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This expose series traces the trajectory of Falun Gong from a Buddhist meditation practice in China in the 1990s to a right wing disinformation machine today. A former longtime practitioner of FLG, I am using the anonymity of Blind to share this. Apologies to everyone and Blind for using Blind in this way: I am doing is out of concern for my own safety from both the CCP and FLG. In part 7 of this series I will talk about how the CCP cracked down on FLG during initial three years from 1999-2002. This covers what most will consider to be serious breaches of human rights. If you don’t want to hear about it, feel free to skip this post. For CCP supporters, keep in mind that I am not posting this to attack the CCP or China. Rather this information is part of a complex and nuanced story not all of which is China bad. Chinese President Jiang Zemin launched a ferocious crackdown on July 20, 1999, a day that marks the start of a dark chapter for FLG practitioners. Nationwide, FLG practice sites (which were mostly innocuous up to this point) were shut down, FLG offices and the homes of key FLG practitioners raided and documents were seized, many of the publicly known FLG figures (coordinators and people who had organized previous protests) were arrested or brought in by police for questioning, and media across China started broadcasting a public awareness campaigning against FLG (basically a propaganda campaign though it did contain some truths that FLG leaders did not admit). People across the country who worked for the government, state owned enterprises, or were CCP members were required to sign pledges denouncing FLG. Many schools also required students to do the same. Anti-FLG material was injected into Chinese curricula and some questions on the university entrance exams asked test takers to write essays that talk about FLG in a negative light. People who were known to practice FLG were asked by local authorities or sometimes their workplaces to renounce it. Massive book burnings of FLG texts were also carried in public. A new govenrment bureau named the 610 Office was formed to crush FLG. The Ministry of State Security (MSS) scoured through foreign websites to find overseas FLG coordinators to blacklist (either not allow them to come to China or arrest them if they do come). For a while many phone calls between China and foreign countries were tapped and overseas mail was scanned for suspected FLG material and propaganda. Against such a ferocious assault by the state, most FLG practitioners folded and at least publicly went along with the state’s demands out of a desire for self-preservation. Some practitioners gave up the practice entirely (often they weren’t strong believers anyway or they were genuinely convinced that FLG wasn’t so good). Others continued practicing in private. Li Hongzhi in New York believed that he could convince the CCP to overturn the ban (he would continue doing this for decades) but he was politically inexperienced and picked the wrong tactics. He continued to use his millenarian message and promise of Buddhahood to exalt his practitioners in China to publicly demonstrate for FLG. Thus many practitioners went to public places to unfurl banners saying “Falun Dafa is Good”. Some went to Tiananmen Square to do this. Anyone who made such demonstrations were promptly arrested. As the protests continued (though only small protests since police no longer tolerated large FLG gatherings), CCP’s treatment of the arrested practitioners grew harsher because the protests seemed to show that indeed FLG wanted to overthrow the government. The CCP escalated by threatening some steadfast practitioners with losing their jobs or being expelled from school or university. Again many gave in in public but some remained steadfast. Unable to break the will of the diehards, the CCP began arresting FLG practitioners, sending them to labor or re-education camps, or insane asylums. What happened in these places was brainwashing, torture, interrogation, but ironically also some truth sharing. Warning: the content below may be upsetting to some readers. Feel free to skip the following two paragraphs. Ordinary practitioners who were arrested but were not considered to be leaders in organizing protests or talking to foreign journalists endured the lightest punishment. Usually, they would be asked to sign a pledge renouncing FLG and then get released but with regular checkups by the police. If an ordinary practitioner refused to renounce FLG and a minority did so, then he/she would receive a jail sentence or labor/re-education camp equivalent (usually for a couple of years). During incarceration, the ordinary practitioner can expect to be forced to read critiques of FLG some of which were legitimate and some of which were not. These critiques include contradictions in FLG doctrine, the fact that Li Hongzhi had amassed millions in wealth including multiple houses in China, claims from Li Hongzhi that were provably false or pseudoscientific (eg those claims of prehistoric civilizations, hollow moon, NASA finding a galactic city out in space etc), and the fact that some of FLG’s teachings used Buddhist ideas incorrectly (Li Hongzhi had only studied Buddhism briefly in Thailand and got some details and ideas wrong). However ordinary practitioners were unwilling to accept thought reform or who were suspected of being ringleaders in protests, printing FLG material, carrying clandestine communication with overseas FLG leaders, or of leaking to the foreign media for harsher treatment. Chinese police used stress positions (eg being handcuffed for days or months) to try and break their will. If that didn’t work, physical beatings were used. Many of the ringleaders were younger , well educated practitioners and these posed the greatest threat in the CCP’s view. Without going into too much detail, various forms of humiliation were used against such ringleaders to break them. Some times violent convicts were brought in to torture practitioners so that the government could have plausible deniability. The worst treatment was meted out to ringleaders who had intelligence value (ie know other ringleaders who had not been arrested yet). The Ministry of State Security (MSS) sent special interrogators to use outright torture (beatings, stress positions, electricity) to obtain information. This was done because these ringleaders were considered to be seditious. Based on internal bookkeeping in FLG, I think somewhere between 5000 and 10000 practitioners died in custody since 1999 while tens of thousands went through incarceration of a year or more. Hundreds of thousands were questioned by the police or had their jobs threatened or went through police monitoring. In 2000, China sentenced Li Hongzhi’s top lieutenants in China to anywhere from 7 to 18 years in jail. Li Hongzhi had relied on these people to spread FLG during the 1990s and later on used them to organize mass protests in 1998 and 1999, but in prison they all cracked and spilled beans on their work with Li Hongzhi. Because they had given in and essentially defected, Li Hongzhi would later abandon them. Two more events that deserve mention were that in 2002, the CCP cracked a FLG cell in Beijing consisting of Tsinghua university students and graduates who had been sending intelligence about what was happening to foreign media and FLG leaders overseas. The cell members gave each other up under interrogation and would spend around a decade in jail. Also in 2002, a few FLG practitioners managed to hijack a Chinese TV channel and broadcast FLG content for an hour. The practitioners were caught and later died in custody. I mention this because despite my criticism (more on that to come in this series) of FLG, there were some brave souls among the practitioners who sacrificed everything to protect FLG. Thank you for wading through this weighty subject. This is the only post where I will talk about torture and imprisonment, but other dark matters will be discussed in future posts.
Please consolidate this and post it on Reddit so i can share with others
“Some times violent convicts were brought in to torture practitioners so that the government could have plausible deniability. “ I heard this is a common tactic used even today in other areas of China like when the local gov wants to get something done
Unfortunately it still happens to groups that the government considers a threat.
what in the absolute fuck is going on over here?
Don’t you know that blind is property of the CCCP?