Annie's Blog: 'Don't Ask'

Read Anne's and blog posts here.

In July 2011, the persecution of Falun Gong will have been ongoing for twelve years. In the first few years, people like me tried hard to explain to our fellow Chinese what Falun Gong really was and how bad the persecution was. But most of the time, the reaction was similar to mine when I first heard my American friends talking about the Tiananmen Massacre. 

When I was in the middle school in China, our history textbook was very thick because China has a long history. But when it came to the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), it was literally one page and a half. It essentially said that the “great, glorious, righteous” Communist Party corrected all the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution, and everything went back on the right track. 

If history is not taught, it will be repeated. 

Thus, at the end of 2004, the Epoch Times, a newspaper founded by Falun Gong practitioners in the United States, began to roll out a series of "Nine Commentaries of the Communist Party," detailing the uncensored historical accounts of the communist party.” You can be sure that that was quite an eye-opening reading even for me.

When I grew up, my parents were always like "Grow up, study well, go to the United States. And DON'T ask." They remember the Cultural Revolution and they knew how bad the Communist Party was. But they did not want to tell me, lest their daughter would develop any sort of "independent" thinking that might cause her trouble.

The "Nine Commentaries" was quite a hit. I remember the Hong Kong office of Epoch Times kept printing the special edition, until it literally ran out of paper. There were lots of tourists from mainland China coming to Hong Kong on a daily basis. People were hungry for information that they could not find inside the Mainland. 

Soon after, the Epoch Times began to receive messages from Chinese people saying they would like to announce that they quit from the communist organizations (the Party, Youth League or Young Pioneers). Thus, the editors at the Epoch Times set up a website for people to post their announcements. The editors always encourage people to use aliases, if they have security concerns. 

As of June 2011, there are more than 96 million Chinese who made the announcement. Though the names they used may not be their real ones, I believe the stories behind the names are real. As you can see, our aim is in changing people's minds, not the regime itself. But I also agree that any kind of change for China has to come from within -- Chinese people need to get access to the real information, then stand up and demand whatever changes they may want.

Strictly speaking, Falun Gong practitioners are not "dissidents" or "political opposition" in the usual sense. This persecution is something imposed upon us. All we are doing is to help end the persecution and help saving lives (like my friends in my hometown). 

Of course, if ending the persecution entails that all Chinese choose to quit from the communist organizations (and stop being an accomplice), and therefore the regime also changes, well, at that point, we really do not mind.