NEW YORK—Chinese entrepreneur Chen Quanhong had one message he wanted to tell to the world: “Tuidang.”
It’s a Chinese phrase—and it means “quit the Party.”
The words were emblazoned on a yellow flag Chen was carrying at a parade in Washington on July 21 to highlight the Chinese communist regime’s myriad human rights abuses.
Chen is now one of 400 million Chinese who have renounced their ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its affiliate organizations.
In June, the business owner from China’s eastern Shandong Province made a statement formally breaking his ties with the Party, participating in a nearly two-decades-long grassroots movement that has sought to expose the communist regime’s history of deceit and killing, and give people an opportunity to disassociate from the entity.
“In China, I was no different from a worm trampled upon by the authoritarian power, not daring to stir a bit,” Chen told The Epoch Times. “Only when I came to America did I begin to feel like a person, because finally there’s no fear from the communist party.”
The Washington parade was the first one of its kind Chen had joined in his 50-plus years of life. It came ahead of a major milestone for the Tuidang movement: 400 million people renouncing their Party affiliations. The number tipped over that mark on Aug. 3.
“400 million—this number is greater than some countries’ entire population,” Yi Rong, the president of the Global Tuidang Center in Flushing, New York, told The Epoch Times. “With such a large group abandoning the CCP and steering clear from its crimes, it will spur a positive change in Chinese society.”
As more people join the quest for freedom, a “new China” free of communist control appears ever closer to reality, she added.
Dark Memories
The Party’s history of killing during its ruling of China has left generations of families broken and scarred, including Chen’s own.
Chen’s mother was about 21 or 22 when she lost her mother during the Great Famine, a manmade disaster from 1959 to 1961 resulting from then-CCP leader Mao Zedong’s industrial policies which saw tens of millions die of starvation.
Driven by hunger, Chen’s grandmother and his mother’s 17-year-old sister took about half a sack of mung bean pods from the land the regime had collectivized. After the deed was discovered, the authorities publicly denounced the two and beat them. Chen’s grandmother, blindfolded and surrounded by a group of thugs who punched and slapped her, died about 10 days later.
Dark memories like these, either retold by Chen’s mother in bits and pieces over the years or gleaned through reading into history, helped the businessman see the nature of the Party despite its repeated claim of being the “savior of the people,” he said.
Tuidang Movement
The Tuidang movement began in 2004, spurred by the release of the “Nine Commentaries of the Communist Party,” a book first published by the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times detailing the brutality and deception perpetrated under the totalitarian regime.
Since then, millions of copies of the book have made their way into China. Many who helped distributed these copies were adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline the regime has sought to wipe out with an all-society-wide campaign of arrest, torture, and vilification for the past 23 years and counting.
Falun Gong is a meditation practice consisting of a set of moral beliefs centered around the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Its huge popularity in China during the 1990s—with up to 100 million practicing by 1999—was deemed a threat to the CCP’s authoritarian grip on power.
As a restaurant owner in Shandong, Chen once received informational materials about Falun Gong from two adherents who dined at his establishment, who, he remembered, were “incredibly peaceful and kind.”
Their persistence despite the relentless state suppression awed him then, and again in Flushing, New York City, in July, when he came across a Falun Gong information booth encouraging people to withdraw from the Party and its affiliates.
“I just thought: ‘what kind of people would arrest those who pursue truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance? Definitely not good people,’” he said, citing Falun Gong’s three core values. At Flushing’s Global Tuidang Center, a volunteer gifted him a copy of the Nine Commentaries. He read it three times and knew he no longer wanted to be affiliated with the Party.
