Taiwanese Businesswoman Reflects on the Coronavirus Pandemic

(Minghui.org) Tse-Min Chin (also known as Tammy Kawamura) grew up in Taiwan and later moved to Japan after she got married. She founded the high-end handbag company TAMMY in 2005. Along with running the company, she has real estate businesses in Taiwan, China, and Hawaii, and operates a luxury apartment rental business in Taiwan. In a recent interview with the Epoch Times, she discussed how the pandemic changed her view on China and Falun Gong.

Ms. Chin’s husband is chairman of the Japanese restaurant giant Tentsusaikan Group. His restaurants have been losing millions every month since the start of the pandemic. Ms. Chin also canceled all her real estate businesses in China. Despite financial losses, she keeps her perspective. “I want to say that nothing is more important than life and health,” said Ms. Chin.

The pandemic has given her an opportunity to realize the evilness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). She said, “The CCP persecutes people all over the world, not just Falun Gong. Because the CCP concealed the virus outbreak, the disease harmed the world and claimed the lives of people everywhere.”

Ms. Chin regrets not believing Falun Gong practitioners before. She said, “I think we all owe Falun Gong an apology. In many places, such as Taipei 101, I have seen Falun Gong practitioners calling for everyone to understand the truth about the persecution [of Falun Gong]. But the facts of the persecution I heard were too far from our lives and beyond normal people’s comprehension. I couldn’t believe them to be true. So like many people, I felt indifferent and failed to condemn the CCP’s crimes. Today, we also fell victim to the CCP ourselves. It is a hard lesson. I want to apologize to Falun Gong practitioners for not giving them due sympathy and humanitarian support back then.”

Ms. Chin added that the struggle of people in Hong Kong against the totalitarian regime made her completely sober. It made her admire the courage and determination of Falun Gong practitioners even more – now that she knows what they had been facing. She is calling for all the media and governments around the world to stand up to the CCP. She said, “I hope that in the future, our society, including China, will no longer be threatened by the CCP, and that people will live freely, in peace and without fear.”

Like Ms. Chin, many people in Hong Kong are waking up to the CCP's tyranny after seeing the police violence and the corruption of the legal system since last year. They realized that what they had heard from Falun Gong practitioners for years was all true. Some left comments on social media platforms to show their support and apologize for misunderstanding Falun Gong in the past.

During the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong last year, authorities had declared a number of deaths as suicides from drowning or jumping off buildings under suspicious circumstances. People are reminded that similar tactics were used in the persecution of Falun Gong in China after July 1999, when the former Chinese President Jiang Zemin launched the brutal persecution.

In order to incite people’s hatred towards Falun Gong, the CCP mobilized every means to fabricate lies, such as the Tiananmen Self-immolation. Many people were deceived and kept silent about the persecution. Many innocent practitioners were detained and tortured, and even became victims of forced organ harvesting.

On October 26, 2019, Fox News published a report titled “Survivors and victims on shocking state-sanctioned organ harvesting in China,” which mentioned a judgment by the China Tribunal that “Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years, and Falun Gong practitioners have been one – and probably the main – source of organ supply.”

Ms. Chen, a Hong Kong resident, said that after her personal experience with Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement and looking back at the efforts from Falun Gong practitioners over the years, she finally realized, “What Falun Gong practitioners said was all true.”

Another netizen posted, “Hong Kongers did not believe the testaments from Falun Gong in the past twenty years. Only when the evil laws were imposed on us, one by one, do we realize that the CCP can turn anything illegal to legitimate.”