In an interview with the Epoch Times’ Amir Talai, Erping Zhang, a spokesman for the Falun Dafa Information Center, explained why practitioners of Falun Gong stood on street corners in Seattle, Washington D.C., and New York to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping during his first formal visit to the United States in September.
China’s constitution guarantees citizens rights for freedom of association, conscience, and expression, Zhang says. But in July 1999 former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin initiated a brutal persecution of Falun Gong, a peaceful meditation exercise whose practitioners live according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
While current Chinese leader Xi Jinping has abolished the labor camp system where many Falun Gong practitioners were detained, and Falun Gong is now rarely slandered in the state press, Zhang says that Xi needs to go one step further and end the persecution.
If Xi Jinping also dissolves the Communist Party and ends its oppression of the Chinese people, Zhang said, he would “have a legacy that is respected.”
