2018 NTD and Epoch Times Fa Conference

October 27, 2018
Li Hongzhi

A good afternoon to all of the Dafa practitioners here for the NTD and Epoch Times Fa conference.

The two media gathered here today have played an outstanding and critical role during all of these years when the wicked Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been persecuting Dafa practitioners. You have effectively exposed the evil’s persecution, let people truly know what Falun Gong is, and helped to save many lives all the while.

The CCP is an evil regime, a rogue regime. Those who have been fed its lies and lost their ability to tell true from false will face destruction along with it. But The Epoch Times and NTD have done a great job of remedying this, and truly been a force in saving lives.

Of course, those of you who work in the media have to cultivate yourselves well if you’re to do well at what you are supposed to do. And so cultivation should be first and foremost for you—for every Dafa practitioner involved in the media. That’s because how well you cultivate yourselves determines your power to save people as well as the effectiveness of your work. This is for sure. You have learned this from your own experiences over all these years, whatever the line of work you’ve been involved in—including media work. It’s often the case that those who work hard on their own cultivation get much better results with less effort. So we mustn’t neglect our own spiritual practice. It is first and foremost.

You’re well aware that the media work you do is to save lives, to let the truth be known, and to stop the persecution. But what is the ultimate goal? Each of you involved in the media are in the process of cultivating yourselves, and this work that you are doing is part of it. That is for sure. And that’s the case regardless of what role you play at the company or what work you do. So if you want to travel this path well, you need to really be diligent and attentive about working on, or cultivating, yourself, and never let up, for what you aspire to ultimately is spiritual perfection, isn’t it?

I’m seeing that a lot of young people are now involved, and most of the faces here are new. Well, with young people, my first thoughts go to how evil the things and theories of the CCP have been in mainland China all these years, and how those things go against tradition and our shared humanity. What they have done to make people receptive to its stuff has been to first overturn the traditional culture of China as well as universal values. They have been doing this all along. In each of the political crusades launched in China, it was the country’s cultural elite that were taken down. And during the Cultural Revolution it destroyed the material culture of the past—from historical relics to historical sites and texts—so that no evidence of the values inherited from the past would remain, and people would know nothing of them. Meanwhile, in the school system they don’t teach Chinese history; at first it was taught very generally, and then they gradually dropped it. After that, they started teaching students to criticize the past, which eventually gave way to a complete degradation of China’s history, and teaching that the past is devoid of any merit. They try to brainwash people into believing that the CCP is the greatest thing, the most admirable. With all of this propaganda, many young [Chinese] people know nothing about their own cultural heritage or history. Many young people from China are pleasantly surprised when they see a Shen Yun performance, as they had no idea that China had such a wonderful cultural past. It seems to be the first time they realize this. So this is how evil the CCP is. The people of China have been getting severely brainwashed by it ever since it seized power years ago, and this includes even my generation. There’s a vast difference in the thinking of these people as compared to those in normal, non-communist societies. And today’s youth have been affected even more.

So in light of all this, traditional culture should underlie whatever your media do, and should be your cultural foundation and serve as the basis for determining what are universal values. You must be grounded in traditional values. Just think about why the wicked CCP is so afraid of Shen Yun’s work, when Shen Yun is just giving artistic performances after all. It’s because what Shen Yun portrays is humanity’s traditional culture, and that is precisely what the CCP wants to undermine and crush, as otherwise its evil stuff wouldn’t be able to proliferate or spread unchecked. In China, where it has ruled for decades—for over half a century—it regards the entire populace as the Red Dragon’s spawn, as part of its very tissue, and thinks it can violate the people of China as flagrantly as it wants, and brazenly kill, butcher, and persecute people. And its influence is so pervasive that even when Chinese people condemn the regime, they do so in a communist manner; it’s not how condemnation is normally done. Shen Yun is overturning all of that nonsense from the wicked Party, and so it’s really a devastating blow to the evil specter, and it stands to undo over a century of efforts, rendering it all in vain. So you have to first be able to recognize and discern the influence of the wicked Party. And that only becomes possible by way of the true, traditional culture of humankind.

So as you do your media work, as members of the press, or as cultured and educated people, you should be grounded in traditional culture, and use this to understand universal values, if you hope to be discerning about the wicked Party’s influence and do away with it. And there are many manifestations of modernism in the world today, of course, including in the West; so this is another problem alongside the wicked Party’s harming of the Chinese people. I can tell you that it’s a case of the wicked Party ruining the West; again, it is the Party behind it. Human culture has changed over the past century or two. It used to be that the human world was characterized by the presence of both good and evil, or the positive and the negative. It was like the balance between yin and yang. But starting a century or two ago, the evil specter of communism began to gradually replace the Devil, meaning, it came to fully take over the negative, demonic side, in the yin-yang balance of forces. And this has led to its unabashed efforts to destroy humanity during these years.

So in other words, to do these things well you need to, for one, cultivate yourself well, and secondly, have a clear understanding of those things. You should be using universal values to evaluate the merits and correctness of things like ideas, cultural phenomena, or news. Of course, you have all gone through a great deal over the years, and your motive for starting up these media was to save people and expose evil. That was your original intent, and that is still your purpose, which should never change. Then you must stay on course. As I was just saying, the wicked Party has not only done evil in China: it is also behind things that are associated with modernism. I indicated that during the last century or two the communist specter has become the Devil for humankind, so what was previously involved in the positive-negative, or yin-yang, balance is no longer the same. And so the evil specter has been at work throughout the world, not just in China or in communist countries, where it is pervasive. It has come to assume the part of the negative throughout humankind—that is, the negative role for all of humanity. Didn’t Nostradamus state that Mars [Marx] would be ruling the world? The communist specter is indeed presiding over the negative side. The positive side, however, is of course commanded by divine beings, as part of the balancing of opposite forces. But what is happening in these times is that humanity’s moral baseline has been sliding down, and the specter has been driving people to do evil, to the point that the balance has been lost. That is, the opposite forces are no longer balanced, and the evil outweighs the good, as it now stands.

Of course, under normal circumstances divine beings would put things right again upon seeing a situation like this, and not allow it. But in this case, all of humanity is sliding down, and the situation is one of its own choosing. Yet people aren’t all that aware of what is happening, and have been spurred on by the specter and the things it has instilled in them. The modern ways of thinking and other modernist things that are now seen in the world are in fact, to put it frankly, the product of the communist specter acting in the free world, and this is again the specter trying to destroy humanity.

None of these things is by chance. While it may seem that the specter of communism has no bearing on Western society, it is in fact behind all of those bad things. In Chinese society the specter can be seen at work in the killing of the well-educated, the highly cultured, and persons of wealth, as well as in the destruction of tradition. Whereas in Western society it can be seen in heavy taxation and in the assaults on tradition from modern thought and ways. As people engaging in spiritual practice, you know that people’s financial welfare is the result of karma from their past lives, and that forcibly seizing people’s money goes against cosmic laws. But this world is now as it is—a mess, with values all askew. And people’s morals have continued to decline. On top of all this there’s the fact that the cosmos itself had arrived at the final phase of the cycle of creation, stasis, degeneration, and destruction. So the world is as it is now, broken, and headed for destruction. Problems aren’t just occurring in the human world, as even worlds at higher planes in the cosmos have become abnormal, too. That is the state of things. And this is why it sometimes occurs to me that the media run by our Dafa practitioners are truly rescuing humanity, and that you really are humankind’s only hope.

On the surface it appears that we are fighting a lonely battle. This would mean that each of us needs to make sure we keep ourselves in good shape, and do a bit better in terms of our own cultivation and the standards we hold ourselves to, or it will be hard for us to accomplish our task. Of course, as the saying goes: “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” You may have noticed that the positive is gaining ground, and becoming a real force, and traditions are being restored; and traditional culture is being more valued around the world, as people come to understand things better. So all the more so should we do well and play the role that we should. Cosmic forces are helping as well, as was sure to happen, for things have to go this way.

Of course, as I have said, the wicked CCP persecutes Falun Gong because it was made for Falun Gong. It came about for this very purpose, even though it dates back several decades. You can see this if you think it over. The persecution of Falun Gong is run by the wicked Party, and it is utilizing the entire state apparatus to do that. We have arrived at the stage where both the tests that Dafa practitioners face as well as their own cultivation are just about done, and we are at the final phase of saving the people that we should save. Everything is about done. It’s gradually being wrapped up. The communist specter’s existence no longer has much significance, so it’s about time that it was eliminated. Those of you who are younger might not know this, but back when I was young, in those days, nobody in China would dare to say anything negative, not so much as a word, about the CCP, even if no one was around to hear it; the specter was always lurking and watching you. Those things have since been destroyed. Nowadays people might even rail against the sinister CCP while they have a drink together, and people will think there’s something wrong with you if you don’t speak badly of it. So everyone is criticizing it. But what has emboldened them? The evil factors and specter that were behind the CCP have been decimated. And that is why people dare to be like that and feel more at ease. But for as long as the communist specter still exists, it remains evil. It is like poison, and it will surely continue to poison people for as long as it exists. It can’t be changed, for that is its nature, and its very being was created that way. It has to be eradicated. So within the wicked Chinese Communist Party things are going to become more and more chaotic at this stage. Divine beings are destroying it, and the mighty force of Fa rectification is continually purging it. That is the stage we have arrived at. So whoever still sings its praises, whoever goes along with it, will go down together with it.

But whatever the case, our media should be feeling increasingly optimistic about their future. I say that because, thinking back to the beginning, things were terribly trying for you early on, both in terms of financial and human resources. Whereas now, for one, I see that, wow—you’ve got so many young contributors! I’m delighted to see all of you involved in this. Also, things aren’t as hard to do as they once were, and the world around us has changed. Back in the early days, the wicked Party was controlling all of China’s one-sided media and spreading lies around the world. You couldn’t find honest and positive reporting anywhere. The reports coming from the wicked CCP’s media were getting disseminated around the world, and it amounted to the whole world persecuting Falun Gong. Even the pressure and stress that Dafa practitioners outside of China felt was enormous. How people looked at Dafa practitioners was influenced by the CCP’s propaganda. It was under those circumstances that Dafa practitioners began their own media, and ever since, they have made them progressively better. The general public has become increasingly aware of what we are really about and of the persecution, thanks, as well, to the combined efforts of other Dafa practitioners who have worked on raising awareness among people all throughout society. So what we’ve been doing has served, in subtle ways, to make the truth known and lessen the strain along the way, and that is why things seem to have eased up now. But back in the beginning it really was like I’ve described. I can see that the forces of good are surging ahead now, while the wicked CCP is approaching its demise. Whoever still tries to preserve it will go down with it. Those who can see what is happening are the wise ones, while those who can’t are the biggest of fools.

Basically I wanted to convey today that for your media to be successful you have to do two things well. One is to cultivate yourselves well, and the other is to be grounded in traditional culture and base what you do on universal values. Only then will you manage to do everything well. And you have done quite well already. You have made it through a number of really trying years, you have continued to strengthen your workforce with new resources, and have grown stronger and stronger. I should add that Epoch Media Group, which includes NTD, is now the biggest news organization among the Chinese population worldwide, and it’s steadily becoming more recognized and valued by the Western world. That’s really heartening to see! Seize the day, and take the media to the next level. I’d like to see your work have a powerful impact when it comes out. I’d like to see each piece have a big impact. You can definitely achieve that! That’s all for today. Thank you all!

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(Translation by Team Yellow, subject to further improvement. Date of this version: November 2, 2018.)