[7.20 Commentary] When Persecuting Good People Becomes a Profession

(Minghui.org) The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been persecuting Falun Gong for 22 years. Many people have forgotten the totalitarian regime’s blanket coverage of the anti-Falun Gong hate propaganda in the early years. Even some relatives and friends of Falun Gong practitioners residing outside of China say to the practitioners, “Come back to China and visit. Who says there is still persecution? There’s no longer mention of Falun Gong in the news.” Is is true that there is no more persecution in China?

According to a recent Minghui.org report, the first half of 2021 recorded 9,470 Falun Gong practitioners in China being targeted for their faith. It is obvious that the CCP didn’t even lessen its persecution of Falun Gong during the pandemic.

This persecution started with a "movement" of the Cultural Revolution style. On June 10, 1999, about one month before the CCP openly launched the persecution, a special agency was created and dubbed the 610 Office. It became an extralegal agency that has absolute control of the public security and judiciary branch in order to implement the persecution policy of Falun Gong. 

The establishment of the 610 Office has essentially turned persecuting good people into a profession, as people working for the agency are paid by the government to orchestrate and carry out the persecution.

Being a “professional organization” to attack innocent and law-abiding practitioners, the 610 Office directly targets practitioners and exerts strict control of media and information flow. 

In the early years of the persecution, to quickly incite hatred and establish support from the general public for the persecution campaign against Falun Gong, the 610 Office directed the state-controlled media to attack the peaceful practice. The prime time show “Focus Report” of state-controlled China Central Television (CCTV) dedicated 30 episodes during the 42 days between July 21 and August 31, 1999, to spread propaganda against Falun Gong. It’s also the same “Focus Report” that later broadcast the “Tiananmen Self-immolation hoax” in 2001 to solidify the Chinese people’s distrust and hatred of practitioners. 

As the persecution progresses, however, the CCP adopted a different approach. Instead of carrying out more blatant propaganda campaigns, they turned the persecution underground, to keep it from the eyes of the Chinese public. 

With strict information censorship, most people have no knowledge of the on-going persecution, unless they are practitioners themselves or have family members who practice Falun Gong. The more the public is oblivious to the persecution, the more blatant the CCP is in persecuting Falun Gong practitioners.

Without public scrutiny, the 610 Office also became even more unscrupulous in their “professional crimes,” carrying out the chief persecution policy to “destroy them [the practitioners] physically, ruin their reputation, and bankrupt them financially.”

The crimes committed by the CCP against Falun Gong practitioners over the years have been too many to list. 

One of the CCP’s most gruesome crimes in this persecution has been forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners. An insider revealed this unprecedented evil to the world in March 2006. 

Shortly after the onset of the persecution, the number of organ transplants in China experienced exponential growth and China became the most popular destination for “transplant tourism,” despite the lack of any donation system. Witnesses who later came forward testified that Falun Gong practitioners are the major target for the procurement of organs.

Such large-scale secret killing pipelines are only feasible when hospitals, detention facilities and oftentimes military branches are all mobilized by the 610 Office at the same time. 

In this crime, doctors and nurses, who were trained to save lives, became ruthless murderers. For them, perhaps the lives of Falun Gong practitioners are nothing but stepping stones for them to gain political capital and make a fortune. The CCP’s persecution policy thus made forced organ harvesting part of the “profession” of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners. 

Shen Zhongyang, the former director of the Center for Organ Transplantation in Tianjin Central First Hospital and the Liver Transplant Institute of Armed Police General Hospital, has been active in attacking Falun Gong since the onset of the persecution. 

Zheng Shusen, the former president of First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University and director of Organ Procurement Organization-China, also chaired the “China Anti-Cult Association” of Zhejiang Province between 2007 and 2017, responsible for producing and spreading defamatory propaganda against Falun Gong, both inside China and overseas. 

Huang Jiefu, the former Deputy Minister of Health, said in an interview with the People’s Daily (the largest state-run newspaper in China) in 2001, “The fight against Falun Gong is a serious political war, and we should not have mercy on the handful of core members.” 

Deceived by the CCP’s hate propaganda and brainwashed by the Party culture, these merciless “medical experts” have lost their human nature and professional ethics. 

In addition to “destroying practitioners physically,” another main task of the 610 Office is to host brainwashing centers to attempt to crush the faith of Falun Gong practitioners who follow the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance. According to available information collected by Minghui.org, there are 3,600 documented brainwashing centers throughout China, where practitioners are tortured and pressured to renounce their faith. 

The 610 Office hired “professional educators” to try to make practitioners give up their belief. These people often organize meetings to exchange their experience in torturing and brainwashing the practitioners, in an attempt to achieve higher “transformation” rate. One torture method deemed most effective is the long-term sleep deprivation, which may drive practitioners to mental collapse yet leaving no visible physical injuries.

According to a hiring advertisement posted in 2014 by the 610 Office in Binzhou City, Shandong Province, any recent college graduate younger than 28 years old and who are members of the Chinese Communist Party are encouraged to apply. Isn’t it sad that promising young people join a “profession” to persecute good people?

Cheng Dongxiao, the director of 610 Office in Gulou District, Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, is one such “professional persecutor.” He has spent more than a decade in brainwashing Falun Gong practitioners. He once said, “There is no other place like our country in the world that has such a massive brainwashing system established at all levels of the government.” He claimed one of the most successful experiences he had was to host “isolated brainwashing sessions” against the practitioners. 

In addition to targeting the practitioners, the brainwashing activities of the 610 Office have also reached out to every corner of society, including elementary schools. 

On December 6, 2017, members of the 610 Offices in provincial-, city- and county-level in Ju County, Shandong Province went to the Ju County No. 3 Experimental Elementary School to inspect the effects of the propaganda campaign against Falun Gong among the students. 

The CCP has also never stopped spreading its persecution policy outside of China. An example is the joint appointment letter issued on March 30, 2021 by China’s Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security to name Wu Xiuha as the head of the “North America Branch of Anti-Falun Gong Campaign.”

At the country level, the 610 Office is also hosting special events every few years to demonize Falun Gong and incitepublic hatred against the practitioners. Some examples include “Anti-cult education” in 2004, the “Battle of transformation education and consolidation” in 2010 and 2012, the “Family commitment card in rejecting cults” in 2011, the “resolute battle to transform Falun Gong adherents” in 2013 to 2015, the “Knocking on the door” campaign in 2017 and the most recent “Zero-out” campaign in 2020 and 2021. All of these are to exert pressure on the practitioners, further depriving them of basic rights and robbing their livelihood.

For the “professional persecutors” in the 610 Office system, their career path would be built upon the “professional persecution” of people who strive to follow “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance.”

Despite the brutal physical elimination and mental suppression that has been used against the practitioners in the past 22 years, most practitioners still remain firm in their faith. 

Cheng Dongxiao, the above-mentioned 610 Office director in Nanjing, once admitted that “It’s very difficult to change one’s faith or soul.” “After so many years of efforts, the severity (of the battle against Falun Gong) we face has notimproved, but became even worse.”

In another internal document issued by the Xingdong Street Committee in Dandong City, Liaoning Province on January 26, 2021 that was obtained by The Epoch Times, it stated “Our street is facing big pressure due to the high numbers of Falun Gong adherents who have yet to be transformed. It’s imperative that the street Political and Legal Affairs Committee recognize the challenge we face.”

Sam Brownback, the former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, said in a video statement in 2020, “The CCP is in a war they will not win [since] it is a war that other governments have tried unsuccessfully to persecute people of faith. It always fails, [because the] soul is stronger than the government, a person’s belief is stronger than somebody who seeks to oppress them.”

The persecution is still going on after 22 years and the 610 Office and other agencies that orchestrate the persecution remain active. Only when more people, including those “professional persecutors,” come to understand the evil nature of the CCP, can they help stop the persecution, which has been destroying the moral foundation of Chinese society.