When Cheng Xiongying, a recent immigrant to the United States, saw a parade would be held in Brooklyn to celebrate the 420 million people who have quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its affiliated organizations, he rushed over to attend.
“I just quit the Party today, too,” he told a reporter for the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times.
Mr. Cheng wasn’t alone—other viewers of the parade on Oct. 15 told reporters they had quit the CCP, too.
Mr. Cheng had long ago joined the Communist Youth League as a student in China, but he had a change of heart when students began rallying for liberal democracy in China in the late 1980s. That movement ended with the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which students were brutally killed by the CCP.
Before the parade started, Mr. Cheng met practitioners of Falun Gong, who helped him file his withdrawal from the CCP.
“From the Cultural Revolution to today, the CCP has persecuted so many people,” Mr. Cheng said. “Coming to the United States, this place is filled with sunshine and freedom. This is impossible in China.”
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that was made public in China in 1992. Before the end of the decade, an estimated 70 million to 100 million people in China were practicing Falun Gong. It teaches the three principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance and incorporates five meditative exercises.
Yet in 1999, then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin launched a widespread campaign to “eradicate” the practice. Followers of the spiritual discipline were kidnapped, detained in concentration camps, tortured, and even killed for their organs. The persecution has been widely documented by international human rights groups and media such as The Epoch Times.
The parade in Brooklyn was led by Falun Gong practitioners from the New York area carrying flags and banners and incorporated a marching band and other festivities. The parade participants called for an end to the 24 years of persecution of Falun Gong by the CCP and raised awareness about “quitting the party,” or what’s known in Chinese as the Tuidang movement (EndCCP.com), which has seen more than 420 million people renounce the CCP after understanding the atrocities that it has committed since its inception.
Yi Rong, president of the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP, told NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times, that the fact that 420 million people have withdrawn from the CCP is significant.
“The CCP is about to collapse,” she said. “We hope this message can inspire more Chinese people to join the wave of quitting the Party, and the CCP can be swept into the garbage heap of history.”
Jin Defu, who also recently came to the United States, said he used to be brainwashed by the CCP until just a year ago.
In 2022, he used Freegate, a software program developed by Falun Gong practitioners to bypass the CCP’s firewall, and landed on The Epoch Times.
After that, he was inspired to read “Zhuan Falun,” the main text of Falun Gong. Everyone in China knows that the book is banned by the CCP, so he felt that he had to read it in secret, he said. But once he read it, he felt it changed him.
“My mental outlook is much better than before, and my body is also better than before,” Mr. Jin said. “I used to have a short temper and liked to fight with others. After picking up Falun Gong, my mentality has changed and I’m even-tempered.
“The Communist Party has not done a single good thing since it stole power.”
The realization inspired him to try to find a way to withdraw from the CCP and leave China, and he said he hoped all Chinese people would read the “Nine Commentaries” and quit the CCP.
