Witnessing History: One Woman's Fight for Freedom and Falun Gong - Softcover

Zeng, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1741144000 ISBN 13: 9781741144000

Publisher: Allen & Unwin, 2005

Synopsis

One woman's harrowing story of imprisonment and survival in the face of the Chinese government's persecution of Falun Gong On May 23, 2000, the Chinese government sentenced Jennifer Zeng to reeducation through forced labor. Her fellow inmates were drug addicts, prostitutes, and traffickers in pornography. Jennifer's only crime was her belief in the three tenets of Falun Gong: Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance.
Struggling with a life-threatening illness and a need to understand her place in the world, Jennifer had immersed herself in many Western and Eastern philosophies before finally finding the answers she was seeking in Falun Gong. A few short years later her newfound faith saw her blacklisted and imprisoned in a purpose-built labor camp. Jennifer was forced to squat for hours in the blistering sun, endure hours of physical and verbal abuse, and knit garments until her hands bled to feed the booming Chinese economy. During this time Jennifer saw many fellow Falun Gong practitioners tortured. Some died, many more remain in the camps today.This is the powerful and moving story of how a bright, successful young scientist and happily married mother survived detention and torture, only to be forced to flee her family and homeland to seek asylum in Australia. A raw and compelling memoir, one which provides a fascinating glimpse into everyday life in China, Witnessing History also exposes a bureaucracy still struggling to disentangle itself from the constraints of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

About this title

About the Author:

Jennifer Zeng was born in China and graduated with a Masters of Science in geochemistry from Peking University. Jennifer began practicing Falun Gong in 1997 and was arrested four times before being sentenced to one year's re-education in a Labor Camp. There she was tortured and brain-washed. In 2001 Jennifer was released and fled to Australia where she started writing an account on her experiences.

From Publishers Weekly:

For Westerners, one of the most perplexing recent obsessions of Communist China is the mass persecution of hundreds of thousands of mostly middle-aged, middle-class devotees of Falun Gong, a system of exercise and meditation on "Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance." Equally puzzling is the well-documented determination of practitioners to defy the notoriously repressive government. While this memoir doesn't provide definitive answers, it does shed light on the issues and offer a hair-raising first-person look at China's brutal concentration camps (Zeng spent a year in one), where prisoners are beaten, electrocuted, deprived of sleep, forced into hard labor and subjected to constant "reform" propaganda, aka brainwashing. Zeng, an investment consultant, turned to Falun Gong after the difficult birth of her daughter and a botched medical procedure left her weakened and depressed. The practice improved her health and outlook almost immediately. Like other practitioners, Zeng couldn't believe the government would go as far as it did to crack down on something so seemingly harmless and beneficial, until she found herself under arrest in 2000. After stubborn resistance for a year, Zeng finally pretended to "reform," and when released, managed to escape to Australia. China watchers should be attentive to this simply written but invaluable report from the front. (May)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1741144000
• ISBN 13: 9781741144000
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368