WASHINGTON—A movement encouraging Chinese people to quit the Communist Party represents a spiritual and cultural awakening in which the country’s millennia-old traditions are making a comeback, experts said at a forum on Capitol Hill on Nov. 22.

Chinese people began to peacefully end their affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after The Epoch Times published a series of editorials titled the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” 20 years ago.

Since then, the total number of those who have denounced any association with the regime in China has snowballed to nearly 440 million, according to the Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party, a volunteer organization that assists those who withdraw and keeps a tally.

Some of those who have left the Party were once members of the CCP’s junior organizations, the Young Pioneers (for elementary school children) and the Communist Youth League (for adolescents).

While membership in these organizations isn’t mandatory on paper, it is in practice. Students who haven’t joined these two groups by a certain age face increasing pressure. They may even be less likely to receive education benefits.

As they progress from Young Pioneers member to full-fledged party member, Chinese people have to pledge more of themselves to the regime. First, they are expected to be “contributing to” the Party, then “fighting for” it, and eventually, “ready to sacrifice everything for” the CCP.

Piero Tozzi, staff director of the bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said he sees a connection between the withdrawals from the CCP and traditional Chinese culture.

Many Chinese people who quit the Party and its affiliated organizations say they’re doing it to rid themselves of the CCP’s control and to avoid being considered an affiliate if or when the CCP is held accountable for its crimes in or outside of China.

“There’s a moral problem,” Tozzi told The Epoch Times after the forum. “You’re responding to that by withdrawing from it. You’re not giving consent to that.”

Quitting the CCP, or “tuidang” in Chinese, is an “active choice of passive resistance,” Tozzi told the forum attendees.

Taoism, an ancient belief in China, speaks about “wu wei,” or letting things run their natural course without intervening too much.

“Some of us who studied martial arts are familiar with the ‘wu wei’ principle,” Tozzi said. “When you have a superior force, instead of trying to meet it and getting crushed, you give way.”

As an act of passive resistance, the tuidang movement is “very difficult to control and combat” and has a “tremendous impact,” he said after the forum.

John Lenczowski, a former principal Soviet affairs adviser to President Ronald Reagan, told The Epoch Times after the forum, “Even if people are not particularly ideologically aware, they do have a deeper cultural sense that there’s something wrong about communist tyranny.”

Lenczowski, who is the founder of the Institute of World Politics, a Washington-based graduate school, added that even during ancient imperial rule, Chinese dynasties didn’t have unlimited state power as the CCP does today.

He said at the forum that the CCP’s “center of gravity,” without which the Party might not even survive, is its internal security system, and its nucleus is the “combination of a monopoly of information and communication, and the ideological Party line.”

He said the CCP’s psychological strategy is to subject people to “fatalistic acceptance” that any resistance would be futile and hopeless. Therefore, individual decisions, which people can embrace after breaking through the communist psyche, are effective in dismantling control.

He gave an analogy of coral reefs, which cease to exist when the organisms that cling to them leave or die off.

Tuidang, an “act of individual dissociation from the party-state,” helps to “break down that reef,” Lenczowski said.

In his view, the CCP’s claims to add “Chinese characteristics” to Marxism and Leninism are “a lot of nonsense”; communism is a “Western import” that is “completely incompatible with Chinese culture.” There’s a “war of ideas” in China between communism and “elements of traditional Chinese culture and the religious foundations,” he added.

Robert Destro, a law professor at the Catholic University of America and former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, told the forum audience that tuidang is the way to confront the CCP, which treats the people in China as “commodities.”

“We need to be realistic and understand that what we’ve got is a form of spiritual warfare,” he said. “Unless we understand it as such, we will not know how to prepare.”

‘Let the Party Fall’

Tozzi said that the Western world should let the tuidang movement run its course and “shouldn’t subsidize tyranny” in the meantime.

“Let the Party fall,” he said.

He criticized President George H.W. Bush’s administration for sending national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to Beijing and helping the CCP stabilize its power after it crushed Chinese students’ pro-democratic pursuits in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

“Never again should we side with the Communist Party against the Chinese people,” Tozzi said. “Never again. And if we allow the Party to fall, we allow the Chinese people to spring back.

“Then, and only then, without the Chinese Communist Party, will we see a true rejuvenation of the Chinese people.”

Nury Turkel, a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute and former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, called the tuidang movement “something very significant.” He said it is “truly remarkable that over 400 million people left or decided to quit the CCP.”

“This is not just a number,” he said, reminding the audience of the risks people take by making the “significant decision” to denounce the Party.

A lot of Americans don’t understand how much the CCP controls Chinese people, Turkel said.

“The CCP decides everything” in China, he said, and often subjects its people to “ill-treatment, punishment, or collective punishment.”

Journalist Kim Se Hoon said the whole world is “under the grip of the CCP in some way, shape, or form,” whether through the Belt and Road Initiative, the Party’s geopolitical influence platform positioned as global infrastructure investments, or through school classrooms in which Chinese-language teaching is embedded with CCP doctrines.

Kim said that when people realize the true situation, they will no longer separate human rights issues from defense and trade.