NEW YORK—In the years before leaving China, Chen Weijie relished writing one message more than any other. On rocks, benches, and bridges, he left his pen mark visible everywhere:
“Falun Dafa is good. Truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance is good.”
But he found this to be “the right thing to do—and sorely needed.”
“I know Falun Gong is what the CCP fears the most,” the 35-year-old said at a rally on April 21 marking the 25th anniversary of the Zhongnanhai appeal, a peaceful demonstration by Falun Gong practitioners outside the CCP’s leadership compound in Beijing. That demonstration, spurred by the communist regime’s rising actions to suppress the group, took place months before the regime unleashed a full-scale persecution that has now killed thousands by conservative estimates.
“Whatever the CCP fears the most, this is what I want to do,” Mr. Chen said.
“The CCP is the world’s biggest crime syndicate,” Mr. Chen told The Epoch Times, noting that he cried when watching videos shedding light on the regime’s state-sponsored killing-for-organs scheme, known as forced organ harvesting.
Mr. Chen was one of more than a dozen speakers at the April 21 rally in New York City’s Flushing neighborhood, the city’s largest Chinatown. The anniversary event also celebrates the Tuidang movement, the grassroots efforts among the Chinese community to draw a line between them and the regime by withdrawing from its affiliated organizations. These include the Communist Youth League and the Young Pioneers, which the Chinese people are made to join during various stages of life, often under peer pressure or in the hope of career advancement.
The tally of people who have participated in the movement, using real names or aliases, is now approaching 430 million, according to the New York-based Tuidang Center, the host of the rally as well as an earlier parade.
“The CCP’s very existence is a threat to the whole world,” said Falun Gong adherent Chen Jingyu.
Her 55-year-old sister Chen Jinghui was arrested in March in Changchun, China, for her faith, leaving no one to care for their parents, who are in their 80s.
Speaking at the April 21 rally, Martha Flores-Vazquez, a Democratic district leader from Queens, said she has gotten emotional each time she has attended an event raising awareness about the persecution of Falun Gong.
“I’m not crying because I’m happy, I’m crying because we need to end the persecution. It needs to stop—families are divided, organs are harvested while people are alive,” she said in her speech, thanking the hundreds of Falun Gong adherents in the crowd for their perseverance and strength.
“I have never in my life met individuals as strong and as courageous as you are.”
Cecilia Crowley, managing director at investment company Newcomb and Associates, described those who withdrew from the CCP as “warriors.”
“They’re actually fighting against any ideology that they were born into,” she told The Epoch Times.
“It’s almost like the fish swimming upstream. But they’re peaceful warriors. They’re not trying to hurt anyone. They’re just trying to live in a truthful way. Who could hurt truth, or who could hate truth?”
In the rally, she drew a distinction between China’s ruling regime and the “beauty and splendor of China and her traditional culture.”
“The oppressive influence that seeks to eliminate truth is only 75 years old,” Ms. Crowley said.
Her husband, Fred Newcomb, honorary chairman for the World Human Accountability Organization of the United Nations, echoed her sentiment.
“Whether [in] China, the United States, or countries around the world, the celebration against tyranny and oppression is always well founded and deserved,” he said in a speech.
What they are doing, he said, is in line with the spirit of America, a country founded by people who thirsted for freedom.
“I’m a citizen of a country that goes around the world fighting for other countries, putting the lives of our soldiers on the line, people who die for us and those countries,“ Mr. Newcomb told The Epoch Times. ”I think I feel fairly strongly about it.”
Gong Kai, who narrowly survived the now-abandoned “one child policy” as a third child, credited a software developed by Falun Gong practitioners for allowing Chinese people to circumvent the regime’s “Great Firewall.” He said the software, called Freegate, helped him to open his eyes to the free world while he was in college. By using the tool to get past the internet censorship, he saw that he had been “living in a fake world” for 20 years, he said.
When he was watching a video version of the Nine Commentaries in his college dorm, he said his eight other roommates dropped their video games and joined him. After finishing it, they stopped participating in the Communist Youth League activities and Party ideology classes, according to Mr. Gong.
Cai Yuanxing, a retired public servant who had worked at a Chinese state firm, formally renounced his 21-year Party membership in a pre-written speech.
“A Chinese saying goes that ‘everyone gives a shove to a falling wall,’” he said. “I want to be a part of this, to push down the CCP.”
It’s telling that communist leader Xi Jinping has made reference in recent years to breaking through the “cyclical nature of history”—the rise and fall of rulers, Mr. Cai said.
The regime leader saw that “the Communist Party is falling,” he said.
“It’s in a panic,” Mr. Cai said. “The Communist Party is very weak now. All that’s left is the last straw.”
