Reason Number 8 - The Godless
Senin, 28 Juli 2008
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‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.’ Excerpt 15.
“One strand of Chinese belief well-exposed in Western media is Falun Gong, which at this date is still totally outlawed. Part cult, part religion, part exercise, the Falun Gong followers fatally attracted attention to themselves when using an internationally recognized method of religious protest -- the non-violent demonstration. The crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999 when members of the group gathered near Zhongnanhai, the residence compound of many of China’s top leaders in Beijing, to protest about perceived unfair treatment. This unified display of political protest outside Party control terrified China’s leaders. Within weeks, China banned the movement with extreme prejudice.
Amnesty International reported soon after that 'Tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been arbitrarily detained by police, some of them repeatedly for short periods, and put under pressure to renounce their beliefs. Many of them are reported to have been tortured or ill-treated in detention. Some practitioners have been detained in psychiatric hospitals. Those who have spoken out publicly about the persecution of practitioners since the ban have suffered harsh reprisals.' It has recently been alleged that many Falun Gong detainees who died in custody had been used to provide organs for transplant through organ harvesting.”
Fear.
Fear. Sheer, pure, fear; fear that at any moment the police might come, that you might be taken off to jail, beaten, tortured.
Fear. Fear that you cannot trust anyone, not your neighbors, not your friends, not even your family members.
Fear. Fear, because the whole of society hates and despises you, views you as an enemy of the state.
Fear. Fear that if anyone knows what you are – who you are – they will inform on you, betray you; and you will become one of the vanished.
Many groups have known this fear at different times in history. Jews. Gypsies. Homosexuals. Intellectuals. A death sentence always waiting, watching, hovering behind you simply because of who you are.
Today, in China, it is followers of Falun Gong who feel this fear.
Sure, Falun Gong is just as berserk as any other religion, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, whatever; it is all a bunch of dark ages fairy tales that impedes human progress. To be religious is to embrace ignorance.
But that is hardly a reason for persecution.
And it is persecution, persecution of the most brutal and horrible kind. And just like being Jewish in 1930s Germany, or a suspected ‘red’ in 1950s America, virtually the whole of Chinese society condones, even approves, the persecution.
This is why Falun Gong followers live a life of silence and terror.
Yet in a nation where telling the truth means prison, means pain, some Falun Gong supporters will talk. Not to their fellow Han, of course, but to people like me – foreigners. Just like the people of Xinjiang, like the Taiwanese, Falun Gong followers can speak the truth to foreigners. They can say what they believe, sure in the knowledge that they will not be informed on, will not be handed over to the police.
They cannot trust their countrymen. The risk is too huge. They cannot say what they are to any Han, no more than a Tibetan can tell a Han ‘Your country invaded mine,’ a Uighur can say ‘You are murdering my culture’ or a Taiwanese can burst into laughter at the preposterous, absurd notion their proud and praiseworthy nation ‘belongs’ to China. But to me – to any foreigner – they can speak clear.
And so I have met several of these despised and persecuted people. Some drew strength from their crazy beliefs, strength enough to leave China, and set up lives in other nations, countries where they get the basic human respect denied to them by the motherland.
I cannot forget one young woman I met, two or three years ago now. This was in a class, of course, and there was something … broken, snapped about her. There was a pallor to her skin, a timidity, a fear to her body language. She seemed too scared to even make eye contact with me, and she did not interact with the other students at all.
It bothered me, worried me. She was always the last to leave the class, sitting at her desk, pallid, passive, until the other students had all gone. So at the end of that course of lessons, I tried to get to know her. And, with the other students away, she began to open up a little – made eye-contact, spoke with a little more conviction.
She had spent a year in a labor camp, she told me, undergoing ‘re-education.’ She’d followed Falun Gong, and the State, with its tentacles, its informers everywhere, had found out. What life was like in the camp she would not say. But she did not need to. It was obvious – obvious from the pain and fear in her demeanor, obvious from her broken, shattered spirit.
Tortured, brutalized, destroyed. That’s what China had done to her. Violence, wrath and anger – and she would never be free, she knew it. China would never let her go. Monitored. Watched. Under surveillance. Made a pariah, an outcast in her own nation. And of course her family, her friends, anyone she talked to – they, too, would come under suspicion from the police, the security services – from guys who would be just as happy working in the Killing Fields as downtown Shanghai.
I wanted to keep in touch with her, wanted to reach out – wanted her to see that not all her fellow humans distrusted her. She gave me her phone number. I tried sending a few messages. Nothing came back.
This was, as I say, two or three years ago. I have never forgotten her. Not least because I now carry my own fear, my own worry. For in sending her even one sms message in English I put her in real danger. The police would have intercepted that message, traced it back to me (for the Chinese state will happily see its poorest starve while spending tens of millions of dollars on the most elaborate surveillance) – and would have persecuted her yet further for it. Talking to a foreigner! That was crime enough to put her right back in the labor camp.
I wonder where she is now. Is she even alive? Has she been put to death, has she taken her own life?
It bothers me.
But I cannot imagine it will bother many of my Han readers.
Fear. Sheer, pure, fear; fear that at any moment the police might come, that you might be taken off to jail, beaten, tortured.
Fear. Fear that you cannot trust anyone, not your neighbors, not your friends, not even your family members.
Fear. Fear, because the whole of society hates and despises you, views you as an enemy of the state.
Fear. Fear that if anyone knows what you are – who you are – they will inform on you, betray you; and you will become one of the vanished.
Many groups have known this fear at different times in history. Jews. Gypsies. Homosexuals. Intellectuals. A death sentence always waiting, watching, hovering behind you simply because of who you are.
Today, in China, it is followers of Falun Gong who feel this fear.
Sure, Falun Gong is just as berserk as any other religion, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, whatever; it is all a bunch of dark ages fairy tales that impedes human progress. To be religious is to embrace ignorance.
But that is hardly a reason for persecution.
And it is persecution, persecution of the most brutal and horrible kind. And just like being Jewish in 1930s Germany, or a suspected ‘red’ in 1950s America, virtually the whole of Chinese society condones, even approves, the persecution.
This is why Falun Gong followers live a life of silence and terror.
Yet in a nation where telling the truth means prison, means pain, some Falun Gong supporters will talk. Not to their fellow Han, of course, but to people like me – foreigners. Just like the people of Xinjiang, like the Taiwanese, Falun Gong followers can speak the truth to foreigners. They can say what they believe, sure in the knowledge that they will not be informed on, will not be handed over to the police.
They cannot trust their countrymen. The risk is too huge. They cannot say what they are to any Han, no more than a Tibetan can tell a Han ‘Your country invaded mine,’ a Uighur can say ‘You are murdering my culture’ or a Taiwanese can burst into laughter at the preposterous, absurd notion their proud and praiseworthy nation ‘belongs’ to China. But to me – to any foreigner – they can speak clear.
And so I have met several of these despised and persecuted people. Some drew strength from their crazy beliefs, strength enough to leave China, and set up lives in other nations, countries where they get the basic human respect denied to them by the motherland.
I cannot forget one young woman I met, two or three years ago now. This was in a class, of course, and there was something … broken, snapped about her. There was a pallor to her skin, a timidity, a fear to her body language. She seemed too scared to even make eye contact with me, and she did not interact with the other students at all.
It bothered me, worried me. She was always the last to leave the class, sitting at her desk, pallid, passive, until the other students had all gone. So at the end of that course of lessons, I tried to get to know her. And, with the other students away, she began to open up a little – made eye-contact, spoke with a little more conviction.
She had spent a year in a labor camp, she told me, undergoing ‘re-education.’ She’d followed Falun Gong, and the State, with its tentacles, its informers everywhere, had found out. What life was like in the camp she would not say. But she did not need to. It was obvious – obvious from the pain and fear in her demeanor, obvious from her broken, shattered spirit.
Tortured, brutalized, destroyed. That’s what China had done to her. Violence, wrath and anger – and she would never be free, she knew it. China would never let her go. Monitored. Watched. Under surveillance. Made a pariah, an outcast in her own nation. And of course her family, her friends, anyone she talked to – they, too, would come under suspicion from the police, the security services – from guys who would be just as happy working in the Killing Fields as downtown Shanghai.
I wanted to keep in touch with her, wanted to reach out – wanted her to see that not all her fellow humans distrusted her. She gave me her phone number. I tried sending a few messages. Nothing came back.
This was, as I say, two or three years ago. I have never forgotten her. Not least because I now carry my own fear, my own worry. For in sending her even one sms message in English I put her in real danger. The police would have intercepted that message, traced it back to me (for the Chinese state will happily see its poorest starve while spending tens of millions of dollars on the most elaborate surveillance) – and would have persecuted her yet further for it. Talking to a foreigner! That was crime enough to put her right back in the labor camp.
I wonder where she is now. Is she even alive? Has she been put to death, has she taken her own life?
It bothers me.
But I cannot imagine it will bother many of my Han readers.
'Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.' Excerpt 16.
‘Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism were ruthlessly suppressed for much of “New China’s” history. Today, however, the Communist Party has begun to embrace Confucius once more, using the philosopher to support its own target of ‘harmony’ – a sort of Confucius dressed in Marxist clothes. A communist Jesus.
What is noticeably absent is the Judeo-Christian ethic of doing good, of helping the less fortunate. In Chinese belief, both ancient and modern, wealth is a sign of heavenly blessings. Even Deng Xiaoping said ‘To get rich is glorious.’ Rather than wealth being seen as a mandate to help the poor, it is viewed as approbation from heaven. The wealthy man is the righteous man, often above reproach, as is demonstrated by the way some wealth-seekers in China disregard public welfare, environmental concerns, and often basic human morality. ‘Glorious’ in China has nothing to do with graceful.
Religion is comfort. That so many lives in China are devoid of comfort only increases the vacuum for the religions of the world to flow into. Although the Party has yet not imagined such a theoretical catastrophe, communism is not one of those religions.’
Not long now. The Olympics will soon be here. So - don't forget, 'T' for Tibet and 'X' for Xinjiang.
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Judul: Reason Number 8 - The Godless
Ditulis oleh Unknown
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