Dissonant Notes: Prisoners of Conscience in China’s ‘Harmonious Society’
- Why did my mother, an innocent and harmless elderly lady, have to suffer this kind of inhumane treatment?
By Jennifer Zeng
November 6, 2018
I escaped from China in 2001, after nearly being tortured to death in Beijing Female Forced Labor Camp for practicing Falun Gong. I was lucky enough to have gained protection from the Australian government two years later. I moved to the United States in 2011 and have been working as a journalist and writer ever since.
People might assume that since I have escaped from Communist China, my nightmare as a victim of Communism has ended long since. But the reality is just the opposite.
As late as October 1, 2018, my 76-year-old mother traveled from Mianyang City in Sichuan Province, China, to Chengdu, and then from Chengdu to Shanghai, a journey over 1,000 miles, to take an airplane from there to the United States to visit me, a journey of 7,300 miles.
Coming to the United States was a very tiring and long trip that my mother had been reluctant to take, as she had just had surgery, and her health was not in good shape. She doesn’t speak any English and traveling alone to America was very challenging.
However, she bravely took up the challenge, as, in both a bitter and sweet way, she regarded this as the last chance she would have to see me in her life. She said she didn’t intend to come again after this visit, as she would be too old and unfit to travel, and she never dared to expect that I could travel back to China to visit her.
Why can’t I go back to China? Because as a Falun Gong practitioner, and an outspoken writer and journalist, I could never, ever get a visa to return since I escaped China in 2001.
For more than 17 years, I have never been able to visit my family in China, not even when my father was dying in the hospital, before he eventually passed away in 2014, without having set sight on me for more than 13 years.
So for my mother, the only way for her to see me is to fly across the ocean to the United States.
But alas! To her astonishment, she was unexpectedly stopped at customs at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, while filled with mixed emotions of excitement, longing, sweetness, and bitterness, and an expectation of seeing me in just 15 hours. She was then told that her passport was revoked by the Public Security Bureau in Mianyang City, before an officer actually destroyed her passport by cutting off two corners of the main page.
No explanations were offered. My mother, a shocked, scared, desperate, helpless, and weeping elderly lady, had to figure out, in the middle of night, at a strange place, how to notify me that she couldn’t come, how to stop her luggage from being flown to the United States, how to get a ticket to fly back to Chengdu, and how to travel back from Chengdu to Mianyang with her big luggage, alone.
More than a month has passed since then, and my mother is still weeping alone at home, too distressed and ashamed to go out and let others know that she was not allowed to travel. Nor dare she go to the Public Security Bureau to ask why they decided to revoke her passport, and without informing her.
My heart was nearly broken when I learned all this. Why did my mother, an innocent and harmless elderly lady, have to suffer this kind of inhumane treatment?
Ever since the persecution of Falun Gong started in 1999, more than 19 years ago, she has had to suffer again and again, bitter, unnecessary, and groundless separations that felt like death, when both my sister and I were thrown into labor camps, when I had to flee China to avoid further persecution, and when my father died in misery after suffering from persecution for more than a decade.
My dear mother had to endure all these for more than 19 years. For more than 19 years, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has never stopped harassing her and forcing her to pressure me in an attempt to silence me.
And now, her last hope of seeing her dear daughter for the last time in her life was so cruelly taken away.
I cry my eyes out whenever I have to write about how much my family members have to suffer because I want to speak the truth.
I was very glad that Vice President Pence specifically mentioned religious freedom in China in his landmark speech on U.S.-China relations on October 4, 2018, but was disappointed that he didn’t mention Falun Gong.
When I was incarcerated and tortured in the Beijing Female Forced Labor Camp from 2000 to 2001, as many as 95 percent of the inmates there were Falun Gong practitioners. The U.S. Department of State and Congressional-Executive Commission on China have cited estimates that as many as half of China’s reeducation-through-labor camp population is made up of Falun Gong practitioners.
The sheer number of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners, and the scale and extent of the persecution, are not the worst part of the story. The most inhuman evil nature of the persecution is that the CCP wants to deprive people’s God-given human dignity and rights to own their own thoughts, free will and beliefs.
In order to force Falun Gong practitioners to give up and even to attack their faith - truthfulness, compassion and tolerance, the main principles they follow in their everyday life - the CCP stops at no evil to destroy people mentally and spiritually.
Apart from targeting the very essence that defines a human being as a human being, the CCP also goes so far as to treat human beings as “commercialized” body parts and organ banks in order to make huge amounts of money.
From 2000 to 2015, the CCP regime is estimated to have performed 60,000 to 100,000 transplants each year, with the bulk of the extracted organs coming from Falun Gong practitioners, according to a 700-page, 2016 report, which exposed in detail China’s lucrative practice of organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
Nobody knows exactly how many have been killed on demand for organ transplants in all these years.
But one thing is sure: after accumulating “experiences” during its 19-year-long persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, the CCP is now “expanding” what it learned to the wider society. That is why we are seeing reeducation camps being set up in Xinjiang Province, and an Orwellian surveillance monitor-and-control system being established in the entire Chinese society, as Vice President Pence mentioned in his speech.
I have been very glad to see that under the leadership of President Trump, the United States is now ready to stand up to defend American interests and values against the CCP regime. And I hope that the one hundred million Falun Gong practitioners and their families in China can also gain moral support and help from the United States and the world.
Humankind once vowed “Never Again”. Unfortunately what is happening in Communist China is no less evil than what happened in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The only difference is, while we cannot do anything about what had already happened in the Nazi concentration camps, we can do something to stop what is still happening in China now on a very large scale.
Please, do extend your hands, as stopping the Communist evil is not only about China, but also about every one of us in the world.
___________________________
Jennifer Zeng is the author of Witnessing History: One Chinese Woman's Fight for Freedom, the subject of a documentary (Free China: The Courage to Believe), and a member of ACAT’s Speakers Bureau
- Why did my mother, an innocent and harmless elderly lady, have to suffer this kind of inhumane treatment?
By Jennifer Zeng
November 6, 2018
I escaped from China in 2001, after nearly being tortured to death in Beijing Female Forced Labor Camp for practicing Falun Gong. I was lucky enough to have gained protection from the Australian government two years later. I moved to the United States in 2011 and have been working as a journalist and writer ever since.
People might assume that since I have escaped from Communist China, my nightmare as a victim of Communism has ended long since. But the reality is just the opposite.
As late as October 1, 2018, my 76-year-old mother traveled from Mianyang City in Sichuan Province, China, to Chengdu, and then from Chengdu to Shanghai, a journey over 1,000 miles, to take an airplane from there to the United States to visit me, a journey of 7,300 miles.
Coming to the United States was a very tiring and long trip that my mother had been reluctant to take, as she had just had surgery, and her health was not in good shape. She doesn’t speak any English and traveling alone to America was very challenging.
However, she bravely took up the challenge, as, in both a bitter and sweet way, she regarded this as the last chance she would have to see me in her life. She said she didn’t intend to come again after this visit, as she would be too old and unfit to travel, and she never dared to expect that I could travel back to China to visit her.
Why can’t I go back to China? Because as a Falun Gong practitioner, and an outspoken writer and journalist, I could never, ever get a visa to return since I escaped China in 2001.
For more than 17 years, I have never been able to visit my family in China, not even when my father was dying in the hospital, before he eventually passed away in 2014, without having set sight on me for more than 13 years.
So for my mother, the only way for her to see me is to fly across the ocean to the United States.
But alas! To her astonishment, she was unexpectedly stopped at customs at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, while filled with mixed emotions of excitement, longing, sweetness, and bitterness, and an expectation of seeing me in just 15 hours. She was then told that her passport was revoked by the Public Security Bureau in Mianyang City, before an officer actually destroyed her passport by cutting off two corners of the main page.
No explanations were offered. My mother, a shocked, scared, desperate, helpless, and weeping elderly lady, had to figure out, in the middle of night, at a strange place, how to notify me that she couldn’t come, how to stop her luggage from being flown to the United States, how to get a ticket to fly back to Chengdu, and how to travel back from Chengdu to Mianyang with her big luggage, alone.
More than a month has passed since then, and my mother is still weeping alone at home, too distressed and ashamed to go out and let others know that she was not allowed to travel. Nor dare she go to the Public Security Bureau to ask why they decided to revoke her passport, and without informing her.
My heart was nearly broken when I learned all this. Why did my mother, an innocent and harmless elderly lady, have to suffer this kind of inhumane treatment?
Ever since the persecution of Falun Gong started in 1999, more than 19 years ago, she has had to suffer again and again, bitter, unnecessary, and groundless separations that felt like death, when both my sister and I were thrown into labor camps, when I had to flee China to avoid further persecution, and when my father died in misery after suffering from persecution for more than a decade.
My dear mother had to endure all these for more than 19 years. For more than 19 years, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has never stopped harassing her and forcing her to pressure me in an attempt to silence me.
And now, her last hope of seeing her dear daughter for the last time in her life was so cruelly taken away.
I cry my eyes out whenever I have to write about how much my family members have to suffer because I want to speak the truth.
I was very glad that Vice President Pence specifically mentioned religious freedom in China in his landmark speech on U.S.-China relations on October 4, 2018, but was disappointed that he didn’t mention Falun Gong.
When I was incarcerated and tortured in the Beijing Female Forced Labor Camp from 2000 to 2001, as many as 95 percent of the inmates there were Falun Gong practitioners. The U.S. Department of State and Congressional-Executive Commission on China have cited estimates that as many as half of China’s reeducation-through-labor camp population is made up of Falun Gong practitioners.
The sheer number of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners, and the scale and extent of the persecution, are not the worst part of the story. The most inhuman evil nature of the persecution is that the CCP wants to deprive people’s God-given human dignity and rights to own their own thoughts, free will and beliefs.
In order to force Falun Gong practitioners to give up and even to attack their faith - truthfulness, compassion and tolerance, the main principles they follow in their everyday life - the CCP stops at no evil to destroy people mentally and spiritually.
Apart from targeting the very essence that defines a human being as a human being, the CCP also goes so far as to treat human beings as “commercialized” body parts and organ banks in order to make huge amounts of money.
From 2000 to 2015, the CCP regime is estimated to have performed 60,000 to 100,000 transplants each year, with the bulk of the extracted organs coming from Falun Gong practitioners, according to a 700-page, 2016 report, which exposed in detail China’s lucrative practice of organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
Nobody knows exactly how many have been killed on demand for organ transplants in all these years.
But one thing is sure: after accumulating “experiences” during its 19-year-long persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, the CCP is now “expanding” what it learned to the wider society. That is why we are seeing reeducation camps being set up in Xinjiang Province, and an Orwellian surveillance monitor-and-control system being established in the entire Chinese society, as Vice President Pence mentioned in his speech.
I have been very glad to see that under the leadership of President Trump, the United States is now ready to stand up to defend American interests and values against the CCP regime. And I hope that the one hundred million Falun Gong practitioners and their families in China can also gain moral support and help from the United States and the world.
Humankind once vowed “Never Again”. Unfortunately what is happening in Communist China is no less evil than what happened in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The only difference is, while we cannot do anything about what had already happened in the Nazi concentration camps, we can do something to stop what is still happening in China now on a very large scale.
Please, do extend your hands, as stopping the Communist evil is not only about China, but also about every one of us in the world.
___________________________
Jennifer Zeng is the author of Witnessing History: One Chinese Woman's Fight for Freedom, the subject of a documentary (Free China: The Courage to Believe), and a member of ACAT’s Speakers Bureau