Jiang Zemin’s days are numbered. It is only a question of when, not if, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party will be arrested. Jiang officially ran the Chinese regime for more than a decade, and for another decade he was the puppet master behind the scenes who often controlled events. During those decades Jiang did incalculable damage to China. At this moment when Jiang’s era is about to end, Epoch Times here republishes in serial form “Anything for Power: The Real Story of Jiang Zemin,” first published in English in 2011. The reader can come to understand better the career of this pivotal figure in today’s China.
Chapter 17: Jiang Toots His Own Horn With “Three Represents”; a Staged Immolation Masks an Appalling Scheme (2000-2001)
1. The “Three Represents”
In early March 2003, the state-run People’s Daily newspaper ran an editorial unveiling a new doctrine called the “Three Represents,” which consisted of three sentences. This was the first time the doctrine was promulgated as “Jiang Zemin Theory”—as it was called—on a national scale. The wide promotion of the doctrine quickly amounted to a joke.
Inventing a Theory
How did the phenomenon of the Three Represents come about? No outsiders knew at first. That would change, however, when at the height of the doctrine’s promotion Wang Huning couldn’t keep a secret: it was he, in fact, who had authored the doctrine. Understandably, the revelation proved shocking. Back when Jiang Zemin was Party Secretary in Shanghai he used to recite paragraph upon paragraph of Wang’s articles. Later, after Jiang took his post in Beijing, Zeng Qinghong and Wu Bangguo repeatedly entreated Wang to assist Jiang and brought this up many times with Jiang. Wang thus was transferred to Zhongnanhai.
It was on the afternoon of Feb. 25, 2000, that Jiang first put to use Wang’s new doctrine. The setting was a meeting with Guangzhou provincial leaders at the Zhudao Hotel in Guangzhou. Jiang brought out the freshly crafted Three Represents, stating, “The Communist Party must always represent the requirements of the development of China’s advanced productive forces; the orientation of the development of China’s advanced culture; and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in China.”
Later Wang added a few more sentences for Jiang. On May 14, at a meeting in Shanghai on developing the Party, Jiang declared that, “Always maintaining Three Represents is the basis of our Party’s existence, the foundation of our political power, and the source of our strength.”
Scour all of the official reports in China’s media if you will, and you will discover that not a single person—including Jiang himself, it would seem—can explain in clear terms what the “three represents” are. Of course, nobody in the lower echelon of government is about to dig very deeply into the matter. The droves of corrupt officials are instead preoccupied daily with thoughts of food and drink, women, gambling, graft, pleasure, and property. When they’re told to promote something they follow along; little do they care about what it is they are promoting.
The theory of Three Represents amounts to little more than a few empty words. A person with good judgment wouldn’t venture to boast about such a thing. But the theory is just too important to Jiang, for a doctrine, Jiang knows, is necessary for lasting power. Jiang had long been anxious to mark his achievements and had considered most every possible way to match up with predecessors Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. He needed to solidify his image as “the Third Generation [communist] theoretical authority.” So it was that an empty doctrine, at Jiang’s instruction, was raised aloft by state-run media. Jiang exhausted his wits trying to find a way to introduce the doctrine into the Party Constitution and that of the nation. And the aftermath of Jiang’s efforts can still be felt. Hu Jintao, China’s current General Secretary, chairman of the state, and head of the Central Military Commission, is obligated to uphold the Three Represents. Similarly, most any speech that an official makes must be anchored by the doctrine.
Mixed Reactions to “Studying”
Despite Jiang’s thinking to the contrary, despite all the propagandizing by media outfits, and despite countless meetings to study and implement it, the theory of Three Represents wasn’t something people took seriously.
As study of the Three Represents doctrine in China peaked, [1] CCTV held special programs on a daily basis. One feature of the programming was staged interviews with citizens about the theory. One older-aged farmer declared, “Our village built a bridge—thanks to the Three Represents.” A woman said, “My daughter-in-law gave birth to a chubby son—thanks to the Three Represents.” Some asked that first-class public restrooms be built in the name of Three Represents. On the wall of one rural village a sign was posted, emblazoned with the words: “Use the Three Represents to guide our work of butchering [livestock].” Canned comments of every sort could be seen.
Wang Bin, a Beijing-based reporter for The Epoch Times newspaper who spent three hard years in a CCP prison (for his candid reporting), told the following story. While he was in prison authorities set things up so that prisoners would help the authorities turn a profit. Some prisoners were assigned the task of assembling and making pornographic literature, which was then sold to the public. At that time the Three Represents were the buzzword in the politically-sensitive legal system, and everything had to be connected with the theory somehow. When prisoners produced the lewd materials in quantities beyond a set quota, they would say that their vigor was the result of “guidance from the Three Represents.”
One provincial party secretary remarked, “We have scheduled time to study [the doctrine]. We all have to put on a good show and fulfill our obligations to our superiors. Failing that how can I keep my post as a party secretary? Everybody should cooperate.”
Someone asked a pointed question in reply, “But is the notion of Three Represents going to create cutting-edge science and technology, resolve unemployment problems, and solve the issue of having hundreds of millions of surplus laborers in the countryside?” The answer was obvious, for the theory had little bearing on the practical, immediate, and real challenges people faced.
A leader in one provincial party school asked, “If we achieve something due to the theory of Three Represents, then how are we to explain problems and failures in our work? Would they be owing, in turn, to problems with the doctrine of Three Represents?”
Others furthered the line of questioning, asking, “Why don’t we arrange to have those who’ve excelled at learning the Three Represents to attend international sporting events? They'd be sure to reap gold medals, right?”
Rejection
The theory of the Three Represents has, despite all the promotion behind it, met widely with criticism—both from within and outside the Party.
The Ideology Division of the Qiushi Journal, the official periodical for the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, and the Theoretical Research Institute of the Central Committee’s Party School expressed confusion about the origin of the Three Represents, as it was unknown in the Party’s inner circle—an unusual occurrence indeed for an ideology at a national level. Some at the forum shared the opinion that the doctrine was simply to prop up Jiang’s image and prestige. Others commented that the hoopla of “studying” and “implementing” the theory within the Party was a self-deceiving exercise that accomplished nothing of value; it was merely like checking things off on a list of chores.
The former director of the Political Systems Reform Research Institute of the CCP’s Central Committee, Bao Tong, commented that the Three Represents encapsulated the folly and worthlessness of those who promoted them, since to “always represent all the people of China” is empty talk, to “always represent advanced culture” is a lie, and to “always represent advanced productivity” is to basically equate government officials with private business owners.
Scholars from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences argued that Three Represents was empty, passé, and dogmatic, and said that local Party committees and governments were mostly just going through the motions when they were promoting and studying the ideology. They asked, “After three years of ‘implementing’ the doctrine, how many problems had it solved? The dogmatic undertaking is harmful to the country and detrimental to the people.”
Some said that the theory’s “advanced culture” and “advanced productivity” were a reference to the so-called cultural elite—a motley collection of scholars who have sold out their integrity, proponents of dictatorship, officials who profit from illicit roles in commerce, and unscrupulous entrepreneurs—the very same capitalists CCP theory attempted to supplant early on). As for “the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in China,” this is flat out deceit. Many of China’s farmers survive by the most desperate of means, such as selling their blood and organs and going into prostitution. After many have been infected with AIDS nobody has given them support. [2] As for the working class, the “older brothers”—as the CCP often calls them—at least 30 million have lost their jobs in recent years, but never did Jiang make any effort to represent them.
Plans to publish a volume of Jiang’s alleged writings—Selected Writings of Jiang Zemin on Military Thought—prior to the 4th Plenary Session met with obstacles. A dozen or so army generals—among whom were Zhang Zhen, Hong Xuezhi, and Yang Baibing—wrote a letter opposing the plan, saying that Jiang was positioning himself inappropriately. Yang even stated publicly that the Three Represents was garbage.
In 2002, the holding of the 16th CCP National Congress was delayed. According to internal sources, one key reason for the delay was the considerable diverge of opinion within both the Party and government as to what to make of the Three Represents and how, if at all, they could be acted on.
The Butt of Jokes
Dark humor surrounding the Three Represents has circulated widely in China. Before the recent U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, a political joke could be heard in China that had Bush inviting Putin and Jiang to discuss by how to bump off Osama Bin Laden. Bush expressed a wish to use missiles; Putin said he would opt to use beautiful women, seducing Bin Laden; Jiang said he would use the Three Represents, so as to bore him to death.
In another joke, Mao Zedong sees from the netherworld that Jiang has started forming a personality cult of his own, so Mao was a little jealous. Mao asks his ghost compatriots how many volumes does the Jiang Collection of theory have, to which they answer, “There’s not even enough material to fill one volume—there’s only three speeches.” Mao then asks, “How many representatives of the people are on Jiang’s side?” To which they reply, “We counted and recounted, but could only find three represent(ative)s.” [3]
Evident was it that the Three Represents had become the laughing stock—something ridiculed, rejected, and disliked—of the nation.
The sweeping promotional blitz that was to bolster the shallow theory thus failed to bring Jiang the glory of being “great, visionary, and extraordinary” as he had hoped. One can’t help but recall the words of a bygone Chinese poet, who wrote, “Though some may carve their names in stone, hoping for immorality, their names rot faster than their corpses.” Jiang’s thin theory, the butt of jokes far and wide, was in the end however—at Jiang’s insistence—added to the State Constitution and the Party Constitution. It became another comical chapter of the CCP’s history, and perhaps this was the only real impact of the Three Represents.
2. Self-Immolation on Tiananmen Square
Challenges Mobilizing the Masses
By this time almost a year had passed since Jiang launched his persecution of Falun Gong. Things weren’t going as Jiang had pictured, however (i.e., people condemning Falun Gong en masse.) Many a lie had been spread, many a scathing critique had been written, and countless the “study sessions” that had been organized, yet people just weren’t buying into it. They had seen too many mass political movements before; they know what Jiang was up to. Many people were of the belief that: “If Jiang did not like Falun Gong, then let him go through all of that—just don’t get us tangled up in it.”
With the exception of a few regions that implemented Party policies closely, leaders in many regions—including even 6-10 Office staff—were none too enthused. One former 6-10 officer who was in charge of the Hangu District in Tianjin City has described the situation at that time saying:
To be honest, the people who were in charge at the local level didn’t like to do this [kind of persecuting], as the police there lived in close proximity to ordinary people. For example, maybe you would live right next door to me, and we would see each other all the time. How could I arrest you, then? And this was Hangu—a small place by the sea with only four police stations. Whoever you arrested was bound to be an acquaintance. A police officer’s wife might work together in the same work unit as the wife of the person he arrests, for example. The police at the police station may live on the same street that they’re in charge of, with the person they arrest living right downstairs below them. We were all neighbors and acquaintances. If people like that don’t do anything corrupt or violate the law, could you have the heart to arrest them? [4]
Ordinary people watched how members of the Politburo’s Standing Committee responded to Jiang’s suppression, and they could see that none of the group actively supported Jiang. Zhu Rongji and Li Ruihuan were especially notable for their reticence on the matter.
Public Security Departments Get Into the Act
As the way of the world has it, when there are those who are passive there are always those who are active. One man saw in the persecution a chance to please Jiang: Luo Gan. From the very start Luo put in a lot of effort. Originally Li Peng’s protégé, Luo’s responsibilities had him in charge of politics and law. For some time he had been trying to use suppression of Falun Gong as a means to favor with Jiang. Luo saw Jiang’s campaign as his ticket to membership in the elite, elusive Politburo.
Luo has been on the go ever since Jiang launched the persecution. He ordered his followers in the public security bureaus (PSB) and throughout the legal system to devote all of their energy to “the Falun Gong problem,” with a primary focus being the falsification of evidence.
At a provincial level leadership meeting in the public security system, an officer from the Beijing Public Security Bureau shared the following on how false “evidence” is generated:
At the beginning of 1999, the public security system decided to “modify” existing feudalistic and superstitious activities into “evidence” to be used against Falun Gong. The approach guided a great deal of the work done, mislabeling all kinds of feudalistic and superstitious activities as “Falun Gong activities” … but since there wasn’t enough time to manufacture evidence, the public security personnel had no answers when suspicion arose about their work, so their work was impeded to a certain degree.
This officer further explained that some challenges had arisen due to a delay in expected objectives being reached. For example, persons who personally received qiqong medical treatment from the founder of Falun Gong and were healed of their ailments, or those who experienced the positive effects of Falun Gong, were hard to convert. Thus the PSB had to use the method of imprisonment and limiting such persons’ freedom so as to prevent the truth about Falun Gong from quickly spreading.
One such person is Jing Zhanyi, a former Falun Gong practitioner who was forced to give false testimony.
On Nov. 5, 2003, CCTV’s program “Focus Interview” did a special episode titled “Behind the ‘Patent’,” in which a man named Jing Zhanyi—a Falun Gong practitioner and General Engineer at Handan Steel Company—denied the incredible phenomena he experienced practicing Falun Gong. [5] It was aired in many regions through various state-controlled media outlets. The CCP made Jing’s statement out to be “evidence” that Falun Gong is a pseudoscience.
One former 6-10 official who recently broke from the CCP and defected to Australia, Superintendent First Rank Hao Fengjun, revealed to the media how CCTV’s program was put together. In 2003 the Public Safety Bureau and National Security Bureau in Tianjin City received a special case. The leader of the First Team of the 6-10 office, together with four or five police officers, then went to Shijiazhuang City of Hebei Province to handle the case. When the group returned, Hao saw in the interrogation room a white-haired man who was in shackles. Hao later learned that man was Jing. Later a CCTV reporter came to the National Security Bureau. He had been assigned to “interview” Jing and get footage of a senior leader who had “repented” after practicing Falun Gong; the footage was to be played around the world. That day’s interview was conducted under the careful arrangement of the National Security Bureau. Hao was right outside the interview room. He heard the deputy head of the National Security Bureau, Zhao Yuezeng, telling Jing that if he followed the script provided to him his sentence would be reduced. Doing otherwise, Jing was told, would get him charged with treason atop other alleged crimes, and he would be sentenced to life in prison or secretly executed. Acting under pressure, the poor, elderly Jing complied with the demands. Soon he was seen on television everywhere denying the miraculous bodily phenomena he experienced in Falun Gong; he was even forced to criticize the practice. Jing was later sentenced to an eight-year prison term.
Hao Fengjun saw all of this from outside the interview room. He couldn’t help but blurt out loud, “Isn’t this a lie, though?” Hao didn’t realize that a CCTV reporter was standing next to him at the moment. Several days later Hao was called in to his boss’s office. He knew he was in trouble, but he directly asked, his conscience clean, why they had threatened Jing. His boss, the deputy head of the National Security Bureau, grew angry and pounded his desk, saying, “What’s the meaning of this—are you turning on us?” Afterwards Hao was locked up for more than 20 days in an isolation cell; the cell, though in a northern China jail and the temperature below freezing, had no heat.
Jiang Falls Ill
At the 5th Plenary Session of the 15th CCP National Congress, held Oct. 9–11, 2000, in Beijing, several members of the CCP’s Central Committee called into question the persecution of Falun Gong. They asked for an explanation of the campaign.
Among the seven members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, four members—more than half—namely, Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao, Li Ruihuan, and Wei Jianxing, opposed continuation of the persecution of Falun Gong. Meanwhile the former head of the People’s Congress, Qiao Shi, expressed that he was disturbed by the killing of innocent Falun Gong adherents. He returned from some distance to Beijing and went to Tiananmen Square to see firsthand the beating and arrest of adherents that he had heard about. The Premier of the State Council, Zhu Rongji, went in person to the fifth department of the Beijing Public Safety Bureau and urged public safety officials, “Don’t make it any harder than it already is for Falun Gong practitioners!”
Jiang began to grow worried, with depression even setting in, reportedly, upon seeing that things were no longer favorable for him. On the last day of 2000, Jiang Mianheng, Jiang’s oldest son, then in Shenzhen, received an urgent notice from the CCP’s central office asking him to return to Beijing asap. It happened that at 9 p.m. that night Jiang had experienced a heart attack and had been taken, after his doctor’s appraisal, to the emergency room of Hospital 301.
Jiang’s medical problems seemed to give opposition a small window of opportunity. Immediately following Jiang’s admittance to the hospital the Politburo convened a meeting. On Jan. 2, the Politburo met to discuss political system reform and the matter of Falun Gong. At the meeting a tense exchange took place between reformers and conservatives, only to have the two sides end up in stalemate. The window of opportunity was thus missed and Jiang’s program of suppression continued.
The Collusion of Jiang and Luo
Even in his hospital bed Jiang was thinking about one question: how to turn the public’s sentiments against the so-called “evil cult” of Falun Gong and incite widespread hatred.
Jiang racked his brain to come up with ways to set Falun Gong up as an “evil cult.” On Oct. 25, 1999, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, Jiang referred to Falun Gong for the first time as an “evil cult” (xiejiao). That same year at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) Summit meeting in Auckland, New Zealand, Jiang personally handed the president of the United States and other leaders booklets attempting to discredit Falun Gong. He even seized upon the opportunity of an interview with CBS’s Mike Wallace to libel Falun Gong, claiming, misleadingly, “Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have committed suicide.” Media in mainland China didn’t dare to report this specific part of the interview, fearing Jiang would be seen through and ridiculed.
Jiang thus summoned Luo Gan for many a secret meeting, plotting how to incite public hatred toward the still-popular meditation group.
Back in May 1999 when the persecution of Falun Gong was still in its preparatory stage, Jiang and Luo on one occasion planned a chilling “special action.” First the Central Committee’s General Office issued a document claiming that 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners were planning to commit “group suicide” in Xiangshan, Beijing’s western suburb. The document was then purposefully leaked to overseas media for dissemination. Then local police, plainclothes police, and infiltrators spread the word to Falun Gong adherents that there would be a large “gathering” in Xiangshan. Along with this army troops were dispatched to Xiangshan, and armed riot police were positioned there in hiding. The whole thing was an elaborate trap. Falun Gong practitioners were meant to be lured to there, to Xiangshan, where they would be murdered. The scene would then be portrayed in state-run media propaganda as a tragic “collective suicide” or “failed suicide.” Jiang would then have grounds to label Falun Gong an “evil cult,” and efforts to frame and suppress the group could expand with ease. But as it turned out, not a single Falun Gong practitioner went to Xiangshan. Three times between May 1 and Sept. 9 police and plainclothes police changed the “gathering date” they passed on to Falun Gong practitioners, hoping for better results. Nothing came of the ploy in the end.
Collective acts of cult suicide are well known, of course. But the teachings of Falun Gong are very specific in forbidding killing of any form, suicide included. Followers of Falun Gong in China were clear on this principle, despite that Jiang’s regime had banned all books and materials related to the practice (even confiscating and destroying millions of items) and blocked off all websites related to Falun Gong. Enticing adherents into collective suicide just wasn’t going to work.
After repeated failures to entrap Falun Gong practitioners, Jiang sought out Luo Gan several times to secretly discuss ways to create a bombshell that would demonize Falun Gong. Luo gave Jiang a guarantee that this time, he would succeed.
Luo started off by sowing some seeds of misinformation. On Dec. 29, 2000, the government-run Xinhua News Agency ran—acting on directives from the Central Committee’s 6-10 office—an anonymous news story that told of a “failed group suicide” by Falun Gong members. The vague report failed to disclose the names of any persons allegedly involved, the details of the event, or even its location. The report claimed that the adherents had been “instigated” and plotted a collective suicide sometime near New Year’s Day. The report was meant to prepare readers for what was to come.
