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Beijing Puts on Another Show for Visiting Journalists - Replacing Falun Gong Detainees with Party-Faithful Coached to Answer Media Questions with CCP Propaganda

August 27, 2008 |   By Chen Zhenghong

(Clearwisdom.net) The Falun Dafa Information Center published "A Journalist's Walking Guide to the Persecution of Falun Gong in Beijing," which was widely distributed to foreign journalists reporting on the Olympic Games in Beijing. The guide tells journalists how to visit prisons and labor camps where Falun Gong practitioners were detained. In immediate response, Chinese authorities transferred Falun Gong practitioners out of Beijing prisons. Many were sent to labor camps in Shanxi Province. Some were even sent to Inner Mongolia, far from Beijing. In their place, authorities brought in former practitioners; those who have been so-called "transformed," who have sworn statements renouncing Falun Gong, often after prolonged torture and/or brainwashing. The "transformed" were brought into Beijing detention centers and prisons, and in a show contrived solely to deceive Olympic visitors, were humanely treated and trained to respond to reporters' questions with tightly scripted propaganda designed to glorify the Party and slander Falun Gong.

This is an old trick for the CCP, and hopefully few will be deceived.

In the last few years, "preparations for the the Olympic Games" have been used as code words for "intensifying the suppression of Falun Gong." According to a Falun Dafa Information Center July report, at least 8,037 Falun Gong practitioners had been arrested since December of 2007. The arrests occurred in 29 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, under the direct administration of the Communist regime. Among them, more than 500 arrests were in Beijing. Many have been confined in forced labor camps, and more have been tortured to the point of disability or death.

Masanjia Labor Camp in Liaoning Province, where the guards once stripped a number of female Falun Gong practitioners and threw them into male prisoners' cells to be abused, was given an "Advanced Unit" award by then-president Jiang Zemin, the chief culprit who started the persecution. On April 26, 2001, Masanjia Labor Camp arranged for specially selected detainees to be interviewed by foreign and Chinese media. Less than a month later, journalists were invited back to the same labor camp. They found to their surprise that the labor camp had been renovated, and every detainee was wearing a new uniform with their names embroidered in both Chinese and English on the back of their uniform. Isn't it strange that inmates in a Chinese labor camp are wearing clothes with their names in English? The intention seems clear--authorities wanted to pretty up the camp as a show for foreign journalists.

Propaganda surrounding the conditions in Chinese labor camps is thick. It is so over-the-top sometimes that you might think conditions are more like a luxury resort than the slave labor camps filled with torture and brainwashing that they actually are. Chinese propaganda talks about the "kindly influence" of the "helpers" in the camps. It waxes poetic about the so-called "rich and colorful" recreational activities. Authorities even claim that the prisons are "so pleasant that inmates forget their home," and that "inmates are extremely grateful to the Party for their excellent care." Not surprising in a country ruled by a regime that calls brainwashing centers "legal education schools" and defines years of forced labor, sleep deprivation and beatings as "re-education."

In July 2003, China's Ministry of Justice produced a TV series titled "Life is Innocent," which used the Beijing Labor Camp as it background, to slander Falun Gong and to cover up the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners at the labor camp. The TV series was shot at Beijing Tuanhe Labor Camp in November 2002; some shots were filmed at the Beijing Women's Labor Camp. Apart from some professional actors and actresses who pretended to be Falun Gong practitioners, all others were drug addicts playing the roles of Falun Gong practitioners.

Such absurd dramas are repeatedly played out by the Communist regime. The world's people are cautioned to look closely at such ruses, and see them for what they are-thinly veiled attempts to deceive the public and hide the truth.