NEW YORK—For New Yorkers walking on the streets of the city’s largest Chinatown on April 23y, their presence was hard to dismiss.
With lion dancers and a marching band in sky-blue suits leading the way, the 2,000-strong crew marched through the Flushing community. On a float richly decorated with golden tassels, blue-gilded clouds, and large lotus flowers, men and women donning traditional costumes smiled and waved from under a golden tiled rooftop meant to represent a heavenly palace. From time to time, women dressed as traditional Chinese fairies walked by, offering an origami lotus flower from a small wicker basket to passersby.
But cheerful colors and celebration only told part of the story. The annual tradition, going back over a decade ago, commemorates the largest peaceful resistance in China’s recent history seeking religious liberty.
Roughly 23 years ago on April 25, 1999, 10,000 adherents of Falun Gong, a meditation practice featuring the three principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, gathered at the Chinese communist headquarters in Beijing to appeal for the right to exercise their belief without political suppression.
The adherents disbanded quietly that evening after receiving assurances from a top Chinese official that their requests were heard. But the incident proved to be the prelude to a decades-long persecution targeting their belief.
Three months after the event, then Party leader Jiang Zemin initiated a nationwide campaign aiming to eradicate the group. Millions have since been subjected to detention in various facilities, where they faced torture, forced labor, and organ harvesting, according to estimates by Falun Dafa Information Center.
While still targeted by the communist regime in China, the group’s activities abroad have served to raise awareness among the Chinese diaspora about Beijing’s abuses. Saturday’s event in Flushing likewise had the effect.
April, a Chinese expat, seeing the parade for the first time, said the traditional elements of Chinese culture the adherents presented feel very “heart-warming.”
“There’s no way to see this in China,” she told the Chinese language NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times. “No one in China dares to express their thoughts.”
Another Chinese immigrant watching the parade, who gave the name Sunan, said the persecution was one of many egregious abuses that demonstrated the regime to be the “enemy of China.”
“For some people from a society to be willing to stand up and fight for the freedom to be good, what an admirable thing is this? But such an attempt was suppressed,” she told NTD.
The persecution, she said, has suppressed people’s aspiration to be good, and the entire China is bearing the consequences.
“Look at today’s Shanghai, even the freedom to eat is almost gone,” said the woman, who identified herself as Susan, referring to the regime’s draconian lockdown in the financial hub that has caused many in the city struggling to obtain food, supplies, and medical care.
“Freedom is something that if you don’t defend from the beginning, it will crumble at an accelerating pace. In the end, you not only won’t have the right to eat, you won’t even have the right to breathe,” she said.
From The Epoch Times
