The belief has become persuasive. Falun Gong continues to happen, along with christianity and the othger faiths. Also the belief that the CCP is doomed.
Snap back will be ferocious and will see the entire CCP banded as well as confronting all crimes. The level of operational tyrany is astounding.
And of course, they are applying the same tools to the Uigars as well and we do not know who else.
I do expect to see this convert into a simple NOT CCP POGRAM killing even weak supporters of the CCP. After all, as targeted groups decline, the killers need new targets.
At All Costs: A CCP Leader’s War Against Faith
Hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners hold a vigil near the Chinese Consulate in New York for World Falun Dafa Day on May 11, 2017. (The Epoch Times)
By Eva Fu
For as many as 100 million Chinese, the year 1999 was a watershed moment in their lives.
That year, a massive nationwide persecution began under the orders of Jiang Zemin, then the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) boss, a campaign that indiscriminately targeted adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong.
Jiang, described by some rights advocates as one of the worst tyrants in history, died on the last day of November, but the sweeping elimination effort that he unleashed hasn’t stopped.
Over the past 23 years, millions of Falun Gong adherents have been held in labor camps, mental asylums, drug rehabilitation centers, unofficial black jails, or other detention facilities. The vilification, torture, and organized killing through forced organ harvesting arising from the persecution have led to an untold number of deaths. Those who survived are left with injuries and financial and psychological harms suffered from the ongoing abuses.
They’ve been subjected to this savagery for merely refusing to give up their belief in truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, the core principles guiding the discipline, which also involves a set of slow-moving meditative exercises.
The brutal campaign made Jiang, who officially ruled over China for more than a decade from 1989, the first Chinese leader to face lawsuits domestically and abroad. In 2009, Jiang was among five in the senior Chinese leadership indicted in Spain for committing torture and genocide against adherents of the spiritual practice.
The Instigator
Jiang single-handedly started the persecution and mobilized the entire state apparatus to carry out the brutal campaign.
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Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin checks his watch as he listens to President Hu Jintao speak at a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on Aug. 1, 2007. (Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images)
He appeared so eager to solicit international support for the campaign that, in the annual APEC meeting in September 1999, two months after the launch of the suppression, he handed then-U.S. President Bill Clinton a book defaming Falun Gong in the hopes of convincing the president to adopt a “correct” attitude toward the practice, The Associated Press reported at the time.
“The book’s 150 pages in English is a relentless barrage of propaganda from China’s entirely state-run media,” the report reads.
Jealousy and insecurity have been cited as part of the driving force behind Jiang’s animosity toward the spiritual practice. Falun Gong’s tremendous popularity, reaching almost 1 in every 13 Chinese, was something he couldn’t tolerate.
According to “Anything for Power: The Real Story of China’s Jiang Zemin,” a 2011 book-length series published by The Epoch Times, Jiang’s wife, Wang Yeping, once practiced Falun Gong in 1994. When doing the practice’s exercises one evening, she sensed that someone was mirroring her movements. Opening her eyes, she discovered it was none other than Jiang.
Embarrassed and angry to be caught in the act, Jiang ordered Wang to stop practicing.
“Even my wife believes in Li Hongzhi. Who’s going to believe in me, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party,” he said, referring to the practice’s founder.
The decision to go after one of China’s largest spiritual communities wasn’t a popular one from the start.
Of the seven members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the Party’s inner sanctum, six had expressed objection when Jiang proposed the idea to suppress the practice, according to the publication. Zhu Rongji, the premier of China at the time, suggested that such a move would harm the country’s image and that they should just “allow the ordinary practicing populace to just be.”
Standing up, Jiang pointed at Zhu’s nose and shouted: “Foolish! Foolish! Foolish! That would spell the demise of the Party and the country!
“If we don’t solve the Falun Gong problem right away, we are making a mistake of historical proportions.”
At All Costs
Jiang made such a declaration on April 26, 1999, according to the publication, the day after 10,000 adherents peacefully gathered near the government headquarters in Zhongnanhai, appealing for their rights to practice their belief freely and for the release of dozens of practitioners who were detained days prior.
The crowd dispersed after Zhu assured them of his support during a meeting with some Falun Gong delegates. But Jiang, who rose to power after the Tiananmen massacre a decade prior, pushed ahead with the clampdown.
On June 10, Jiang gave direct orders to create an extra-legal agency to coordinate the efforts nationwide. Later known as the 610 Office after the date of its creation, its structure and operations were comparable to the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.
The persecution began full-scale one month later. State media outlets at all levels pushed out an aggressive propaganda campaign slandering the practice and dehumanizing adherents, while those who refused to give up the belief were subjected to escalating violence and other forms of ill-treatment.
Xu Xinyang (R), a 17-year-old girl whose father (pictured) died as a result of the torture he endured in China because of his belief in Falun Gong, speaks at the Deteriorating Human Rights and Tuidang Movement in China forum, next to her mother Chi Lihua at Congress in Washington on Dec. 4, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
“We have 108 types of torture methods! Do you think you’ll leave here alive?” a guard at the Jilin Women’s Forced Labor Camp in Jilin province once told an imprisoned Falun Gong practitioner there in 2012, according to Minghui, a U.S.-based website that documents the persecution.
Jiang reportedly gave a secret order that Falun Gong adherents who died from beating and other torture would be declared to have committed suicide and sent for cremation, according to Minghui.
To incentivize perpetrators involved in the scheme, officials rewarded them with lucrative salaries and often link bonuses with their level of participation.
According to a 2001 Minghui report, one police station in Dalian, a port city in northern China, required each officer to arrest nine adherents in order to get a bonus.
In Shanghai, 45-year-old Lu Xingguo was stripped naked and tortured in a cell with a towel stuffed in his mouth to prevent him from making noises.
Lu died within one hour. He lost his teeth and the skin on his lips. His hair was fried and electrocution marks were observed all over his body. The police declared him a suicide victim.
“We have been told that a 5 percent death rate is normal,” a prison unit warden there said in October 2003. “We aren’t concerned about deaths.”
In Dandong city, home to a population of more than 2.4 million at the time and the capital of Liaoning Province in northeastern China, authorities sent out political cadres and the police force more than 5,000 times to carry out activities to suppress Falun Gong during the first two months of the persecution, according to internal documents that The Epoch Times obtained from a trusted source. The result was the ban of more than 100 practice sites over the period, while 22,000 practitioners from the area were visited by police.
The city also spent 30,000 yuan ($4,311)—about five times the average annual disposable income in 2000—producing a play to attack Falun Gong to “educate” more than 10,000 people; in the years through 2005, it printed millions of posters, leaflets, and artworks defaming the practice that were either disseminated or pinned on public notice boards, according to the document.
Two Chinese police officers arrest a Falun Gong practitioner at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Jan. 10, 2000. (Chien-Min Chung/AP Photo)
War-Like Efforts
In March 2002, Falun Gong practitioners intercepted the cable lines of the state-run broadcaster in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun to air 45 minutes of information about the persecution. Just 10 minutes after the program ended, a furious Jiang called a close friend in the city, demanding to know who was the city’s Party secretary or mayor, according to his personal biography released in 2005. Soon after, authorities from the city made thousands of arrests over the incident. The core participants received sentences of up to 20 years. Most died in prison or shortly after their release.
Jiang wielded political influence from behind the scenes long after he gave up all of his official positions in 2004. He was the leader of the Party faction known as the Shanghai gang, named after the city where Jiang accumulated his political capital as Party secretary. His loyalists, many of whom were key figures overseeing the persecution, occupied various Party branches when current regime leader Xi Jinping assumed office in 2012.
With the millions of personnel deployed to execute the campaign, the persecution has exacted a hefty economic toll on the Chinese state.
A senior judiciary official in Liaoning was quoted by Minghui as saying that “the financial resources used for handling Falun Gong has exceeded the costs of a war.”
Falun Gong practitioners take part in a parade commemorating the 20th anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong in China, in Washington on July 18, 2019. (Mark Zou/The Epoch Times)
Accountability
Following his death, outside critics have renewed calls for accountability, both for him and for the regime.
“If you believe in human rights and you believe in the legitimacy of people governing themselves and speaking out and having the right of free speech, there’s a lot to hold the Chinese communist dictatorship accountable for, and there’s a lot to hold their leaders accountable for,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently told The Epoch Times.
“The persecution of Falun Gong and the intensity of it is really stunning and tells you all you need to know about how deeply totalitarian the system is.”
Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese diplomat who defected to Australia in 2005, considers Jiang’s death the prelude to the regime’s eventual downfall.
“The CCP has fallen from the peak of its power and is now in a precarious spot,” he told The Epoch Times.
But Jiang’s death doesn’t diminish the regime’s bloody legacy, Chen said. Sooner or later, he expects to see the “accounts settled”—with Jiang and the Chinese Communist Party.