Jiang Zemin’s Persecution of Falun Gong Brought Endless Disasters to China

(Minghui.org) Jiang Zemin, former top leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), died on November 30, 2022, but the persecution against Falun Gong that he initiated in July 1999, continues. Many people believe that the suppression started because the communist regime, which ran on the core ideology of falsehood, evilness, and class struggle, could not tolerate Falun Gong’s principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. In addition, Jiang was personally jealous of Falun Gong’s popularity and afraid of losing control of people. All these contributed to the human rights violations against tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners. 

The victims are not limited to practitioners and their families. Looking at Chinese society right now, one may find the CCP has expanded many tactics against Falun Gong practitioners to the general public. 

Digital Surveillance for All

Many people in Western society may not know that popular social media such as Facebook and Twitter, along with Google searches, are banned in China. This is part of the censorship and information control system by the CCP. 

Various sources show that China has over half a billion surveillance cameras. The monitoring of citizens has worsened in the pandemic area. In the name of combating the pandemic, the authorities mandated the installation of health code (green, yellow, and red) apps on all mobile phones. Connected to the wider surveillance system, the app has essentially become an electronic shackle that restrains citizens’ freedom. 

Many may not know that such a tight monitoring system had been applied to Falun Gong practitioners a long time ago. 

After Jiang started the persecution of Falun Gong in July 1999, he ordered the government to closely monitor practitioners and to block information related to Falun Gong from being posted on the internet. One of my friends worked at an IT firm in Zhongguancun of Beijing (a region often known as “China’s Silicon Valley”). He said that the Beijing Police Department was already working with his company to develop tiny video cameras back in 2000. With the size of a pinhole or a nail, they were installed next to the entrance of Falun Gong practitioners’ homes. Police could monitor anyone coming in and out and people would not notice the cameras. 

Moreover, Jiang Zemin also asked his son Jiang Mianheng to lead the Golden Shield Project, which enhanced the existing firewall with additional capabilities to block websites, monitor the internet, send Trojan viruses, conduct facial recognition, and tap phones. 

Concentration Camps

In the past three years, there have been many instances when family members were forcibly separated and sent to different Fangcang facilities (field hospitals used for quarantine). Such field hospitals were notorious for their poor food, hygiene and medical care, and people quarantined there often likened them to concentration camps. 

Some think that Fangcang facilities were an extension of those that had already existed in Xinjiang Province under the name of “re-education camps” or “vocational training schools.” The only difference between the two is that there was no brainwashing or physical abuse in Fangcang facilities. 

What many didn’t realize is that the re-education camps in Xinjing were modeled after the labor camps and brainwashing centers used to detain and torture Falun Gong practitioners. After Jiang began to persecute Falun Gong, he established a large number of labor camps and brainwashing centers – many of them were known to the outside as “legal education centers.” 

Information collected by Minghui indicates that these labor camps and brainwashing centers were essentially black jails, where practitioners were brutally tortured and inmates were rewarded for torturing Falun Gong practitioners. 

Sexual Abuse

Some women who escaped from the concentration camps in Xinjiang revealed that they were raped there. They were not the only rape victims in China’s detention facilities. Female Falun Gong practitioners have long been subjected to rape and other forms of sexual abuse. 

Journalist Du Bin published Vaginal Coma in 2014 revealing the atrocities that occurred in Masanjia Labor Camp. “As a human being, there’s no reason or excuse to tolerate the atrocities that happened in ‘Masanjia Women’s Labor Camp,’ including the long-time use of a uterine dilator for tube feeding women, making women lie in their own waste, tying up several toothbrushes and twisting them in women’s vaginas, putting pepper powder in women’s vaginas, shocking women’s breasts and vaginas with electric batons, and putting women into male cells,” he wrote.

Ms. Yin Liping testified that she and other 17 female practitioners were put in the male cells at the Masanjia Labor Camp. The incident was so horrifying that some of the women developed mental disorders.

Drugging

The CCP authorities often sent dissidents to psychiatric hospitals despite their good health. The victims include Dong Yaoqiong, who poured ink on the portrait of a CCP leader, and Song Genyi and Li Tiantian, two teachers who questioned the CCP’s propaganda.

In fact, many Falun Gong practitioners have long been labeled “mental patients” for upholding their faith. They were injected with nerve-damaging drugs or had their food or water laced with such drugs. As a result, some had mental breakdowns and even lost their lives. 

Police State

According to Minghui.org, in the first few years of the persecution of Falun Gong, the CCP spent about one-quarter of China’s GDP on the persecution. By 2012, the earmarked budget given to the Political and Legal Affairs Committee (PLAC) system for “stability control” had exceeded that of the national defense. The PLAC is an extrajudicial agency tasked with carrying out the persecution. Its “stability control” budget was often used to persecute Falun Gong practitioners. 

Cracking down on peaceful protesters with armed police forces also started from the persecution of Falun Gong. On July 20, 1999, the day when the persecution started, many practitioners were arrested in Beijing and held at the Shijiangshan Stadium. Armed police officers were dispatched to watch and torture them. Beijing Legal Training Center, also known as Tiantanghe Labor Camp, was also guarded by armed police 24 hours a day, with practitioners physically tortured and mentally abused.

Having gained experience in persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, the CCP easily applied similar tactics to other groups deemed threats to its rule. It’s no wonder Lhasa (capital of Tibet) and Ürümqi (capital of Xinjiang Province) have essentially been turned into police cities. 

Nowhere to Seek Justice Without Law and Order

Because of the CCP’s defamatory propaganda, many people chose to ignore the harsh persecution against Falun Gong and even joined the regime to do evil. But as the CCP turned the law enforcement, procuratorates, and courts into rubber stamps to carry out its persecution of Falun Gong, there is no longer law and order to maintain justice for the general public. 

Numerous petitioners, be they forcibly relocated households, unpaid migrant workers, or financial scandal victims, found that there was no place to appeal for their injustice because they were often intercepted and arrested on their way to provincial or central appeal offices. This is not totally unexpected because police have become very “experienced” in intercepting Falun Gong practitioners en route to Beijing to appeal. 

Today, human rights lawyers and dissidents are often imprisoned for “inciting subversion” or “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.” Long before that, China’s courts have sentenced hundreds of thousands of innocent Falun Gong practitioners with no legal basis. 

Today, police officers often stop pedestrians or drivers at will to search their bags and check their phones or casually break into private homes to beat and arrest people. The same has been happening to Falun Gong practitioners for the past 23 years. 

There are also other examples. The CCP authorities are now forcibly destroying Buddha statues and Christian crosses. This is an extension of its persecution of Falun Gong in which Falun Gong books were destroyed. Furthermore, the CCP’s zero-Covid policy was preceded by Jiang’s vow to “eradicate Falun Gong in three months” when he launched the persecution in 1999. 

Forced Organ Harvesting

In recent years, there have been many cases in which college students and even teenagers suddenly went missing. Some suspect that these have become victims of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting. 

When the crime of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners was first exposed in 2006, many people didn’t believe it. It was confirmed later that Bo Xilai, former Minister of Commerce, and Bai Shuzhong, Former Minister of Health for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) General Logistics Department, admitted that forced organ harvesting was an order from Jiang. 

When Jiang launched the persecution in July 1999, he also gave the order to “defame their [practitioners’] reputation, bankrupt them financially, and destroy them physically.” Additionally, he said “beating [practitioners] to death is counted as suicide. Send the body for cremation directly without verifying identity.” 

As a result, the CCP’s military, armed police, and hospitals have formed a hideous organ-harvesting supply chain to kill on demand. And now, the supply chain has expanded to young students.

Moral Decay

Taken together, Jiang and the CCP have destroyed China socially and morally because of the persecution against Falun Gong. 

In order to encourage participation in the persecution, the CCP authorities offered cash rewards to police officers who arrested practitioners and informers who provided information of the practitioners. 

Jiang also linked officials’ performance and bonuses to their commitment to the suppression. Whoever followed the persecution policy closely would be rewarded or promoted. 

In detention centers, labor camps, and prisons, practitioners were tortured for upholding the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, while their perpetrators were often praised and rewarded. 

When all this chaos remains unchecked, the moral foundation of society will collapse sooner or later. That is, when we fail to protect Falun Gong practitioners for their upright faith, we are leading society into uncertainties, where no one is safe. 

The persecution of Falun Gong by Jiang and the CCP is a dark chapter in the history of China and the world. We need to correct it before it is too late. The recent White Paper Revolution in China may be considered one initiative to oppose the totalitarian CCP regime. And the CCP would become history when more Chinese people quit the CCP organizations and more citizens from other countries reject the regime.