On Friday, as part of a march commemorating the events of July 20, 1999, a solemn procession of women dressed in white will walk through Washington, D.C., carrying photos wreathed in flowers. The photos are memorials—each one is of an individual killed in the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong in China—and together they suggest the bitter legacy left by the former Chinese communist leader Jiang Zemin.
Jiang is now, according to news reports, either dead or brain dead, hooked up to a respirator. On July 20, 1999, Jiang was the paramount leader of the Chinese Communist Party and he unleashed the most systematic campaign of human rights abuses seen in modern China: the persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual practice.
Mr. Li Hongzhi began publicly teaching Falun Gong in his hometown of Changchun in May 1992. A qigong practice, Falun Gong involves five sets of meditative exercises and living according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Adherents claimed extraordinary health benefits, as well as life-changing improvements in their character. The practice spread rapidly by word of mouth across China and by 1999 Western media outlets, citing Chinese officials, said 70 million Chinese were practicing—an official with the Chinese Sports Commission in an interview with U.S. News and World Report suggested 100 million were practicing.
April 25
Before April 25, 1999, there are only anecdotes about Jiang’s encounters with Falun Gong practitioners. On that date, however, over 10,000 gathered outside the State Appeal Office in Beijing, which is just down the street from the CCP’s leadership compound. They had come to quietly request an end to the regime’s unofficial bullying of their practice.
Jiang was driven out in his smoked-glass limousine to observe those gathered, standing in orderly rows. Later that night, “seemingly in the grip of a spiritual crisis” as one Western commentator put it, Jiang penned a letter to the Politburo demanding action. It forshadowed the persecution that came just three months later.
Scholars refer to a litany of reasons, associated with the CCP ideology and history that explain why Falun Gong—with its independence from the state, traditional beliefs, and enormous numbers—might become a target for a political campaign. But it’s clear that Jiang took it all very personally.
In his letter, Jiang remarked that since 1992, when Falun Gong was first taught, it has “become involved in the activities of a considerable number of social groups of Party members and cadres, intellectuals, servicemen, workers and peasants.” This was Jiang’s way of saying that Falun Gong was well liked and many people practiced it. “Yet it has not aroused our vigilance. I am deeply ashamed.”
He continued, that clearly, “ideological and political work”—referring to indoctrinating the people with Party ideology—was not strong enough. “[We] must use correct world views, philosophy, and values to educate the cadres … and the masses,” he wrote.
The final paragraph explained what this meant: “Can the Marxism our Communists have, the materialism and atheism we believe in, really not win over that suit of stuff aired by Falun Gong? If that were not the case, would it not be a thumping joke? Our leading cadres at all levels, especially high-level officials, should become sober now!”
He later characterized the gathering as “the most serious political incident since June 4” (referring to the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, 1989).
Alongside the Party’s primal urge for ideological struggle and societal dominance—Communist Party propaganda had said Falun Gong was “competing for popularity with the Party,” which is regarded as an unpardonable crime—Jiang was highly vested in the campaign.
“By unleashing a Mao-style movement, Jiang is forcing senior cadres to pledge allegiance to his line,” a Party veteran told Willy Lam, a writer on Chinese politics, at the time. “This will boost Jiang’s authority … at the pivotal 16th Communist Party Congress next year.”
“The Politburo did not unanimously endorse the crackdown and … Jiang Zemin alone decided that Falun Gong must be eliminated,” John Pomfret, a reporter for the Washington Post, wrote. “This obviously is very personal for Jiang,” one Party official told Pomfret. “He wants this organization crushed.”
With the April 25 letter, Jiang’s mind was made up.
Next...Just like the Nazi’s Gestapo, the CCP forms the 610 Office
610 Office
On June 7, 1999, Jiang held a meeting with key confidants in the Politburo to discuss the “Falun Gong problem.” He gave a speech, which was later leaked, demanding that Party apparatchiks “take this issue seriously, do more in-depth research, and take effective countermeasures.”
And at the same meeting he outlined the propaganda strategy that would be played out on Chinese televisions and in newspapers over the next several years, according to a book by James Tong, a professor of Chinese politics at UCLA. The regime was to “expose” the “political motives” of Falun Gong, show how the practice causes “deaths, suicides, and schizophrenia,” and present a systematic critique of “superstition,” which Falun Gong, a spiritual practice, was accused of.
An internal directive also went out after that meeting, mirroring the language and tactics used in the Cultural Revolution, for all Communist Party and Youth League members, to “immediately draw a clear line with Falun Gong, break away from its groups, and return to the Party’s correct stand.”
Three days later, on June 10, the 610 Office was established. The 610 Office is a Party organ, a secret task force sanctioned and given sweeping funding and authority. It was “Jiang Zemin’s personal and private tool to persecute Falun Gong,” according to a study compiled by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong. The 610 Office has frequently been compared to the Nazi’s Gestapo, used by Hitler to persecute Jews.
As well as using national security forces to arrest and torture practitioners, 610 Offices would be embedded throughout society to sniff out believers and have them “transformed”—forced to renounce their beliefs—in brainwashing centers, psychiatric hospitals, black jails, and labor camps.
Between April 25 and July 20, when the persecution was officially launched, Jiang gave at least three speeches and issued 13 written policy directives on the subject, according to Tong.
The Central Propaganda Department used television stations, radio stations, newspapers and magazines in a “study in all-out demonization,” according to scholar of Chinese politics Daniel B. Wright.
Within 30 days of the crackdown People’s Daily, the Party’s official mouthpiece had published 347 articles attacking Falun Gong.
Hate propaganda against the practice made its way into schools, government offices, and factories. Every level of society was required to participate in the slander and persecution.
Personal Crusade
Given that it was Jiang’s personal crusade, he frequently got in on the act himself. In September 1999 at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in New Zealand, Jiang personally presented anti-Falun Gong propaganda booklets to many of the participants, including to then-President Clinton.
“The move stunned diplomats,” John Pomfret wrote at the time. The booklet was chockfull of the Chinese regime’s extreme propaganda. “This guy actually thought we needed to know about this stuff,” one Western diplomat remarked afterward.
A month later in France, Jiang again took his Falun Gong crusade public. He told Le Figaro that Falun Gong was an “evil cult,” and the remarks were widely circulated throughout China. One month later, in October, the “cult” designation was made official and became a staple in the anti-Falun Gong propaganda campaign.
Pomfret writes, “It was Jiang who ordered that Falun Gong be labeled a ‘cult,’ and then demanded that a law be passed banning cults,” citing a Communist Party source.
For those who refused to give up their Falun Gong beliefs, Jiang’s instructions were clear: “carry out necessary organizational measures based on the related regulations. … Firmly implement these measures. … Maximally isolate and firmly attack those behind the scene and the key planners and organizers, showing no mercy at all.”
‘No Mercy’
The “no mercy at all” policy lies behind the large-scale persecution directed at followers of all ages. Brainwashing classes, sexual abuse and rape, the injection of mind-damaging drugs, and physical torture are all crucial elements of the campaign.
According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, at least 3,400 people are now confirmed dead from torture or abuse. Getting information about such crimes out of China is very difficult, and the center fears the real figure is in the tens of thousands. Nine new torture deaths were reported in June.
The 44-year-old Huang Wei, an owner of a small bookstore, is a typical case. He was abducted by police in 2009 and subject to electric shocks, sleep deprivation, forced labor, torture, beatings, and brainwashing. But it was the drug injections that killed him. When guards noticed his difficulty breathing and walking, they sent him home. Emaciated and mentally disordered from the injection, he never recovered. Huang Wei died two and a half weeks later, on April 29.
Amnesty International reports that former labor camp inmates say that Falun Gong practitioners “constituted one of the largest groups of prisoners.” The center estimates that the number of practitioners enslaved in labor camps is in a range from 200,000 to 1 million. In the labor camps, in addition to being subjected to miserable food, labor for extremely long hours, and torture, practitioners are vulnerable to being taken for forced, live organ harvesting.
The researchers David Kilgour and David Matas say that between 2000 and 2005, 41,500 organ transplant operations were done for which the Chinese state cannot provide a source for the organs. The two lawyers conclude the most likely source for the organs is Falun Gong practitioners.
