Jennifer Zeng

            My VIP for this week is Jennifer Zeng who grew up in Communist China. She admired the Communist Party and adhered to its strict rules until she embraced religion and join Falun Gong. She was arrested four different times as a young adult and was a prisoner in a labor camp. There she learned the horrors of the socialist state. She was brutally tortured but managed to escape China. Today she shares her knowledge about the evils of socialism and communism.

            Chris Wright is helping Zeng to share her message about the horrors of communism. They were recently interviewed by Rob Bluey at The Daily Signal. The message is especially important today because so many Americans are embracing the teachings of Karl Marx, known today as democratic socialism. To begin the interview, Wright explained the connection between socialism and communism.

Marx saw stages of history, inevitable stages of history, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism. Socialism is the stage before the final stage. Socialism is characterized by the common ownership of the means of production.

Communism is when the state withers away because there’s no more dominant class, no more private property. You don’t need a state because there’s no more economic exploitation, and so that’s a great fantasy, but it’s never happened anywhere.

            After interviewing Wright for a few minutes, Bluey turned his attention to Zeng. He asked her to share her experience of being held as a prisoner in a labor camp and how she was able to escape from the camp and leave China.

I was arrested … four times and sent to the Beijing Female Labor Camp for practicing a spiritual practice called Falun Gong. It is a spiritual practice based on truth, compassion, forbearance, and plus five sets of gentle exercises, including meditation. Because it’s very obvious health benefit, within seven years, there were more Falun Gong practitioners in China than Communist Party members. At that stage, in 1999, the party decided to crack down on it. So, I ended up in the Beijing Female Labor Camp.

The first day was feeling like going directly into the hell.

For the first moment, we were forced to squat under the baking sun for 15 hours, and whenever someone couldn’t endure it and fainted away, they were shocked by electric batons so that they could wake up.

Every day, in the camp, it was a battle between life and death.

On June 17, I was in London at the Independent China Tribunal. They handed out their final judgment about this organ harvest and transplant, and they gave the verdict that the Communist Party is guilty of ant-humanity crime.

I only realized that I had a very narrow escape from being a victim of this organ harvesting because I had Hepatitis C.

While I was in the camp, apart from torture every day, apart from hard, forced labor, we were also given repeated physical checkups so that if anyone need[ed] an organ we could be killed on demand if we were a match.

Fortunately, I told the doctor I had Hepatitis C before I practiced Falun Gong. I was able to be exempted from becoming a victim of organ harvesting.

            Bluey asked Zeng to share some of her experiences or the things that she saw regarding brainwashing, mental torture, physical torture, sexual assault, and rape. It is not a pretty story, so if you are squeamish, you might want to stop here.

I saw a female Falun Gong practitioner tied to a chair, and she was shocked by four or five male police guards on her head and on her private part until she lost control of her bowel movement. As a result, she couldn’t walk for several months.

They also would tie four toothbrushes together and with the sharp end outside and push this inside the vagina of female Falun Gong practitioners and twist it, twist it until they saw blood came out.

The police would also throw females into the male prisoners’ cells to have them repeatedly gang-raped. So, this kind of thing happened in the camp.

I think the worst part for me in the camp is the brainwashing part. Because the police made it very clear, the only purpose for you to be sent there is to get you reformed, which means to change our minds toward Falun Gong.

So, we were forced not only to give up our beliefs in truth, compassion, and tolerance, but also to help the police to torture our fellow Falun Gong practitioners in order to prove that we were transformed.

            After being in the camp for six months, Zeng developed a sudden and strong desire to expose all that was happening there by writing a book. She knew that they had happened in Nazi concentration camps, but she could not believe that such things could happen in the 21^st century. She knew that she would have to be released in order to write a book, and she also knew that the only way that she would be released was to convince the police that she had transformed. She said that she struggled every day in her mind about whether to transform or not to transform. She was forced to prove to the police that she was transforming.

Little by little, I feel like becoming empty in a human shell. Actually, it was my very essence of a human being being taken away like your thoughts, your soul, your free will, and your human dignity. I feel like a non-human being and doing whatever they force us to do.

That was a very, very disgraceful process. Worst deal, after I was released, they still expected me to go to the brainwashing centers to be used as example of reform and to continue to help them to do their reform job. So, I had to escape from my own family only five days after I was released.

I think in this regard I was luckier than many of my fellow practitioners. I had a very good education. I graduated from Peking University with a master of science degree. I spoke good English.

I met an Australian couple who went to China to teach English. I told them how terrible my situation was and how terribly I needed to leave China. They were able to help me to get out of China, so I sought asylum in Australia and was granted refugee status.

            Zeng did write her book about her experience in the labor camps. It is called Witnessing History: One Woman’s Fight for Freedom and Falun Gong. It is available in English in the United States (Amazon) and Chinese (Amazon). An Australian version is available on her publisher’s website, Allen & Unwin. Her story is also told in a documentary called “Free China” available on the front page of freechinamovie.com. She thinks that her book is the only available one in English to tell the story of Falun Gong practitioners inside the labor camp twenty years ago.

The scale of the persecution is so huge, 100 million Falun Gong practitioners, plus their families. Now, we are hearing about millions of Uighurs also be detained in Xinjiang camps.

Because, I think, the world failed to stop the persecution of Falun Gong, now the party has the ability to expand that to other minority groups and to the entire nation. The entire nation is under very strict monitoring of the party.

            Zeng believes that her book will have a significant impact because it is a “firsthand account of what’s really happening inside the camp. It is current, and it is helping the world to know what’s really happened.

            So, here is another report of how socialism and communism fails the citizens of any nation that embraces them. We should learn from watching what is happening in Venezuela. If anyone still believes that socialism and communism are good, they should read Zeng’s books about her experiences in the Chinese labor camps.