(Clearwisdom.net) A recent, dramatic turn in a highly visible capital case in China, where a woman killed a government official to fend off an attempted rape by him and another official, caught my attention. The state-run media recently made public two new witnesses that had never been heard from before. They are expected to say that the officials were not in the process of raping the woman when she pulled out a knife and killed one and injured the other. It made me think, when all of the media, law enforcement and courts are controlled by the CCP, how can an ordinary citizen really find out the truth?

This made me think of something else. On June 4^th, 1989, when the entire world saw the massacre on Tiananmen Square, the vast majority of the Chinese people were told by their media that all of the students withdrew from Tiananmen Square without anyone being hurt. I thought, like everyone else around me, that this was indeed the case. I remember a clip on TV showing a man telling a crowd of people about how the students were shot with machine guns and run down by tanks, and his exact words were, "The blood was running in the street like a river!" Immediately after, the anchor of the news program asked the audience to help find this "rumor monger". Within a week, this person was indeed found and arrested. The next time he was seen on TV, he was sitting in front of a group of policemen, his head down. He was confessing to his crime of spreading rumors.

At the time, truly very few people knew about the massacre. I remember the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Yuan Mu answering questions by American journalists. One journalist said, "We have videotape evidence of the Tiananmen Square Massacre." Yuan said without batting an eye, "Modern technology makes it possible for any videotape to be made of anything." At the time, I remember myself and those around me saying amongst ourselves, "What a great answer. Those Americans are trying to stir up trouble for us again."

Twenty years later, I came to find out about what really happened on Tiananmen, and I lost interest in whatever the Chinese government's media had to say. When they can cover up something like that to the Chinese people, what of their words can we believe?

The Chinese Communist Party does the same thing to those outside of China. In May 2003, graduate student Wei Xingyan at Chongqing University was arrested for telling people about Falun Gong. A policeman at the Baihelin Detention Center had two female prisoners rip off her clothes, and then proceeded to rape her in front of those two prisoners.

This atrocity had zero chance of being exposed inside China, but when the information was sent and published overseas, the Chongqing 610 Office began a comprehensive effort to cover it up. On one hand, they transferred Ms. Wei to another facility. Meanwhile, they ordered Chongqing University to remove all records of Ms. Wei. Within a matter of days of the information being published overseas, all traces of Ms. Wei disappeared from the Chongqing University website, even including her specialized area of research.

It didn't stop there. The Chongqing 610 Office handed out heavy sentences to five Falun Gong practitioners who were responsible for getting the information overseas. Four of those five were sentenced to more than ten years in prison.

The CCP's propaganda apparatus is powerful and shameless, and the first step to seeing through its lies is to understand the CCP's innate nature of deceit and viciousness. The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party goes into great detail on this subject, and these accounts discussed here give a glimpse into just what the CCP is capable of.