MOUNT HOPE, N.Y. — Hundreds of people in the upstate New York town of Mount Hope gathered under the clear sky on Saturday, Aug. 13 for a one-and-a-half hour ‘End CCP’ rally highlighting the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party and the threat it poses to Americans.
Multiple speakers attended the event, including Chinese-Americans concerned about the future of their new country as well as local officials and community figures.
They urged those at the rally to recognize and educate themselves about the extent to which Communist China has infiltrated or manipulated U.S. society, economics, and political strife, and to strengthen their knowledge of America’s founding virtues as the solution.
Dr. Sean Lin Xiaoxu, who emigrated from China and served with the U.S. Army as a virologist, described how, in 1989, he witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacre in which the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) gunned down thousands of people in the Chinese capital.
Lin, who is now a member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, warns that the CCP’s aggression has long spilled over beyond China’s borders, giving as an example the COVID-19 pandemic that was covered up by the Party and allowed to spread, killing millions of people globally.
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“Any regime that treats its own people badly will never treat others kindly.” He asked: “Do you think the CCP will really treat Americans like friends?”
‘CCP Virus’
Though Beijing withholds information that would allow researchers to definitively pinpoint the origins of the virus, Lin noted the “gain-of-function” experiments being carried out in Wuhan’s high-security lab at the time, and how the CCP “let the people who got infected in Wuhan travel to the whole world, while they locked down the city.”
The CCP’s actions in the pandemic, Lin said, are just one part of its overarching strategy to defeat and replace the United States as the world’s dominant power in a campaign of “unrestricted warfare” — a term coined by two PLA officers in the late 1990s, who published a book by that name.
Founded in 1921, the CCP undermined and battled with the republican government of China, eventually defeating it in civil war and founding a totalitarian communist system in 1949. Under dictator Mao Zedong, the Party launched multiple ruinous political campaigns that killed millions of people and ravaged the country’s ancient traditional culture. The CCP is responsible for an estimated 80 million unnatural deaths, making it the deadliest regime by total body count in history.
But after the Soviet Union collapsed, the CCP reinvented itself as a responsible government interested in trade and other mutually beneficial engagements with America and its allies. In fact, the Party embarked on a decades-long effort to steal U.S. technologies, hollow out American industry, traffic fentanyl into the U.S., and wage “ideological warfare” against America by exploiting the political polarization affecting the country to “delegitimize” the entire U.S. system of constitutional government in favor of “Maoist race theories.”
The End CCP rally came as a follow up to the similarly themed “Wake Up to the CCP Threat” seminar held on July 20, also in Mount Hope. Both events were put on by the Mount Hope Chinese Association and the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP.
Chris Furman, a Mount Hope town councilman, who attended both the seminar and the rally, said he was concerned about the CCP’s mass data collection from Americans who use Chinese-controlled apps such as TikTok, which has 80 million U.S. users.
“If you think it doesn’t affect you, if it doesn’t now, it’s going to in the future, and that’s why we’ve got to get together to stop that. We’re America, we’re a free country.”
On July 19, the eve of the seminar, organizer Mr. Cheng received a voice message in heavily accented English accusing the event of “talking [expletive] about the CCP.” The message, which came from a UK phone number, threatened to take deadly action should the seminar be held.
Cheng informed local officials, who dispatched police officers to provide security for the seminar.
An unconventional war against America
Orange County Democratic Representative Jan Muller said that the CCP’s authoritarianism is much more serious than many realize.
“I thought I knew how authoritarian the Chinese Communist regime is. It wasn’t until today that I did more research and began to understand how determined the CCP is to infiltrate and undermine the United States,” she said, expressing hope that the event organizers would continue to awaken Americans “to this very real threat from China.”
“If our enemies are waging an unconventional war against us, and we still think they might merely be competitors or collaborators, then we will definitely lose the war,” Sean Lin cautioned.
According to Prof. Zhang Tianliang, who teaches Chinese history at the Fei Tian Academy in nearby Deerpark and hosts a number of popular online video programs, the CCP uses five main methods of infiltrating the United States.
First, the CCP runs a formidable overseas propaganda machine to the tune of $10 billion a year, Zhang said at the July 20 seminar, citing data from David Shambaugh, a distinguished professor of Asian studies at George Washington University. This helps the CCP successfully present itself in a positive light among Americans.
Second and third are data collection from Americans and the theft of intellectual property, especially industrial and military secrets.
Fourth is to recruit agents to serve as the CCP’s pawns overseas; one example Zhang cited was that of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose former driver and aide was found to be a Chinese spy.
Fifth, the CCP infiltrates U.S. society through educational and cultural exchange programs. After the U.S. State Department identified the Chinese Confucius Institute in the U.S. as a CCP influence operation, the CCP just changed its name to “Chinese Language Learning Center.”
In November 2020, shortly after the U.S. presidential election, pro-CCP scholar Di Dongsheng boasted about the Party’s successful elite capture operations in the top circles of U.S. politics and Wall Street.
How to face the CCP threat?
Liam O’Neill, a long-time Chinese human rights advocate and community leader and a former Deerpark town councilman, opened with a rhetorical question, asking if it was a little extreme to say the Chinese Communist Party was threatening this semi-rural part of Orange County?
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that there is a threat from the CCP here in Otisville,” he said, referring to the village in Mount Hope where the rally was held.
“This kind of rally should actually be held in towns throughout the United States,” O’Neill said.
He cited the current state of political division in the United States as being an important vehicle for the success of the CCP’s effort to overtake America.
“A fundamental characteristic of Marxist regimes like the CCP is that they thrive on division, pitting one group against another, leading to a breakdown of trust, a breakdown of goodness (relationships), a breakdown of communities,” he said.
“Many Americans don’t know much about the history of the CCP or its current practices. For decades, the Communist Party has publicly stated that it is an enemy of the United States and is using unconventional soft power tools to build a new world order.”
“At a time when our country is so divided, the CCP issue is one of the very few issues that has gained bipartisan support in recent years. Get the message, spread the word, and use the issue to find common ground with the other side,” he urged.
Local figures speak
Chip Murray, founder of the NGO Orange Strong NY and a resident in the county of nearly 45 years, spoke of how the CCP “has poisoned education, health care, entertainment, religion, and nearly every level of the local and federal government.”
While he doesn’t believe in dividing people between liberal or conservative camps, Murray said that Marxism, communism, and other totalitarian ideologies have grown more influential in U.S. politics, eroding the American system.
Murray said that the CCP made the same mistake as the Biblical giant Goliath, who was ultimately defeated by the devout shepherd boy David.
“Americans are slowly realizing that the CCP is an evil that threatens all of humanity,” he said.
Rev. Bill Banuchi, director of the New York Faith and Freedom Coalition, warned that a dearth of religious faith — the first freedom guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution — was contributing to America’s weakness in the face of communist infiltration.
He stressed that the national motto was “In God We Trust.”
Hundreds of millions quit the CCP
One of the speakers at the rally was Yi Rong, president of the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP.
She noted that as of Aug. 3, the 18-year movement to have Chinese renounce the Communist Party and its ideology had counted 400 million people who made statements annulling their affiliations with the CCP and its two youth organizations.
The Tuidang movement started in November 2004 with the publication of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, an editorial series that examines the ideological foundations and misrule of the world’s deadliest regime.
Millions of volunteers in China — mostly practitioners of the banned spiritual faith Falun Gong — spread the message of the Nine Commentaries and help other Chinese recognize the nature of the communist regime, even though they risk persecution for doing so.
“We hope to work with Americans and all righteous and kind people in the world to defeat the evil CCP,” she said.
