Speech by Lizhi He - Human Rights Torch Relay

Remarks delivered by Lizhi He
Kingston Human Rights Torch Relay
Sunday, May 18

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen,

I am a Falun Gong practitioner from Toronto. Two months ago I started to work in the beautiful city of Kingston. This is one more reason why I would like to share my story with you today.

I used to be a senior structural engineer with the Ministry of Construction in China, working in the examination center for professional engineers. I also received an award of excellence as an engineer for good performance and my project won a gold medal for national engineering design. As a Falun Gong practitioner since 1995, I strive to be a good person following the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance.

However, disaster befell upon me on July 21, 2000. Several strong guys claiming to be State Security Agents who forced me into a car suddenly broke into my office. My office and home were ransacked and then I was sent to a detention center and held in a gloomy dark cell. I was arrested because I sent personal letters in an effort to clarify the truth about Falun Gong to my fellow engineers and friends before I was about to move to Canada. I did not realize that I was followed, monitored, videotaped in the post office.

I was deprived of communication with anybody and thus became a missing person to all my family and friends, including my coworkers. For a whole month, my wife didn’t know what had happened to me and where I was. She was not allowed to visit me in prison until seven months later when I was tortured so severely, close to the point of death, and then I was moved to a prison hospital. The inhuman torture almost ruined my health and everyday I felt faint and struggling for life, with ongoing high fever for months, coughing blood, urinating blood along with my breathing capacity being considerably reduced. The X-rays were unable to show a clear image of my lungs. I was doing heavy exhaustive slave labor in the field and I was shocked with 30,000-volt electric batons.

I was only just one of tens of millions of Chinese citizens whose right to belief in Falun Dafa was illegally banned since July 1999. Out of envy of the enormous popularity of Falun Gong during the first 7 years of its inception in 1992--with practitioners outnumbering the membership of the Communist Party—Jiang Zemin, the then head of CCP, initiated the persecution. According to a speech taped on video that I was once forced to watch, the Head of the CCP's Religion Administration Bureau stated that, the "ultimate objective" of Communism is to eliminate religion from the earth and wipe out the concept of Gods from the human mind. And the current policy on religious affairs in China is to minimize any spiritual believers until they totally vanish and all become atheists. This official speaker disclosed that to reach their goal, in the past 50 years of ruling China, the communist party invited all previous religious leaders to Beijing from provincial areas and granted them high official ranks and leisurely lives; to relentlessly suppress those who aren't submissive; enforce atheist education into the school system at a very young age and force future generations to abandon their beliefs. By all these insidious means, the communist regime has transformed all the existing religious groups into its political components.

From this revelation, it is not difficult to understand why the Dalai Lama fled China and what the Tibetans have been suffering and there is no question that this is why there are "Approved" or "Official" religious groups in China and why the independent Christians or family churches are persecuted. The enormous popularity of Falun Gong with their uncompromising adherence to the principles of "Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance"--rather than communist ideology--showed the regime's spiritual suppression to be an utter failure.

Thus Falun Gong was targeted by the Communist regime as a top enemy. The persecution of Falun Gong is not only an issue of human rights abuses, but one of anti-humanity and genocide. This genocide is different from other cases known to the world. It is characterized by two evil extremities: massive live organ harvesting - the new form of evil on this planet as concluded in the investigation by Mr. David Kilgour and David Matas - and extensive destruction of human conscience and spirit.

In China, the Communist regime formed the 610 office, a superstructure nationwide controlling the media and legal system dedicated to eliminate Falun Gong. Anyone practicing Falun Gong can be arbitrarily abducted into a “brainwashing class”, detention center, labor camp, mental hospital, jail, or other unknown secret places funded by the regime and where the state machinery is authorized to torture, kill, or even murder via live organ removal. All the brutalities are aimed at a forced denunciation of practitioners’ beliefs. All the brutalities are targeting their beliefs and conscience. While practitioners were abducted and sent to mental hospitals and injected with drugs to destroy their nerves, there were also a national team composed of psychological researchers investigating the means used to destroy the practitioners' spirit and make them totally submissive physically, mentally, and spiritually. This is how all the hard-to-believe and beyond-imagination atrocities have come to light. In the prison, a police official and a communist party branch head said with shameless complacency "I know what I am doing now but, as long as the CCP rules China, I will never fear of going to hell regardless of whatever I have done." Such a statement makes it brazenly clear how the evil communism turns a human being into a merciless murderer.

I was imprisoned for 1278 days and suffered tremendously. I eventually survived the torture but many of us were killed. Still hundreds of thousands were jailed. Countless are still homeless or missing. Unknown huge numbers were killed through crimes of live organ harvesting.

The Olympics was supposed to help China's human rights condition, however, it has only been exploited by the regime to posture itself and to justify its crimes against humanity. I still remember that during my imprisonment, every time in the past years when the regime escaped the condemnation of human rights abuses by failing the resolution on China in Geneva, the state media would celebrate this national triumph. All the prisoners were forced to write a statement that China had the very best human rights conditions and that all the criticisms were groundless which thus again had been evidenced by the failure of an anti-China resolution. Imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners were forced to write that being jailed was a salvation by the communist regime, and the international community supported the crackdown on Falun Gong. The Olympics has been greatly abused thus far.

As a structural engineer, I may know more than others about the seismic design of buildings. This very realization caused me much pain when I see how so many students were simply buried by the disastrous earthquake in Sichuan on May 12. The gruesome pictures revealed that there was no required minimum reinforcement seen from the collapsed building components. It is really shocking but not surprising that the government office buildings stayed upright. How much would be needed to offer students safer buildings that satisfied the seismic design code? Merely a tiny bit of the 50 billion USD spent on the regime's image engineering of the Beijing Olympics.

Let's see what the regime - who assume the identity of the Chinese government - is doing around the earthquake.

Days before the earthquake, it was appeasing the "rumor" from local regions that there would be an earthquake coming soon - in order to maintain the so-called societal stability and harmonious environment for the Beijing Olympics.

After the earthquake, during the critical rescue period, the help from professional rescue expert teams from foreign countries was denied - every Chinese know the reason, which is for fear of revealing the real damage to the outside world.

Without immediate action to save victims, what on earth is the regime exactly doing while the earthquake caught the heart of the entire world.

In Beijng, a new round of desperate arrests of Falun Gong practitioners is going on unabated. 23 friends known to fellow practitioners in Toronto have been confirmed arrested within the first three days of the mass arrests -including Ouyang Wen, a female practitioner and former colleague of my previous workplace when I was abducted in the year of 2000.

The earthquake is disastrous and the communist regime is at the root of all disasters. Simply because of the Olympics, the regime has gone crazy committing more and more crimes as part of a pre-Olympic white wash. It must be stopped and as all bad things must come to an end--the regime is no exception. Let raise the human rights torch high and move on. Peace and justice will prevail.

Thank you.