(Minghui.org) The Chinese society has a unique phenomenon called jie fang (interception of petitioners). On the surface, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allows citizens to petition the government when they feel their rights have been violated. In reality, it uses an extralegal system of interception and detention to silence them.
“In the past few years, Chinese authorities have engaged in systematic and extensive illegal interception, detention, and torture against petitioners. ‘Petitioners’ are those individuals who brought grievances to higher-level government offices in Beijing and provincial capital cities. This has made petitioners currently one of the social groups most vulnerable to human rights abuses in China,” said a 2009 Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) report titled “Human Rights Abuses Involved in Official Interception of Petitioners in China.”
Sixteen years later, the situation has worsened with even tighter censorship, internet monitoring, and video surveillance. In fact, intercepting petitioners is just one of many ways the CCP mistreats the Chinese people in order to retain control and bolster its rule.
We will explore this topic from five angles: ideology, human rights, human life, abuse of the law, and trade.
Free thought is mankind’s right. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech are also basic rights. But the Soviet Union and now communist China have deprived people of these basic rights. Through decades of brainwashing, the CCP has trained Chinese people to follow the Party unconditionally and give up their own ideas.
The CCP started similar campaigns even before it took power. One example was the Yan’an Rectification Movement between 1942 and 1945. After the CCP usurped power, it launched the Thought Reform movement between 1951 and 1952, followed by the Anti-Rightist Campaign between 1957 and 1959.
The story of Wu Ningkun, a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of International Relations in Beijing, was one of countless tragedies resulting from these campaigns. Wu and Lee Tsung-Dao were studying at the University of Chicago when Wu decided to return to China in 1951. When Wu asked why Lee did not return with him, Lee replied, “I don’t want to have my brain washed by others.”
Shortly after he returned, Wu experienced the first wave of the campaign, which was relatively mild for him as a newcomer from overseas. In 1957, the CCP enticed intellectuals to speak out freely. It promised there would be no consequences—then it turned on them and targeted them for those remarks. Wu was denounced as an “ultra-rightist” in September 1957 and imprisoned. That year, Lee won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
“You can’t reason with the Communist Party; there is no logic to them,” said Wu’s wife Li Yikai. “Black and white are always reversed.”
Instead of “liberating” people as the CCP claimed, the regime took control of people’s minds. Because of its brainwashing, the Chinese people are led to believe that China and the CCP are inseparable. At any mention of landlords or capitalists, they immediately think of wicked villains who exploit peasants or workers; whenever someone mentions intellectuals, they think of reactionaries or rightists.
As time passed, the CCP revised its propaganda, but the central theme remained, that the Party is always correct, and anyone who criticizes the Party is labeled “political” or “unpatriotic.”
In recent years, this playbook has been applied to Falun Gong practitioners. With countless lies such as staged self-immolation incident at Tiananmen Square, the CCP incited public hatred of Falun Gong practitioners, numbing Chinese people to the widespread abuse, torture, and even forced organ harvesting that practitioners have been subjected to.
Having lived through the CCP’s political campaigns, most Chinese people have learned not to think independently, and instead follow the Party line, whether intentionally or subconsciously.
Because the CCP controls the media and deprives people of independent thinking, human rights violations are inevitable and often ignored. In some cases, the public even goes along with them. Even Liu Shaoqi, chairman of China, was purged during the Cultural Revolution and declared an “enemy of the state” before he died a miserable death. Given the abuse of this high-profile CCP member, one can only imagine how ordinary citizens are mistreated.
The CCP has had a long list of political campaigns since 1949, including the Land Reform Movement (1950-1953, targeting landlords), the Three-Anti and Five-Anti Campaigns (1951-1952, targeting business owners), the Four Cleanups (1963-1965, the rural version of Five-Anti), the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), and the Tiananmen Square Massacre (1989). After each of these tragedies, the CCP identified scapegoats in order to whitewash itself. The only exception was the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which was instead highly censored.
After the Cultural Revolution, many people reflected on what went wrong, and discussed how to prevent another havoc. Few people realized that the problem was rooted in the CCP itself, making these disasters unavoidable.
This reality played out yet again in the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong that started in 1999. Jiang Zemin, the former CCP leader who started the persecution, issued orders to “ruin [practitioners’] reputation, bankrupt them financially, and eliminate them physically.”
As a result, tens of millions of practitioners faced discrimination, and many have been harassed, arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. Minghui.org has reported over a hundred types of torture being applied to practitioners, including beatings, being hung up from handcuffs, solitary confinement, forced injection of unknown drugs, forced ingestion of feces and urine, rape, forced abortions, and even organ harvesting. Over 5,000 practitioners have been confirmed to have died as a result of the persecution, and the true toll is likely much higher.
“Every Chinese person lives in danger. But this danger doesn’t come from thugs, gangsters, or organized crime; it comes from the illegal system of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” wrote lawyer Zuo Zhihai from Yunnan Province. “Under the CCP’s judicial system, its leaders and officials can arbitrarily use their power, easily manipulating the police, prosecutors, and courts to convict any innocent Chinese citizen.
“When they say you’ve committed murder, you become a murderer. When they accuse you of rape, you’re branded a rapist. When they say you’ve obstructed official duties, resisted arrest, or disrupted social order, you’re charged with obstructing official duties, intentional injury, or disturbing the peace. They can fabricate any evidence they need to, and collect any witnesses and testimonies they want. They can even use torture to force you to confess to crimes you never committed,” he said.
In China, children are taught that the red on the CCP’s flag represents the blood of martyrs who died for communism. However, far more Chinese have died as a result of the CCP’s own brutality. Classified documents reveal that the CCP used large numbers of innocent civilians as cannon fodder in the Chinese Civil War between 1945 and 1949 alone. Below are three examples.
The Battle of Siping
The CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fought with the Kuomintang Army in Siping, Jilin Province, between March 1946 and March 1948. Liang Su-yung, a former speaker of the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan, wrote about the battle in The Great Right and Wrong: The Memoirs of Liang Su-jung.
In the final assault, “The Communist army employed human wave tactics, organizing civilians into units and sending them forward in waves. The bodies of the civilians piled up like mountains. The Kuomintang army could no longer bear to continue fighting. The Communist army thus advanced over the corpses, entering Siping,” Liang wrote.
Why did these civilians go along with this tactic? Liang explained, “My hometown was 25 kilometers from Siping. When the CCP officials arrived there, they first held mass rallies and publicly executed landlords and wealthy people. They then threatened the locals, and said, ‘You have led the execution of the Kuomintang landlords and wealthy people. If the Kuomintang comes back, you will be dead.’”
Ma Sen, a Canadian writer from China, corroborated Liang’s account. “When the PLA attacked the city, their front lines were a vast crowd of unarmed elderly and weak peasants, which prevented the defending Kuomintang Army from opening fire. This allowed the PLA to easily climb the city walls,” he recalled.
The Menglianggu Campaign
Xin Haonian, an American scholar from China, heard from a retired PLA official about the Menglianggu Campaign that occurred in May 1947.
During the battle, the PLA launched three assaults. After the Kuomintang soldiers fired, they were startled to find the front line of opponents were composed of elderly people (landlords, rich peasants, and counter-revolutionaries). So they stopped shooting.
In the second assault, the front line was a group of children taken from landlords and rich peasants. The Kuomintang had no choice but to put down their weapons again. The PLA Army seized the opportunity to charge forward, but it was defeated by the Kuomintang Army.
When the third round of assaults came, the front line was obscured behind white bed sheets. Just as the Kuomintang soldiers were ready to open fire, the sheets were removed. Behind them were naked young women—daughters and daughters-in-laws of landlords and rich peasants. The Kuomintang soldiers dropped their weapons—they knew they would never be able to fight a war like this.
In this way, the PLA conquered the battlefield. Zhang Lingfu, one of the most accomplished Kuomintang generals at the time, committed suicide.
Hu Lian, another Kuomintang general, described a similar experience to his friend, scholar He Jia-hua. “When fighting with the PLA soldiers in the Yimeng Mountains, I personally witnessed them forcing civilians to charge with two hand grenades each. My army fired at them with machine guns and saw those who died were all civilians. We could not continue like that and stopped–then the PLA Army arrived,” he said. “I know of human wave tactics, but can we use them? We would rather admit defeat.”
The Siege of Changchun
The Siege of Changchun occurred between May and October 1948. The CCP’s propaganda claimed it took the city “without bloodshed,” but this was far from the truth.
There were about 500,000 civilians in Changchun, and the food supply could last only until the end of July. Kuomintang leader Zheng Dongguo asked civilians to leave the city, but they were stopped by the PLA Army. Those who left the city were blocked by PLA soldiers, and died. Some who attempted to flee were shot.
By the time the Kuomintang army was forced to surrender, nearly 200,000 people had starved to death due to the CCP’s brutality. Homare Endo, who was born in Changchun in 1941, witnessed the event and documented the tragedy in her book, Japanese Girl at the Siege of Changchun: How I Survived China’s Wartime Atrocity.
“This was a basic principle of the Communist Party. It didn’t matter how many people died to demonstrate its validity. It didn’t matter how many lives had to be sacrificed to drive the logic of this lesson home,” she wrote. “It was many years later that I realized this.”
Eighty years have passed—has the CCP now changed? A hot mic conversation between CCP leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in September 2025 suggests that some CCP officials are now extending their lifespans through organ transplants. Meanwhile, independent investigations have found that prisoners of conscience, including Falun Gong practitioners, have been killed under the CCP through forced organ harvesting. If the above wartime examples show how the CCP treated human life back then, forced organ harvesting takes the CCP’s exploitation of human life one step further.
Some netizens in China now describe themselves as ren kuang, a human mine that is relentlessly exploited until they are eventually discarded on the refuse pile.
Among all the political campaigns launched by the CCP, the persecution of Falun Gong is the longest, farthest-reaching, and most damaging to humanity. Since July 1999, about 100 million Falun Gong practitioners and their family members have been discriminated against and suppressed in various ways. Unlike previous political campaigns in which people were targeted based on their social status or political opinions, however, practitioners are persecuted because they want to be better people and live according to the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.
People in over 100 countries practice Falun Gong, and some Western leaders have pointed out the severity of the persecution. “China is at war with faith. It is a war they will not win,” said Samuel Brownback, former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, at the China Forum held on October 27 and 28 this year.
The CCP has carried out this persecution in violation of Chinese laws. More specifically, it has committed:
1) Violations of international laws such as crimes against humanity, torture, and genocide.
2) Violations of Article 36 of the Chinese Constitution: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief.”
3) Violations of Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration.”
4) Violations of China’s Criminal Law:
Article 234: “Whoever intentionally injures the person of another is to be sentenced to not more than three years of fixed-term imprisonment, criminal detention, or control.”
Article 246: “Those openly insulting others using force or other methods, or those fabricating stories to slander others, if the case is serious, are to be sentenced to three years or fewer in prison, put under criminal detention or surveillance, or deprived of their political rights.”
Article 245: “Those illegally physically searching others or illegally searching others’ residences, or those illegally intruding into others’ residences, are to be sentenced to three years or fewer in prison, or put under criminal detention.”
Article 248: “Supervisory and management personnel of prisons, detention centers, and other guard houses who beat or physically abuse their inmates, if the case is serious, are to be sentenced to three years or fewer in prison or put under criminal detention. If the case is especially serious, they are to be sentenced to three to 10 years in prison.”
Article 251: “Workers of state organs who illegally deprive citizens’ rights to religious beliefs or who encroach on minority nationalities’ customs or habits, if the case is serious, are to be sentenced to two years or fewer in prison or put under criminal detention.”
Article 254: “Workers of state organs who abuse their authority by retaliating against or framing accusers, petitioners, criticizers, or informants, in the name of conducting official business, are to be sentenced to two years or less in prison or put under criminal detention. If the case is serious, they are to be sentenced to two to seven years in prison.”
5) Violation of China’s Prison Law
6) Violations of China’s Supervision Law, Civil Servant Law, Police Law, and so on.
After the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, the CCP was isolated internationally. U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972 marked a shift in policy, however. After establishing diplomatic relations with China in 1979, the U.S. ignored the CCP’s Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 and helped China enter the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.
But the CCP’s totalitarian ideology is opposite to the free world’s. Both Deng Xiaoping (who led the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989) and Jiang Zemin (who initiated the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999) followed the CCP’s strategy to “hide your strength, bide your time.” The CCP grew rapidly by constantly violating its WTO commitments, such as ending industrial subsidization, and theft of intellectual property.
The CCP did not stop at harming its trade partners. It has also ramped up ideological infiltration and bribery of foreign government officials. The CCP aims to weaken its perceived enemies through “unrestricted warfare,” including exporting drugs, sowing discord and division through propaganda, and imposing a CCP-friendly worldview through entertainment and social media.
Furthermore, the CCP undermines the rights of people in free countries through transnational repression. This includes threatening dissidents who speak out about the regime’s human rights abuses and censoring them even on foreign soil. For example, the CCP has encouraged physical attacks on Falun Gong practitioners in the U.S., pressured community organizations not to allow practitioners to participate in parades, and instigated bomb threats against theaters hosting Shen Yun Performing Arts.
Similar to Karl Marx and the Soviet Union, the CCP’s ultimate goal is to dominate the world with its communist ideology. Fortunately, more people in the free world have awakened, and some countries have joined the U.S. in its efforts to counter the CCP. The severe religious persecution in China has also become a focal point.
“China’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners is an attack on religious freedom and human rights. It’s long past time to dismantle the CCP’s state-sponsored organ harvesting industry,” said U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in a press release when introducing the Falun Gong Protection Act in March 2025. “I urge my colleagues to join me in countering these human rights violations and ensuring the CCP is held accountable.”
The CCP does not represent Chinese civilization. Instead, it has deeply harmed Chinese people while endangering the world. Over 450 million Chinese people have renounced their memberships in the CCP and its junior organizations. When more people in international society take action, the situation will change.