Who are they? I asked him.
We think they are called “Falun Gong,” he said. “Apparently it’s a huge Chinese religious movement, but we don’t really know anything about them. Ethan,” he said, “we’ve simply been caught with our pants down.”
As we commemorate the 10 year anniversary of Falun Gong’s catastrophic oppression, we must acknowledge that—with a few special exceptions, the Western response has essentially given the Chinese Communist Party a free hand.
We have only begun to assess the damage: Over 3000 confirmed deaths by torture, abuse and neglect. According to my current research, at a minimum, over ten thousand Falun Gong have been harvested for their organs. The final tally is likely to go well over 100,000.
According to my colleague, Leeshai Lemish, quantitative analysis shows that media mentions of Falun Gong fell in proportion to rising fatalities. So I submit that our pants are still down. And I submit that the failure starts with the Western media’s interpretation of April 25 itself.
You can’t even refer to the event without feeding into a set interpretation, a pre-fabricated picture. Out of the clear blue sky, 10,000 majestically disciplined Falun Gong practitioners “surrounded” (that’s AP and Reuters) or “besieged” (that’s AFP) Zhongnanhai. These are straight-ahead translations of the Communist Party line. And they are repeated in scholarly works on Falun Gong history.
Even Falun Gong practitioners writing in The Epoch Times—perhaps feeling it’s too hard too explain—often refer to April 25 as a mass “gathering” at Zhongnanhai. The only difference is that they treat the word “demonstration” as if it’s a dirty word. Well, it is to the Chinese Communist Party. But not in the West right?
Henry Kissinger justified the Tiananmen Square Massacre with the statement: ''No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators…” That sentiment was recently echoed by Charles Freeman, the Obama Administration’s nominee to chair the U.S. intelligence council.
If the foreign policy elite talks this way about the student demonstrators of ‘89, imagine how they view an obscure Buddhist Revival movement in ‘99. How about: Well, that’s China. Those Falun Gong were asking for it.
Scholars might phrase it a little differently: the oppression of Falun Gong began as an action-reaction phenomenon. It’s a tragedy. A misunderstanding. A mistake.
Well, yes, Falun Gong practitioners have made plenty of mistakes. But I don’t accept that they asked to be martyred. And I don’t think you should accept that either. But if you do, you should interview people who actually participated on April 25, and its precursor, Tianjin.
Set Up at Tianjin
In early 1999, a physicist published an article in a Tianjin University journal attacking Falun Gong, essentially portraying it as a dangerous cult. Since the physicist and the journal were relatively obscure, Falun Gong has been accused of hypersensitivity to criticism.
But this isn’t the West and these things aren’t random. The physicist, He Zuoxiu, is said to be the brother-in-law of Luo Gan, at that time, the head of Public Security. And the Tianjin university journal answers to the state.
Li Hongzhi’s book Zhuan Falun had already been banned from formal publication in the mid-1990’s, in part because of Party concerns over runaway sales. By 1999, Falun Gong had attracted at least 70 million practitioners, 5 million more than the membership of the Party.
So the article wasn’t obscure at all; it was a flare in the night sky, a signal that the Party was trying something out. Something of consequence.
In China, when you see a signal like that, you have two choices. You can keep quiet. And probably get crushed. Or you can stand up. And you may well get crushed—yet spreading truth, refuting lies, these are essential parts of Falun Gong morality.
So Falun Gong stood up quietly; about 5000 practitioners staged a silent demonstration on April 22 at Tianjin Education College asking for a retraction of the article or dialogue. The police were called in. Officer Hao Fengjun was one of them. His “entire police force was suddenly maneuvered to the college.” They “were told to enforce martial law and close off the area.” When they arrived at the scene: “We all realized that it was nothing like what had been described to us—Falun Gong looking for a fight, disturbing public order, and so on. But we had no choice.”
Video surveillance records a bunch of people sitting around. So what prompted some policemen to wade into the crowd, beating and arresting 40 practitioners? Many practitioners—Jennifer Zeng is one—tried to reason with Tianjin officials and the police. The answer? The police were powerless. “This has been taken up by the Public Security Ministry, under the central government, so you need to go to Beijing to appeal.”
In the two days following the Tianjin arrests, that word “appeal” (or “petition”) spread widely among practitioners—not by some sort of central command, simply by word of mouth. But it had an explicit meaning: the National Appeals Office, the only location in China where a citizen can legally complain about their local or central government.
Auntie D (let’s call her that) says: “Everyone who was in China at the time knew that [the arrest of practitioners in Tianjin] was a very frightening thing. But we also knew that we should be allowed to appeal at the Appeals’ Office. We had the legal right to appeal. So we didn't think about it too much.”
Looking for the Appeals Office
Echoing the Party’s own reticence about the petitioning process, the National Appeals office location wasn’t well publicized. Not a single practitioner that I have interviewed could place it precisely on a map, although it was widely believed to be in the hutongs, the twisting alleyways right off of Fuyou Street. And Fuyou Street abuts the western entrance to the Zhongnanhai compound.
So as April 25 dawned, a lovely, crisp spring morning, every single practitioner (that I have interviewed) sincerely believed were following legal protocol, not that they were going to Zhongnanhai to demonstrate.
They were not naïve about the risks. Some practitioners made out their wills the night before. If that sounds melodramatic, consider this.
Early in the morning, a practitioner couple, on their way to the appeals office, walking by the moat on the Eastern side of the Forbidden City, observed something very strange: A large unit of Red Army soldiers, bayonets fixed and ready, sitting in jeeps, facing west, towards Zhongnanhai.
When they and other practitioners arrived in Fuyou Street around 7 a.m., and tried to make their way into the hutongs, where the fabled appeals office was believed to be, a huge police presence suddenly materialized. Yet Fuyou Street was wide open—Jennifer Zeng, having worked for the state council office in Zhongnanhai, thought this was odd too. Normally, “The security there was very tight and there were a lot of guards and it was hard to get near the street. But at that time nobody tried to remove people from there. Normally anybody who shows up there is questioned right away…it seemed they were very well prepared, they were expecting us.”
With some vague assurances that the appeals office would open later, the practitioners were herded onto Fuyou Street, directly in front of the gate to Zhongnanhai. Auntie D remembers official buses and police cars carefully arranged up and down Fuyou Street: “Cameras were also set up and were pointing directly at us. I was rather afraid and didn't dare to stand in the front row. I thought if they caught me on film, they would come for me later.” (Auntie D would end up in a labor camp for several years).
Those practitioners who believed that the appeals office was on Southern Fuyou Street, or thought that they could circle around the block and enter the hutongs from the West, found their way blocked at Chang’an Boulevard and were encouraged to move north again in front of the Zhongnanhai Western gates. Those who came in from the north were allowed into the dragnet, and quickly herded directly opposite the northern exposure of Zhongnanhai and down Fuyou Street. Auntie C (a friend of Auntie D’s) described it this way: “At the time they just told us—go this way, go this way, and we just followed.”
The stage was set for the Kabuki performance that followed. Premier Zhu Rongji’s reassuring public appearance, and Jiang Zemin’s smolderingly slow circle around Zhongnanhai in his smoked-glass limousine. Throughout it all, for 16 hours, no record, film, or plausible account suggests that the Falun Gong practitioners did anything that could be construed as even faintly provocative. No littering. No smoking. No chanting. No talking to reporters (or anyone else).
One practitioner suggested that they take turns to go eat or get something to drink, but the other practitioners “Said no, definitely not. Because if we drink, we’ll have to go to the bathroom and that would disturb those living or working in that area.” Even by the Party’s rather creative standards, there was simply no pretext that could justify the use of the troops waiting by the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City.
The evening announcement that the Tianjin prisoners would be released was greeted with quiet relief and practitioners left feeling optimistic. The next day, according to Auntie C, the official media reports said: “FLG gathered at Zhongnanhai,’ they didn’t say we surrounded Zhongnanhai. It also said that there is freedom to practice or not practice as one wishes.”
Advanced Planning
In the days following there were constant reassurances from the Party that everything was okay, and that the “three no’s” (no promoting, no criticizing, no debating chi-gong) were still operational—while practitioner phones were tapped, spies appeared at practice sites, warnings were selectively issued at workplaces, and the Party created the 6-10 office, one of the most terrifying secret police agencies ever to receive extra-constitutional powers. On July 20, the well-oiled machine of the crackdown was given free reign to roam China at will. And it was all justified by an image of a day of infamy—April 25—an image used to stage an unprecedented persecution, one that continues to this day.
One final point. Officer Hao Fengjun went to work at the 6-10 Office in 2000. Here’s the first thing he noticed: “our monitor room already had a comprehensive record and data on the Falun Gong practitioners. These things are not something that can be done and collected in just one or two years.”
Hao’s suspicion is correct. According to a former district-level official, I’ll call him “Minister X,” the Party’s decision to eliminate Falun Gong—and preparations towards that goal—was actually made long before any ban was made public. It was circulated explicitly in internal Party meetings: Jiang Zemin could not resolve the Tiananmen slaughter except by creating a new target. Falun Gong was it. Minister X, for his part, was told to quietly stop granting business licenses to practitioners. April 25 was simply the unfolding of an elaborate bait and switch with Falun Gong as the patsy.
Perhaps that last term could just as well be applied to the West.
It’s ten years. Did the Party really mean to kill so many? Of course not. The Party is prone to believing in its own rhetoric. Generals always imagine short wars. So too, it seems, do Western reporters.
But today, let’s dispel at least one myth, one ugly relativist notion that feeds the misplaced idea that we in the West have no business commenting on an obscure family quarrel.
Falun Gong did not start this war. The Chinese Communist Party did. I submit that the Party should be held fully accountable for the results.
Ethan Gutmann is the author of Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal and of a forthcoming book on the Chinese state and Falun Gong. This article is the text of a talk given on April 15 at the International Conference on Religious Freedom in China, hosted by Edward McMillan-Scott, Vice President of the European Parliament, in the European Parliament, Brussels.
