Like former Chinese leader Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) "little red book," the critical Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party is pocket-sized and ubiquitous.
The little blue book is also chock full of ideology, but don't let the authorities in China catch you reading it.
"There's a mandatory seven-year prison sentence for anyone caught with this book in China," said Kuo Chin-han (
PHOTO: CNA
Kuo was joined yesterday by thousands of other anti-CCP protesters in front of Banciao Stadium amid the rain to promote the "Quit the CCP" movement.
Triggered by the Nine Commentaries in 2004, the movement has encouraged 16 million former CCP members to quit the party, event organizers told reporters yesterday.
"The movement is unstoppable -- people are reading this book and understanding just how evil the CCP is," said Lee Ching-mei (
Lee said Chinese spies were probably in attendance at the rally yesterday, but that protesters "were not afraid."
"The collapse of the Chinese government is imminent," she added.
Members from the Falun Gong-backed newspaper the Epoch Times were also in attendance.
Although she insisted that the Quit the CCP movement was spontaneously organized, Lee conceded that the Nine Commentaries was published by the Epoch Times group and that information about the movement was mostly relegated to the group's Web site.
She added that her service center helped Internet users in China get around software firewalls erected by the Chinese government in order to view anti-CCP material online.
Epoch Times reporter Olga Yang (楊加), meanwhile, said that although her newspaper celebrated China in terms of its people and culture, "it's very anti-CCP."
Protesting the alleged illegal harvesting of human organs in China, thousands of Falun Gong practitioners marched and beat drums at the rally.
"We got in just last night," a Singaporean practitioner who identified himself only by his surname Lee (李) told the Taipei Times.
"How many millions have suffered under the CCP's half-century of rule? This is a very important event," he added.
The Falun Gong is a meditative, self-cultivation practice, the group's members said.
The spiritual movement has been outlawed as a cult in China since 1999, with practitioners claiming that group members there are routinely tortured and killed.
Protesters yesterday displayed posters depicting Chinese surgeons cutting open live Falun Gong prisoners and removing their organs.
"Organ transplants cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and are extremely difficult to arrange. But in China, you can get organs very easily and very cheaply. Why is that?" Lee Ching-mei said.
She added that there were 36 Nazi-style concentration camps in China in which Falun Gong members were killed for their organs.
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