In anticipation of Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s planed visit to the U.S. over one hundred people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, September 3 to raise awareness of the four million Chinese people who quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Speakers at the rally, sponsored by The Epoch Times along with the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP, said that the party-quitting movement has had great impact on Chinese politics.
Zhang Hailian, spokesperson for the DC Quitting the CCP service center, explained the communist regime’s response to the mass withdrawals from the Party. He described how the “the Chinese Communist Party[has] tightened its mind control and started a campaign called ’maintaining the advancement nature of the Chinese Communist Party.' They issued new regulations in the military preventing military officers from further quitting the Chinese Communist Party. And they have launched a database of people who quit the CCP.”
He indicated that this database has been used to begin “mass arrests of dissidents who have quit the Chinese Communist Party.” And he interprets these actions as proof that “mass resignation of Chinese Communist Party membership indeed exists in China and that quitting the CCP has spread to the entire society in China.”
Human rights activist Jim Giragosian spoke of mass withdrawals from the CCP in theoretical terms as a three-step process. First, people recognize “that there exist moral principles that go beyond mere political power” and, second, when governmental authority defies these principles “they have not only the right, but the obligation to abandon the political system, and, third this abandonment does not represent a step backward into chaos, but rather a step forward to the development of a more principled society and a happier future.”
Mr. Giragosian cited a long tradition of people following these three steps to seek freedom from oppressive governments: from Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and into a renewed covenant with God, to the Puritan’s immigration to America and later establishment of the guarantee of religious freedom in the United States Constitution.
Wei Jingsheng, president of the Overseas Chinese Democracy Coalition, addressed Hu Jintao’s visit to the United States specifically asking, “What does Hu Jintao expect from this visit to the US?” And going on to explain, “According to the Communist Party’s heritage we can tell that he is expecting to get some support from the United States government to save the Communist Party from imminent collapse. Certainly Hu Jintao has his probable reason for thinking this way because actually the U.S. government saved the Communist government several times, accidentally.”
“In the year 1972 when President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger visited China and actually that visit saved the Communist Party,” he said. “At that time even Mao Zedong himself felt that the Communist Party was going to collapse soon, but that visit from President Nixon and Kissinger saved the Communist Party.”
“In 1979 the Communist Party was going to collapse again in China, but at that time the United States government planned a big welcome ceremony for Deng Xiaoping and that also saved the Communist Party.”
Due to Hurricane Katrina Bush and Hu mutually decided to cancel Hu’s visit to Washington, DC. The two will meet in New York next week when Hu visits the UN for its 60th anniversary on September 14.
