Upholding Justice in the Face of Threats and Intimidation

(Minghui.org) Since June this year, Li Taotao (alias) has been receiving phone calls from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s national security police at around 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m.

Li, who is in his early 20s and came from a northern city in China, is currently studying in the U.S. Earlier this year, he had posted some comments criticizing the CCP on the Internet in his real name. Two weeks later, the local national security police in his hometown started to frequently summon his parents to the police station, forcing them to talk with their son on WeChat and urge him to stop posting such comments. The police joined in the WeChat calls too. They sometimes called Li on their own. The head of the local domestic security division once called Li and tried to force him to work as an informer for the CCP.

Li's parents' passports were recently confiscated by the police.

But despite the threats, Li shared his story with Voice of America.

The CCP’s surveillance, harassment, and intimidation of overseas dissidents is no longer news, and from time to time, one would hear that someone is being tailed, receiving death threats, or his or her family members are being implicated. This year alone, Voice of America has interviewed at least five Chinese students studying in the United States and Australia, including Li, whose parents in China are facing threats from the authorities.

Ji Jiabao, a law student at the University of Wisconsin in the United States, said that police from Tianjin domestic security division had repeatedly asked his parents to “have tea” with them and threatened to make them unemployed if their son failed to delete online comments to promote democracy in China.

Before Li and Ji, in 2018, Gu Yi and Wu Lebao, who were studying in the United States and Australia respectively, also revealed similar situations to overseas media.

The above individuals' parents are not the only ones being “kidnapped” by the CCP in its attempts to achieve its goal of silencing people. The term “kidnapping” usually refers to criminal acts by thugs who take hostages by violence, coercion and other forcible means, and then try to extort money or political benefits from the victims' families or institutions, even governments. If a regime unscrupulously “kidnaps” innocent people and restricts their personal freedom via the state apparatus, with no regard for legal procedures, then such conduct would not be tolerated by today’s civilized society. However, this is exactly how the CCP functions.

Over the years, the CCP has “kidnapped” a large number of dissidents, including human rights lawyers, people from minority ethnic groups, religious believers and Falun Gong practitioners. The CCP has gone so far as to “kidnap” medical doctor Li Wenliang, who rightly warned his professional colleagues about the suspicious “Wuhan pneumonia” and sent out a prevention alert regarding the deadly virus infection. Dr. Li was officially reprimanded for warning about the coronavirus outbreak and later died of the disease.

Since the CCP came to power in China 71 years ago, it has continuously used atheism and all kinds of fallacies to brainwash the Chinese people, such as “there are ‘anti-China forces’ overseas,” “to love China, one must first love the party (CCP)”, “loving the party is being patriotic” and so on and so forth. Under such coercive brainwashing, the Chinese people are unwittingly kidnapped and totally controlled and manipulated by the CCP.

Fed with the “Party culture” from birth, the Chinese people have learned to “trim their sail to the wind” to protect their personal interests. They are reluctant to express any opinions not consistent with the Party line. Their fear for the CCP also prevents them from making courageous choices in the face of good and evil.

Chapter 18 of the book How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World points out: “The CCP is not a political party or regime in the normal sense. It does not represent the Chinese people. It represents the communist specter. To associate with the CCP is to associate with the devil. To be friendly with the CCP is to appease the devil, aid it, and play a role in pushing humanity toward destruction. Conversely, to push back against the CCP is to engage in the battle between good and evil. This is not a simple matter of countries fighting over national interests. It is a battle for the future of humanity.”

The CCP has always treated the Chinese people as puppets, and it is now also threatening the safety and well-being of other countries. The free world headed by the United States is pushing back against the CCP. At such a historical moment, overseas Chinese students and various Chinese organizations need to choose wisely between good and evil to avoid being held accountable when the time comes to seek justice against the CCP.

Just recently, the U.S. Department of State added the National Association for China’s Peaceful Reunification (NACPU) to its growing list of Chinese “foreign missions,” after calling out a few Chinese media and the “Confucius Institutes.”

Upholding justice and defying totalitarian power are the fundamental defense against such gangsters and bullies. In particular, we must not be afraid of the CCP's savageness on the surface. Only by upholding justice and standing up to the intimidation can we break free from the CCP’s kidnapping and its evil claws and bullying, and walk towards a bright future.

We applaud Li Taotao’s courage for standing up against the CCP’s authoritarianism intimidation.