Salton, Herman. “Arctic Host, Icy Visit: China and Falun Gong Face Off in Iceland,”
Lambert Academic Publishing (October 2010).
261 pages. $111.00.
ISBN: 978-3843365130
When Jiang Zemin journeyed to Iceland in 2002, he brought a dark cloud with him. His grudge against a particular Chinese spiritual group led to a series of bizarre, even burlesque episodes, as Chinese agents in Iceland and the Icelandic authorities repressed, censored, and generally treated with prejudice spiritual practitioners who were attempting to protest against crimes against humanity.
At the time Jiang was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a political organization of some 70 million members who control a country of 1.3 billion people. The population of Iceland is about 300,000, no more than a Chinese village, and people there call each other by their first names. To secure economic privileges with China, for a period of about two weeks the government of Iceland aided and abetted Jiang and his entourage in suppressing the voice of Falun Gong on that island.
Herman Salton, a well-traveled academic now living in New Zealand, wrote a detailed account of what happened, and it was published in October 2010 by Lambert Academic Publishing, an academic press. The fact that Lambert is charging over $100 for a copy means the book will probably only end up in academic libraries. That is a shame, because Salton has produced a monument.
Salton, wisely, begins with an explication of what Falun Gong is and what it is not. Falun Gong is a Chinese spiritual practice with five meditative exercises and three moral principles. It is not violent or dangerous. For several complex reasons, but mostly because it got too popular, in 1999 Jiang Zemin targeted it for elimination. People who practice it have been persecuted in the mainland since then, and it has been vilified in a cross-media propaganda campaign.
When Jiang visited Iceland he did not want to see any Falun Gong people protesting against the persecution he started. The Icelandic authorities respected this wish, and Falun Gong practitioners were each made persona non grata. They were to be stopped from entering the territory or, if they got in, prevented from protesting.
The key loci of this bullying and harassment were 1) A blacklist sent by Iceland’s Ministry of Justice to its embassies abroad, and to the country’s flag carrier airline Icelandair, seeking to intercept Falun Gong practitioners, cancel their visas, and otherwise prevent them from boarding incoming flights, and 2) Chinese agents in Iceland, sometimes assisted and often observed by Icelandic police, blocking Falun Gong practitioners’ protests, infiltrating their events, getting their hotel reservations canceled, getting them kicked out of hotels, and at one point, almost running the Falun Gong spokesman off the road.
The responsibility to provide the first line of defense against traveling Falun Gong activists fell onto the shoulders of Icelandair, the national carrier. The company was therefore put in the unenviable position of having to carry out ethnic profiling at airports around Europe, the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere: Chinese and “Asian-looking” people were siphoned off the queues at airports, shepherded into rooms, and questioned about their spiritual beliefs. Westerners who happened to be on the blacklist were also targeted.
The confusing and awkward nature of all this was represented in an incident in the customs line at Keflavík airport, in Iceland, where an American couple were witnessing Chinese people entering the country being questioned and led away. One of them asked out loud, “What is happening to these people? How come any person who looks Chinese is being prevented from entering the country?”
Some people were banned from flights, others delayed for hours or days, and others again forced to sign a piece of paper saying they would not protest when they got to Iceland. (This is lighter treatment than Falun Gong gets in China, where the paper that practitioners have to sign is to renounce their faith altogether, under the pain of torture and death.)
Other practitioners were apprehended once they got to Iceland, interrogated about their beliefs, sometimes for up to five hours, and held in makeshift detention centers with dozens of other accidental thought criminals.
In some cases Icelandair staffers were annoyed at their government for humiliating them with the task of suppressing peaceful activists, so they let Falun Gong practitioners on the flight as payback.
The begrudging way that Icelandair staff carried out the government’s orders was thrown into sharp relief by the actions of Chinese security forces on the ground in Iceland. Under the aegis of the Chinese Embassy they were given free rein to spy on practitioners, follow them around, intimidate them, and “try to use all possible means to disrupt Falun Gong’s peaceful protests,” (p. 93) in Salton’s words. Many were apparently flown in for the purpose from the mainland, where they have had years to perfect the skills.
In one case, Chinese operatives ordered an Icelandic policeman to confiscate a “Truth-Compassion-Tolerance” banner from Falun Gong practitioners—this was caught on tape. In other cases Icelandic police tacitly or actively aided Chinese operatives in blocking Falun Gong protesters: either with enormous red Party flags, or buses, or other means. When Icelandic police became aware they were being videoed, they often pulled back; the most scurrilous activities therefore may lay only in memory.
Next: Icelanders resist government directives; “WE APOLOGIZE” announcement in the major newspaper.
Sometimes Iceland police arrested protesters, which much of the time consisted of non-Falun Gong practicing Icelandic citizens, who often turned up to protest en masse, so incensed were they at the audacious suborning of their civic institutions.
Indeed, the Iceland government did not seem to expect this resistance from the locals.
Icelanders, proud of their liberal democracy (putatively the oldest in the world), made their thoughts clear to the government with protests, slogans, banners, and a full page “WE APOLOGIZE” announcement in the major newspaper. Such collective protest action is unheard of in Iceland, Salton observes, making the Falun Gong incident an important part of the country’s modern history. On several occasions they gathered in crowds of hundreds and thousands, many of them toting Falun Gong banners, though they had only recently even heard of Falun Gong, and never practiced it.
But sometimes the protesters did practice it. After two hundred Icelanders gathered outside a detention center where Falun Gong adherents were being held, the authorities relented and let the practitioners go. Then, with the detainees released, protesters and reporters held a joint session of Falun Gong exercises, as the police looked on. The police praised the practitioners for cleaning up the room in the detention center where they had been locked up, and took a group photo with them.
Herman Salton’s book is a steady and meticulous account of all that happened between Iceland authorities, Chinese officials, Iceland citizens, and Falun Gong practitioners. He goes to great lengths to untie the various knots of denial, deceit, temporizing, and red tape used by the Icelandic bureaucracy, police, and government, and of course the Chinese Embassy, to appear that they had done nothing wrong when they clearly had done much wrong.
For instance, he spends dozens of pages unraveling the controversy about where the blacklist came from, carefully dismantling, one by one, every facile explanation the Icelandic authorities provided about how it was they who had compiled the blacklist (which would have necessitated a network of agents around the world, surveilling and documenting Falun Gong people—something Iceland’s 200-man police force clearly could not have done even if they had wanted to), and not the Chinese authorities. His conclusion was that the list, or “at least a substantial portion” of it, came from the CCP.
He spends another dozen or more pages exhaustively charting the rabbit warren of international and EU laws on the whys and wherefores of legitimately banning people from a country (the conclusion on that point, too, was not favorable for the Iceland government in the Falun Gong case).
But the best part of Salton’s book is the penultimate chapter and the conclusion, which analyze and synopsize how the CCP exports repression, despite its professed foreign policy concept of “non-interference.” Salton’s detective work is of great service to everyone seeking to understand the darker side of the New China’s interactions with the world.
Italy seems to have gotten the worst of it. One article published in an Italian newspaper described Falun Gong practitioners as “moths that destroy humanity,” deserving “neither pity nor protection.” Italian politicians “must be extremely careful” about interacting with them, the article said. At a particularly vigorous anti-Falun Gong denunciation meeting, one Chinese said that Falun Gong was a “filthy rat, a rat that everyone wants to hit.” Another said “we must humiliate them… we must hunt the exhausted criminals, we must hit the dog who has fallen into the water.” And the Chinese Embassy representative topped it off: “We must nurture a strong hatred against the enemy.” All this, in Italy.
Numerous other examples are given of house break-ins, surveillance of activists, harassment and intimidation, and so forth, carried out by presumed Chinese agents in many countries abroad.
Thus, while the Iceland events cannot be understood outside the CCP’s general anti-Falun Gong international policy, that policy itself must too be understood as the conditions the CCP has set to the world for its rise. Salton is very clear about this.
In the pursuit of this end “...China is not afraid of openly adopting rogue-state methods… that plainly violate human rights,” Salton writes. It is happy to claim the centrality of non-interference in internal affairs, but also to go right ahead and interfere with the internal affairs of other countries when it comes to a topic like Falun Gong (or Tibet, Taiwan, and the Uyghurs).
“Arctic Host, Icy Visit” is the final word on the Iceland incident. It is compelling, rigorous, and careful. The tight-knit sinews of its net have left no room for the CCP to swim or thrash away from. It also provides an important beginning to a discussion of the troubling consequences of China’s rise to the international human rights regime.
One final, most baffling detail should be mentioned. That is Jiang Zemin’s aversion to the color yellow. Because Falun Gong practitioners’ peaceful protests are usually marked by bright yellow t-shirts (often with “Falun Dafa is Good” printed on them), the former leader of the CCP, Jiang, began demanding that he not see yellow on any foreign trips. If he were to see yellow, police in Iceland were told, he would immediately leave the country.
A similar thing happened in Germany in 2002, a few months before Jiang graced Iceland. During Jiang’s visit to Germany, ordinary people on the street were told to take off or cover yellow items of clothing.
This is the extent of the lunacy behind the CCP’s campaign against the Falun Gong. Salton has done us all a service by shining a focused and sustained light on an important but heretofore unexplored part of this perplexing historical moment.
