PureInsight | May 5, 2003
[PureInsight.org] Throughout Chinese history, there have been people who were courageous enough to tell the truth, the real truth that matters.
The millet is scattered over the ground.
The leaves of the sweet potato are withered.
The young and old have gone to smelt iron.
To harvest the grain there are children and old women.
How shall we get through the next year?
Marshall Peng Dehuai
That is a poem written by Marshall Peng Dehuai, a highly decorated Red Army General, right before he submitted a long essay with more than ten thousands words to the Chinese Communist Party leadership in 1959 asking the party to take immediate action to prevent the impending disaster that the country was abut to face under Chairman Mao's "Great Leap Forward" policy. Under that policy, farmers were organized into county-wide collective communes involving hundreds of thousands of people. Chairman Mao urged the peasants in the communes to build backyard blast furnaces to make iron and steel for tools. The peasants were supposed to melt down scrap metal to make useful items such as tools and utensils. In practice the program worked backwards with peasants melting down useful items to produce unusable masses of metal. This happened because the State exhorted the peasants to increase production from the backyard blast furnaces and when they ran out of scrap they started melting down anything they could find, including tools and utensils. Communist leaders at the local level, faced with the choice of possible personal punishment for not meeting the quota or destruction of useful items of metal and of wood for fuel, usually would choose to try to meet the quota. But the mixture of metals and the impurities in the fuel produced metal that could not be formed into anything useful. The metal was too brittle. The more insidious consequence of the backyard blast furnaces and other nonagricultural projects of the Great Leap Forward was that they took labor away from food production and led to a shortfall in food. Terrified of being punished if they appeared to question Mao's policy, officials across China announced ridiculously high productions for the 1959 harvest. Along came the lies that onemu of land (1 mu = 0.165 acre) could produce 5,000 kg of grain. The highest so-called record for one mu produced was over 650,000 kg of grain. Marshall Peng Dehuai, the Minister of Defense at the time, was the only person among the top Chinese Communist leaders who had the courage to confront Mao about the famine. For his honesty, Peng was denounced as a traitor and demoted from the leadership. Later, he would be imprisoned, tortured and killed. After that, no one else dared to speak up. As a result, more than 30 million Chinese farmers died the ensuing famine that lasted more than three years.
Jiang's regime was recently forced to admit it had covered up the extent of the infectious disease called severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. A lone retired military doctor--Jiang Yanyong--contacted the media to say that Beijing was lying about the number of cases in the capital. Personnel from other hospitals followed his example, telling reporters that they had been told to hide patients suffering from SARS in a hotel and in ambulances that were driven around the city while WHO investigators conducted visits. Compared to the courageous conduct of Dr. Jiang Yanyong, the deceit of Jiang's regime reveals its willful selfishness and its complete disregard for human life.
There is another person who is very little known to the outside world but who has as much moral integrity, compassion and forbearance, if not more, as Marshall Peng Dehai and Dr. Jiang Yanyong. This person is Hong Kong resident Zhu Keming. Mr. Zhu is not only an innovative businessman who holds two patents in China, he is also a Falun Gong practitioner. In 1999, Jiang's regime fabricated one of the biggest lies of the 20th century and outlawed Falun Gong. After seeing countless other practitioners imprisoned and persecuted to death for cultivating "Truth Compassion and Forbearance," Mr. Zhu went to Beijing by himself. In August of 2000, he and another Falun Gong practitioner filed a lawsuit against Jiang and his followers for the unlawful persecution of Falun Gong at the Supreme Court in China. The Chinese police arrested him one month later, and sentenced him to five years in prison. Today he is still suffering serious mental and physical tortures in prison. But because of Mr. Zhu's example, more and more people in many parts of the world these days are suing Jiang and demanding prosecution of Jiang's regime for its methods of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners. Although he is still imprisoned today, Zhu's fearlessness in revealing the lies and promoting the truth serves as a fine example for all people. I believe that he will obtain his freedom in the not-so-distant future under the call of all the righteous people in this world.
Friends, let us feel proud that there are still honorable people in the land of China. Only because of such people has China been able to have its five thousand years of radiant culture.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2003/4/18/21254.html
