Sunday, May 18, 2008

Speech by Lizhi He - Human Rights Torch Relay

Remarks delivered by Lizhi He
Kingston Human Rights Torch Relay
Sunday, May 18

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen,

I am a Falun Gong practitioner from Toronto. Two months ago I started to work in the beautiful city of Kingston. This is one more reason why I would like to share my story with you today.

I used to be a senior structural engineer with the Ministry of Construction in China, working in the examination center for professional engineers. I also received an award of excellence as an engineer for good performance and my project won a gold medal for national engineering design. As a Falun Gong practitioner since 1995, I strive to be a good person following the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance.

However, disaster befell upon me on July 21, 2000. Several strong guys claiming to be State Security Agents who forced me into a car suddenly broke into my office. My office and home were ransacked and then I was sent to a detention center and held in a gloomy dark cell. I was arrested because I sent personal letters in an effort to clarify the truth about Falun Gong to my fellow engineers and friends before I was about to move to Canada. I did not realize that I was followed, monitored, videotaped in the post office.

I was deprived of communication with anybody and thus became a missing person to all my family and friends, including my coworkers. For a whole month, my wife didn’t know what had happened to me and where I was. She was not allowed to visit me in prison until seven months later when I was tortured so severely, close to the point of death, and then I was moved to a prison hospital. The inhuman torture almost ruined my health and everyday I felt faint and struggling for life, with ongoing high fever for months, coughing blood, urinating blood along with my breathing capacity being considerably reduced. The X-rays were unable to show a clear image of my lungs. I was doing heavy exhaustive slave labor in the field and I was shocked with 30,000-volt electric batons.

I was only just one of tens of millions of Chinese citizens whose right to belief in Falun Dafa was illegally banned since July 1999. Out of envy of the enormous popularity of Falun Gong during the first 7 years of its inception in 1992--with practitioners outnumbering the membership of the Communist Party—Jiang Zemin, the then head of CCP, initiated the persecution. According to a speech taped on video that I was once forced to watch, the Head of the CCP's Religion Administration Bureau stated that, the "ultimate objective" of Communism is to eliminate religion from the earth and wipe out the concept of Gods from the human mind. And the current policy on religious affairs in China is to minimize any spiritual believers until they totally vanish and all become atheists. This official speaker disclosed that to reach their goal, in the past 50 years of ruling China, the communist party invited all previous religious leaders to Beijing from provincial areas and granted them high official ranks and leisurely lives; to relentlessly suppress those who aren't submissive; enforce atheist education into the school system at a very young age and force future generations to abandon their beliefs. By all these insidious means, the communist regime has transformed all the existing religious groups into its political components.

From this revelation, it is not difficult to understand why the Dalai Lama fled China and what the Tibetans have been suffering and there is no question that this is why there are "Approved" or "Official" religious groups in China and why the independent Christians or family churches are persecuted. The enormous popularity of Falun Gong with their uncompromising adherence to the principles of "Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance"--rather than communist ideology--showed the regime's spiritual suppression to be an utter failure.

Thus Falun Gong was targeted by the Communist regime as a top enemy. The persecution of Falun Gong is not only an issue of human rights abuses, but one of anti-humanity and genocide. This genocide is different from other cases known to the world. It is characterized by two evil extremities: massive live organ harvesting - the new form of evil on this planet as concluded in the investigation by Mr. David Kilgour and David Matas - and extensive destruction of human conscience and spirit.

In China, the Communist regime formed the 610 office, a superstructure nationwide controlling the media and legal system dedicated to eliminate Falun Gong. Anyone practicing Falun Gong can be arbitrarily abducted into a “brainwashing class”, detention center, labor camp, mental hospital, jail, or other unknown secret places funded by the regime and where the state machinery is authorized to torture, kill, or even murder via live organ removal. All the brutalities are aimed at a forced denunciation of practitioners’ beliefs. All the brutalities are targeting their beliefs and conscience. While practitioners were abducted and sent to mental hospitals and injected with drugs to destroy their nerves, there were also a national team composed of psychological researchers investigating the means used to destroy the practitioners' spirit and make them totally submissive physically, mentally, and spiritually. This is how all the hard-to-believe and beyond-imagination atrocities have come to light. In the prison, a police official and a communist party branch head said with shameless complacency "I know what I am doing now but, as long as the CCP rules China, I will never fear of going to hell regardless of whatever I have done." Such a statement makes it brazenly clear how the evil communism turns a human being into a merciless murderer.

I was imprisoned for 1278 days and suffered tremendously. I eventually survived the torture but many of us were killed. Still hundreds of thousands were jailed. Countless are still homeless or missing. Unknown huge numbers were killed through crimes of live organ harvesting.

The Olympics was supposed to help China's human rights condition, however, it has only been exploited by the regime to posture itself and to justify its crimes against humanity. I still remember that during my imprisonment, every time in the past years when the regime escaped the condemnation of human rights abuses by failing the resolution on China in Geneva, the state media would celebrate this national triumph. All the prisoners were forced to write a statement that China had the very best human rights conditions and that all the criticisms were groundless which thus again had been evidenced by the failure of an anti-China resolution. Imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners were forced to write that being jailed was a salvation by the communist regime, and the international community supported the crackdown on Falun Gong. The Olympics has been greatly abused thus far.

As a structural engineer, I may know more than others about the seismic design of buildings. This very realization caused me much pain when I see how so many students were simply buried by the disastrous earthquake in Sichuan on May 12. The gruesome pictures revealed that there was no required minimum reinforcement seen from the collapsed building components. It is really shocking but not surprising that the government office buildings stayed upright. How much would be needed to offer students safer buildings that satisfied the seismic design code? Merely a tiny bit of the 50 billion USD spent on the regime's image engineering of the Beijing Olympics.

Let's see what the regime - who assume the identity of the Chinese government - is doing around the earthquake.

Days before the earthquake, it was appeasing the "rumor" from local regions that there would be an earthquake coming soon - in order to maintain the so-called societal stability and harmonious environment for the Beijing Olympics.

After the earthquake, during the critical rescue period, the help from professional rescue expert teams from foreign countries was denied - every Chinese know the reason, which is for fear of revealing the real damage to the outside world.

Without immediate action to save victims, what on earth is the regime exactly doing while the earthquake caught the heart of the entire world.

In Beijng, a new round of desperate arrests of Falun Gong practitioners is going on unabated. 23 friends known to fellow practitioners in Toronto have been confirmed arrested within the first three days of the mass arrests -including Ouyang Wen, a female practitioner and former colleague of my previous workplace when I was abducted in the year of 2000.

The earthquake is disastrous and the communist regime is at the root of all disasters. Simply because of the Olympics, the regime has gone crazy committing more and more crimes as part of a pre-Olympic white wash. It must be stopped and as all bad things must come to an end--the regime is no exception. Let raise the human rights torch high and move on. Peace and justice will prevail.

Thank you.

OLYMPIC WATCH: Human Rights in China and Beijing 2008

17 comments:

tiamhdha ailin le brun said...

it's great to find this blog. i added you to my friends list :) tiamhdha.wordpress.com

Anonymous said...

What shame.
Fa Lung Gongs believe that they must practice and practice their ways until one day they will have a ball inside themselves. This will protect them from dieing, and they will be super natural.

1st of all, what a act of cowardiness, afraid to die? Its NATURE!

2nd of all, What the hell, come on? There has been ZERO (0) Official Fa Lung Gong that have actually became supernatural human unable to die.

3rd of all, China is doing the best it can, unless you give China the chance how can it improve itself.

Yes, human rights is an issue in China but you have exageratted it to an extent that the world will believe china beats on it's OWN BROTHERS AND SISTERS everyday. Which is not TRUE!
People are still living, their lives becoming better. They have good food to eat, they can walk around just like Canadians or Americans. They can watch TV. They can do most that the "1st world nation" is doing.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
MaKina said...

Patriot,

Maybe you don't know that the teachings of Falung Gong are very scientific and most people don't understand them the first time they read them anyhow--I can tell by your reaction that you are confused. But your making a joke of the teachings is not quite right. The Falun Gong are not afraid of dying, on the contrary they choose to die rather than giving up their belief in Truth,Compassion and Tolerance. The minghui website is full of testimonies similar to that of Lizhi He. The murderous regime uses more than 100 Stalinist torture methods on them.

Check this report on live organ harvesting from Falun Gong and see for yourself--the killing of Falun Gong has gone unchecked for 9 years. And this is the country that will host the Olympics! How can this be allowed?

http://www.organharvesting.org

Food and shelter only constitute a small percentage of basic human rights - what true human rights are made of is:

Freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

In China, the rich gets all the rights and 1 billion people get no civil and political rights and are poorer than a church mouse. They live on $1 per day.

For a country with a strong military arsenal and elaborate space program, and one of the strongest economy on the globe, it is hardly a 3rd world country.

If China was to stop killing its own people for their religious beliefs and respect the poor, it would gain the respect of the outside world. Until then, China is still considered the 'sick man of Asia' in my book. And that's putting it mildly.

MaKina said...

Thanks Tiamhdha!

Anonymous said...

What do you mean freedom to practice religion? I know how you think that China disallowed Fa Lung Gongs, but do you know what they did to China?
Plus, most people think China banned buddahism, that is not true. Every (most) Chinese people have at least gone to a monastery to pray for good fortunes and the well-being of loved ones. I'm sure the president and prime minister pray every week.
What China and no one likes are people who are too obsessed with religion. My grandmother was buddhast but she was also a doctor. If your going to believe in something at least contribute to the world also. The monks that are in Tibet show a great deal of culture and religion but there musn't be too much. Can you imagine having the whole population praying everyday and not doing daily work to sustain life. (e.g. farming, constructing, getting food and water, and nowadays economic growth) I mean what will happen to a place like that? China pays for these monks to survive. Do you actually think the monks grow their own food? Believe it or not, when I visited a monstary I saw couple of the "da she" (big leaders) driving BMWs... Wonder where the money came from...

Anyways trust me, live in China for 10 years and you won't find that human rights are a major problem in China.

Anonymous said...

To your comment on how 1 billion people are as poor as a church mouse. Funny stuff but no, that's not true.
Add up the people living in the big cities and you'll find it'll add up to more than 300million like you said about the middle class. Let's name a few big cities so that you can get the idea: Shang hai, Bei jing, Hong Kong, Xi'an, Hai'er Bing, LaSa, Chengdu (love the food there), Kweng Ming, Nan Jing, Xia Meng, Tian Jing, Tai Bei (remember Taiwan still lists itself as Republic of China), Ching Dao, etc. Remember that all these cities are larger than Toronto and Montreal combined in population.
You might think that people living in counties and towns are poor but they are earning more money than a man working at Wal-Mart would earn. I have family in many of the undeveloped area, believe me, houses are being built and sold so fast even though it costs more than $3000RMB for a square meter! So for you saying that 1 billion people are living for $1 a day, is just (sorry for language) BULLSHIT!

MaKina said...

P.
It's up to you to believe what you want to believe, but tons of human rights reports have documented that the Communist Party torture the Falun Gong for their beliefs - a people that is kind and innoffensive. All the lies have people believing that they are a cult, when they are not. Dictators use that tactic to justify the killing of people they hate--that's called genocide in the west. Plus it is well documented by rights advocates the world over that close to 1 billion peasants make less that $1/day in China.

For people to still believe the lies of the Communist Party is shameful but not you're fault really, because they get people brainwashed with daily propaganda to the point that Nationalists are starting to attack Falun Gong in broad daylight for raising awareness to the persecution. The Nationalists get paid $90 for doing that. Just check the other posts about that on this blog. Beijing's long arm of lawlessness is at work in more ways than one and it should be stopped. The world's most powerful dictatorship is going a bit too far with the repression inside China and abroad.

Anonymous said...

Your right about people living on $1 per day, but its not 1 billion people though.I personnally think its 300million people. I
agree with you that China has problems but they aren't that bad. The government is trying to handle 1.35 billion people, so give them a break.
What nationality are you Makina? And why do you tend to focus so much on China? I mean there's so many other countries, why China?

If your going to be biased, at least tell some of the other side too. Because if you don't, then your a hypocryte. You say that China brainwashs its people but aren't you doing the same thing to your audience by having a 100% biased site?
Thanks for your time and I appreciate you helping China with its problems but making China look bad isn't going to help. It'll just make China even more mad and make freedom of speech even harder.
Please I ask you a favour, can you at least award the Chinese army, the PLA for saving so many men and women from the earthquake wrecks. They walked for a day to reach the non accesible areas, they starved and not rested for 3 days. Spare some humanity.

MaKina said...

I love China and all its people and I feel I want to be their voice because they have none - no free speech. It's the regime that abuses and the corruption of the Chinese Communist Party that I don't agree with. The tyrannical grip is beyond belief - read again the speech from Lizhi He. That truth has to come up for the sake of the precious people of China.

If you just want to keep on believing the lies of the Party, go right ahead. More people are seeing that the Party is just interested in its public image.

But we know in the free world that Beijing has waited up to 5 days before the army was sent out to rescue the people - the civilians got there first - which was a critical time for the survivors. A lot of lives were lost. And then the regime ignore the alert that the earthquake was going to hit Sichuan 2 days before it did. Countless lives could have been lost because the Party chose to ignore the scientific facts - so please let's get our information straight before we glorify the party.

Anonymous said...

What's so bad about Communism? It's not like the people in democracy actually get what they want from the lies of the presidental or prime minister runners.
The PLA dispatched 50,000 troops 5 hours after from Cheng Du, exactly 20km away from the hardest hit areas.
Yes countless lives could have been saved but I didn't ask you to glorify the party, I asked you to glorify the army. Not the army in general, but the each and individual restless soldiers that rescued day and night with their bare hands. They each carried 40 pounds of rice up the mountain into counties. They piggybacked the old and fed the young. The amazing 14 parachauters that risked their life on a cloudy day to get to the area so that food, water and medicine could be dropped.

Anonymous said...

And to the people who think that China permitted help from other nations late it was because:
There is a major military base in an area near the earthquake. It stores one of the largest masses of ammunitions and weapons of all of China. This military base also contains a space launching research center. All of China's space programs are developed here and the rockets are launched here as well.
So to put all of the future safety of the whole 1.3 billion people in China in the hands of other countries, NO COUNTRY WOULD DO SUCH A THING!

MaKina said...

In 1989, the regime deployed 300,000 soldiers to shoot about 3000 freedom loving students at TAM, and for this earthquake, which is one of the worst disaters, they deployed only 50,000 and the worst hit area only got aid 5 days later. Do you see where the caring of the party really is?

Also most of the buildings and schools that were flatened were not up to standards - more corruption - while the government buildings are still standing upright and untouched.

There is a serious problem of misinformation in China, and I can tell that it's not your fault because Xinhua will only reveal the government propaganda anyway to its people. It's not real news and it only serves one purpose - to glorify the party and the army.

This is not to say that there are not a lot of kind souls who are trying their best to fix a disaster that could have been avoided had the Party alerted its people of the major earthquake and secured the buildings.

The Party has the world richest economy - it can afford to pay for its natural disasters. Only a few countries can - but yet they are taking money from others. Shame on the Communist Party.

MaKina said...

The soldiers don't have the expertise for rescue -- the civilians were the ones that need to be praised.

Choppers were limited on the first few critical days - drops of food and water was all smashed and unusable according to testimonies.

And on top of that Beijing refused the expert rescue teams from other countries to save their own people in that critical period of time. Most survivors had died by the time they finally agreed to let them in the country.

This is the way that the Communist Party cares for its people!

Anonymous said...

The total deployment of troops, medical staff and police is 135,000. Mind you that the police aren't there to fight, they are there to help.
Aid could not reach the hardest hit areas because along a fault line there will always be mountains. Same in Sichuan. Heavy rain(it always rains after earthquakes) for 2 days caused large landslides and made visibility through the mountains to almost 0.
5 small teams each having about 200 men set off a day after the earthquake but heavy machinery were blocked because of cracked and completely destroyed roads. These 200 men walked! for a day, no sleep no rest through the mud and the rocks, in the mountain and along the flooding rivers. It's still a miracle how they reached there in less than a day walking...

Anonymous said...

"And on top of that Beijing refused the expert rescue teams from other countries to save their own people in that critical period of time. Most survivors had died by the time they finally agreed to let them in the country." - Makina

The Russian team only saved a total of 1 life, the Japanese 3, South Korean none reported, Singaporean none reported.
These 4 teams are all great people and I greatly thank their effort. I deeply believe they tried their hardest but China knows that no one is going to survive after a week in rubble so therefore the British response team, Canadian DART, and other countries were cancelled.

MaKina said...

I know the soldiers have to do what they're told. And they are trained under the worst conditions, but they didn't have the expertise to deal with the situation apparently. Civilians were able to do more on their own.

The priorities of the Party are again off - sending 300,000 soldiers to attack peaceful students in 1989 and only 100,000+ on the scene of the worst disasters, and refusing help during the critical time, and not acting on alert warnings makes the losses countless and unforgivable. It's criminal negligence.

The mandate of heaven dictates that such disasters precede the fall of the dynasty - of the communist party.

Nice conversing with you and this is all I have to contribute on this topic.