Below is the speech given by the speaker of Assembly of Citizens, Ruohui Yang, at the New York venue of the global Launch of “The Declaration of United Civil Resistance in China (《全民反抗宣言》)”, organized by China Action. The original transcript was posted on the official twitter account of China Action, English version translated by Ashlynn Peng, Assembly of Citizens.
We No Longer Kneel to Beg For Justice
There’s an old Chinese saying: “What troubles people is not scarcity, but inequality.” In the set of China, the core issue is the fairness. The Chinese Communist Party rose to power waving the banner of equality, but what did they bring? Ironically and ridiculously, the equality of starvation, the equality of being crushed beneath tanks, the equality of being exploited by the Party elite. That is the kind of fairness the CCP promised and delivered.
According to statistics from China International Capital Corporation Limited, 92.6% of the Chinese population, which accounts for approximately 1.3 billion people – collectively own only 7% of the whole nation’s wealth. In contrast, just 0.3%, the ruling Communist elite and their agents – have control over 67% of China’s wealth.
While children in the remote rural mountains starve in poverty, and those food delivery workers in big cities brave the pouring rain to earn a living, while underpaid laborers are treated as threats to national stability simply for demanding their meager wages…The elites, untouched by such struggles, drive their luxury cars straight into the Forbidden City, a national heritage site supposedly protected for the people, to enjoy their private tours.
The children of high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials are often promoted through behind-the-scenes arrangements, bypassing years of competition. Meanwhile, students from ordinary families who study diligently need more than a decade of pursuing to get the same roles. As for the top tier positions? It’s nothing more than a fantasy for those without the “red family bloodline”.
In China’s healthcare system, ordinary citizens often avoid seeking medical treatment simply because they can’t afford it. In Henan province, a 70-year-old man waited to die at home due to lack of money for healthcare. In Guizhou province, a university girl was suffering from heart disease and died after months of malnutrition since she had never received the promised “charity donations” and unable to afford any treatment. Meanwhile, in contrast, in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, they are building a sprawling retirement homes for high-ranking Party bureaucracy, covering several thousand square kilometers. Even the Minister of Health admitted that 80% of China’s healthcare fund goes toward Party and government elites.
While countless families fall ill from overwork, and face melancholy consequences simply because they cannot afford a doctor appointment. bureaucracy lie comfortably in private hospitals, extending their rotting lives with organs harvested from children whose names we’ll never know.
In every nights when you ordinary people are worrying about how to make it through tomorrow, the children of them are flaunting luxury jewelry – bought with money they squeezed from countless struggling families. And when the public dare to question them, they shrug and sneer: “What can you do about it?”
In 2019, as the people of Hong Kong protested on the streets to fight for their basic rights, the class of privileged children of Chinese officer in Toronto paraded through Canadian streets with their luxury cars, flaunting their power, funded by Chinese taxpayers’ money that should have gone to building roads, schools, and public services.
Perhaps the older generations of hypocritical officers still understood the need to hide their stolen wealth, even staging anti-corruption theatrics just days before the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. But ever since that, they believed the dignity of the Chinese people had been crushed by tank tracks, they’ve grown shameless. Now, they flaunt their power without fear, indulging in excess while daring the public to object. Every act of arrogance is a message – a taunting and screaming one core belief of the Communist Party: You vulgar people, what can you possibly do to me?
Is this what you call justice?
We are not asking for much. We simply want to live in a society where fairness exists; where banks don’t swallow our life savings; where ordinary people aren’t thrown into psychiatric wards and tortured for speaking their minds; where seeking dialogue with the world isn’t a crime; where children aren’t fed poisoned milk; where lawyers aren’t imprisoned for defending justice; where citizens have rights that actually mean something.
The Chinese Communist Party wants us to forget. Their tyranny is continuous happening. Many who once resisted, and those who silently watched, both have a day returning to their daily lives. They no longer shout, no longer protest, as if nothing ever happened. For us here in Canada, seems we are meant to believe we’ve made this exodus and everything is all right. Yes, everyone want to enjoy life, to go skiing in winter, surfing in summer. But when we look back to China, let us remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, remember the young people on the streets during the White Paper Revolution of 2022. Look at the brave citizens in Jiangyou this year, who stood up against a unacceptable judgement of a school bullying case. They were ordinary people, they faced the full force of the brutal institution, and they were not scared off easily. So how dare we retreat? How dare we turn away from the pain inflicted on our fellow citizens, on our homeland, by this regime?
The CCP wants to numb us, to close our eye, to make us forget.
Forget the concentration camps in Xinjiang,
Forget the blood spilled in Tiananmen Square,
Forget the 2008 Chinese milk scandal,
Forget the screams of those trapped in the Urumqi fire,
Forget the innocent people infected with HIV during the Henan blood scandal,
Forget the lives lost in shoddy buildings built on corruption,
Forget Hong Kong’s fight for freedom,
Forget the so-called “rehabilitation centers” where teenagers are tortured in the name of curing internet addiction…
Forget all of it.
But we won’t.
We will not forgive, we will not forget, and we will never kneel!
They want us to knee down.
They want us to grovel, to beg with wagging tails.
“Come on,” they say, “kneel, plead, show us submission.”
And they call that political consultation.
But the truth is, kneeling to them only leads to heavier chains. Bullies don’t stop when you submit, they tighten their grip. The Jiangyou incident made this painfully clear, again and again. We must never bow to perpetrators. We must stand together, united in resistance to against their cruelty and tyranny. Peaceful resistance is not only our right, it’s our most vital path forward.
Sons and daughters who yearn for freedom,
who among us was born to live like livestock, waiting to be slaughtered? With unwavering determination, we rise to overthrow dictatorship, to dismantle tyranny, to bring down the Chinese Communist Party!
We may be the last generation, but we are also the first to walk toward the light. We are the final generation of silence, because we refuse to pass the burden of resistance onto the next.
Stay strong.
Resist.