Lin Yangzheng is a 19-year-old man who decided to become a human rights defender in opposition to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). His online activities caught the attention of the regime, forcing him to flee the country.
The wickedness and cruelty of the CCP is “beyond words,” Mr. Lin said, “The only solution is to join forces and bring them down, ensuring that in the future, no one will fall prey to their tactics,” Mr. Lin told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times about his decision to become an anti-communist activist.
He was born in 2004, in the southern Fuzhou City of China. His father is a writer and his mother is a teacher.
His relatively comfortable life took a downturn in 2018 when the regime banned his father’s book, a fiction based on history during the Republic era of China after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. “He spent about 10 years writing the book, that’s what he’s good at, history,” said Mr. Lin.
However, history from that time is taboo to the CCP.
In 2018, the regime claimed any historical narratives associated with the Republic promote “historical nihilism,” are “harmful to the establishment of a socialist society,” and “oppose Marxism,” according to state propaganda.
Following the ban, the CCP also negated all his father’s previous works. Consequently, the family’s financial situation took a big hit.
Zero-COVID Measures
Around 2020, the strict zero-COVID measures woke him up: “I was locked at home twice, both for more than a month,” he said, the elderly were left at home alone and sick, but he couldn’t even visit them.“It was like the Cultural Revolution when people were treated without any dignity,” said Mr. Lin.
Beijing Bridge Protest
On Oct. 13 last year, a rare protest took place on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge. A banner that read “Let us strike from schools and from work and remove the dictatorial traitor Xi Jinping” excited Mr. Lin.He immediately spread his excitement through the Chinese social media WeChat, especially the idea of “removing Xi.”
However, the act brought a police visit to Mr. Lin. The police took him from his home in the mid-day of Oct. 16, 2022.
At the police station, he was threatened with charges such as “committing the crime of inciting subversion,” and possible “forced disappearance.” He said, “the cruel tactic was to undermine and intimidate my mental resilience.”
He was not released until midnight. “I came to a complete realization of just how oppressive and dictatorial the CCP is,” said Mr. Lin.
For an 18-year-old boy it was an extremely horrifying experience. “I knew if I were to be caught again, I might forever be gone,” he said.
He decided to flee to Thailand with a valid visa and kept his online posting to a very low profile.
Thailand Is Not Safe
“I didn’t know CCP could conduct cross-border arrests of people in Thailand so easily,” he said. Chinese national security called his mother less than a month after he resumed his online activities in Thailand.The national security told his mother that Mr. Lin would be arrested on the charge of “committing the crime of inciting subversion.” Soon after, Mr. Lin found his accounts on Chinese social media such as WeChat, QQ, and Zhihu, were also blocked.
In 2013, state media reported the CCP’s success in catching four Chinese “fugitives” in Thailand during a cross-border arrest campaign in late 2012. Since then, numerous arrests of Chinese dissenters in Thailand have been exposed, including the Swedish publisher Gui Minhai, scholar and co-owner of Causeway Bay Bookstore in Hong Kong.
Seeking Refugee Status
Mr. Lin hoped to seek asylum in Germany, but during a transit flight in Singapore, he changed his plan and took a flight to South Korea.“At the airport in Singapore, they wanted to send us back to China,” he said, believing the airport has much stricter rules in identifying the qualification of Chinese passport holders to Europe.
Through negotiation with the staff at Singapore airport, insisting that going back to China would only subject them to the persecution of the regime, they were finally allowed on the plane to Jeju Island, South Korea.
While in the process of applying for refugee status, Mr. Lin is now focusing on his path to promoting Chinese democracy as a volunteer of a Chinese rights-defending movement, “Evil List Project.”
His volunteer work started when one of his posts in Thailand regarding the detention experience in China was posted on Twitter by Evil List Project, a rights-defending movement initiated by a Netherland-based activist, Lin Shengliang.
Speaking of his determination to strive on the path to oppose CCP, Mr. Lin gave examples of the CCP carrying a heavy burden of historical blood debts.
“In Mao Zedong’s era, there was the Cultural Revolution and the Three Years of Great Famine. The Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 and the ‘100 Days without Children’ campaign (family planning) were debts incurred during Jiang Zemin’s leadership. The present-day blood debts rest on Xi Jinping’s shoulders, encompassing the crackdown in Hong Kong, the Xinjiang concentration camps, the zero-COVID, and the arbitrary detention of dissenting individuals.”
He hopes his anti-CCP efforts will help to wake up innocent Chinese and encourage them to stand up against the regime.
He believes the regime has intentionally confused the Chinese people by conflating the country and the CCP. “Being patriotic is not about being a party-loyalist,” he said, but it’s unfortunate that the brainwashing and propaganda have misled the general public.
“To me, those party loyalists are truly the victims themselves,” stated Mr. Lin.
