This speech was given at the forum "A Closer Look into China: Nine Commentaries Triggers Mass Resignations from the CCP" held Friday, July 22 at the National Press Club at Washington, D.C.
That was a very kind story to share. It was incredible though and I remember I had Members of Parliament who came up to me the day after that happened and they said, and I am sure you all know and can relate this so much better because you know people that suffer in a much greater way than me getting a finger poked in my chest and told to leave, and he said, “You imagine if that is what the People’s Republic of China does to you in the House of Commons, in West Block, in the area where you work, you imagine what they do to their own people back home.” And you know that.
I’d like to, first off, thank you all for this tremendous opportunity, I have been involved with Falun Gong practitioners ever since I first got elected. What first heightened my awareness was I remember a story that was in the Natural Review, and it talked about Falun Gong having about 100 million people who were practitioners, followers, supporters, etc, around the world. Of course the Chinese Communist Party having maybe 50-60 million people, hopefully the number continues to go down, of people who are supporters of it, in China. And that that was probably the single biggest reason why the Chinese Communist Party was repressing Falun Gong, was because it enjoyed so much broad support amongst the Chinese people and ex-patriot community around the world, and they feared anything outside the Communist Party having some sort of level of support.
So that was the first thing that really kind of caught my attention and then immediately thereafter when I saw some Falun Gong practitioners out on the front lawn of Parliament Hill, I went up to them and embraced them and I said “However I can help you, please let me know.” (applause) And I have been so impressed over the number of years with the tremendous spirit, that Falun Gong practitioners have shown, their good nature, their determination, whether it’s wind, or rain or cold, or what happens to be on the front lawn of Parliament Hill if they stage a demonstration they are there, and they make sure they carry it out and its tremendous to see.
I’d like to talk a little bit, I know Congressmen Tancredo talked about looking in to China, like him I have to claim some of you have greater insights than mine. But I give this: I have read some bit of ancient history in preparation for the debates Canada had on changes to the definition of marriage, and I would like to relate some of what I see from that. I think that a society has to have something that feeds its soul. It has to have, you know, we commonly talk to it, or speak of it as religion, spirituality, a moral underpinning, a reason, a belief system, something that ennobles it, and gives purpose to people’s lives. Something that speaks to the truth, that explains the truth and something that is eternal. I think those are very important for any society.
And I feel that under Communism, not just in China, but anywhere, what it does is it rips that away from a society. And you look at what has happened, over the last 56 years in China that way and you see that, a destruction of the soul, a destruction of a moral underpinning and a compass to the society. You look today at China and nobody, well few, I think, actually really believe in the original tenets set out by Mao. In the ideas of equality, in any of these what are supposedly the actual communist ideals. I mean now it is all about getting rich, it is all about abusing power, it’s all about position, it’s all about station, it’s all about preservation of the status quo, it doesn’t have any the original intent, so in a sense, whatever belief system was there has been supplanted.
And I would argue that in a lot ways China has actually made a transition from a communist country to being a fascist country. It’s taken a clumsy engine that is communism and replaced it with all of the state control, all of the authoritarianism, all of the oppression, all of the violence and everything else, but it, you know it, it has lost, in some respects its original sense of purpose.
Now, I’d like to talk about some of the contrasts, you know a government that is legitimate versus a government that is corrupt. And we see that today in China, it doesn’t have a legitimate source of support form the people, ‘course its not democratically elected, it doesn’t allow for freedom of speech, it doesn’t allow for open debate, and consent in various things. And what happens eventually is that as it loses its sense of legitimacy, and it no longer has its moral underpinnings, its ethics, etc.
You know the police are a function of the society, they are merely a reflection of the society they serve. And as things become more and more corrupt, it’s kind of a downward spiral. And what winds up happening is you know, it’s kind of an old Roman question, “ Who guards the guards?” And what you wind up happening is, you know police take bribes, they commit all sorts of atrocities against their citizens, even people who live on their streets. You know you look at the well-documented cases of Falun Gong practitioners who are starved, and beaten, and mistreated, and it’s, unfortunately these things only get worse. If the society doesn’t correct itself these things only get worse.
Another contrast I would like to draw is that between creativity versus force. When something is truly productive and truly good, and nourishing to a society and has a generative quality to it, they recognize it as creativity and many people will flock to it because it feeds them in some way. When it no longer has any form nourishment, when it no longer feeds, when it no longer gives, then in a sense it maintains its order, its control, its presence, its place through force. And if you look that today, I mean, it is written all over what goes on in Communist China today. You see the thousands of well-documented human rights abuses that go on and obviously its force, it’s that compulsion.
You know I think of my mothers’ stories because she comes from behind the Iron Curtain, in what was formerly the East block, controlled by the Soviet Union in many ways. And she said as a little girl growing up you know, you didn’t like communism because you knew how corrosive it was. She said as a little girl you were told “you have to draw” pictures of Marx and Lenin for the May Day parades, and if you didn’t it was going to be taken against you and your grades would be diminished despite the fact that she was a bright student. And she said “Just those little niggling factors of kind of corruption and corrosion and oppression and that type of thing, compounded and led to a dislike amongst the population for that oppression.” She talked about how kids would gather in the cemeteries because that was where the police often wouldn’t go. I mean, people don’t like generally gathering in cemeteries, but because people didn’t really go there, that’s where the kids went. And they would turn on radios and listen to radio from the West, because they could pick up stories. She’s got some touching stories.
Another contrast I would like to draw is that between the power of the pen and the power of the sword. And what is going on right now in China, there is no, in a sense, drawing on the power of the pen. If you think originally, with Mao of course he used the sword, but still there were people who believed in the Red Book, people who believed in Mao’s writings. I would say today, even though some of them may talk about these things and may go through the rote and the rehearsal of some of the sayings and whatnot, actually fundamentally deep down I think fewer and fewer of them really believe in these things. And that’s where it has lost in a sense, the power of the pen now it is just of the sword, now its only the what can be imposed by the power that stems from the end of a gun barrel, end of the barrel of the gun as Mao also said, domination, threats, fear, intimidation, torture, pain public loudspeakers, all these types of things. I’ll also draw the distinction, once again, between honey versus vinegar. I look at the Falun Gong practitioners and how you are drawn to what nourishes you, to what gives you a sense of purpose, a sense of internal peace in your lives.
You know one of the things they tried to do very early on in Communist China was, when they recognized things were having problems, internal dissentions, things weren’t quite working they decided to take a Great Leap Forward. And what that was, was an attempt, in a sense, to jump to the future, because people were losing faith with the present under the communist system, so they said don’t worry about the present, don’t worry about the problems we have right now, instead we are going to take you to a new society—trust me. It is going to be better, is going to be different, it is going to be special, we have never done it before, we are going to break our traditions with the past, we are going to reform our language, we are going to do all these things. But it’s going to be a great leap forward. And of course, you know, that never works, because the reason you have traditions, and heritage, and history and all of these things, is because those things work, they tie you to who you are and what you are as a people. What he was trying to do was say forget the past, that worked, forget the present that is being undermined, and we are going to make a great leap forward to the future. And of course, that didn’t work and now they are turning to nationalism and various things to try to whip that up. Well what does it mean for the future?
We have in Communist China what is a very rigid response. You have these changes that are happening, people are resigning their memberships in the communist party, which is wonderful to hear about. And I embrace Epoch Times and all of these groups like Falun Gong and whatnot for being a part of that. And I deeply, deeply appreciate what you do to send those messages to those people who suffer under that oppression and I know that some of you have family members who are probably in that scenario and my heart goes out to you.
The fundamental choice that Communist China is making is that it is responding to it in an inflexible, rigid way. What that means is it’s building up pressure inside that society, it’s like a pressure cooker. When, for example, I think of my family’s experience, when East Germans flooded into Hungary to be able to get themselves across the border into the West, the Hungarians said “let them go.” And that allowed for a more peaceful change of government in Hungary. When the food riots were starting to happen in East Germany and they decided, you know, we are not going to roll out the tanks, we are not going to suppress the people, we are just going to let them go and if they start ripping down the wall, then they start ripping down the wall. It made for a somewhat more peaceful transition.
And now you look at the other side of what happened in Eastern Europe, you look at Romania and Chowchesku, and there they intensified the secret police. They brought out, you know, their tanks and their guns, they suppressed people, they did everything they possibly could to hang onto the last vestiges of power. And it created that pressure cooker situation, unlike what happened in East Germany where you saw Germans venting as they ripped down the wall with pick-axes. Instead it created this pressure cooker and it lead to a violent overthrow of the government in Romania.
And China, unfortunately, is choosing that path. It’s very sad. They could allow for these changes, they could allow for the students to vent in Tiananmen, they could allow for people within the Communist party to take up memberships, I should not say memberships, but to support a spiritual practice like Falun Gong. They could allow these things to have, in a sense, a flowering, and change within Chinese society for it to happen naturally and to evolve that way. But they are not letting that happen, and that is very sad: because it means a lot of negativity; it means a lot of destruction; it means a lot of pent up anger and rage and frustration and venom and poison and all these types of things and that’s very sad to see. I wanted to be able share that and then, I don’t know how much time I have left or how time is running, but I would like to share a couple of personal stories, if I may.
You know, you all know well what is going on inside China, but I would like to give you a perspective of what is happening in Canada. I was at a forum a little smaller than this one, but it was with regard to the Nine Commentaries and the effect that it had. And there was a lady in the audience who came to speak, actually she didn’t come to speak, she came to just observe really. She wore dark sunglasses and she wore a large brimmed hat, and she didn’t want to be identified and she was very scared. And after I shared my feelings about communism and what had happened to my family in Eastern Europe, how they took our horses and granaries and nationalized these things and murdered my great grandmother and all these types of things during the communist revolution in 1917, and various other people shared their stories. She felt emboldened to come up and she kind up crept up to one of the microphones, like you have at the side of the room here, and she was hiding her face. She said, I want to tell you about something that happening here in Canada and she said I wanted my children to be able to learn traditional Chinese characters, so she said, I took them down to a school here that was well know for teaching traditional Chinese. And she said, but the Chinese Communists have infiltrated the school here in Ottawa, she said they are changing the characters so that it’s the representation of the changes that Mao made to the language in the 1950s. And she said, that is not the Chinese I want my children to learn, I want them to be able to learn about the traditional culture. And she says but I can’t do that even here in Ottawa, Canada because they are infiltrating the press, the Chinese press, they are infiltrating the Chinese language schools, etc. She says, they are doing everything they can to get rid of any representations of the China that was before them. And she was scared and she was trembling at the microphone, and she said I am scared to be here, I am afraid they are going to be black listing me that somehow they are going to find out about me, that they are going to harm my family, whatever vestiges of them are back in mainland China, etc.
But that just gives one example of what is happening, not just with inside China, but what the missions, the consulates, the embassies of the People’s Republic are being used and abused for overseas. Another story, we had a young man who came to me, who was a practitioner of Falun Gong and he talked about his business associates in Canada who had been approached by representatives of the People’s Republic China, by the embassy officials, the same who had poked and prodded me, those same types of people, wearing their little lapel pins from the embassy. And they went and they interfered with his business deals, they met with his compatriots, with people who he was doing negotiations with, conducting contracts with and they said this guy is a bad guy, his family is under criminal charges back in China, you shouldn’t be involved in business with him, he is an embarrassment, you should leave him, you know, etc.
And of course, that is what they were doing. They were destroying his business contacts, they were ruining his relationships in Canada, and they were, in fact, arresting and oppressing his family back in China. But it was because he was a Falun Gong practitioner. And then I think of another young man who was invited inside the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa. He was supposed to be there for what was supposed to be a fairly benign celebration, you know a New Years type thing, and what they did is they pulled him aside, they shoved him inside a room, they beat him, they twisted his arm, they assaulted him, on Canadian soil. So, I wanted to tell you about what I see, as the internal problems that China is facing as a result of its oppression repression and its attempt to thwart Falun Gong and various other aspects of spirituality and freedom internally. But also to give you a perspective of what I see happening in Canada, and I, for example, have been asking for our government to change its foreign policy in relation to this, and I applaud those in the U.S. that advocate the same, that when it comes to trade status you have to tie that to human rights, that is the only way they understand these things, you can‘t reward the oppressors.
Also, in the last few years Canada was giving $55 million a year in aid to China. Well, you know, when you’ve got a government that is using that aid in some way to aid its space programs, or its ballistic missiles, or its weapons of mass destruction and various things, once again you can’t aid that oppression. If you do, you’re turning a blind eye. I remember, I’ll wrap up maybe with a story that I think it was Alexander Solzenitzen gave and that was that, when Western leaders would, in a sense, go through an operation or talk about détente with the Soviet Union, he said it was very demoralizing for the people inside the Soviet Union who were suffering the oppression, the people who the dissenters and in jail, and he said it robbed them of their soul, and their spirit, and their drive, and their morale. He said but when Ronald Reagan actually, called the Soviet Union an evil empire, he said even when Pravda couldn’t change those words, and that message came through the tapping of the pipes in prison. They wept, somebody cared. (applause) And that, my friends, is why you and Falun Gong and the Epoch Times are so, so valuable: you let those people know that you care and you stand with them. Thank you.
This talk was given by Rob Anders at the forum "A Closer Look into China: Nine Commentaries Triggers Mass Resignations from the CCP" held Friday, July 22 at the National Press Club at Washington, D.C. Rob Anders has been a member of Canada’s Parliament since 1997. His time in Parliament has been marked by his staunch defence of human rights. His official bio mentions that he has sponsored and participated in many events protesting the Chinese government’s occupation of Tibet, brutal repression of Falun Gong practitioners, and military intimidation of Taiwan.
Feeds