June 19, 2005
MELBOURNE - Hao Fengjun never thought his visit to Melbourne's Epoch Times office on June 4, 2005 would send shock waves throughout Western society. Hao chose to step forward to tell people why he defected from his post as a police officer in China's notorious 610 Office. He risked his own and his family's lives to help people understand the situation in China.
A Model Police Officer at the Public Security Bureau Branch Office
Hao Fengjun was once a model police officer. He believes that law enforcement is a sacred profession. As a child he loved martial arts and dreamed of becoming a policeman. He realized this dream when, in 1994, he graduated from the Department of Law in Nankai University and joined the Heping district branch of public security bureau in Tianjin city.
"I was a public security police officer in Heping district, Tianjin city from 1994 to 2000. I thought a policeman should punish evil, encourage kindness and promote righteousness. This is how I thought and this is how I worked. I received excellent ratings almost every year. I solved two large-scale drug-deals and several robbery cases and was awarded Detective Third Grade. In the chief police officer election in 1998, I was elected to be a first-level police officer. I led over a dozen policemen from my office to protect the area. I felt that I had reached the peak of my career."
No Policeman Wants to Work at the '610 Office'
In October 2000, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) transformed the Tianjin public security division into a public security bureau. This was a combination of the former department of administration and security with the mechanism of the 610 Office. The change improved the ability of the '610 Office' to suppress the meditation practice Falun Gong. The '610 Office' has the power to issue orders to outside organizations and conduct other organizations' investigations.
Although the '610 Office' openly recruited within the public security system, it received only one application. The Tianjin public security bureau came up with a solution- to arbitrarily transfer people. Under orders from the Tianjin public security bureau, each branch office uses a computer program to pick at random which employees have to transfer to the municipal security bureau. If the person fails to register at the municipal security bureau, he will be dismissed from work. Unfortunately Hao Fengjun was selected and transferred to the place that nobody wants to be.
610 - The Nightmare Begins
The first day that Hao Fengjun stepped into the '610 Office', he knew it was not the right place for him.
When he joined the '610 Office' in October of 2000, there were over 40 people in one office. Hao Fengjun's boss handed him a thick stack of records, including details about the supposed crimes of Tianjin Falun Gong practitioners and the CCP's guidelines about Falun Gong. Hao's boss asked the newly transferred 27-year-old young man to "learn, study and memorize" the materials in order to build a "solid foundation" for future assignments requiring him to persecute Falun Gong.
"They tried to brainwash me. It goes on every day," Hao Fengjun said. "I was never able to put my heart into it or sit still. I knew the '610 Office' monitored, arrested, and persecuted innocent people such as Falun Gong practitioners and other dissidents. I was tired of it. In the end I just showed up at the office but I did not do any work. I didn't think this was the kind of job that a true policeman would do. Whenever I could no longer read the materials and wanted to walk around, seniors in the office who were quietly reading the newspaper would turn around and look at me. I felt suffocated."
The seniors at the '610 Office's are CCP cadres who have worked for years in the department of administration and security. According to Hao, they regard punishing dissidents for the CCP as their career. They do not trust the young men who have transferred from local offices. Hao said he could not always escape by walking around the office and had to learn to bear it.
He wasn't happy at home either. The excitement he once felt from solving cases was replaced with silence and despair.
"In the '610 Office' people talked to each other with their hands covering their mouth. They keep their voices low and are always looking around. After being in such an environment for a long time, people even talked like this in public. People are always afraid of being heard and are paranoid, as if they have mental problems."
The '610 Office' Has a Yearly Arrest Quota
When Hao Fengjun started to work for the '610 Office' he was assigned to the 1st Team. "As a member of the '610 Office' my job was to guide and coordinate with local offices to crack down on Falun Gong and analyze collected materials."
A lot of information came from overseas. Hao Fengjun said, "The Australian government has been saying that only the key Falun Gong members would be dealt with [by the CCP] and ordinary practitioners would not be punished. I think the Australian government does not understand the true nature of the CCP. If it only targets key members, it should be limited to a small-scale operation and would not involve every level of the police force. If it were a small-scale operation, the authorities would not care about what practitioners in other parts of the world are doing. However, Falun Gong practitioners all over the world are under CCP surveillance. I personally received intelligence information about Falun Gong practitioners in Australia, the United States and Canada. The CCP collects information on overseas Falun Gong practitioners. They hope to develop strategies and policies to dissolve the Falun Gong group internationally, eventually eliminating the group."
The CCP's monitoring of Falun Gong includes those practitioners who live in Tianjin. "Over 30,000 Falun Gong practitioners in Tianjin have been registered. Every year superiors give the police a 10-percent quota. This means that the number of people the police detain, put into forced labor camps, juvenile re-education camps, or brainwashing classes must be 10 percent of the total number of practitioners. Take 30,000 Falun Gong practitioners as an example. Ten percent is 3,000 practitioners." So Hao had to arrest, detain and brutally "transform" eight or ten Falun Gong practitioners every day.
Since November 2004 when The Epoch Times published the series of editorial articles the "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party", the '610 Office' has had additional work.
"The '610 Office' of the public security bureau is responsible for monitoring and analyzing those who resign from the CCP. Every resignation published on the Epoch Times Tuidang (Quit the CCP) website is reviewed by the city where it was posted. The Tianjin public security bureau has a Falun Gong database with 30,000 Falun Gong practitioners' records. They monitor the withdrawal website every day. For example, every day a report with a list of names that resigned from the CCP is generated. They search the Falun Gong database for matched names and more information, including which local office they belong to. The information is passed to the local office and the local office then handles the cases. In that way, whoever publishes a resignation with their real name will be arrested."
All News about Falun Gong Coming from the '610 Office' is Fake
"Since I did not want to get involved in these activities and did not want to pressure local offices, I was not able to complete my quota. From a policeman who got rewards every year, I gradually became a policeman who failed to meet the requirements of the '610 Office' and who finally lost his job as a police officer. I was demoted to the support staff."
Hao Fengjun went on: "Actually the staff at the branch level is not willing to persecute the detainees that they work with every day. Falun Gong practitioners could be their next-door neighbors. How could they possibly detain them? And they did not do anything wrong - how could we do it?"
After witnessing Sun Ti, a Falun Gong practitioner, being beaten by the police at the '610 Office' (Case 103 by the '610 Office'), Hao Fengjun felt that he could not work there any more. "Sun Ti was one of more than 70 Falun Gong practitioners that had been arrested. I saw her sitting on a bench in the interrogation room. Her eyes were practically swollen shut. The interrogator was Mu Ruili, the 2nd team leader of the '610 Office.' He had in his hands a steel rod 1.5 centimeters in diameter. On the desk was a high-voltage electric baton. After I came into the room, Mu Ruili was ordered to leave. Sun Ti cried. She lifted her blouse and showed us her wounds. Because she was a woman I wanted to leave. She asked me to stay and said that she only wanted to show me. She turned around and lifted up her clothes. I was shocked. There was not one piece of normal skin in her back. Her back was all black and blue with two 20-centimeter-long cuts oozing blood.
"At that moment, I felt my heart break."
"I once told my boss that I was incapable of doing this job. I asked him to let me go back to the local office. My boss said: 'That's not going to happen. It took us so long to collect these people and we still need more help. How can I let you go? Once you are here, you cannot leave.' In the end, my boss did transfer me to a team that does not handle Falun Gong cases, the 4th team. Later I became my boss' driver.
"The CCP said that it treats Falun Gong like 'breeze and rain during spring time,' and like a parent disciplining their children. I would just like to know: Would parents starve their children and beat them to death?
"Ordinary people can't see the truth about Falun Gong. They only hear slurs the CCP has invented about how Falun Gong is harmful to people, inventions such as the 'self-immolation incident in Tiananmen Square'[1] and the Beggar Murderer cases (in which a series of murders committed by a man with a long history of mental problems was blamed on Falun Gong.) The CCP wants people to think that Falun Gong is an evil cult. The government blames all society's ills on Falun Gong.
"The CCP's media only broadcasts pictures of very clean and neat labor camps with policeman treating Falun Gong practitioners humanely. They say the government's compassionate treatment moves Falun Gong practitioners to tears. All those scenes are fabricated. The people you see might not be genuine Falun Gong practitioners. I saw the making of one of these fabricated TV programs. One CCTV (China Central TV) reporter interviewed the Falun Gong practitioner Jing Zhanyi in our bureau. Even the '610' policemen thought the things Jing Zhanyi said were completely untrue. I witnessed how the head of our bureau 'taught' Mr. Jing what to say before the interview. He threatened Mr. Jing that if he failed to say what he was told, Jing's detention would be extended. Mr. Jing recited his lines like an actor."
Being against the CCP Is Not Betraying China
Hao Fengjun made up his mind to leave the control of the CCP and explore the democracy and freedom in the West. He finally arrived in Melbourne on February 15, 2005, and applied for asylum. In Australia on June 8, Hao Fengjun publicly announced his resignation from the CCP in front of the media.
Hao Fengjun said, "The thing that touches me the most is that the Australian people can say what they want when they want, anything from joy to anger. But in China it is impossible for people to express their feelings. There is no medium for them to vent their joy or anger. They do not have that freedom. They have to bear their suffering silently.
"Someone accused me and Chen Yongli of betraying China. I want to ask this person: If in Australia the Green Party or the Labor Party disagrees with John Howard's policies, do you think it is unpatriotic? The notion that being against the CCP means that you are against China is the result of the CCP's incessant brainwashing.
"I love my country and the Chinese people. It is a beautiful country with abundant resources. But I am against the way the CCP treats the Chinese people and I am against its prosecution of dissidents. Several days ago I quit the CCP and other CCP related organizations - the Youth League and the Young Pioneers. All of a sudden I felt light and relieved. I felt as refreshed as grass covered in early morning dew."
Advice to Chinese People in Australia
Hao Fengjun said: "Life in Australia is tougher than life in China. The reason I came here is not to seek a better material life, but to look for a way to extricate myself from the heavy burden of my experiences. I want to expose their dark nature to the people of the world so they will have a better understanding of the CCP."
"As a former employee of the CCP's public security system, I recognize the fabrications of my ex-coworkers when I read them in news articles. I hope those who know the truth about the CCP will tell the truth. Those who work as the CCP's mouthpiece and do secret work for the CCP, please step down. Your behavior and your articles clearly expose you. Your intention is well known. When the CCP collapses, how will you face your own people?"
Note:
[1] On January 23, 2001, a small group of people apparently set themselves on fire in China's Tiananmen Square. The state-run Xinhua news agency reported the incident with unusual speed, claiming that the immolators were practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual practice. Evidence shows that this incident was staged, a ploy used to turn public opinion against a group already persecuted for their beliefs.
To view a slow-motion analysis of the film of the incident, please go to www.faluninfo.net/videosonline.asp
Source http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-6-19/29645.html