(Minghui.org) During this year’s Shen Yun tour season, 42 theaters received threats of bombings or mass shootings targeting the performance. According to Liberty News, the Taiwan Criminal Police Bureau investigated and concluded that the source of these threatening emails was Huawei Xi’an Research Center, located in mainland China.
Why would Huawei, a company with deep ties to the Chinese military, attack a performing arts group? Recent history shows that this is just one small part in a series of systemic suppression by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Jiang Zemin, former General Secretary of the CCP, rose to the top by suppressing the students’ democratic movement in 1989. To stay in power, he always tried to maintain tight control over the military. As Minister of the Electronics Industry since 1983, Jiang was highly visible in aerospace and other fields of technology. After he became Chairman of the Central Military Commission in 1989, Jiang controlled both the military and the aerospace industry in China.
To achieve this level of control, Jiang Zemin coordinated with his son Jiang Mianheng. Several years after obtaining his PhD in 1999, Jiang Mianheng was appointed Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. When Shenzhou 5, the first human spaceflight mission of China’s space program, was launched in 2003, it was announced that Jiang Mianheng was one of the deputy chief commanders. This continued when Shenzhou 6 and Shenzhou 7 were launched in 2005 and 2008, respectively. In contrast, no reports were published about the astronauts who risked their lives or the technical leaders who played instrumental roles.
Jiang Zemin kept his hold on the aerospace industry even after he left his position as the top CCP leader in 2002. When former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited China in 2011, he asked about the test flight earlier that year of the J-20 stealth fighter jet, China’s fifth-generation fighter. Hu Jintao, then head of CCP and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and other Chinese officials were caught off guard, according to AFP.
The Jiang family relied on many institutions to develop aerospace technologies, and one of them is Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU) located in Xi’an. Huawei has collaborated closely with NWPU.
When the internet first became available in China in the 1990s, people could use Google and access overseas information, including the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Jiang Zemin was furious and ordered a firewall be created to block overseas information.
As early as 1994, Jiang Zemin selected Huawei to develop the Golden Shield Project. This is a network blockade project that allows police to use modern information and communications technology to monitor Chinese citizens. Managed directly by Jiang Mianheng, this project served the Political and Legal Affairs Committee (PLAC) system, which is controlled by Jiang Zemin’s followers.
Huawei grew rapidly with the help of Jiang Zemin’s influence. After he met with visiting Russian President Yeltsin in 1996, Huawei signed an engineering contract in April 1997 with Ufa, a major Russian military industrial city.
Two months after Jiang visited the U.S. in October 1997, Huawei visited IBM and other large U.S. companies. When President Bill Clinton visited China in June 1998, Huawei took the opportunity to open a research institute in Dallas. It then established a subsidiary to prepare for its entry into the U.S. market.
The level of support Huawei received from the Chinese regime was also unprecedented. The China Development Bank (a state-owned bank overseen directly by the State Council) signed a $10 billion loan for Huawei in 2004 to fund its overseas expansion. At the time, Huawei was the only “private enterprise” that could receive funding from the China Development Bank, and the amount exceeded that of genuine state-owned enterprises. Even the CCP’s official news media found this loan strange. By 2009, the China Development Bank increased the credit available to Huawei to $30 billion per year.
It’s not known how much money was ultimately transferred to Jiang’s family through Huawei. But people throughout China know one thing: Jiang Mianheng is “the number one corrupt official in the country.”
An article published by the Financial Times on December 18, 2018, stated that there were signs that Huawei had the support of Jiang Zemin.
With all this support, Huawei quickly expanded the firewall into a comprehensive system. The Golden Shield Project and big data intelligence system was able to scan through all 1.3 billion people in China within 12 minutes, all fugitives within four minutes, and all drivers within three and a half minutes. Furthermore, the Ministry of Public Security was able to conduct searches on seven types of key personnel in no more than two minutes and collate all the information in approximately 40 seconds. “This way, everyone in the country is under surveillance, and anyone can become a victim,” commented one human rights advocate.
In recent years, the CCP has been able to suppress many protests and appeals seeking one’s rights to be upheld, including those by veterans and people victimized by the collapse of China’s peer-to-peer lending industry. The surveillance system created by Huawei has been able to accurately intercept key individuals involved in these protests.
The Chinese news portal Sohu.com reported in July 2020 that for its most important projects, Huawei chose NWPU because of its loyalty instead of the renowned Tsinghua University. Huawei also opened a Hongmeng Innovation Class at NWPU to find new talent.
Simply put, NWPU was trusted as Jiang Zemin’s own backyard, while Huawei considered itself to be among “Jiang’s people.” Huawei seemed to believe that such collaboration was more reliable, given the nature of these tasks.
Shen Yun’s headquarters in New York has received death threats almost every day in the past few months. Both individuals and organizations associated with Falun Gong practitioners (such as the Falun Dafa Information Center) have also received death threats.
According to news reports, when Shen Yun Performing Arts arrived in Taiwan, several government agencies immediately received emails threatening to detonate bombs or conduct mass shootings. Joint investigations by fire and police departments narrowed the source of the threatening letters to the vicinity of Huawei Xi’an Research Center in Shaanxi Province, China. Analysts believe this was carried out by Huawei staff, and involvement by the local Chinese cyber army could not be ruled out.
Public information shows Huawei Xi’an Research Center was established in 2000. A Bloomberg report in 2019 revealed that Huawei’s relationship with the Chinese military was closer than previously known. In the past decade, Huawei cooperated with multiple People’s Liberation Army agencies to conduct at least 10 studies, including artificial intelligence and radio communications. Huawei employees also assisted the Investigation Department of the CCP’s Central Military Commission to extract and conduct sentiment analysis on online video comments. They also cooperated with the National University of Defense Technology to explore methods for collecting and analyzing satellite images and geographic coordinates.
Huawei did not carry out these activities alone. There has been extensive collaboration between the Huawei Xi’an Research Center and NWPU. Huawei claimed the joint effort achieved results in the fields of high-level database research and high-precision heat dissipation devices.
This joint effort may include online censorship and information manipulation. In fact, some documents were recently exposed online as “receipts for receiving online publicity royalties” and had the red seal of the “Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China Northwestern Polytechnical University Committee.” The CCP’s Propaganda Department at NWPU previously organized large-scale cyber attacks.
So, why target Shen Yun? Shen Yun Performing Arts was established in 2006 to restore China’s 5,000-year-old civilization and show audiences pre-communist China through the arts. Shen Yun has performed more than 10,000 shows in more than 200 cities and had a huge impact. The show has been praised by artists and people from all walks of life. Many people say they’ve felt the kindness, beauty, and divinity displayed by Shen Yun’s artists and the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.
Who would threaten such a group with death? Only those who follow the CCP, a regime whose core values are class struggle, hatred, brutality, and lies.
As one of the most persecuted groups in China, Falun Gong practitioners are not only subjected to online censorship, but have also been arrested and imprisoned for their belief since Jiang Zemin started the persecution in 1999. The persecution campaign includes an extremely stringent “political review” in Chinese college admissions, job recruitment, and job promotion processes. NWPU has maintained an intense suppression of Falun Gong since the persecution began.
During a postgraduate reexamination, the examiner may suddenly ask, “Do you still practice Falun Gong?” Based on the student’s reaction, they could tell if the person had any connections to Falun Gong. Some people were even told to shout slogans against Falun Gong. This kind of political suppression has nothing to do with the goals of educational institutions.
Not everyone bows to the CCP’s brutality, however. Qian Xuesen, a renowned Chinese aerospace engineer who is recognized as the “Father of Chinese Rocketry,” thought highly of NWPU and entrusted it to complete many scientific research tasks. But many people may not be familiar with Qian’s contributions to qigong and human science.
When some officials opposed qigong and tried to suppress it in the 1980s, Qian wrote to the central government to express his strong support for the study of supernormal abilities and qigong. Due to his prominence, he was able to directly influence then CCP leader Hu Yaobang’s view on qigong. Hu took a neutral stance toward qigong: “Don’t publicize it, don’t introduce it, and don’t criticize it.”
Qian also founded and served as the head of the Chinese Society of Human Science, and his contribution to Chinese human science is invaluable. Qian Xuesen believed that “human science may lead to a new scientific revolution in the 21st century, perhaps a greater scientific revolution than quantum mechanics and relativity in the early 20th century.”
After Jiang Zemin came to power, he was deeply unhappy that Falun Gong had gained so much popularity. In 1999, he launched a nationwide persecution of Falun Gong. To seek support for the suppression, Jiang personally visited Qian, who had been paralyzed for more than ten years, in the name of awarding him titles, sending him New Year greetings, and celebrating his birthday, hoping to pressure him to stand up against supernormal abilities and Falun Gong, either “verbally” or “in writing.” However, Qian never changed his views on this issue.
I hope more people will follow Qian’s example. Siding with the CCP to persecute traditional values will harm oneself and others, as well as our future generations.