The 450+ pages of the 2020 Minghui Report have now been updated by the 190-page “The Persecution of Falun Gong.” July 20 is the 24th anniversary of the beginning of Falun Gong’s ordeal.
by Marco Respinti
Part 1 of 4
For the Marxist-Leninist dogma, which is the basis of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s doctrine, all religions are alienations. Followers of all creeds or beliefs are affected by mental disorders and should be cured. The state, acting as a doctor, a cop, and a nanny all at the same time, sets up facilities to “cure” and “re-educate” these poor souls. In the Soviet Union and its satellite countries this was an industry. It happened in all Communist regimes of the world. It still happens in the People’s Republic of China (PRC.)
Psychiatric clinics hospitalize believers despite their being in good health: for example, practitioners of Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, a new spiritual movement. They are “obviously” mentally disturbed since they resist the eradication of religion. At times, these “sick” people become even “dangerous,” and harsher action should be taken.
On January 23, 2001, “the CCP staged a propaganda stunt on Tiananmen Square in which actors posing as Falun Gong practitioners began to light themselves on fire.” The resulting video “was broadcast continuously on state media and turned public opinion against Falun Gong. A week later, the Minister of Education issued an order urging all schools in China to launch campaigns to condemn Falun Gong. As a result, numerous young minds have been poisoned and misled to hate Falun Gong. About eight million youth from a hundred cities signed their names to smear Falun Gong. In the same month, youths in over 1,500 communities launched campaigns and collected signatures from twelve million residents to denounce Falun Gong.”
This episode is presented at page 38 of the 190 that constitute “The Persecution of Falun Gong: Upholding Faith Amid Tyranny (2020-2022 Minghui Report)”—a bloody tomfoolery that we supposed had gone out of fashion since the defeat of the National-Socialist criminal propaganda against the Jews. We were wrong. Published in July 2023, “The Persecution of Falun Gong” brings up to date the detailed account published in the 450+ pages of the “Minghui Report: The 20-Year Persecution of Falun Gong in China” in 2020. Both texts are authored and published in several languages in the United States of America by Minghui.org (a word in Chinese Mandarin, 明慧,meaning “clear wisdom”). It is a volunteer organization working as a central communication hub for the Falun Gong community in the world, through a multilingual web site and a publishing branch.
All started on July 20, 1999, when Falun Gong practitioners, considered among the PRC’s enemies No. 1, began going through their ordeal. For a few years after the movement was founded in 1992, the Chinese regime tolerated and even endorsed Falun Gong as a healthy practice of qi gong for its citizens. But the materialistic regime was not able to silence Falun Gong’s essential spiritual dimension—and also the fact that a spiritual movement was rapidly growing in numbers, contradicting its irreligious ideology. Falun Gong was publicly denounced as a “xie jiao” and a bloody repression started.
Jiang Zemin (1926–2022), General Secretary of the CCP from 1989 to 2002, Chairman of the Chinese Central Military Commission from 1989 to 2004, and President of PRC from 1993 to 2003, was the initiator and the mastermind behind the staggering persecution of Falun Gong. He died on November 30, 2022, while the 2023 updating report by Minghui was being completed, “leaving a trail of corruption, human rights atrocities, and moral decay in his wake” (page 33). This included a surveillance state, concentration camps, sexual abuses of prisoners in detention, and the forced drugging of people who “were injected with nerve-damaging drugs or had their food or water laced with such drugs” since they were considered “dangerous” and “mentally damaged” religious criminals. Some “became disabled, and others lost their lives” (page 37). This horror galore is the heritage of Jiang, which the CCP brought on and President Xi Jinping perfectioned. It is “The Present-Day Orwellian State”, as the title of paragraph 2.7 in Chapter 2 of Part 1 of the 2020 “Minghui Report” goes, and Chapter 4, “Torture Methods,” details.
The 2020 “Minghui Report” details it in Part 1, Chapter 7, stamping yet another mark of horror on the CCP, the practice of organ harvesting, “an unprecedented crime” which was “first brought to light in 2006” (page 171). This writer still clearly recalls when he heard the story for the first time, frankly finding it hard to believe. It was when I met and discussed the topic with the late Wu “Harry” Ongda (1937–2016), who spent 19 years in a CCP’s laogai. Wu brought publicly presented testimonies, documents, pictures, and videos. Minghui itself focused on the topic in its 2016 “Minghui Human Rights Report: Falun Gong Practitioners Systematically Murdered in China for Their Organs.” There is now a plethora of evidence, which is impossible to ignore.
Out of the tons of documents that the 2020 “Minghui Report” offers to the readers, those presented in Part 1, Chapter 8 are of special interest. In those pages it is explained how the CCP also manages to persecute its victims outside the borders of the PRC, using the ill-famed “Office 610,” now said to be no more active, but also PRC’s embassies in foreign countries. The irony here is pitch black: customarily, embassies promote their country abroad, and so PRC’s embassies in the world do promote the signature practice of the CCP—tormenting Chinese citizens.
Now the 2023 update report moves even one step beyond, bringing to light a new persecuting strategy. In March 2020, the Guizhou province section of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee (PLAC), sometimes transliterated also as “Commission,” a CCP Central Committee’s organization, “issued an order to completely ‘transform’ all Falun Gong practitioners between 2020 and 2023” (page 3). This was based on directions from the PLAC in Beijing, one of the chief arms of the Party’s persecution against the movement. Of course, “[t]ransforming practitioners means forcing them to renounce their faith, often through brainwashing and torture. Practitioners who give in can be offered early release, though many are then forced to help transform and abuse other practitioners” (page 3.) To reach this goal, “officials set up brainwashing facilities around China to target practitioners who refused to renounce their faith” (page 13). The now famous Wuhan city, cradle of the new coronavirus, “was also recognized as a ‘national role model’ in holding brainwashing sessions for Falun Gong practitioners. With more than 60 brainwashing centers already in place, Wuhan authorities opened another nine locations across the city in 2021” (page 13). Parenthetically, “Bitter Winter” does not believe that “brainwashing” is a valid category to describe psychological pressures, but certainly such pressures in China are extreme.
The report claims that “the ‘610 Office,’ a Gestapo-like organization established on June 10, 1999, specifically to eradicate Falun Gong, still plays a critical role in the persecution, even as the CCP announced the agency’s dissolution in 2018” (page 4). Perhaps it just changed its name.
The years of the COVID-19 pandemics were a nightmare for the entire world, but in China they were even worse. The new coronavirus worldwide death toll did not in fact stop the CCP, which relentlessly continued to persecute Falun Gong. At the outbreak of the pandemics, with all its delays and cover-ups, the CCP launched the policy of lockdowns and its “zero COVID” strategy, whatever that really meant, and “Bitter Winter,” among others, frequently reported on numerous suspicious facts. But another “zero” operation preceded it: the nationwide “zero-out” campaign against Falun Gong, perceived by Chinese authority as the final blow against an already decimated group.
From January 2020 to December 2022, 16,033 Falun Gong practitioners were arrested, 22,939 harassed, 2,427 sentenced to prison, and 360 were confirmed to have died from the persecution. “In December 2020 alone,” the 2023 updating report writes, “1,714 practitioners were harassed. In comparison, a total of 3,582 harassment cases were reported in all of 2019” (page IX.) Also, “[t]he CCP escalated its harassment of Falun Gong practitioners before the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022 and in the months leading up to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022” (pages IX-X).
An elucidation comes from the Falun Dafa InfoCenter. The total number of Falun Gong believers documented to have died due to persecution in almost a quarter of a century surpasses 5,000, and from January to June 2023 there were 3,133 documented cases of arrests and harassment, a 15.7% increase from the same period in 2022.
Minghui.org and other information network of Falun Gong did a major work. Alongside the efforts of many other organizations and individuals, as well as the massive amount of data made available by the London-based “China Tribunal” in 2018‒2019, they document tragedies of our time that can no longer be ignored. A list of perpetrators of those crimes against humanity exists and will be discussed in the second article of this series. I just used a common expression, “crimes against humanity,” which is at risk of becoming a buzz word or even a cliché. This is why articles 3 and 4 in this series will try to exorcise that degradation into the predictable that borders cynicism by avoiding the use of numbers and statistics only. I will present real stories of actual people: the parents of Ding Lebin, and the case of Ma Xiuyun and Tang Pingshun, wife and husband. There is still time to save them—provided there is also the will to do it.
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