Bitter Winter: Reporting on Religious Persecution in China
The Chinese Communist Party has persecuted religion and people of faith since its inception, yet Western media and the general public have not given the issue of Chinese religious freedom its due attention. Bitter Winter, an online journal focusing exclusively on the problem, is a marked exception. Friends of Falun Gong creative director Christine Lin spoke with Bitter Winter’s director-in-charge, Marco Respinti, about why this is, and why the world should take heed of the danger posed by China’s persecution of religion.
Full interview transcript below:
Christine Lin: Marco Respinti, thank you for joining me on this interview.
Marco Respinti: Thank you Christine.
Ms. Lin: So I want to talk today about Bitter Winter, which is the online magazine that you help run, and talk a little bit about religious freedom in China and what are the issues surrounding it, especially during this day and time. Can you tell us a little bit of background for the magazine? What is Bitter Winter and how did you become involved with it?
Mr. Respinti: Yes, of course. Well, Bitter Winter is basically a journal. It’s an online magazine, which we publish every day. So it’s a daily magazine in five languages. Chinese, English, Korean, Italian, and Spanish.
We’re pretty proud of being able to publish also in Chinese since we focus only on human rights and religious liberty in China. So publishing in Chinese, it’s a big feature for us. And of course, the Chinese government knows that. We have been quoted a few times in confidential CCP documents as dangerous people because we’re speaking the truth. We are reporting on what is really happening in the country. And the fact of being able to publish in so many languages among which are Chinese and English, which are of course, read all over the world. As I told you, Bitter Winter is a magazine, so we deal with news reports. We were able to publish many, many unpublished videos, which are online for the first time.
We’re pretty proud to have been able, after a few weeks after our launch, to be tuned to have been able to publish the very first video from inside one of the ill-famed — well, let’s call them by their name — concentration camps in Xinjiang. You can see many, many pictures from the outside of these facilities, but we were the first one being able to document from this facility from inside. And keep in mind that, as you know, the CCP, the Chinese government are saying that these facilities are not prisons, they’re not concentration camps. They are, you know, professional schools or something like that. We were able to show these “professional schools” on the inside and you can see barbed wire. You can see all the technical equipment and equipment of the prison. So I mean those are prisons. And we were, again pretty proud to have been able to document that.
To go back to Bitter Winter as such: We went online on May 2nd, in 2018. So we’re a little bit more than two years old. Bitter Winter was born out of an original combination between religious studies experts, activists and advocates for human rights, and professional journalists such as myself. I joined in since the beginning as the Director-in-Charge. Being a professional journalist, the org structure needed a professional skill like that, and I was very happy to join in because human rights and religious freedom has been always at the center of my interest and concerns. I published a book on human rights in China more than 10 years ago. And as a journalist, I dealt with many other topics but when the possibility to deal again with China human rights and religious freedom [came up], I said yes right away because it’s a very challenging, important, and relevant topic not only for Chinese people, but also for foreigners. I’m Italian; I was living in Milan. Nonetheless, I think that the situation in China should concern everyone. Keeping together these different people within one magazine, it’s an original thing and it’s not difficult, but it’s challenging because these people have different angles from which they see the same problems. We were able to manage the three communities and bring them together to give the audience an original take on the problem.
Bitter Winter is an original combination of three kinds of people: the activists and advocates for human rights, religious studies scholars and journalists. Sometimes it’s not easy to bring all these people together, but we were successful in doing it. And this is part of the success of which I think Bitter Winter has enjoyed. Because we are able to bring to the audience different angles combined together different takes on the same problems. And this is part of the secret, so to speak, why we were quoted many times in many media. And recently, we were quoted 74 times in the section dealing with China of the most recent report on religious freedom by the US State Department, which is pretty important and pretty relevant. And we’re very proud of that.
I repeat the word “proud” — that we are proud of doing this. And I am speaking frankly… I can say we’re proud because it’s not my merit. The merit goes to all the people we have on the ground in China, working undercover daily, at the risk of their own lives, to report the truth on China. And they do that on a voluntary basis. They do the best they can to smuggle out of the country information: original, truthful information, videos, pictures that sometimes you cannot see on other media. So, again, when I say we’re proud the merit goes to great people risking their lives. As a matter of fact, soon after we were launched in May 2018, within six months 45 of our correspondents on the ground in China had been arrested because they were informing outside — they were sending true information outside of the country. Half of them had been released soon after, and some of them told us they had been tortured. So we know for sure what happens inside but half of them disappeared in the void. We know nothing about them yet. I mentioned that the video that we published from inside one of the detention camps in Xinjiang — as a matter of fact, when we published that video, the person who shot it was already arrested. We didn’t know that because it takes time for these things to come to us because of security reasons. So we published that, and soon after we knew that the author was in jail, and had disappeared. We know nothing about him or her. So this is the situation we’re working with.
Ms. Lin: That’s tragic. And it just goes to show how important it is to get true information coming out of China and how difficult it is. And with the corona pandemic, we’ve seen that over and over again, and it’s becoming more apparent to the world. Only now, are we seeing the general public pay more attention to issues in China that affect the whole world. Why do you think it’s so rare for the media to look at the issue of religious freedom in China? Years back, there’s been issues about food safety, and working conditions, and stuff like that. But when it comes to religious persecution, there’s really not been a lot of attention on it. What are your thoughts on that?
Mr. Respinti: Well, this is the personal part of mine, because it’s sometimes harder to document this kind of reflection. But first of all, I would say that religion as such, it’s not a big deal for many media, because many media work under the impression that the religion is nothing relevant. I mean, we are working, we are living in times, in which the world thinks that secularization and even atheism is the dominant role and so they don’t mind that they’ve gone by so many religious arguments. So I mean, they basically don’t have the cast of mind to see the problem so they don’t realize it. So even if you show them the problem they always say now this is not for religious reasons, there should be something behind that — political reason, economic reason. I mean, this is a common cast of mind, especially in the West. If we got to philosophy, it’s an old positivistic attitude that is going on in positivistic science and a scientistic cast of mind, [where] religion doesn’t come [in] so much. So, again, even if you show them the reality, they don’t realize it. And this is the first reason I think.
Secondly is, one is, religion these days has been very polarized… So if you were in favor of religion, it means that you have a moral standard. Many things in this moral standard, many things do not go along with some political mainstream understanding of life. So don’t touch religion… I personally know many editors in chief, many editors, many colleagues that prefer not to touch on religion because it’s a sensitive thing and it will disturb someone, so they don’t go into that.
Specifically with China, I think that China is so powerful as a nation in the world that the economic and political ties that China has all over the world — in the West, especially in many countries of Europe, many countries of Asia, and of course in many country of Oceania — brings a kind of self-imposed censorship on many colleagues. They don’t want to disturb the Red Dragon because it can become dangerous. So they don’t pay attention; they basically don’t care what happens in a huge country like China, about which many people cannot even locate cities. They don’t know the culture. They don’t know the language. They think that Chinese is one language. There are many, many, many languages within the country. There are many traditions, many peoples, many religions, they basically know nothing or if they know about that, they ignore it because, again, it’s disturbing. So religion goes you know down the line and religious people can go down the line being persecuted in face of the silence of the world.
And finally, I would add, just very quickly that we know, we documented, that many journalists in the West are on the payroll of the CCP. So they will never touch the topic. You can see many times Western media repeating the fake news, the lies of the CCP with no critical understanding of anything. And this is a very, very unprofessional way of doing by many of my colleagues, but it’s a sad, sad reality.
Ms. Lin: I think you hit on a really important point, which is the marginalization of religion and faith in modern life. And that’s, that’s ironic, because the very basis of history is so deeply steeped in various religions and most people subscribe to a value system or another, whether you call it a formal religion or not. And that really strikes at the core of being human. So the implications of religious freedom is, is much greater than whether you can go to your church or your mosque. And I don’t think a lot of people realize the extent to which it’s going to affect human life if religious freedom is not protected. Can we talk a little bit now about what the faith landscape is like in modern China? And what has been done to it over the last 20 or so years?
Mr. Respinti: Yes, if I may just recap of what you were saying, you’re right. Religion is not a marginal point in the human landscape. This is why I consider myself blessed. It’s a privilege to work on religious freedom every day because I feel that I’m not working with some remote interests, but I’m right at the core of the important things.
Going to your next question. Well, the religious landscape in China is very articulated right now for different reasons. Let me just start with a strong point. Religion is persecuted in China no matter what. The CCP doesn’t make any theology, doesn’t make any distinction, they persecute people with any kind, any kind of religious belief, whatever is the name they give to God. Whatever is the tradition they belong to. Again, as you correctly say, even just a set of moral values or core beliefs, not maybe an organized religion, becomes an enemy of the CCP and is persecuted as such. And this is because the CCP is still very proud these days to call itself communist. Communism comes from a strong ideology, coming from Marxism-Leninism, and in China as a Chinese flavor to that. The CCP leaders are proud to call it communism or Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics.
One of the characteristics of all forms of communism, specifically of Chinese communism, to revive that all-positivistic attitude that I already dealt with, meaning that they think that religion is an unnatural thing in human life, just like we believe that it’s a natural thing, whatever name it takes, or whatever form it takes, they just think of the opposite. [The CCP believes that] religion is something unnatural and foreign to human nature, so sooner or later it will die out. It’s an evolutionary process in the cast of mind of the communists, it will die out sooner or later. So they just say ‘let it be, it will die out.’ But they realized since the beginning that it didn’t happen. People were still religious. Religions didn’t die out. The opposite was true. They were growing. They are growing. And sometimes they fascinate people also within the CCP. So this religion which is the enemy, it’s an enemy from the start because it’s an alienation of the human mind, in the CCP perspective. It becomes an enemy even stronger because it doesn’t die out. So it must be helped to die. This is why violent persecution comes in.
It’s a two-fold process. They are convinced that it will be extinct sooner or later. But in the meantime, they help this process to accelerate and they do it as they can. Of course, I mean the CCP, the communists, like to think that they are omnipotent, but they are not gods. So they like to think that they can persecute everyone in the same way at the same time and get the extinction right away, but this is another thing that doesn’t happen. So, since the beginning — when I say at the beginning I mean 1949 when the CCP took power with Mao Zedong in China — the regime managed the “religious problem” with a two-fold attitude. One is direct persecution and another is trying to control a religious group or churches from within.
When the groups are not very powerful they are not connected to organizations abroad. They may be numerous, but they have not [gotten] well known abroad, so it is easier for the CCP to persecute them, often violently, and so get them to extinction using violence and this has happened many times during the Maoist time and is still happening in China today. When the groups are connected to organizations abroad, they are starting to become known abroad, it is not, this is not easy for the CCP to act in the same way, so what they do is trying to control them from from within.
As a matter of fact, since the ’50s the CCP established five great patriotic associations to try to control Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islamism, and Taoism with patriotic associations obeying to the CCP and trying to get the extinction, the natural extinction of “unnatural religion” from inside, from within. But sometimes this doesn’t work, so they still need to go back to violent means. So, these days it happened during Maoist time but it’s happening again. It’s stick-and-carrot. They sometimes hit very forcefully on groups and sometimes they pull back and try to lure them, sometimes into power, but in some sort of controlling of the faithful, of the believers. And this happens many times when again, when the CCP doesn’t have the material power to act directly in some region, in some contexts, in some times. When it can, the CCP acts violently directly. When it cannot, it uses other tools.
Let me point out that even patriotic associations, meaning state-controlled religion, are persecuted these days in a different way. For example, they say that the church controlled by the state cannot be that high because it “disturbs some landscape.” So, it should be cut off and they cut off the cross. Or sometimes they say, to build Islamic control groups that they cannot display religious symbols because some party leaders are supposed to come on that way. And that is not good. Or they close gathering venues even for the state-controlled religions. Why I underline these is because it is true that the CCP hates religion as such. It doesn’t make any kind of theology. It persecutes all groups, religious groups alike. The differentiation is just in terms of the material possibility to act directly at that very moment. So sometimes they need to pull back waiting for the right moment, but the attitude is always the same: Religion is an enemy and it should be cancelled right away.
Ms. Lin: It goes straight to the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and its historical origins, actually. It’s like you said — they’ve been trying to eradicate religion right from the beginning. And it’s only escalated and become more sophisticated in its forms. And of course, I come from Friends of Falun Gong, and I want to talk a little bit about Falun Gong, which has been the hallmark group that’s been persecuted in China in recent times. How do you contextualize the 20-year-long persecution of Falun Gong in the grander scheme of religious freedom in China? What does it mean for the average person now?
Mr. Respinti: The persecution of Falun Gong, responds again, to the hatred for religion that the CCP managed since the beginning. Falun Gong is a set of spiritual beliefs. So it’s an enemy [of the CCP]. And we could end here but there is more to it than that. Falun Gong has been very successful in China in the beginning; trying to hide, or trying to misinterpret for their own sake, the true nature of Falun Gong, and perceiving it not as a spiritual thing, but only as a physical training, so to speak, [the CCP] tried to live with, to cope with that. As soon as this was not possible anymore because the spiritual nature of Falun Gong comes evident, and since Falun Gong was so successful and growing in numbers, the CCP perceived it as an enemy, as a danger, as it does every time religions start growing. Because the growth of religion is the blatant contradiction of the other prerequisites of materialistic communism. Again, for communism, Chinese communism, religion is unnatural. So it will “die out,” per se. But if it doesn’t, and instead it grows, it’s the defeat of communism. So they cannot allow it.
Ms. Lin: It disproves their entire basis.
Mr. Respinti: Yes. They cannot say, “we were thinking that religion would die, but it didn’t, so we were wrong.” No, they cannot say “we are wrong.” So, the very existence of groups like the Falun Gong is the defeat of the basic idea on which communism started and lives. So this is why religion is an enemy of the CCP, not because you’re waging war against communism, against the CCP, on the Chinese government as such, but the other way around. Because they perceive you, and growing, successful spiritual groups, as they deny the premises of communism. And in my opinion, they are right in the sense that you demonstrate that communism is a great lie, because it’s based on a wrong perception of human nature, saying that spiritual things are alienation. Of course, I understand what the CCP does, but I am sided with you. And this is why they are waging war specifically on growing groups and Falun Gong has enjoyed a very relevant growth in years, which scares the CCP.
Again on the landscape of religion in China, some sociologists have divided the religious landscape in three great areas. They call them the gray market, the red market and the black market of religion. The red market of religion is represented by the five patriotic associations I dealt with before. Which is the way by which the CCP tries to infiltrate and control churches that they cannot smash right away. The gray market is made of those religion that the CCP would like to smash immediately, but doesn’t have the power to do it. The black market is made of those religions that, for many different reasons, are easier to smash by the CCP and they are called “xie jiao.” “Xie jiao” is an old Chinese expression, meaning “heterodox teachings”. It was used in the old days for political reasons. It has been resurrected by the CCP recently by the meaning of cults. “Cults” is a bad word which academics don’t use because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s an insult that people use when they want to offend their opponent. So, but in the West, it has been used many times by media and political power to try to get some religious group out of the public square. So the CCP resurrecting the xie jiao (“heterodox teachings”) in the new meaning of Western-like cults, and they applied this “xie jiao,” meaning “cults”, to many groups among which chiefly since 1995, Falun Gong. They made a list of these “cults.” And just belonging to these “cults,” just thinking of belonging to these “cults,” is a high crime in China, punished by Article 300 of the crime code with years and years of prison in horrible conditions. So this is the list of “cults,” which are completely forbidden and particularly persecuted in China. Falun Gong and other groups because of their growth, are listed in this list of xie jiao. And for this reason, they belong to the black market. Even thinking of belonging to one of these groups is a high crime, severely persecuted.
So this is why Falun Gong has been so targeted — because it was growing. But it was challenging the core belief of the CCP. And because it’s one of the forbidden religions in China, because to some extent it is easier to crush them in comparison to others. Why? Keep in mind, the Catholic church or the Protestant church, they have so many ties with people abroad, with governments abroad, with organizations abroad, that it becomes a little bit embarrassing for the CCP to crush them in the same way. I remember the old days when I spoke of Falun Gong in my country, people said “what are you talking about?” Because no one, or a few people, knew about that. So it’s easier for the CCP to work secretly in this way. And this is why Falun Gong, being perceived as a great enemy, was easier to target and to crush.
Ms. Lin: Well, easy, but it’s been 20 years and they still haven’t done it. Falun Gong is alive and well in every part of the world, including China underground.
Mr. Respinti: And they defeated the communist premise.
Ms. Lin: That’s true, and the CCP has been weakening during the same time because people have seen through what it is. And I just want to raise a question. It seems to me that what happened to Falun Gong, what the CCP has been doing to experiment on Falun Gong, they’ve then translated those experiences and applied them to other groups. It’s like the Falun Gong were the testing ground of religious persecution in the modern age.
Mr. Respinti: I do agree, this is very well said. It’s the big experiment, since it worked to some extent. As you said, it didn’t wipe out Falun Gong, but it took so many lives. So it’s successful for the CCP in many sense, so they were able to apply the same thing to other groups. In fact, some of the techniques, the persecuting techniques, that have been been tried first on Falun Gong, are being used right now in Xinjiang on Uighurs, or other groups, minority groups like The Church of Almighty God, and sometimes on Tibetans and some Christians. They experimented it first on the Falun Gong before they realized it works. So they’re using it on other people. I’m thinking especially of human [organ] harvesting. Falun Gong has been the first designated victim of this horrible practice of human harvesting, targeting prisoners of conscience and to transform them in industries to feed the black market of human organ transplants.
The Falun Gong practitioners have paid a high toll to that. But that same technique is now used on other groups because it was successful on Falun Gong, so they’re transferring that to other groups. Some ingenious journalists that come to some truth on persecution of religion in China, sometimes say they are surprised by the huge high tech technology surveillance system that it’s going on in many parts of the country like Xinjiang, Tibet, and this and that, and sometimes they encounter also DNA profiling of people in Xinjiang, and they wonder why they are profiling for DNA. You know, if you connect the dots, what they did with human harvesting, it’s a medical thing, a biological thing — you need some biological analysis before that, some medical analysis. They did it successfully on Falun Gong, and you wonder why there are DNA profiling people in other regions, other groups or other ethnic or religious groups. Connect the dots.
So you’re totally right, it was the grand opening to modern persecution in China, and I think a lot of the world — because it’s not only a Chinese problem — the persecution of Falun Gong. From that they were able to export the experience, so to speak, to our groups and religions. This is why, let me tell you — not because I’m speaking to Friends of Falun Gong, I’m not a Falun Gong practitioner — but I feel very sorry and I feel a need to do something for people of Falun Gong because you were scapegoats. You have been sacrificial victims of the horrible altars of ideology, and you have served as the test, the great test, for persecuting others. So you opened the way and you paid so high a price that people cannot stay silent. It’s something similar, even if different for many reasons, when we speak about the Holocaust of the Jews. People should, must, react… I underlined that specific people like Falun Gong, based on what they suffered, should get people to react, to be outraged, then to go in the streets and do something.
Ms. Lin: Thank you for that. And a couple minutes ago, you said that this is not solely a Chinese problem. Can you expand on that thought a little?
Mr. Respinti: Well, religious persecution is not just the Chinese problem. It doesn’t happen only in China. I think China is the greatest form of modern religious persecution. I will not go into details because as Director-in-Charge of Bitter Winter, I need to stay only on China. I have my ideas and of course I can share them with you. Or, when I work as a journalist not writing on Bitter Winter, I’m free to comment on other situations. But not to avoid your question: I think that what is tried in China, serves at least as a model for many other countries who take religions in contempt, and sometimes not only that, but they positively persecute groups. And maybe not at the same time, not on the same scale. But again, China is something that works in that respect. So it’s copied by many, at least as a cast of mind.
Ms. Lin: What I’ve been seeing lately is the surveillance that they’ve been using — the technology they probably started using to monitor Falun Gong, and now it’s monitoring everybody who is suspected of anything, or maybe even has a cough or something because of the coronavirus.
Mr. Respinti: Yes, you’re right. This is why I’m very skeptical of applets on smartphones or tablets that come into the West also, or other surveillance systems that are supposed to fight viruses, but instead may be used forever.
Ms. Lin: This administration in the US, the Trump administration, has been paying particular interest in the issue of religious freedom around the world. And this is something that’s really new. At least in my lifetime, I’ve never seen the White House been so interested in this issue. What do you think the outlook is for religious freedom, especially in China since that’s your area?
Mr. Respinti: I hope the best will come out of this special interest. Let me add that you’re right, it is unprecedented to some extent, it is an unprecedented action from the US and the White House. But keep in mind that the USA, the United States, are based since the beginning on religious freedom. It was made of people escaping religious persecution from here [Europe], they went there and they tried to establish a new land.
But more than that, if you look at the American Constitution, the First Amendment of the American Constitution is the right to religious freedom or freedom and to live according to your [values]. It is not just your personal freedom as an individual, it’s also the freedom to work, to live, according to your faith. This is the first political right of every American citizen enshrined in the US Constitution. It’s the basis of all the constitutional law in the US. So there is something there that has been working since the beginning. But you’re right, again, to some extent this interest is kind of unprecedented.
I think that one of the reasons — it may not be the only one — but one of the reasons is the scale of religious persecution that is going on these days. I mean, come on, we’re living in the year 2020. We’re not living 500 years ago, and we still have people burning at stakes. I’m using this image burning at stakes, but it’s not very far from reality. They are torturing people in the year 2020 on a large scale because they belong to a different ethnicity, and they belong to a religion. I mean, after the Holocaust of the Jews decades ago, we’re still there. We are so proud of speaking about world peace, equality, freedom for all, there is no discrimination and we still have a country of 1.4 billion people persecuted — not all of them but — the government of this huge country is still doing these barbaric things to people.
I think this gets people mad, and the political reaction in a country like the US, which is not paradise, has a lot of problems, but which at least have this idea of religious freedom as the first political right of every human being… This is why I hope that good things will come out of this new interest. I do hope that other interests will not lower the interest of the US toward religious freedom — you know, politicians may be sensible to different things. We know that money plays a role — I mean commercial ties. I hope that you, the USA will keep on doing what they are doing for the sake of religion, liberty, and even more.
Ms. Lin: Thank you for the history lesson. I’m sure a lot of Americans need to hear it. I think it’s going to be very helpful, for people’s broader understanding. So, speaking of the average citizen, what do you suggest that people do to educate themselves more about this and what can anybody really do in their individual lives to promote religious freedom?
Mr. Respinti: Yes I mean it’s a big topic but it’s also an easy one to answer. We’re living in the age of the Internet. We have tons of other reliable sources on the internet for free to get informed. I mean Bitter Winter is out there, Friends of Falun Gong are out there — I can make a full list of daily newspapers or think tanks or websites who do a professional job, so it’s quite easy. It costs nothing to use your smartphone and say wait a minute, what the CCP is saying is a lie. I mean, you can [easily debunk a lie]. So this can be done today by everyone on the web on their smartphone. Yeah, of course, it’s a jungle, the internet. So you need some guidance. Well, we have some guidance. It’s easy to understand when someone is reliable or not because reality speaks for the truth.
We, Bitter Winter, have been found reliable by many. Why? For example, we receive so much news, much more news than we publish. And sometimes it takes days for us to publish a piece of news. Why? Because we verify it. Because if by mistake, in good faith, if I publish fake news, the CCP will be after me immediately. This does mean that CCP tried to attack us many times. We have been hacked, our server has been burned. We have been hacked many times. Forty-five of our reporters have been arrested but never, never, never has the CCP been able to say that we were lying. So it’s easy also to verify who is good or not, who’s reliable or not.
So everyone should do this every day and confront what they hear from the CCP or their advocates, some Western journalists, and find out the truth. And once they have found out the truth, they should have the moral duty to pass it on to their friends. I mean, it’s human and normal. If I go to the seaside or the mountainside with my kids, or my wife, when I see a beautiful landscape, what do I do? You would call your friend saying, look, this is so beautiful, look at that. So if you see a piece of news which is truthful and reliable on the CCP, on religious persecution you, you, you should call your friends: Look at this, have you heard this? Have you read this? You didn’t. So read it. And when you have read it, pass it on yourself. This is the least we can do.
We should create a kind of moral majority in the normal people before going to professionals — if the normal people who can change the average view on these problems, politicians and the media will start looking at these things carefully. Only when people, average people, will press upon them. I mean, this is the way democracy works. When people are able, when people can lobby on the subject, politicians and the media will start taking care of that. So this is something easy that people can do.
Normally, I’m afraid that many times people don’t want to pay attention to these things because they are disturbing. Sometimes they don’t have time. They won’t be disturbed. But again, is it worth living? Is life worth living in merely materialistic and hedonistic terms? Should I go on not caring for what is happening around me and being satisfied with my small little life when I know that some guys beside me are persecuted in some way? I think this is not natural for human beings. But sometimes human beings these days don’t recall this truthful human nature. We should try to awaken them. There is a level in which you can do the basis of an organization and a magazine like we do, but we can start doing it on a personal basis every day. I taught my kids to speak the truth every time they hear a lie. And in schools when they say now the CCP is helping Italy during the coronavirus, “yes, but my father is working every day and he tells me that they persecute people.” Look at this video, look at these pictures. This is simple, everyone can do it.