Rally Marks 20 Million Quitting CCP, Offers Hope for End of Persecution

NEW YORK, NY — Falun Dafa Information Center representatives were among a dozen speakers featured in a New York City rally Sunday meant to show solidarity with the 20-million-plus persons in china who have now publicly quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its affiliated organizations.

“There are many in the world who believe the CCP has changed, and it’s not the same Party that killed tens of millions of its own citizens during political purges between the 1950’s and 1970’s,” said Information Center spokesperson Levi Browde. “However, the persecution of Falun Gong in China that has raged on for the past seven years tells a very different story… that the CCP is still very, very much the same.”

Browde was one of a dozen speakers to address a crowd of thousands who braved near-freezing temperatures, and at times snow, yesterday in New York City’s Union Square. “China’s Communist regime has imprisoned millions of Falun Gong adherents,” Browde told the crowd, “holding tens of thousands in concentration camp-like facilities where vital organs are taking from living people and used to fuel a booming organ transplant business… this is a regime that is no longer fit to rule… a Party that should not exist.”

European Parliament Vice-President Mr. Edward McMillan-Scott was called in from his home in the UK to address the rally. McMillan-Scott is the longest-serving member of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and founder of the $160 million EU Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights — which funds the International Criminal Court (ICC). McMillan-Scott visited Beijing in April 2006 to investigate human rights abuses there and has strenuously raised the cases of Falun Gong victims of the Beijing regime with the EU, UN, and other bodies. McMillan-Scott told Sound of Hope radio last week that the names of those responsible for crimes against humanity in China are being collected for an eventual ICC trial.

Also among the speakers were Wang Jun, Chairman of the China Democracy Party World Union, Tang Baiqiao, Director of the China Alliance for Peace and Democracy and John Nania, Editor-in-Chief of the Epoch Times, English Edition.

Known as “Tuidang” in Chinese (literally translated as “Quit(ing) the Party” or “Quit(ing) the Gang”), the grassroots movement was set off in 2005 by the publication of a nine-part essay series, entitled Nine Commentaries on the [Chinese] Communist Party. The series was authored and run by the Epoch Times newspaper. The Commentaries offer a searing look at the CCP’s legacy, and detail the political campaigns waged by the CCP since coming to power in 1949 and which have left more than 80 million dead. (Commentaries full text) The persecution of Falun Gong is discussed at length in the Commentaries. Between 20,000 and 30,000 people are said to be publicly divorcing themselves from the CCP each day.