July 20, 2009

Writing in the July 1, 2009 issue of National Review, author Ethan Gutmann describes in detail the Falun Gong practitioners' peaceful appeal in Beijing on April 25 1999, including the events leading up to the appeal, and the mis-characterization of the appeal by the Jiang regime, which used it as an excuse to launch the persecution of Falun Gong on July 20, 1999. As the article is available by subscription only, here we are reprinting a few selected excerpts, and we encourage readers to access the entire article at: http://nrd.nationalreview.com/?q=MjAwOTA3MjA=

Ten years ago, on April 25, 1999, while attending a Beijing wedding, I heard a rumor that a large crowd of people had gathered at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese government's compound. I phoned an acquaintance at the South China Morning Post. "Who are they?" I asked. "We think they are called
'Falun Gong,'" he said. "Apparently it's a huge Chinese religious movement, but we don't really know anything about them." Nobody knew much about them, but the scale of the event was shocking: 10,000 Chinese standing silently in the first mass demonstration since Tiananmen. Equally shocking was the party's ferocious crackdown, which came on July 20.

Mr. Gutmann notes that the Western media has paid very little attention to the persecution, despite the large number of deaths and torture victims, or the considerable achievements of Falun Gong practitioners outside of China.

This is curious, considering Falun Gong's achievements: They are the only dissident group that has broken through the Chinese Internet firewall on a mass scale (Iranian dissenters use Falun Gong-designed systems to communicate and surf the Web freely). Until quite recently, they operated the only independent television station on air in China, broadcast into the country 24 hours daily. They print the only dissident daily newspaper, maintain the only significant shortwave radio presence, and on and on.

Or consider Falun Gong from a bleeds-leads perspective. Each of the 300 who came to the Chinese Embassy on June 4 was metaphorically carrying perhaps three or four victims of Tiananmen Square on his shoulders; on the Falun Gong side, we have only begun to assess the damage. They have suffered more than 3,000 confirmed deaths by state torture, abuse, and neglect. According to my current research, a minimum of 10,000 Falun Gong have been killed for their organs. I suspect the final tally will go far beyond that, because the practice is ongoing. So let's speculate that every one of those 5,000 Falun Gong practitioners is carrying ten, perhaps even twenty, corpses on his back - murdered in labor camps, detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, or on operating tables, usually at the hands of a military surgeon. Quantitative analysis by my colleague Leeshai Lemish demonstrates that American media attention to Falun Gong fell in almost exact proportion to rising fatalities. So as we think about the anniversary of Falun Gong's suppression, we must acknowledge that the Western response has given the Chinese Communists a free hand. And the failure starts with the Western media's acceptance of the party's interpretation of April 25, 1999.

Mr. Gutmann points out that the press has uncritically adopted the Chinese communist party line when describing Falun Gong and the April 25 event.

It is hard even to refer to the episode without endorsing Beijing's interpretation of events: Out of the clear blue sky, on April 25, 10,000 majestically disciplined Falun Gong practitioners "surrounded"

(that's AP and Reuters) or "besieged" (that's AFP) Zhongnanhai, blindsiding the Chinese leadership. The idea that Falun Gong besieged Zhongnanhai in a threatening way is a direct transmission of the Communist-party line. It is repeated in scholarly works on Falun Gong history, and is regarded almost as the movement's original sin. ...Whatever you call the demonstration, it was not specifically targeted at Zhongnanhai, much less was it a siege of the compound. Regardless, for the Chinese audience that Falun Gong is trying to reach, the party still owns the language and the history.

A policeman said: "we all realized that it was nothing like what had been described to us - Falun Gong looking for a fight, disturbing public order, and so on. But we had no choice."

****

While buses and police cars cruised around the intersection, Auntie Dee suddenly realized that video cameras had been set up at regular intervals and were filming them. Sick with fear now, she tried to move back from the front row: "I thought if they caught me on film, they would come for me later." (She was right: Auntie Dee and Aunt Sha would ultimately be sentenced to labor camp for three years. Zeng Zheng would get two, and Luo Hongwei's husband was released from prison last year.)

***
No record, film, or plausible account suggests that the Falun Gong practitioners did anything even faintly provocative during the entire episode, which continued for 16 hours. No littering, smoking,
chanting, or speaking to reporters. When one practitioner suggested that they take turns to go eat or drink, others said no, definitely not - if we drink, we'll have to go to the bathroom, and that could disturb those living or working in the area. Even by the Communist party's hair-trigger standards, there was no pretext to the use of the troops waiting by the Forbidden City. The evening announcement that the Tianjin practitioners would be released was greeted with quiet relief. The demonstrators left feeling optimistic. The next day Aunt Sha read the official media reports. "They said: 'Falun Gong gathered at
Zhongnanhai.' They didn't say we surrounded Zhongnanhai. They also said that there is freedom to practice or not practice as one wishes," she says. The myth of a disorderly demonstration or riot would not be manufactured until later, in official media reports and in an hour-long film portraying the demonstration as a terrorist act. Because the Western media know so little of Falun Gong, this fiction survives in accounts of April 25.

***
It's been ten years. Did the party really mean to kill so many? Perhaps not. It is prone to believing its rhetoric. So are Western reporters. The party will not fire itself, and it is time for the West to engage the reality of China. A post-Communist civil society in China will include a role for Falun Gong, and we should better understand the real history of the movement. For today, it's enough to dispel at least one myth that feeds the misplaced idea that the West has no business commenting on an obscure family quarrel. Falun Gong did not start this war. The Chinese Communist party did. And the party should be held fully accountable for the results.

Mr. Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is the author of Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal. He wishes to thank the Earhart
Foundation and the Peder Wallenberg family for research support.