China’s anti-corruption agency is investigating a Communist Party cadre who previously headed a police academy. Although the agency has not announced the reasons for its probe, the man had been identified to be a serial human rights violator by a U.S.-based non-profit organization.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) announced on March 22 that Du Min, the former Party chief of the Yunnan Police Officer Academy and former security chief in Kunming, a city in the southwest province of Yunnan, had been placed under investigation for “seriously violating Party discipline”—a byword for corruption—without further elaboration. Du’s last appointment in December 2015 was deputy director of Yunnan’s Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to China’s rubber stamp legislature.
In his role as head of the internal security apparatus in Yunnan—the same agency controlled at the central level by the purged official Zhou Yongkang—Du Min was well-known for his persecution of those deemed enemies of the Party. This category includes dissidents, house Christians, practitioners of Falun Gong, among others.
Most information is known about Du’s role in the persecution of the latter group, given that it has been a major political priority of the Communist Party for over a decade.
The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, a human rights research and advocacy group based in the United States, points to a number of cases of egregious abuses against practitioners of Falun Gong at the time that Du Min was in charge—making him ultimately responsible for the torture that was administered.
Falun Gong, a self-cultivation practice whose adherents perform five sets of meditative exercises and closely follow the principles of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance, has been persecuted in China since July 20, 1999, under order from then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. Jiang had declared Falun Gong an ideological challenge to his rule because of its popularity and independence from state control.
As a result of the campaign, the regime’s security apparatus has for the past 16 years imprisoned, tortured, and forced Falun Gong practitioners to sit through forced brainwashing sessions. Over 3,900 practitioners have been killed, and hundreds of thousands others languish in labor camps, according to Minghui.org, a website that serves as a clearinghouse for information about the persecution. Researchers have also marshaled evidence which point to the Chinese regime’s role in forced organ harvesting of live Falun Gong practitioners; an estimated 65,000 practitioners were killed between 2000 and 2008 for their organs, though the real total may be much higher.
