Special Editorial: Unless Persecution Ends, Discussion of Reform in China Is Empty Talk

In Beijing the Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party is set to begin and the talk is of reform. That talk will be just talk and nothing more, unless the persecution of Falun Gong is addressed.

Portraits of recent Chinese Communist Party heads, in chronological order, (L–R) Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping at a museum in Tianjin, China, Sept. 28, 2013. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

The Chinese Communist Party is seeking to reinvent itself, and the Third Plenary Session of the Central Committee, which opens on Nov. 9, is meant to be the staging ground for putting the Party on a new path of economic reform.

On Oct. 28, the day prior to the announcement of the dates for the Plenum, a SUV carrying three Uyghurs careened through Tiananmen Square, the symbolic seat of power for the Chinese regime. The car left 28 wounded and three dead in its wake before it crashed and exploded, killing those inside.