‘Beyond the Red Wall: The Persecution of Falun Gong’

FOCUSED: Peter Rowe gathering footage for his documentary Beyond the Red Wall at World Falun Dafa Day activities in Toronto, Canada, in May, 2005. (Jan Jekielek/Getty Images)

Rowe, who produces the "Angry Planet" series for OLN, says Red Wall was three years in the making. He commends the CBC for taking on such a controversial topic, especially in light of the fact that the network has broadcast rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympics in Canada.

"The fact that they're willing to broadcast a film that has people in it advocating the boycotting of the Olympics which they themselves are the broadcaster of in Canada is remarkable," says Rowe.

Rowe is referring to the section in Red Wall that documents the illicit, state-sanctioned harvesting of the bodily organs of Falun Gong practitioners to supply China's booming transplant industry.

Some who are concerned about the organ harvesting have questioned whether Beijing should have the right to host the Games. In the documentary, Clive Ansley, a Canadian lawyer who practiced law in China, likens Beijing 2008 to the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany, which served to glorify and legitimize Hitler's regime.

Former Canadian cabinet minister David Kilgour co-authored "Bloody Harvest," a report on the theft of Falun Gong practitioners' organs. He speaks in Red Wall about his investigation and how organ brokers freely admitted in phone conversations that they had "Falun Gong suppliers" immediately available to provide organs.

Average wait times for a kidney transplant appear silently on the screen, the figures speaking for themselves: Canada, 2555 days; United Kingdom, 1095 days; United States, 1825 days; China, 15 days.

Former Canadian MP David Kilgour speaks at a rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa about his report into organ harvesting in China. The report concludes that the Chinese regime is stealing bodily organs from detained Falun Gong practitioners for sale in a lu (Matthew Hildebrand/The Epoch Times)

Red Wall tells how practitioners all over the world have become the voice for their counterparts in China, lobbying politicians and calling attention to the persecution, their sole aim being to somehow bring it to an end.

With its continuing protests and vigils outside Chinese consulates and embassies around the world and its many awareness-raising efforts, Falun Gong has almost become defined by its struggle to end the persecution.

Zheng Weidong, Minister Counsellor of the Chinese Embassy in Canada, denies in Red Wall that practitioners are tortured. He states emphatically that within China, Falun Gong has "crumbled."

Such is the new party line. Inside China, state media have shifted from constantly vilifying Falun Gong to not mentioning it, as though the group no longer exists.

But behind this façade, reports show that Falun Gong continues on in China—as does the persecution, as severely as ever.

Two-thirds of reported torture cases in China are Falun Gong cases, according to Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture. Human rights groups have documented over 3,000 torture deaths of Falun Gong practitioners in China, and the most recent U.S. Department of State report on human rights highlighted the ongoing persecution.

Far from being eliminated, Falun Gong has even been quietly growing in rural areas and smaller cities, says Guo Guoting, an exiled Chinese lawyer who defended Falun Gong adherents in China before the authorities shut down his law practice. He fled to Canada in 2005.

"In my understanding, Falun Gong is not only a practice for physical health; actually it is a kind of belief, a faith, and nobody can destroy one's belief," says Guo. "This is why it's impossible for the communist regime to destroy Falun Gong."

Falun Gong practitioners in a march in New York City hold wreaths in memory of fellow practitioners tortured to death in China for their beliefs. (Jeff Nenarella/The Epoch Times)

Johnson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of features he wrote about Falun Gong, says in Red Wall that the persecution "remains one of the scars on the body politic of China," and the time has come for the regime to "come out and deal with this and say there was this terrible crackdown, this repression, and these people were systematically persecuted.

"In order for China to move forward, they have to have this kind of a reckoning."

As Kilgour puts it, "the killing has to stop."

Beyond the Red Wall will air on CBC Newsworld on Tuesday, November 6 at 10:00 pm ET/PT, and will repeat on Saturday, November 10 at 4 a.m. ET and 11 PM ET/PT. The film will also be aired in Quebec and Ireland this fall.