Peiyi Yuby Peiyi Yu
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Photo Credit: Peiyi Yu
“CHINA INTENTIONALLY RELEASE COVID VIRUS?” reads the title of one of the plaque boards on the information device placed in front of Taipei 101 at a juncture that saw heavy tourist traffic. Consisted of multiple plaque boards, a screen and speaker on auto replay, free pamphlets, and a mock 101 on top, the art device resembled a news booth. The information, listed in multiple languages, included China’s human rights abuses, calls to end CCP, but also patently unfounded conspiracy theories about the Chinese government intentionally releasing the COVID virus that put China itself in a 2 years lockdown, and an economic coma from which it has yet to fully recover.
The booth did not fail to muster attention. But most stoppers-bys appeared to be more interested in the mock 101 on top of the booth rather than the information the booth has to offer. An influencer that passed by toured around the booth looking for an interesting angle, and finally settled on a photo juxtaposing the 101 architecture model against the real 101 that filled up the entire background of his photo.
The plaque board in question reads in four line bulletins: “CCP covered up the truth and colluded with WHO”, “CCP covered up infection cases, and affected the entire world,””CCP concealed evidences, prevented the international community to investigate its medical lab, and rejected accusations as conspiracy theory””CCP spent years developing bio-chemical weapons.” While the bulletins contained some factual information, none of the bulletins established credible intentionality nor facts of the Chinese government releasing COVID virus to wage biological warfare.
Photo credit: Peiyi Yu
“How is this allowed to be displayed here?” exclaimed a mother walking by with her family without stopping, as I took a knee to take a photo. Another father teased as he took a photo of the plaque boards and left, “I didn’t know you can do this with so much technology” referring to the QR codes decorating around the booth.
The QR code on the plaque board leads to a campaign website, EndCCP.com, and the donation button leads to a donation option for Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party, an international organization that is registered in New York City, Flushing. The Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party declared that it aims to end the Chinese Communist Party by encouraging a wave of denunciation of CCP membership. Part of its bulletin exposé reads:
“Systematically, CCP is taking control of the narratives in the West: the mainstream media, big tech companies, Hollywood, the sports industry, and politicians … we have watched them bowing down, again and again, self-censoring their speech in favor of Beijing. The universal values were corrupted by the devil.”
The bulletin did not provide a link to further information about “mainstream media, big tech companies, Hollywood, the sports industry, and politicians” who “bowed down again and again” “in favor of Beijing.”
On the website and on the booth, the conspiracy theory never clarified the intended target of China’s biological warfare. Instead, CCP was portrayed as an menacing omnipotent entity that releases the virus onto the world with no explanation of its intention, yet, paradoxically incompetent in preventing the spread of COVID among its own population that “not surprisingly, the CCP is still covering it up with a rosy picture of low case counts.”
Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party claims to be the “the largest grassroots movement in China, freeing hearts and minds.” But according to its United States IRA 990 form, past journalism reports and legal cases, its president Rong Yi, director Yufeng Liang, and CFO Yuebin Yu, are all Falun Gong members. Falun Gong, an anti-communist corporatized cult that has been actively persecuted by CCP since the 2000s, owns Shen Yun dance group that has 26.5 million USD worth of assets listed under its title. Among Falun Gong’s associated organizations is the New York based Epoch Times, the media giant of the Chinese diaspora and one of the key outlets disseminating conspiratorial claims that COVID-19 was intentionally released by the Chinese government.
Founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong was initially a quasi-religion preaching for mental and spiritual transcendence through the practice of Chinese martial art meditation, and did not inherit an explicit theology by its inception. Due to its spontaneous rapid expansion in China and globally, CCP denied Falun Gong’s organizational registration application in China in the late 90s. In 1999, CCP reached a decision to ban Falun Gong and denounced it as an “evil cult”. Following after was a series of rapid brutal crackdowns with most of Falun Gong’s high ranking members either convicted by unfair trials, or seeking asylums abroad. Today, Falun Gong operates as a loosely associated organization with a galvanizing anti-communism theology to mitigate China’s global crackdown and harassment.
“The Epoch Times was founded by followers of Falun Gong from diverse backgrounds and perspectives,” reads the Epoch Times’ “about us”. In 2000, Falun Gong practitioner John Tang founded Epoch Times in the US. Over the years, Epoch Times grew into a media giant that publishes in 21 different languages, with websites registered in 33 countries, and peaked with more than 10 million Facebook followers on its English page. In the editorial room of Epoch Times, Falun Gong’s explicit theology gradually took shape. 2004, Epoch Times published a 200 and some page pamphlet, “Nine Commentaries on Communist Party”. While the pamphlet alluded to a fusion of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism ancestor worship, it establishes the Chinese Communist Party as an anti-deity that “can be thought of as a kind of being, one that opposes nature, heaven, earth, and mankind. It is an evil specter opposing the universe.”
Falun Gong is perhaps best known today as victims of alleged organ harvesting by the Chinese government. Falun Gong citself claims that 3,700 Falun Gong victims have died under CCP custody. Internationally recognized organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International do not provide a definite number of Falun Gong victims who were killed by torture and denial of medical treatment. Amnesty further stated in 2013, that “[3700] may be only a small portion of the actual number of deaths in custody.” Human Rights Watch confirmed in 1994 that China has an organ harvesting economy. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, in 1995, confirmed CCP’s common practice of transplanting organs from deceased convicts, and organ transplants without donors’ consent.
During the 2016 US presidential election, Epoch Times pivoted its editorial line to embrace Donald Trump. What was for a long time a niche outlet with a primarily ethnic Chinese diaspora audience now took a far-right partisan line to appeal to both US and Chinese audiences. In 2018, Epoch Times published its second theological pamphlet, “The Ultimate Goal of Communism” with different editions in different languages. With anti-communism conspiracy theory taking the main stage of the pamphlet, it amalgamated anti-semitism elements familiar to the far-right US audience, and Chinese exceptionalism familiar to Chinese traditionalist, into a “chosen people” versus “eternal evil” narrative similar to Mein Kampf:
“Karl Marx was born as a Jew. When he was six years old, his family converted to Catholicism… In his youth, he praised God with sincerity in his literature…But then something strange happened. Marx suddenly started to conceive an amazing hate for god.”
“Marx has been chosen by the evil spectre. The Satan worshiping and god hating Marx was not at all an atheist.”
“The evil spectre of communism knows, once it manages to destroy China, the destruction of the world will be in its reach.”
“The vast land of the Sino world is unique, and its variation, sublime. It is the central nation chosen by god, and it is the land that will nurture the final resolution to save the world when the apocalypse arrives.”
Photo credit: Peiyi Yu
As COVID pandemic spreaded in 2020, Epoch Times published the COVID conspiracy theory documentary, “The first documentary movie on CCP virus, Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus”. As early as April when New York City was still adapting to the newly imposed reality of lockdown, and when CCP struggled to suppress information about COVID in China, the suggestion was made by Epoch Times about links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the CCP’s “pro-active biological weapon portfolio”. This contributed to terms as “Congflu”, “Chinese Virus”, and the like, as Trump’s racial slurs encouraged a wave of hate crimes against Asians.
In spite of their troubled reputation, Falun Gong, and Falun Gong associated disinformation booths are found in many corners of the Sino diaspora from New York, Vancouver, Sydney, to Taipei and beyond. At Taipei 101, many of those who stopped and interacted with the booth were children. As they took photos of the architecture model, the speaker broadcasted in front of them, “These are the things that CCP does not want you to know.” This occurs in Taiwan, too, even as Taiwan faces coercion from China.