‘Party Nature’ on Kissena Boulevard
| June 18, 2008 | ||
| By Stephen Gregory/Epoch Times Staff | ||
[Many more articles on this topic are available on the Epoch Times website.] Sometimes a single photo can capture an instant that goes to the heart of complicated events. Such a photo was snapped the week before last. In the photo, a young Chinese mother—you can see her right hand is on a baby carriage—is in distress and appears to be turning for help to the only non-Chinese face in the crowd, a black gentleman who is looking down at her. The instant before this photo was snapped, a group of Chinese men had crowded around her and were shouting insults and curses at her in Chinese. The young mother is a Falun Gong practitioner, and many of the men crowding around her are part of a mob that the Chinese Consul General for New York is known to have encouraged. The photo was taken by Dayin Chen of The Epoch Times on Kissena Boulevard, the main drag of Flushing, a neighborhood in New York City of several hundred thousand people. Since mid-May, the peace of Flushing has been disturbed by organized attempts to intimidate and sometimes physically assault Falun Gong practitioners who have gone there to urge Chinese to withdraw from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Party Nature How could grown men in a time of peace and plenty gather together on a public street to bully an unprotected, young mother pushing her child in a stroller? The Chinese refer to something called “party nature.” Perhaps the most terrifying examples of the power of party nature occurred during the Cultural Revolution, when students would humiliate and torture teachers, and children would inform on their parents. The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party tells a story about Zhou Enlai, a powerful member of the CCP who rose to the rank of premier under Mao Zedong. Upon the death of a comrade whom he was close to, Zhou adopted that man’s daughter as his own. Years later, during the Cultural Revolution, the daughter was publicly criticized. Arrested, she died in jail when a long nail was driven through her skull. In signing his daughter’s arrest warrant, Zhou had shown “good” party nature. Someone demonstrates party nature when he or she puts the Party ahead of anything else—such as a father’s love for his daughter From the beginning, the CCP has put its own survival ahead of all other concerns. Through terror and indoctrination the Party has made what it wants become absolute, transcending humanity. Terror isolates the individual so that survival is understood to depend on pleasing the Party. And indoctrination establishes the mental habit of believing to be true what the Party says is true, no matter what one’s own judgment might suggest. This decades-long habit of mind that is party nature still clings to the Chinese people. It blocks them from being able to see things clearly and sometimes involves them in doing evil, such as the harassment of the young mother on Kissena Boulevard. Humanity Reasserts Itself But the men surrounding the young mother in the photo are shown to have fallen silent when she cried out. Perhaps a sense of shame at what they were doing took hold. In any case, their party nature momentarily failed, and a part of their humanity reasserted itself. Party nature depends ultimately on the reality of terror. But the CCP does not rule in Flushing. One doesn’t need to degrade oneself by shouting curses at, spitting on, or beating Falun Gong practitioners. Here in the United States, one can walk away, and many who had originally taken part in the Counsel General’s mobs have done so. In fact, the gossip from Flushing has been that the Chinese regime is now importing people from mainland China to do this dirty work. The regime can unfortunately count on having much stronger control over these new arrivals, who also will have had much less chance to know the truth of what is happening here. Meanwhile, all of the fuss created in Flushing has forced the Chinese people in the neighborhood to confront their own deep fear and to recognize the reality before them. They cannot deny the ugliness of a gang cursing a young mother. They see before them the evidence for why the Falun Gong practitioners have been asking the Chinese people to withdraw from the CCP—and they are now taking sides. This past weekend, one of our staff was distributing our Chinese-language paper. A man from the neighborhood came up to take it, and a voice yelled out, “Don’t take that paper!” The man from the neighborhood turned on the man who was shouting and said, “She is a woman standing in the scorching sun offering free newspapers. Look at you. A man wearing sunglasses, hiding in the shade, telling me not to accept the newspaper. In my opinion, you are an evil cult!” The man hiding in the shade could not do anything but skulk off. The Epoch Times has always taken the lead in making the case for withdrawing from the CCP. We understand that in doing so, the Chinese people are walking out of the shade and into the sunshine. The CCP has slaughtered the Chinese people by the tens of millions and made miserable those who have survived. But it has never eradicated from the human breast the natural desire to cherish and protect mothers and children. As more and more Chinese people come to reaffirm the goodness in their human nature, party nature is crumbling along with the party that created this inhuman thing. |
