In an internal document reportedly issued by the General Office of the Chinese Communist Party, the regime has admitted to some instances of abuse in its 17-year persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual practice.
Its existence and contents described by an inside source in contact with the Falun Gong website Minghui.org, the document said that because of the persecution, Falun Gong practitioners and their families suffered injustice in employment and education, and calls for the repression to be gradually “redressed.”
But aside from a nuanced admission of the wrongdoing, the document does not propose any meaningful changes to Party policy—as in the past, “redress” is still to be based on whether or not a practitioner can give up his or her belief in Falun Gong.
According to the Minghui source, the document was handed out during an Aug. 30 meeting convened by the municipal Political and Legal Affairs Committee of an unnamed city. All workplaces that employed those practicing Falun Gong were required to send their representatives.
Examples of “unjust treatment” at the hands of the authorities given in the document included the practitioners and their family being barred from serving in the armed forces, receiving work promotions, or having their education disrupted. Greater abuses—heavy labor in prison camps, torture, death, and forced organ harvesting in military hospitals across China—received no mention.
Falun Gong is a Chinese spiritual practice that teaches truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, and has a set of meditative qigong exercises. In July 1999 Jiang Zemin, then the head of the Communist Party, led the regime in a nationwide suppression of the faith and its adherents.
