as hardships and tragedies
continued. According to reports confirmed deaths with detailed information of
torture reached [2,781 in early September 2005], which represents only the tip
of an iceberg. The actual count is believed to be 10 times more.
Summary
of Persecution of Faith-Based Groups
The stories behind Communist China’s
history are extremely tragic and rarely known to the European society and the
free world. Under the rule of the CCP, 80 million innocent Chinese were killed,
tortured to death, or died of unnatural causes. This number of deaths exceeds
the total deaths in World War I and World War II combined. Since 1949, the CCP
has directly persecuted more than half of the people in China through dozens of
planned political movements. More than 95 percent of the families in China have
immediate family member(s) killed by the CCP. Many people today wonder why the
CCP has killed the Chinese people in such a large scale during the past decades
of “peace” time. Why it continues its on-going brutal persecution of
religions and belief systems in China. Will it stop killing?
According
to the Nine Commentaries, the CCP itself is essentially an “evil cult”.
It has all features of an evil cult. They harm not only people of faith-based
communities in China, but all Chinese, and poses threats to all people in the
world, as discussed extensively in the first half of the seminar. All orthodox
religions and belief systems foster belief in God, Buddha, Tao, or Heaven, and
teach their followers to harmonize with the society and other people with compassion
or benevolence. The CCP’s doctrines, however, are based on animal-like “class
struggles”, violent revolutions, and dictatorship, which are meant to be
full of blood and violence.
However we are now able to see hope–the
hope of a China without communism in the near future, a new China that allows
the freedom of religion, belief, and conscience. Let us stay together, join forces,
and witness the great era of the coming collapse of the evil communism. Let us
put our faith together to welcome genuine freedom for the people of faith-based
groups in China.
Editor’s note: The persecution of faiths by the Communist
Government in China is extensive. It also includes Tibetans practising Buddhism,
the Muslim Uighur people of Xinjiang province and religious observance in Inner
Mongolia. To find out more about the persecution of faiths in China please see
Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, and the US State Department, the
International campaign to save Tibet, and the Falun Dafa Information Center and
also the Lagoai Research Foundation.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-9-13/32265.html
Posting date: 14/Sep/2005
Original article date: 13/Sep/2005
Category:
Media Report
