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A Letter to President Hu Jintao from Retired Government Officials in Beijing

March 02, 2004 |  

(Clearwisdom.net)

President Hu Jintao:

The new Central Party leading group has been established for more than one year. Looking back, there has not been much improvement in civil rights, especially in policies and treatment of Falun Gong. The government is "wearing new shoes and walking down the old road," and it is still following Jiang Zemin's policies.

Right now, people in more than 60 countries around the world are practicing Falun Gong. Mr. Li Hongzhi's books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Mr. Li and Falun Dafa have received more than 1,000 proclamations and awards from foreign governments at various levels around the world. More than 100 internationally renowned persons had nominated Mr. Li for the Nobel Peace Prize. Minghui Schools have been established in foreign countries, in which children are taught to read Zhuan Falun and to practice the Falun Gong exercises, to keep physically and spiritually healthy. Many highly accomplished people deeply believe in and practice Falun Gong. At the present, Falun Gong practitioners around the world are paying close attention to the ruthless persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China at the hands of the government machinery under Jiang's manipulation. The lawsuits against Jiang Zemin have been filed one after another.

A few years ago, Jiang Zemin lied and claimed that Falun Gong was anti-China and opposed the Chinese government in order to cover up his atrocities during the persecution. The fact that Falun Gong practitioners welcomed Premier Wen Jiabao on his visits to the U.S.A. and Canada exposed Jiang's lies of Falun Gong practitioners being anti-China.

In 1999, Jiang Zemin overturned the government's decision with his personal will, suppressing the opinions of the former members of the Politburo against the persecution of Falun Gong. He ignored the investigation report by Qiao Shi, former Chairman of the National People's Congress, in which it was stated that "Falun Gong brings about a hundred benefits and no harm at all to the society" and warned the government with the saying that "those who have the people's support will obtain all; those who lose people's support will lose everything." Yet, Jiang Zemin made arbitrary decisions and forcibly pursued the persecution against Falun Gong. (Attachment 1: "The Persecution is the Result of Jiang's Decision to Override the Government's Decision with his Own Will"
http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2003/7/13/38091.html)

Jiang, as President of China also overstepped his power to make slanderous claims about Falun Gong. On October 26, 1999, in an interview with reporter from the French newspaper Le Figaro, Jiang claimed that "Falun Gong is a [slanderous term respectfully omitted] that harms the society and the public." On October 28 of the same year, Jiang ordered the editorial commentator of the People's Daily to publish a headline article "Falun Gong is a [slanderous word omitted]." On October 30, 1999, the NPC Standing Committee at its 12th plenary session passed a resolution called "Outlaw Evil Cult Organizations, Prevent and Punish the Activities of Evil Cults." Jiang Zemin defamed Falun Gong during his interview with foreign journalist before the resolution was passed, which clearly showed that Jiang brazenly abused his power and placed himself above the law and the NPC. Even in this resolution, which was generally regarded as a way to help back up Jiang's false accusations, it did not name Falun Gong as being a [slanderous term omitted] specifically, but only made a general statement to outlaw and punish evil cults.

The key points are:

Firstly, is Falun Gong an [slanderous term respectfully omitted]? There was no investigation conducted on Falun Gong by an independent third party other than Jiang's lies, because Jiang dared not to allow any international human rights groups to collect any evidence of the persecution. Why did he suppress people's voices and forbid them from appealing for Falun Gong?

Secondly, is there any legitimacy to the accusations made by Jiang and the editorial commentator of the People's Daily, since neither of them has the right to enact law? If judged by the standards of countries that apply the principle of "rule-by-law," Jiang's acts are no doubt illegal and invalid. As the president of China, Jiang not only didn't abide by the law, he also overstepped his authority in violation to the constitution, therefore he forfeited his right to stay in office as a state president [even after he stepped down, he still manipulates the government behind the scenes], and he should be punished by the law.

Let us take a look at the article by the editorial commentator from the People's Daily, in which it listed the following six "evil cult" characteristics.

The first one is so-called "homage to a cult head." The founder of Falun Gong Mr. Li taught people the principles of cultivation, but the editorial commentator twisted Falun Gong practitioners' respect for Mr. Li Hongzhi and falsely claimed it to be "homage to a cult head!" According to such logic, would school students' respect for their teachers also be called "homage to a cult head"? In fact, the person who truly promoted "homage to a cult head" is Jiang Zemin himself. He shamelessly floods TV news programs with his self-promotional appearances and advocates his so-called political theory of the "Three Represents" at prime viewing times. He even squeezed these political lies into the constitution.

The second one is "psychological manipulation." Can teaching people to be good be called "psychological manipulation"? If so, are schoolteachers practicing "psychological manipulation" by passing knowledge to their students?

Falun Gong teaches people to improve their moral standards and helps them get rid of illnesses. There are no rules that force people to stay in the Falun Gong practice, and people are free to come and go as they please. Can you call this psychological manipulation? On the other hand, Jiang's group ruthlessly slanders Falun Gong on TV and in the newspapers; they also abduct Falun Gong practitioners and send them to "transformation sessions" for brainwashing. These acts are truly psychological manipulation.

The third characteristic is "making up heretical ideas." According to Karl Marx's theory of materialism, all religions advocate "superstition," so they are all "heretic ideas." Then why are other religions regarded as orthodox? Does the principle of Truth- Compassion-Tolerance teach people "heretic ideas?" The CCTV-concocted news programs deleted parts of Mr. Li Hongzhi's lecture videotape and slanderously claimed Falun Gong advocated the fallacy of the "end of the world." However, Mr. Li clearly said in one of his lectures, "There are also some religions that talk especially about doomsday and particularly focus on these things. These are one-hundred percent evil religions. They cause social turmoil and are irresponsible to society. So it's not difficult to distinguish these evil religions." [Falun Buddha Fa- Lecture at the Conference in Europe, unofficial translation] More than once, the CCTV and Xinhua News Agency intentionally took Mr. Li's words out of context to twist them into something completely opposite in meaning. In fact, Jiang Zemin's defamatory accusations against Falun Gong are downright evil fallacies.

The fourth characteristic is "amassing wealth." At that time, the tuition fee for Mr. Li Hongzhi's classes was the lowest of all qigong classes in the country, for ten teaching sessions, the total cost was 20 yuan for students who had attended the classes before and 50 yuan (for new students, and this fee also covered the cost of the book). Who ever saw a teaching class with such an inexpensive price? The 330-page book Zhuan Falun was priced at a meager 12 yuan. At the time, a middle school Olympics mathematics test book with only dozens of pages published by the Education Department was priced at 24 yuan, twice the price of Zhuan Falun. Moreover, all books written by Mr. Li Hongzhi can be downloaded and printed free of charge from the Internet. Would a person who wants to amass wealth do such a thing?

The CCTV showed a luxurious house in Changchun and claimed that it belonged to Mr. Li Hongzhi, while in fact the owner was a person whose name merely sounded the same as Mr. Li. The police borrowed his house and re-arranged it before the TV crew went to film the house to deceive the public.

In fact Jiang Zemin and his sons are the real ones who amass wealth. Jiang Zemin promoted his elder son, who is lacking in both intellectual prestige and morality, to the position of the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He further allowed his son to engage in power-money deals with public funds, which enabled him to quickly become a billionaire. This is truly amassing wealth illegally and corruption.

The fifth characteristic is "secret association." Falun Gong practitioners do their exercises in public, oftentimes in public parks, so there is nothing "secretive" about Falun Gong. The police system used to send spies to mix with the practitioners before the persecution of 1999 to obtain "information." However, they couldn't find anything illegal about Falun Gong, and some of them were so moved by Falun Gong's powerful effect on health and moral improvement that they admitted they were spies and started practicing Falun Gong themselves.

On the other hand, Jiang Zemin formed his own power clique within the Party and the military; he bribed officials to make them his lackeys. His conduct is indeed "secret association" in a real sense.

The sixth characteristic is "damaging to the society." The investigation report by Qiao Shi, former chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress concluded that "Falun Gong has brought about a hundred benefits and absolutely no harm to the society." This report was based on investigations conducted by representatives of the NPC, who worked at the grassroots level and whose information is therefore objective and reliable. In contrast, Jiang's group brutalizes the people, slanders the innocent, covers up the truth about SARS and indulges in corruption without restraint, all of which are truly damaging the society.

All in all, the six characteristics by which the editorial commentator judged Falun Gong to be an [slanderous term respectfully omitted] overlooked factual evidence and these comments were fabricated completely based on Jiang Zemin's needs. In fact these accusations are most appropriate to make against Jiang Zemin himself. Jiang took advantage of most Chinese people's ignorance of the law, their thinking habits and their trust in the People's Daily to create the illusion that Falun Gong had already been determined to be an [slanderous term respectfully omitted] according to law.

It is well known that the international legal community does not acknowledge the concept of "evil cult." The offenders in the Sarin poisoning case in the Tokyo subway system some years back were tried and sentenced as individual criminals. The international legal community has been very careful in making any law against an "evil cult" because it is difficult to define the legal boundary of an "evil cult," and the concept of "evil cult" can easily be abused and manipulated to restrict citizen's freedom of belief. (See attachment 2: "The Complete Illegality of the Jiang Regime's Persecution of Falun Gong," http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2003/8/18/39234.html) It is surprising that a "dignified" president of the People's Republic of China, General Secretary of the Party, uses such garbage to deceive and threaten the Chinese people in order to satisfy his own thirst for power. It is really lamentable and shameful!

Since people were skeptical about the big label "evil cult," Jiang and his associates further staged a series of cases to slander Falun Gong, including the "Self-immolation" in Tiananmen Square, Fu Bin's murder of his family and other fabricated events to prove that Jiang was "in the right" and to incite those who blindly believe the government to hate and fear Falun Gong. But all of these cases were framed or staged. The documentation on Clearwisdom.net has proven the falsehood of these cases, and thus we can not discuss them in detail here due to limited space.

In the past four years since July 20 1999, Jiang Zemin and his associates have persecuted Falun Gong practitioners in a most ruthless manner. There have been more than 800 verified deaths of Falun Gong practitioners whose names and addresses have been documented. The death cases of practitioners whose names were unknown are numerous. According to a confidential source inside the Public Security Bureau, several thousand people have died as a result of this persecution. Approximately ten thousand people are severely injured or disabled from torture, abuse and physical or mental torment. Nearly one thousand people have been sent to mental hospitals and injected with drugs that harm or destroy the central nervous system. Normal and healthy people were turned into mentally disoriented people. Such conduct has been strongly condemned by the international psychiatric association. In addition, over one hundred thousand people are incarcerated in prisons, labor camps and detention centers. Countless people's families were ruined, with some of their family members being forced into exile and some dead.

Jiang and his associates used so-called "law education classes" [state sponsored brainwashing programs] in their attempt to force practitioners to give up their belief. For those practitioners who refuse to obey their orders, they would prolong their detention terms and deprive them of sleep, beat and shock them with electric batons, burn their bodies with hot irons, put sharpened bamboo sticks into their finger tips, lock them inside a water dungeon, put them in straight jackets, and torture them with a most savage method called "five horses pulling apart the body" and other unimaginable cruelties. These enforcers of Jiang's orders have used all kinds of the most brutal torture means from ancient times until present and borrowed from the worst things in countries everywhere. Jiang Zemin gave the secret order, "death of Falun Gong practitioners from beating is nothing and shall be counted as suicide. The body shall be directly cremated without investigating the person's identification", and to"defame their reputation, bankrupt them financially, destroy them physically." With those orders, the policemen who have no conscience left become even more aggressive in order to win prestige and recognition, to get promotion and gain praises. A blood-shedding tragedy is secretly being played out in China.

Jiang Zemin and his associates have applied an "implication" system left over from the feudalist-era not only to Falun Gong practitioners themselves, but also to their family and relatives, their superiors at work, the neighborhood committees as well as policemen in the local police station. They punish their families by taking away their apartments, and by disqualifying their children from going to universities or from joining army. They punish their superiors at work by demoting their rank and reducing their salaries and by deducting the bonus of the all employees in their work units. They also punish the relevant neighborhood committees and local police stations with all kinds of methods. They award those who have won notoriety in persecuting Falun Gong with promotion, salary increase, bonus and other rewards.

They have also sent spies to other countries to disrupt Falun Gong practitioners' activities in those countries, and bribed willing thugs in local areas to beat Falun Gong practitioners. Furthermore, they try to win over foreign governments, officials, and politicians through diplomatic channels or with trade deals to silence the voices of justice in the world. Jiang's cohorts disregard the reality that the Bank of China is operating under bankruptcy and seduce foreign enterprises with overly favorable commercial investment projects, in order to impact other government's choices.

For this, Jiang has used huge amounts of national financial resources. If this money were used on industry and agriculture, it would have reduced unemployment and maintained the stability of the society.

Fearing that his shameful acts be exposed, Jiang Zemin colluded with his eldest son Jiang Mianheng to block the Internet. They spent huge amounts of public funds to purchase high technology from overseas companies, and hired tens of thousands of Internet secret agents to block information.

Falun Gong practitioners in several countries have filed lawsuits against Jiang, including those in the U.S.A., Belgium, Spain, Germany, Taiwan, Korea and other nations, charging him with genocide, torture, crimes against humanity and other atrocities. The lawsuits have won support from people and politicians in various countries, who acted in support of humanitarianism and justice. The Global Coalition to Bring Jiang to Justice has held activities to try Jiang in over twenty major cities around the world.

How long can Jiang Zemin's deception of the Chinese people last? Once people get to know the truth they will completely lose confidence in the Party and the government. Jiang's wrongful policies and actions against Falun Gong are like a malignant tumor, which eventually will cause the real subjugation of the Party and the country.

This persecution, therefore, is not just against Falun Gong practitioners. It is against all Chinese people. It is to destroy the progress of human civilization and to cause damage to people around the world.

I hope that the General Party Secretary Hu Jintao will take people's fundamental interests and future as most important, and will, for the future of the Chinese people, make a prompt decision to resolutely stop Jiang Zemin's wrongful policies and actions against Falun Gong and restore Falun Gong's innocence.

To this end, I request to:

  1. Unconditionally release all illegally detained Falun Gong practitioners;
  2. For the sake of people's right to know, publish the investigation report on Falun Gong by Qiao Shi, former Chairman of the National People Congress;
  3. Stop the one-sided defamatory propaganda on radio, TV and other news media. Allow the media to publish different opinions on the Falun Gong issue, and strictly prohibit retaliation against those holding different opinions;
  4. Investigate major cases that fabricated charges against Falun Gong, such as the "Self-immolation" on Tiananmen Square, the Fu Yibin murder case and other incidents, and publish the investigation results;
  5. Repeal the Ministry of Civil Affairs' announcement to "ban Falun Gong" and the Ministry of Public Security's announcement of "six prohibitions," which contradict with the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. Dissolve the "610 Office" and its corresponding agencies, which violate the Constitution.
  6. Stop and freeze all funds being used to persecute Falun Gong. Do not waste the Chinese people's sweat money, public funds on the persecution of Falun Gong any longer.
  7. Remove Jiang and his scoundrel gang from their posts and strip them of their power; prosecute Jiang and his associates for all the crimes they have committed.
  8. Let all who have participated in the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners openly apologize to people and compensate Falun Gong practitioners for all their losses over the last few years;
  9. Punish the murderers of Falun Gong practitioners severely, and appease practitioners' family and relatives;
  10. Apologize for the slanderous acts against Falun Gong, and the harm they have brought to the Chinese people and people around the world;
  11. Respectfully invite Teacher Li, who has brought boundless benefits to people, back to China.

Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing (who are retired government officials and senior intellectuals with senior titles)

January 5, 2004