Free China: The Courage to Believe – a most important film
By Greg Autry
The practice of “Truth, compassion, and tolerance” is not an activity that a civilized nation responds to with torture. China today is an uncivilized country. From a Chinese perspective this is the gravest national insult and I would not make such a statement without purpose or cause.
My purpose is to turn around our failed engagement failed policy with communist China. Since the massacre at Tiananmen Square this policy has been an unjustifiable disaster. Millions of American jobs have vanished while millions of Chinese live like slaves. The despotic Chinese regime has been enriched, empowered and emboldened. Censorship and repression has escalated and the goose-stepping People’s Liberation Army is on the verge of provoking war with nearly every one of China’s neighbors. The details of all that are found in my book with Peter Navarro, Death by China and Navarro’s film based on it. But the more important question might be “Why has China consistently responded to American engagement with lying, cheating, stealing and threatening?”
A powerful new film, Free China: The Courage to Believe directed by Michael Perlman and produced by Kean Wong provides the evidence that backs up my charge and addresses the root cause of China’s uncivilized behavior.
Free China opens by showing how Mao Tse Tung and his sociopathic, communist followers intentionally and systematically attacked the moral foundations of ancient China. Mao’s movements, purges and pogroms including the infamous “cultural revolution” were aimed at the very soul of China. Their goal has been nothing less than to replace centuries of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian thought with the amoral philosophy and disastrous economics of a drunken German and his mad Russian protégés.[1]
Inside China, this has been manifest in the brutality, murder and repression that is so elegantly portrayed in Free China. This English language film (with Chinese subtitles) is intensely personal look at a dream of a free China through the story of two courageous practitioners of Falun Gong.
Falun Gong, is a moral philosophy that arose in reaction to the communist depravations and seeks “truth, compassion, and tolerance” and advocates for the restoration of China’s historical values. While the communist regime has attacked every source of ethical standards from Tibetan Buddhism to American Evangelical “house churches”, it has been the practitioners of Falun Gong that have led the resistance and suffered the cost. They have conducted their peaceful civil disobedience with resolve that would make Gandhi and Martin Luther King proud.
Like many others, our film’s protagonists, Jennifer Zeng and Dr. Charles Lee end up in Chinese prison camps where they are subject to depravation, torture, political thought control and enslavement. We are lucky to have them alive so they can share both these horrors and their valor with us. As the film tells us, so many more have not been so fortunate. They’ve been starved, beaten to death, mentally broken and even used as involuntary organ donors.
Like Mr. Pearlman’s other work, Tibet: Beyond Fear, this film is beautifully shot and edited. Zeng and Lee are genuine and powerful. Additionally, two of the West’s great voices for human dignity, Canada’s David Kilgour and American Congressman Chris Smith, offer poignant contributions. Free China is a compelling and heart-wrenching look at a human tragedy in progress that America continues to ignore only at our own peril. Please see this film and share it with as many others as you can. Free China should give Americans the courage to stand with the bravest of the Chinese people so that China may reassume its place as a great and civilized nation.
Free China is showing Wednesday September 12 at the Los Feliz 3 Cinemas in Los Angeles. I hope to see you there! Additional information and pre-orders for the DVD are at: http://freechinamovie.com
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Greg Autry serves as Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance and is the co-author of the book Death by China. He also served as a producer on the Death by China documentary film directed by Peter Navarro and narrated by Martin Sheen.
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[1] In the 1980s China’s rulers combined the very worst ideas of socialism with a poisonous corruption of capitalism to establish a new and utterly amoral brand of “state capitalism.”
(L-R) Greg Autry, Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance , co-author of the book Death by China, Kean Wong, producer of Free China, Jennifer Zeng, main character of Free China, David Kilgour, former lawyer and Canadian politician, co-author of Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China, at Free Thinking Film Festival in Ottawa, Canada on Nov. 2, 2012.（Wu Wei/The Epoch Times)
