Commentary
Several hot-button issues will no doubt be on the agenda when President Barack Obama meets with Chinese regime leader Xi Jinping at the G-20: cybercrime, conflict over the South China Sea, and economic blackmail over American missiles in South Korea.
Obama, however, can have the greatest impact—and help seal his legacy in the Oval Office—by leading other world leaders in raising a long-standing human rights issue.
Chinese politics has revolved around Falun Gong since former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin vowed to “eradicate” the spiritual practice. If Obama and the G-20 leaders, in the privacy of G-20 discussions, ask Xi to formally end the persecution and prosecute its mastermind, the international backing could give Xi confidence in his moves to take down Jiang, and conclude a state-sanctioned genocide.
Systematic Eradication
On July 20, 1999, Jiang ordered the persecution of Falun Gong. Over 70 million practitioners in mainland China of all ages and walks of life found themselves liable to be hauled away for performing gentle exercises and believing in truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
In the last 17 years, practitioners in China have been rounded up and thrown into prisons, labor camps, and brainwashing facilities. These detention facilities have held hundreds of thousands of practitioners at any one point, and thousands have died from abuse and torture inside, according to incomplete figures from Minghui.org, a clearinghouse for firsthand information about the persecution.
In 2006, independent investigators verified allegations that the Chinese regime was engaged in harvesting the organs of Falun Gong practitioners for profit, killing them in the process. In a 680-page update to their original report, the investigators estimate that the regime had in the the years 2000-2015 performed 60,000 to 100,000 transplants each year, mainly using organs from prisoners of conscience, the majority of whom are practitioners of Falun Gong.
This June, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously condemned the regime’s live organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience, the bulk of whom practice Falun Gong. The European Parliament had earlier issued a similar resolution, and recently called on the European Union to take action against the regime in a new declaration. Obama hasn’t yet made an official statement on organ harvesting or the persecution of Falun Gong.
Accident of History
Jiang Zemin knew that he had sanctioned crimes against humanity and wanted to avoid ever being held accountable.
So Jiang stacked the regime’s top decision-making body and important military positions with his allies before handing over the reins to Hu Jintao. Virtually all of Jiang’s made men secured their promotion by playing an active role in the persecution of Falun Gong. With a collection of bloody hands running the regime, Jiang the Party godfather felt safe—until an accident of history scuttled his plan to escape responsibility for Falun Gong.
In the lead-up to 2012, Jiang’s preferred candidates to succeed Hu as Party leader were ruled out due to political scandals or age. Jiang basically had two options. With Hu’s protégé Li Keqiang emerging as a favorite to take the top job, Jiang picked the seemingly less threatening and less ambitious Xi Jinping as a compromise candidate.
But Xi was never Jiang’s ideal choice because he didn’t have a vested interest in the persecution of Falun Gong. (Xi is not listed as an oppressor by nonprofit organizations that closely monitor the persecution.) Also, Xi owed his ascent up the political rungs to his pedigree as a red aristocrat (his father, Xi Zhongxun, was a founding revolutionary) and wasn’t a Jiang loyalist.
Xi was a loose end that Jiang needed to snip before his tightly woven tapestry unraveled.
Two of Jiang’s lieutenants, the wily Politburo member Bo Xilai and the former security czar Zhou Yongkang, planned to displace Xi after he took office in 2012. Xi indirectly alluded to this coup plot in a speech when he accused Bo, Zhou, and other purged cadres of conspiring to “wreck and split“ the Party.
The failed coup initiated what some China analysts are calling a political deathmatch between Xi Jinping and Jiang Zemin.
Paradox of Power
