(Minghui.org) April 25 is a significant day for Falun Gong practitioners. Twenty six years ago, around 10,000 practitioners gathered near the State Council’s Central Appeals Office in Beijing to seek the release of practitioners who were arrested in Tianjin in the preceding days. Despite the peaceful nature of their appeal ,the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used it to smear Falun Gong after the regime began persecuting the practice in July 1999.
If we examine history, however, the CCP actually allowed and even advocated for freedom of assembly, until it took power in October 1949.
After the Second Sino-Japanese War ended in 1945, the ruling Kuomintang was ready to reach an agreement with the CCP to establish a democratic society. But the CCP started a civil war. In addition to fighting the Kuomintang army on the front lines, it also used “petitions” and “assemblies” to undermine the Kuomintang.
According to the official website of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, “Led by the CCP’s General Branch in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, nearly 3,000 students broke through all obstacles and drove a train to Nanjing on May 13, 1947, and appealed to the Kuomintang government in Nanjing.” It was hard to imagine that college students were allowed to misuse such wartime resources and confront the government in this way.
This was just one of many episodes of unrest instigated by the CCP. In Hubei Province, the CCP mobilized students to attack the provincial government in Wuhan on May 22, 1947. They destroyed government offices, Chiang Kai-shek’s portraits, and vandalized government compounds with graffiti. When the guards shot three students and injured twelve more, the CCP immediately publicized this event nationwide.
In Beijing, the CCP instigated over 6,000 students to confront the city council on July 5, 1947. After they attacked armed police officers with bricks and batons, soldiers opened fire and killed about 10 students.
The CCP expanded the turmoil to 22 colleges in northern and northeastern China and held large-scale assemblies in Beijing, together with strikes by workers in major cities. In the end, the Kuomintang government was forced to yield.
From these actions, we can see that mobilizing students to attack the government was part of the CCP’s playbook—that is, until the regime took power in 1949. In all these events, no more than a hundred people were injured or killed. During the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, however, the CCP shot unarmed students and ran them over with tanks. The Red Cross in Beijing estimated that about 2,600 students were killed and 30,000 were injured. Declassified British and American files concluded there were over 10,000 deaths, setting a record for the number of people killed in a peaceful protest.
The tragic event in 1989 helped propel Jiang Zemin to the top of the CCP’s leadership. He knew that freedom of assembly was an effective tool which helped the CCP take power, but it was also a major risk that could undermine its rule. So Jiang and the CCP would not tolerate such assembly under their rule, in violation of the Chinese Constitution. This double standard shows that the CCP has no principles and that its top priority has always been to suppress Chinese people with brutality and lies.
On April 25, 1999, Falun Gong practitioners appealed for justice with no personal or political agendas. Their quiet, harmonious demeanor left the CCP with no excuses with which to immediately respond with an armed suppression. Because of practitioners’ selflessness, their appeal became the largest and most peaceful in modern Chinese history, and the success they achieved under such a violent regime brought hope to China and those who watched from abroad.