The Peculiar Immorality of the Persecution of Falun Gong

The University of Delaware

[Editor's note: A perspective of a non-practitioner's is represented by this article.]

October 27, 2001

Beginning in the middle of the night on July 19, 1999, the government of Jiang Zemin of the People's Republic of China began an attempt to "crush" or "eliminate" the practice of Falun Gong in China. This persecution is a highly developed form of state terror1 . This terror has often been understood to be the reaction of a Communist Party leadership that feels vulnerable. Suffering from a crisis of legitimacy, facing huge domestic problems, and caught in a conflict between the economic modernization now in full swing and the attempt to maintain the Party's control over every aspect of society, conflict between Falun Gong and the Communist Party may have seemed inevitable, particularly after the incident on April 25 at Zhongnanhai. However, the terror unleashed on Falun Gong was not inevitable, and in fact found its origin in the fear and ambition of Jiang Zemin. In bringing every weapon of the totalitarian state to bear against the practitioners of Falun Gong, Jiang is seeking to destroy a group that seems uniquely suited to help China develop the civil society it desperately needs and to overcome the spiritual crisis that underlies China's vast problems.

In order to understand why the simple emergence of Falun Gong should bring it into conflict with the state, one needs to understand the role played by the Communist Party. The role the Communist Party understands itself to play in China is familiar from other Marxist-Leninist states. In principle, nothing in society exists independent of the Party, and as a result, all activity potentially has political meaning. The model of society is hierarchical, with all organizations meant to be controlled from above. This is taken so seriously that even bird-watching clubs are supposed to be registered with the state, and any activity that collects people into groups is strictly regulated. While the Party controls the Press, it does allow a certain range of opinion. However, once the Party makes it clear it has taken a definite line on a question, it still expects everyone in society not only to conform, but to show enthusiastic support for that line. This organization of society was originally justified by the Party's role as the vanguard of the revolution, something the Party would shed once the state attained communism. However, while the Party has tried to maintain the form of a Leninist state, it has abandoned the justification for one, creating a crisis of legitimacy that can only present itself in more and more acute forms as China modernizes. At the same time, the leadership of the Communist Party is very aware of what happened to most of the other Marxist-Leninist regimes around the world, and is very determined to avoid a similar fate.

This crisis of legitimacy facing the Communist Party today began with the decision by Deng Xiaoping to "reform" the economy, which meant to begin the transition of China from a socialist economy to one that would begin making more and more opportunities for capitalist acquisition. Deng abandoned socialism because China had difficulty feeding itself, and could not possibly compete with the productivity and technology of the west. However, this revolutionary change in policy called into question the theoretical basis for the role of the Communist party itself and at the same time has set in motion changes in society to which a Leninist state must necessarily be opposed.

At the theoretical level one can see the difficulties the Party faces in the manner in which the party ideologists first characterized the persecution of Falun Gong. This was said to be a struggle between theism and atheism, superstition and science, and idealism and materialism. The word "materialism" in this context refers to the dialectical materialism of Marx as later modified by Mao. However, what does such materialism have to do with the policy of China today? Nothing. China is no longer striving to realize a communist state or to understand itself as following the laws of historical development. Moreover, those who practice capitalist acquisition are at least agnostic with regard to "materialism" or "atheism" (indeed, some commentators, beginning with Max Weber, argue that capitalism owes its existence to a form of spirituality). This concept of "materialism" is an artifact. It is like the century old facades one sees in some American downtowns behind which rise entirely modern buildings.2

The hollowness of communist ideology, and its lack of connection to anything vital in today's China, is brought into sharp relief by the attempts to introduce capitalism. Capitalism is still a very small sector of the Chinese economy, but it is creating institutions in society that the government does not own or directly control. The employees of these institutions do not depend directly on the government for their paycheck, and often own their own homes or apartments. In addition, the technology required by the modern economy, the internet, fax machine, and cell phone, gives the individual in China the revolutionary opportunity to communicate outside of the regulation of the Party. The success of capitalism requires that individuals in society be able to trust in the rule of law, the sanctity of contracts, and in the promises of strangers; it also requires spontaneous and voluntary action. In short, in order to thrive, capitalism needs an independent, civil society, and China's rulers today are struggling with the contradiction of how to provide these conditions for capitalism while preserving their iron-fisted control of society.

These challenges to the role of the Party are greatly complicated and deepened by the enormous social problems in China today. State run enterprises lose huge amounts of money and are allowed to close, with the result at times that entire towns lose their livelihoods. Levels of unemployment have skyrocketed, and no safety net exists to provide the basic conditions of life. Corruption is endemic, and workers see privatized state enterprises turned over to "little princes," the sons of the Party elite. Not surprisingly, the state is racked by strikes and riots, some of which go on for days at a time and require troops to suppress. The domestic challenges to the Party are complicated by active separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang, while Taiwan has become bolder in asserting independence from the mainland.

The anxieties produced in the Communist leadership by these many challenges to its control are said to have made the continued existence of Falun Gong appear intolerable. What made Falun Gong intolerable was its real independence from the hierarchy of the state. The challenge Falun Gong posed lay first of all in the size, rapid growth, and potential influence of those who practice it in China. According to a study done by the Public Security Bureau, in 1999 the number of people practicing Falun Gong was between 70 and 100 million, or approximately 5% to 8% of the total population. In contrast, the membership of the Communist Party in 1999 numbered 56 million. Included among the practitioners of Falun Gong were large numbers of Communist party members, including some very high-ranking ones, important members of the armed forces and security apparatuses, and leading scientists, engineers, doctors, and scholars. Also, the appeal of Falun Gong was very broad, including not only the elites, but also individuals from all regions, ethnic groups, and walks of life, including the very poor and uneducated members of society. However, the challenge of Falun Gong to the Party goes beyond the demographics of its membership. Falun Gong offers the people of China spiritual independence, a set of principles independent of the Party.3

The incident at Zhongnanhai on April 25, 1999 is said to have convinced many in the leadership that the independence of Falun Gong was dangerous and political in nature.4 Early that morning between 10,000 and 18,000 Falun Gong practitioners unexpectedly appeared on Fuyou Street in Beijing opposite the State Appeals office, which is directly adjacent to Zhongnanhai, one of the most sensitive pieces of real estate in all of China, the leadership's compound. The practitioners gathered in response to an incident in the provincial town of Tianjin in which police had beaten and arrested a number of them. This incident was the culmination of three years of increasing restrictions placed on Falun Gong by local authorities all over China. The practitioners gathered that morning to ask the government to release those arrested in Tianjin, and to grant Falun Gong a safe and legal environment throughout the country.

In fact, while one might be persuaded that the incident at Zhongnanhai shocked the Party leadership into opposing Falun Gong5 , there is evidence that very significant parts of the leadership did not believe that the subsequent persecution was necessary.

There are very good reasons why the leadership would understand perfectly well that Falun Gong had no political ambitions. There are tens of thousands of party members who practice Falun Gong, including veterans of the Long March who are respected as national heroes and personally known to all the members of the Politburo. There are also rumored to be family members of those on the Politburo who practice. These informal connections inside the party would have provided a sure source of information about the true character of Falun Gong. More formal studies supported what could be learned through longstanding ties of friendship and family. In 1998, a group of retired National People's Congress Cadres led by Qiao Shi conducted a detailed study of Falun Gong and reported back to the Politburo headed by Jiang Zemin that Falun Gong "only benefits and does no harm to the nation and the people." Moreover, the Public Security department did two extensive investigations, in 1997 and again in 1999, in which every police station in the country of China was ordered to produce the evidence of the negative impact Falun Gong was having on society. In both cases, the Public Security Bureau in effect defied the orders from above by reporting it could find none. A report by the national Sports Administration reached a similar conclusion, as did several non-governmental studies.

CNN's China correspondent, Willy Wo-Lap Lam, reported earlier this year regarding the persecution of Falun Gong that "It is no secret that several Politburo members thought that Jiang Zemin had used the wrong tactics. They ranged from moderates such as Premier Zhu Rongji, Vice President Hu Jintao, and head of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Li Ruihuan to conservatives such as National People's Congress Chairman Li Peng... Li Ruihuan and Zhu Rongji were both said to favor a conciliatory approach to Falun Gong." (CNN: China's Suppression Carries a High Price, 2/6/01).

In order to understand the decision to persecute Falun Gong, one must look to the decisive role played by Jiang Zemin. As head of the Communist Party, the government, and the armed forces, Jiang unites in his own person all the institutional sources of power; no other figure in China has an independent base that can oppose him. At the same time, Jiang's term is due to end next year. Hovering in the background of the persecution is the question of succession - whether Jiang will step down, and if he does, who will take his place.

Willy Wo-Lap Lam quotes a party veteran as saying that "by unleashing a Mao-style movement, Jiang is forcing senior cadres to pledge allegiance to his line. This will boost Jiang's authority - and may give him enough momentum to enable him to dictate events at the pivotal 16^th Communist Party Congress next year." (CNN, 2/6/01)

Two secret party documents in which Jiang Zemin sets forth his reasons for the persecution before it began corroborate what Lam reports. In a letter to top party members on the night of April 25, 1999, Jiang Zemin asked whether there "is a mastermind [inside the party] plotting and directing behind the scenes?" In a June 7^th letter entitled "Comrade Jiang Zemin's Speech at a Meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee Regarding Handling and Resolving the 'Falun Gong' Issue Without Delay," Jiang again speculated on political rivals manipulating events behind the scenes.

In this letter he also drew the conclusion that the April 25 incident is "the most serious incident since the political turbulence of 1989." "1989" was, of course, the year of the democracy movement. Jiang is reported to have said in party meetings around the time that the persecution began that if the Communist Party did not crush Falun Gong, Falun Gong would be the end of the Communist Party. At the same time, the alarm Jiang felt at the peaceful gathering on April 25 is inseparably mixed with his own ambition. "1989" was not only the year of the democracy movement. Soon after that movement was put down Communist Party Leader Zhao Ziyang was demoted and replaced by Jiang Zemin. We may credit that Jiang Zemin feared the political implications of Falun Gong for the Party as a whole. However, it is also true that he began the persecution out of fear of political threats within the Communist Party to his own personal power, and as a means for extending that power. (for more detailed discussion of these secret documents, see "Why Persecute Falun Gong?" by Shiyu Zhou, Faluninfo.net)

What has Jiang's ambition unleashed? At his direction, a new government agency, the "610 Office," was created. Like the Committee for Public Safety in Paris the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, the NKVD in Stalin's Soviet Union, or the Cultural Revolution Leadership Group in Mao's China, the 610 Office is an extra-constitutional organization whose business is terror. It has the authority to command any part of the government in order to carry out the persecution of Falun Gong.

The 610 office has developed a three pronged strategy in the attempt to defeat Falun Gong: detention and torture; brainwashing; and propaganda. Each part of this strategy is aimed at a different group. The torture is used against those identified as "hard core" and difficult to "reform." Brainwashing is meant for those the government suspects are less intensely devoted to Falun Gong, who may be convinced to abandon the practice after several weeks of sleep deprivation and round the clock indoctrination, with the threat of the labor camp always in the background. Propaganda is meant to prevent any sympathy or support for Falun Gong from developing in the population at large.

In fact, the treatment given the practitioners of Falun Gong does not fit into any neat titration, such as the scheme of the 610 office suggests. Two principles that guide the administration of the persecution assure that it is a much more brutal and messy business. First, responsibility for the persecution is passed down from the top of the government to each successive level. Thus, the central government requires that the provinces meet a quota of practitioners arrested and prevent any of their inhabitants from coming to Beijing to appeal. The provinces pass similar requirements to the district, and the districts to the sub-districts, and the sub-districts to the towns. Passing down the responsibility for enforcing the policy of persecution puts tremendous pressure on the lowest level. Second, all levels of government are told that any means are acceptable. All that counts is reaching the targets set by the central government. Thus, practitioners being tortured are regularly told by police that if they die, the police will simply say the death is suicide, and will be rewarded by their superiors. In fact, advancement and bonuses for the police now often do depend on their success in persecuting practitioners. The pressure for results placed on the local police officers, combined with the complete absence of restraint as to means, has produced in China's Public Security apparatus an institutionalization of sadism.

An incomplete list of the means used to torture practitioners includes: teams of police beating a practitioner until the police are too tired to continue; shocking practitioners with cattle prods all over the body, but in particular on the face, the lips, the mouth, and the genitals; branding practitioners with heated irons; the force feeding of scalding water or high density salt water or water heavily laced with hot pepper; inserting wires or bamboo strips under the fingernails; jabbing needles deep into muscles, hooking them up to electric generators and running high voltage current through them; handcuffing in very painful positions for long periods of time; locking individuals in cages so small they cannot sit, lie down, or stand up, and leaving them for days at a time; the deprivation of sleep; exposing naked individuals to freezing weather for hours, often while dousing them with water, or to very hot weather without providing any water or shelter. Women are often raped, and forced to endure various forms of sexual humiliation and torture.

These tortures occur in local jails, in labor camps, and in mental hospitals. In the mental hospitals, psychiatrists administer huge doses of psychotropic drugs for long periods of time, which often results in drastically and permanently damaging the nervous system. Also, psychiatrists often also subject practitioners to large doses of [high voltage] electric shock. In labor camps, practitioners are forced to perform exhausting slave labor for very long hours, are allowed very little sleep, and are fed very poorly. At the same time, the conditions in these camps, particularly for practitioners, are extraordinarily filthy. Camp guards often force practitioners to use the same pot for their toilet and their food rations.

Not surprisingly, there have been over 300 confirmed deaths of practitioners due to police abuse. In fact, sources inside the government place the true number at over 1,000. No one knows the exact number. At least 20,000 practitioners are being held in labor camps today. We have confirmed that around 750 previously healthy practitioners have been confined to mental hospitals, but believe the true number is in the thousands. In the two plus years of the persecution, hundreds of thousands have endured detention at one time or another.

For the most part, the detention of practitioners occurs extra-judicially. There have been a number of show trials, but these are only for propaganda purposes, in order to give foreign audiences the impression that a legal system functions in China and to let domestic audiences know that even elite members of society are not safe. In order to subject someone to detention in jail or in a labor camp or mental hospital, police simply have to decide that the individual is a practitioner. No judicial process is needed. Sentences are often given to practitioners, but the sentences are arbitrary. If practitioners do not agree to give up Falun Gong, then the sentences are simply extended.

The Chinese government is expert at using every part of society to enforce persecution. Practitioners often lose their jobs, or if they are retired, their pensions. Indeed, the security forces of companies, including American companies that have plants in China, often turn in practitioners to police, or commit them to mental hospitals or themselves beat or torture the practitioners. Practitioners also often have their housing taken away. If they are students, they lose their places in universities. Typically, families are made to be responsible for the conduct of family members, so that if one member of a family practices Falun Gong the entire family stands to lose jobs, housing, places at school, etc. For this reason, there are now very large numbers of homeless Falun Gong practitioners wandering China, seeking to protect their families by staying away from them. In addition to all of this, the police seek to bankrupt practitioners with arbitrary fines and confiscations. If a practitioner spends a week being tortured in jail, the family is presented with a hefty bill for room and board when they come to pick him up. If a practitioner dies from torture, the family must pay to recover the body or the ashes. It goes without saying that practitioners who die in police custody can end up as part of the black market in China for harvested organs; in some cases this is actually vivisection - the harvesting begins before the body has died. Local police in several regions have been getting rich off practitioners. They simply go into practitioners homes, take anything of value that they see, and demand huge fines from the practitioners on top of this. Practitioners who farm are often ruined as the police simply confiscate all of their seed and equipment. In all of this, the police are following explicit directives from the 610 office, which order the police to exhaust the practitioners financially.

As an adjunct to the regime of torture, the government this year began a campaign to round up every known Falun Gong practitioner and subject them to brainwashing. Brainwashing is part of the regimen in the labor camps as well. But the brainwashing centers the government has established outside of the labor camps are meant to make the terror of the labor camps more effective. By first putting practitioners through this less severe torture, the government lets practitioners know that if they don't give up Falun Gong, then they are headed for the labor camps. The government understands itself to be splitting off the less committed practitioners from those who are more devoted, thus simultaneously identifying those who are more devoted and depriving them of the support of the larger body of practitioners.

The goal of the brainwashing, and of the terror as a whole, is to bring every single practitioner of Falun Gong to utter a simple statement, to say that they will no longer practice. The People's Republic of China has never been shy about shedding the blood of its own people. However, Jiang Zemin has apparently eschewed mass executions of Falun Gong practitioners, perhaps because of the public relations costs of such a tactic (whether there have been no mass executions isn't clear; there are two camps in Xinjiang province built since the persecution began at which no one knows what is going on). Nevertheless, forcing those with independent beliefs to conform to the state's ideology is a greater triumph of terror than simply murdering them. Murder produces martyrs whose deaths are always a silent rebuke to the legitimacy of the regime. If Jiang succeeds in "reforming" the practitioners of Falun Gong, then their own words may be used to bear witness to the justice of the horrible acts he has set in motion, and to help support the legitimacy of his regime of terror.

The absence of a working civil society in China, the corruption, the labor and the civil unrest, all of these are symptoms of a more fundamental problem. China is in the midst of a spiritual crisis. This crisis has parallels in all of the formerly communist nations around the world, but appears in particularly virulent form in China. While the Chinese people may remain loyal to the Communist Party, this loyalty has more to do with the memory of the Party unifying the country and expelling foreign invasion than with any sense of the justice of Communism. Communism itself is known in China to have been a stupendous failure. Communist economics could not feed or modernize the country, and communist ideals have been forgotten except in the mouths of party ideologists. At the same time, though, decades of propaganda have convinced the Chinese that capitalism is not just, even as the population has now turned all of its energy to the business of acquisition. The traditional beliefs of China, Confuciansim, Taosim, and Buddhism, have been extirpated by the Communist Party insofar as it was in its power to do so. In the Cultural Revolution, and then again in 1989, two different generations saw the best members of society destroyed by tyranny, teaching the population at large what tyrants always teach, the wisdom of selfishness: of lying low, and appearing to conform while minding only one's own business. Disillusioned by Communism, convinced of the injustice of capitalism, with old faiths a dead letter, there is no apparent basis in China for any public philosophy. There is no set of beliefs that can command the heart willfully to assent to the order of society, to give that society shared principles, and to give the individuals the dignity of their own moral worth. Not surprisingly, contemporary observers report that Chinese society is poisoned by cynicism. No trust exists in anything outside the individual self, and an aggressive selfishness dominates all relations.

The appearance of Falun Gong in China in 1992 might have been perceived by a different kind of man than Jiang Zemin as a great gift to China: a group that was strenuously apolitical, that gave its adherents firm moral principles and in doing so taught them to step outside of themselves, to introduce trust into society and to seek harmony where there might have been conflict. Falun Gong, if simply left alone, could have aided China to find its way to the moral regeneration and civil society it so desperately needs. At the same time, based on ancient Chinese teachings, Falun Gong could have been the source of legitimate national pride rather than the hysterical and xenophobic form of patriotism that Jiang now attempts to inflame.

The party veteran quoted by Willy Lam refers to the persecution of Falun Gong as a Maoist movement. In fact, it isn't really. In the Cultural Revolution, the masses of China often broke out in frenzies of brutal, violent, destructive action. The masses of China today are mostly uninvolved in the struggle against Falun Gong. Jiang has been able to gin up mass demonstrations against Falun Gong, but everyone concerned understands this is merely a performance they are required to enact. Although the propaganda attacking Falun Gong is heated and constant, the persecution itself has been conducted with a cool cynicism. When practitioners ask the police torturing them to look inside themselves and do what is right, they are often met with the response "tell it to Jiang Zemin." This terror involves the leaders of China politically mobilizing society against an apolitical, nonviolent group and striving to destroy something they know to be good. It involves the demand of repentance being made using the tools of the Inquisition in the hands of those who have no belief of their own. Tyrants have always been willing for the sake of their own self-interest to destroy the innocent and good. Totalitarian states have on many occasions launched insane self-destructive wars against their own people. But there is at work here in China's terror of Falun Gong a nihilism and a will to gratuitous evil that seems to me to be unique, and unexampled in human history.