BBC Monitoring: Hong Kong magazine publishes Chinese dissident's critique of Party Congress (Excerpt)

(Clearwisdom.net)

According to a BBC Monitoring report on December 6, 2002, Cheng Ming, a Hong Kong magazine published Chinese dissident's critique of Party Congress. The report said, noted Chinese dissident Bao Tong has criticized the recent National Party Congress and slammed the party for not supporting and protecting its traditional constituency. The report also criticized the suppression of Falun Gong. Below is an excerpt from the report.

Promises about political reform, democracy, and rule of law were made in a similar manner on the same rostrum five years ago, when the 15th CCP National Congress was in session. Five years on, people have not seen any political reform and have not been given democracy and rule of law, but they have witnessed the encirclement and suppression of Falun Gong, which is a regimen that encourages people to improve their health through some exercises in a sincere, benevolent, and tolerant frame of mind. There were thousands upon thousands of participants, most of whom were elderly people or poor people who could not afford medical expenses. [Editor's note: Falun Gong practitioners come from all walks of life including government officials, successful businesspersons, workers, students, professors, housewives, peasants, technicians and so on. Through practicing Falun Gong, they improved their health and therefore saved a great amount of medical expenses for the nation.] In 1999, they were outlawed in Tianjin Municipality, so they were forced to petition the CCP Central Committee and [ask the latter] to allow them to carry on with their exercises. Without anybody knowing it beforehand, an orderly peaceful petition unfolded at the entrance to Zhongnanhai, giving the CCP's top leadership a big surprise. From then on, they were considered a mortal danger. In order to translate the party's intention into the will of the state, the legislature, posthaste, adopted a law that defined Falun Gong as (slanderous word omitted). From then on, the executive organs conducted ruthless struggle and delivered merciless blows on a continuous basis. In the CCP history, the cores of leadership over the three generations were in the same strain and each of them earned a discredit in their record: the cultural revolution, the Tiananmen blood-bath, and the encirclement and suppression of Falun Gong. They were all unique products grown from the soil of single-party autocracy and cannot possibly happen in a civilized country. As long as the single-party autocracy exists, the Chinese people will continue to be deprived of their right of freedom from fear, despite the fact that representatives of the Chinese government under the leadership of the CCP did sign the "International covenant on civil and political rights" on 5 October 1998.