Chinese Protesters

Chinese protesters in town

09.01.2006

By LAUREL STOWELL A GROUP of New Zealand Chinese want to tell Kiwis about the hidden activities of the all-powerful Chinese Communist Party. About 20 travelled to Wanganui on Saturday afternoon to spread the message. They were Chinese from Auckland, Wellington and Palmerston North, and they brought banners, photographs and newsletters and marched in Victoria Ave. Shirley Shao and John Yu live in Auckland and were among those who came. Ms Shao is a reporter for the Chinese version of the international Epoch Times newspaper, and both are also practitioners of Falun Gong. Ms Shao said people had been resigning from the Chinese Communist Party at the rate of 20,000 to 30,000 a day since November last year, when her paper published its Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.

Mr Yu said the party had been responsible for the deaths of 80 million Chinese over the past 56 years. Between 1959 and 1961 40 million died of starvation. They were prevented from leaving their provinces to look for food elsewhere. Death and torture were still happening, the protesters said, and they hoped defections from the party would eventually cause its collapse and a new democratic era in China. Nearly seven million people had resigned so far, leaving about 60 million party members. They had made their statements using false names, in order to avoid persecution. But they had provided genuine contact details to the paper. There was an “unwritten law” against resigning from the party, and people’s lives were endangered if their withdrawal became known. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had banned Falun Gong in July 1999, Ms Shao said. Falun Gong was not a religion, more a practice of exercise and meditation. But it did promote truth, compassion and forbearance. It was completely free, with no donations asked for. It had nothing equivalent to a place of worship and didn’t worship any being. The demonstration in Wanganui showed photographs of Christians and Falun Gong practitioners being tortured. Members of Falun Gong numbered 100 million. They had been taken to detention centres, had their bank accounts closed, been fined, lost their jobs, lost their entitlement to education and worse. Ms Shao said her practice of Falun Gong endangered her relatives still in China. She had mailed one piece of paper about the practice to her parents, who were retired university professors. “They didn’t receive it. Then one day they were asked to go to the police station, and told their daughter in New Zealand was practicing Falun Gong. They were asked to renounce the practice, and told they would immediately be taken to a detention centre for 15 days if they refused.” Their telephone was tapped, and they were afraid to tell their daughter what had happened, but her son was able to pass on the message when he returned to New Zealand after visiting them. Mr Yu said he had personally been tortured for his Falun Gong practice while on a visit home to China in late 1999. He was hit with a plastic bar and kicked by police in his northern home town of Harbin – with the police wearing their hard winter boots. Two of the other practitioners he travelled with were subjected to electric shocks. In China the CCP had absolute power, the two said. It controlled the media, there were no elections and it didn’t allow other parties to grow their membership.

wanganui chronicle