Persecution of Faith-Based Groups in China

The following speech was given by Sen Nieh, the co-founder and director of the Global Coalition for ByeCCP, in Stockholm, Sweden. The title of the seminar was "Communism and Human Rights in China"

Orjavascript:images("col_IMAGE_ID") IMAGE_IDganizers included the Chinese Overseas Democracy Coalition, The Epoch Times, the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, and the International Society for Human Rights.

Thank you, Seminar Moderator, for having me here today to speak on the subject of “Persecution of the Faith-based Groups in China” along with many distinguished speakers.

Introduction

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 ruling 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 time of speech allocated to me today, I only plan to touch very briefly on the persecution of each group, and provide a summary and a new message.

Why Persecution?

China has been one of the four ancient civilizations in the world, and is the only one existing until this modern day. 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.

Originated from Europe, the philosophy of CCP completely contradicts Chinese culture and belief. CCP believes in atheism, namely no God, no Buddha, no Tao, and no supernatural beings. Furthermore, it runs wild in defying the Tao and assaulting heavenly principles (wu-fa-wu-tian, or in Chinese: 無法無天). In their eyes, the faith-based groups are major obstacles to CCP’s pursuit of dictatorship and a challenge to the legitimacy of its ruling.

Eradicating Traditional Religions and Belief Systems

Ever since the CCP has overthrown the Republic of China and established the government of the Peoples’ Republic 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), the traditional religions, belief systems, and all other remaining faith-based groups experienced the darkest time and the greatest catastrophic destruction.

For example, a typical incident for Buddhism: 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, CCP had a special way to destroy religions, namely sending the underground CCP members to infiltrate religion directly and subvert in from within. In mid-1970, the Vice President of the Buddhist Association in China, Mr. Zhao Puchu (趙樸初), was found to be a CCP member, an atheist and not a believer of Buddha Shakyamuni.

Persecution of Christians

Since CCP attained the 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 CCP over Christ, and to actively join in the war fighting against U.S.A in Korea. The top leader of the 3-Self Church, Mr. Wu Yaozong (吳耀宗), 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, CCP has 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 for fighting and killing. Various groups of Christians, Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, etc. in China were largely disintegrated under violent suppression of 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 millions 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 by the CCP. Since July 1999, the CCP, led by the former Head 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”.

(The following example is taken from Ch. 5 of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party)

Ms. Zhang Fuzhen (張付珍), 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 and she denied. 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.

Ms. Zhang was only one out of hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners who suffered the most evil, cruel and weird methods of torture. Eyewitness reports describe cruel beatings resulting in broken off ears, crushed eyeballs, gaped open flesh, torn skin, amputated arms and broken teeth, skull, spine and ribcage. 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.

For the first 2.5 years since July 1999, the inside information from a government source confirmed 7,000 plus deaths in detention centers, forced labour camps, prisons, and mental hospitals, which is an average of 7 deaths per day. (i.e, during today’s seminar of 4 hours, there will be another death by torture of a Falun Gong practitioner in China). This on-going persecution has directly affected 100 million people and indirectly affected 300 plus millions (or a quarter of the polulation). Millions of families were broken, adults were wandering and suffering on the streets (to escape arrest), children and senior citizens left unattended at home, and hardship and tragedies continued. According to Falun Dafa website Clearwisdom, confirmed deaths with detailed information of torture reached 2,500 in June 2005, which represented only the tip of an iceberg. The actual count is believed to be 10 times more.

http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/special_column/death_cases/death_list.html

Summary of Persecution of Faith-Based Groups

Let me summarize the situation of the persecution of faith-based groups in China. The 56 years of CCP history of ruling is pretty much written with blood and lies. The stories behind its bloody history are both 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 kills 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 post 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 the Heaven, and teach their followers to harmonize with the society and other people with compassion or benevolence. They all, from different perspectives, help to uplift or maintain morality and save souls. 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. What CCP has done in this past half century in China proves itself a matured evil cult with military power.

What can we do?>The Epoch Times published the remarkable series of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, it revealed, for the first time, the uncensored historical facts and crimes of the CCP, including the atrocities on faith-based communities in China. As more and more Chinese awakened to their conscience from the deception and poisons of the CCP, people will free their minds from its evil control, free themselves from the shackles of terror, and support the basic rights and freedom of the faith-based communities in China.

For us, it is no longer a matter of just tell how bad and sad the story of persecution was. 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 the genuine freedom for the people of faith-based groups in China.

Thank you.

Mr. Sen Nieh has been a professor at The Catholic University of America, Washington DC since 1983. He is the co-founder and director of the Global Coalition for ByeCCP. Professor Nieh is an expert on the subject of religious practices in China. He is a commended speaker on topics of persecution of faith-based groups in China.

Prof. Nieh received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published 70 scientific papers and 8 patents of invention. He has received the lectureship award of United Nations’ Development Program and honorary professorship awards from 3 universities in China. http://www.ByeCCP.org.