For 20 long years.
It’s changed China in unexpected ways.
What is the true impact...
Of the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown
on Falun Gong?
Welcome back to China Uncensored.
I’m Chris Chappell.
July 20, 2019 will mark the 20th anniversary
of the Chinese Communist Party’s
brutal and deadly persecution of Falun Gong.
And if you’re shopping for a gift, the traditional
20th anniversary present is...China.
Which is perfect, because the Communist Party
has just about broken their China.
In 1999, the Communist Party declared it illegal
to practice Falun Gong.
Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline that
draws on traditional Chinese values
and teaches people to be tolerant, honest,
and compassionate.
But if you’re a *certain type* of Chinese
leader,
you see everything as a threat to your power.
Even compassion.
Especially compassion.
That’s why in the 1990s,
Chinese leader and hypnotoad Jiang Zemin
set in motion a terrifying campaign of persecution
that
has directly victimized tens of millions of
Falun Gong practitioners in China.
That campaign includes mass incarceration
without trial,
torture, and state-sanctioned killing.
But even for people who don’t practice Falun
Gong,
or don’t particularly care about Falun Gong,
or can’t imagine why someone would just
sit there with their eyes closed for like
two hours—
the *persecution* of Falun Gong matters.
Over the last 20 years, it’s had a profound
impact on many other things in China—
from the way policing is done,
to how other citizens are treated under the
law,
to the mass surveillance and labor camp system.
It indirectly affects all people in China.
So to really understand what China is like
today under Communist Party rule,
you need to understand what they did to Falun
Gong.
That’s why in today's episode,
we look at 5 ways the persecution of Falun
Gong changed China—
for the worse.
Number 5: Strengthening the Tools of Repression
You know, it’s not easy persecuting 100
million people.
To carry it out, Jiang Zemin had to drastically
beef up China’s domestic security apparatus.
In addition to the normal police force,
he set up a Gestapo-like secret police called
the 610 Office.
According to the Congressional-Executive Commission
on China,
The 610 Office “was charged with the mission
of enforcing a ban on Falun Gong
and carrying out a crackdown against its practitioners.”
The 610 Office did everything:
From the boring things, like mass surveillance;
to the exciting things, like rounding up elderly
people
and torturing them to death in reeducation
camps.
That’s a job where you really don’t want
to bring work home with you.
And the budget for these actions grew and
grew.
Along with the 610 Office,
the Communist Party also expanded the police
and other types of internal security.
After all, it takes a lot of teamwork to crush
the spirit of the people.
From almost nothing in the 1990s—
by 2017, the Chinese regime was spending $180
billion US dollars on internal security.
Which is a lot—especially considering they
only spent $152 billion on external defense,
including the army, navy, etc.
It’s almost as if the Party thinks the real
enemy isn’t the United States,
but a billion angry Chinese citizens.
But the Party didn’t just expand domestic
security.
No, if you’re going to persecute 100 million
people,
all of the worst parts of the Communist Party
system need to be involved.
“The persecution of Falun Gong had a profound
effect on the party apparatus.
It really strengthened the parts of the party
apparatus that were more aggressive,
more repressive.
It expanded the labor camp system.
It created more pressure on judges from party
committees behind the scenes.
It strengthened the propaganda dimensions
of Chinese state media
and it gave a set of resources and money to,
again,
the most repressive parts of the party apparatus.
And this was at a time that a lot of people
thought that maybe the party was shifting
gears,
that there was a loosening.
There was talk about closing the labor camp
system and things like that.
Launching the campaign against Falun Gong
really reversed that.
”
The 610 Office was technically disbanded last
year,
but that doesn’t mean it’s over.
The 610 Office’s functions were merged into
other domestic security forces—
including ones now used in Tibet and Xinjiang.
Bringing their years of expertise to persecuting
even more people.
Number 4: Fueling an Ongoing Power Struggle
You may recall that in 2018, the National
People's Congress
removed the two-term limit for the presidency,
effectively allowing Xi Jinping to remain
president for life.
Or as I call him, presitator.
Because he’s not quite a president,
but not quite a dictator.
Instead, he’s the best of both worlds.
According to the BBC,
now Xi "has amassed power the likes of which
has not been seen
since Chairman Mao Zedong."
But Xi’s dictatorial maneuverings have their
roots
partly in the persecution of Falun Gong.
That's because the president for life ploy
is tied to the power struggle
between Xi Jinping and former leader Jiang
Zemin,
the one who really hates Falun Gong.
Jiang had formally relinquished all his titles
by 2005,
but he’s remained at the helm of the so-called
“Shanghai clique”.
That’s one of the two major competing factions
within the Chinese Communist Party.
The other being Xi Jinping’s faction.
Jiang was initially a weak leader.
He amassed power through the Party apparatuses
he built up through persecuting Falun Gong.
Then, he promoted all his cronies to run them.
So his people were in charge of the military,
domestic security, propaganda, and more.
Even when Jiang retired, his successor Hu
Jintao was almost powerless.
Which is why he always looked like this.
But when Xi Jinping came around,
Jiang’s people weren’t happy.
They don’t dare let all their crimes come
to light:
torture, murder, and worse—yes, it gets
worse.
So their struggle against Xi Jinping is aimed
at protecting that.
“Since taking office in 2012,
Xi has been engaging in a life-and-death contest
with Jiang Zemin's influential political faction.”
Part of that contest were Xi’s so-called
“revenge purges.”
Also known as his anti-corruption campaign.
These involved taking charge of the military,
disbanding the 610 Office,
and arresting Jiang Zemin’s closest associates
and locking them up for a long long time.
But to do those things, Xi Jinping had to
first amass power for himself.
That’s the only way to undo Jiang’s death
grip on the system.
Or maybe he would have done it anyway.
President for life does have a nice ring to
it.
Number 3: Setting the Stage Persecuting Uighurs
The persecution of Falun Gong primed the Chinese
regime
for its persecution of the Uighurs in China's
northern Xinjiang region.
Not to say that Uighurs weren’t targeted
before.
But after 20 years’ experience going after
Falun Gong—
mass surveillance,
locking people up,
throwing them in political reeducation camps—
the Communist Party got really good at persecuting
people.
Practice makes perfect.
The UN estimates that around one million Muslims
have been detained in re-education camps in
Xinjiang.
The anti-Falun Gong crackdown
“may have very well been the training model
for what is now taking place in Xinjiang,
where the Party has designated the practice
of Islam by Uighurs
as an extremist threat to regime
that must be extinguished by the forcible
reform
of the thinking of each individual Uighur.”
Falun Gong’s belief system, of course, is
completely different from Islam.
But the Communist Party’s “solution”
is the same:
Torture and brainwash people,
until they see how great the Communist Party
is.
The persecution against Falun Gong is two-pronged.
First, vilify the practice ideologically,
then destroy its practitioners physically.
That's exactly the same pattern taking place
right now in Xinjiang:
“The legitimacy of their beliefs are both
ridiculed and denigrated,
and the population is attacked as a dangerous
threat to society in need of harsh reform.”
And not only are the methods the same,
some of the same Party officials are in charge.
And the fact that they have 20 years of experience
“helps explain how they have managed to
launch
and implement such a massive campaign
within such a short time frame.”
Gotta learn from the best...at being the worst.
Number 2: Starting a Global Hacking Campaign
China's state-backed hacking of other countries
cyber-infrastructure
is a well-documented threat.
“As evidenced by this investigation,
the threats we face have never been more severe
or more pervasive or more potentially damaging
to our national security,
and no country poses a broader, more severe,
long term threat to our nation’s economy
and cyber infrastructure than China.”
But what's less well known is that China's
hacking program
got off the ground targeting overseas Falun
Gong websites.
See, one of the challenges with persecuting
millions of innocent people
is that you also have to keep them quiet.
But Falun Gong practitioners in the US, Canada,
and other free countries began to set up websites
like Minghui.org.
They publicly exposed as much of the torture
and killing as they could document.
It was a serious PR problem for the Communist
Party!
According to this report by the RAND corporation,
when the Communist Party started going after
Falun Gong in 1999,
and Falun Gong practitioners tried to peacefully
appeal,
the Party attacked pro-Falun Gong websites
around the world.
“Party bosses responded..by ordering the
arrest
and prosecution of Falungong leaders and members
and the blocking of access to the group’s
international constellation of web sites.”
Think about it.
If you’re trying to slander a group through
lies and propaganda,
and that group publishes information that
tears apart your lies,
you really have no choice but to silence them.
The RAND report documents a whole bunch of
these cyber attacks
in the early years of the persecution.
Attacks that were directly traced back to
the address of the Public Security Bureau
in Beijing.
Fast forward a few years,
and all thanks to all those years of practice
hacking dissidents,
China's hackers have been able to take the
training wheels off.
Now they’re pulling off “mass-scale espionage”
attacks on global cellular networks.
Chinese hackers hit 27 universities to steal
military secrets.
And Chinese hackers even hacked the NSA and
stole their hacking tools,
and used them for...more hacking!
And finally...
Number 1: Killing People for Their Organs
The Chinese Communist Party’s persecution
of Falun Gong made widespread
the heinous practice of killing prisoners
of conscience for their organs.
Recently, an international tribunal found
there was clear evidence
that it’s been taking place for decades.
“We the tribunal members are all certain,
unanimously and sure beyond reasonable doubt
that in China forced organ harvesting from
prisoners of conscience
has been practiced for a substantial period
of time
involving a very substantial number of victims.”
Falun Gong practitioners are not the first
victims of forced organ harvesting,
but they are “probably the principal source”.
Over the last 20 years, millions of Falun
Gong practitioners
in the vast network of detention centers across
China
have served as a kind of living storage bank
for organs.
And that’s allowed Chinese state-run hospitals
to improve their transplant skills and technology.
Currently, an estimated 60,000 or more illegal
organ transplants
are carried out each year.
I mean, sometimes rich Party cadres just need
a new heart.
Or liver.
Or kidneys.
And with forced organ harvesting,
the persecution of Falun Gong seems to be
a blueprint
for the treatment of other dissidents.
“When you look at what's happening in Xinjiang
on that background
and some of those circumstances it's really
scary.
It's really scary.
Because they’ve got a massive bio data.
Basically what they do in China is they reverse
match organ transplants.
People get organ transplants within a week,
within a month.
They reverse match them to people in custody
and that they otherwise have access to.
I think it breaks down across a variety of
different populations.
I think from that perspective,
it's maybe a genocide, it's maybe pre-genocidal.”
So those are just some of the ways that the
Chinese Communist Party’s
persecution of Falun Gong has changed China
over the last 20 years.
Which makes it incredible that so few people
pay attention to it.
I mean, I get it.
20 years is a long time.
20 years ago, there was no YouTube.
20 years ago you could rent the Matrix on
a VHS tape from Blockbuster Video.
Hold on, my youth is flashing before my eyes.
The point is, whether it’s the persecution
of the Uighurs,
or Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign,
or a whole slew of other things—
there’s a lot that’s happening in China
right now
that you can’t really understand if you
don’t look at
the Communist Party’s treatment of Falun
Gong.
And it may have started 20 years ago,
but it’s still going on now.
So what do you think about all the ways
the persecution of Falun Gong has changed
China?
Leave your comments below.
And now it’s time for me to answer a question
from you,
one of my loyal members of the 50-Cent Army.
Sell asks:
“At what point would the U.S./U.N. get involved
to help protect the 1 party 2 systems?
With the tensions surrounding the trade war
and North Korea,
what responses could be on the table if China
continues to press the issue?”
Good question, Sell.
At what point would the US or UN get involved
if the Chinese Communist Party
erodes Hong Kong’s One Country, Two Systems?
That sad answer is: at no point.
Since Hong Kong is officially part of the
People’s Republic of China,
that makes it China’s internal affair.
There’s nothing the United Nations has the
power to do—
especially since China sits on the UN Security
Council
and can veto pretty much anything.
Likewise, the US would not go to war to protect
Hong Kong,
since the US has no defense treaty with Hong
Kong.
Hong Kong’s best foreign ally *should* be
the UK,
since the UK signed the Sino-British Joint
Declaration,
which is an official treaty—
except the UK has shown it won’t do anything
beyond issuing
toothless statements condemning the erosion
of freedoms, yada yada yada.
The best hope for Hong Kong is...
the people of Hong Kong.
And boy, do they know how to protest!
Thanks for your question, Sell.
And you, too, can have your question answered
on China Uncensored.
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Once again I’m Chris Chappell.
See you next time.
