In an interview, Janice Trey discusses why the Chinese communist regime opposes tradition, and the importance of upholding it.
Epoch Times CEO Janice Trey’s thirst for truth sprouted from an unlikely place: a Chinese labor camp.
She was born in the middle of the Cultural Revolution—one of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong’s campaigns that targeted traditional Chinese culture, killing an estimated millions.
Authorities had labeled people like her parents, college-educated engineers, as an inferior class and sent them to a labor camp in a remote southern Chinese village. There, Trey spent her first nine years, growing sugar cane, carrying fertilizers to the top of the hill, and picking crops during harvest season. Her parents farmed and sewed. To go to school, Trey walked 1 1/2 hours every day to another village, passing hills, cemeteries, and snakes, she told PragerU CEO Marissa Streit on her “Real Talk” podcast.
She never saw fridges and cars in the camp, things that she read about in pamphlets that flew across the sea on balloons from Taiwan, mainland China’s democratic island neighbor. She had wondered if they were true.
Living her first nine years in the camp and then making it out of China gives Trey an inside view of two vastly different worlds and ingrained in her a commitment to seek—and spread—true information, a task she’s spearheading at The Epoch Times.
“Freedom and totalitarian regimes are opposites,” Trey said during the show aired on Nov. 13. And to have true freedoms, she said, keeping people informed is necessary.
When Trey’s family escaped the mainland to Hong Kong, she immediately felt a “breath of fresh air,” she said. No longer was she forced to sing songs praising the CCP or study propaganda-filled books. She got her hands on textbooks in the same period from various places—Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China—and noted how different they looked.
Any remaining illusions she had about the Chinese regime shattered about a decade later, when Beijing opened fire on unarmed students protesting for political reform in Tiananmen Square.
By Eva Fu
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