[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CHINA'S POLICIES TOWARD SPIRITUAL MOVEMENTS
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ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JUNE 18, 2010
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Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
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C O N T E N T S
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Page
Opening statement of Douglas Grob, Cochairman's Senior Staff
Member, Congressional-Executive Commission on China............ 1
Tong, James, Professor, Department of Political Science,
University of California-Los Angeles........................... 4
Gutmann, Ethan, Adjunct Fellow, Foundation for Defense of
Democracies.................................................... 8
Shan, Mark, Program in Philosophy, Theology and Ethics, Boston
University..................................................... 13
Cook, Sarah, Asia Research Analyst, Freedom House................ 15
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Tong, James...................................................... 30
Gutmann, Ethan................................................... 34
Shan, Mark....................................................... 36
Cook, Sarah...................................................... 41
Submission for the Record
Prepared Statement of Caylan Ford, Falun Gong Practitioner and
Volunteer Analyst and Editor, Falun Dafa Information Center.... 45
CHINA'S POLICIES TOWARD SPIRITUAL MOVEMENTS
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FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2:03
p.m., in room 628, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Douglas Grob
(Cochairman's Senior Staff Member), presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF DOUGLAS GROB, COCHAIRMAN'S SENIOR STAFF
MEMBER, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Mr. Grob. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank
you very much for joining us here today. On behalf of Senator
Byron Dorgan, Chairman, and Representative Sander Levin,
Cochairman, and Charlotte Oldham-Moore, Staff Director of the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China [CECC], I would
like to welcome you to this, the 14th Congressional-Executive
Commission on China roundtable held during the 111th Congress.
My name is Douglas Grob and I am Cochairman Levin's Senior
Staff Member.
We have asked our distinguished panelists here today to
examine the Chinese Government's policies toward spiritual
movements and the factors that drive Chinese Government
officials' treatment of members of spiritual groups. The
Chinese Government has allowed space for some spiritual
movements to operate in China, but the Communist Party has
banned other groups, such as the popular spiritual movement,
Falun Gong. Authorities have subjected members of Falun Gong
and other banned groups to strict surveillance and, in some
cases, imprisonment, detention outside the legal system, and
other abuses. Why does the Chinese Government consider some
spiritual movements a threat, and what challenges and prospects
do Falun Gong practitioners face in China that adherents of
other groups may not? And what does the Chinese Government's
treatment of spiritual movements mean for religious freedom in
China?
We still do not have a clear understanding of all the
factors that prompt Chinese authorities to criminalize some
spiritual movements as ``cult'' organizations.
We will hear today of individuals subjected to abuse, in
some cases including detention and imprisonment. These cases
include those of Wang Chunyan, Qiu Shaojie, Cao Junping, Tian
Zhongxia, Zhu Lijin, Li Yaohua, Chen Zhenping, Qiao Yongfang,
and Yan Dongfei. Other cases, some less well known, include the
cases of Xu Na, Wang Zhiwen, Yang Xiyao, Zhang Binglan, Duan
Youru, Li Zongbo, and others. These are Falun Gong
practitioners, but there are cases of members of other
spiritual movements labeled as cults in China as well,
including Shi Hua, Gong Shengliang, Tong Houyong, Shu Wenxiang,
Xie Zhenqi, and others.
Another case that we will hear about today is that of Gao
Zhisheng, a prominent Chinese human rights attorney who, in
late March 2010, resurfaced after having disappeared for more
than a year and who has now again disappeared. Gao's case has
attracted international attention due in part to his legal
advocacy on behalf of religious minorities, including Falun
Gong practitioners, Christians, and ethnic minorities, rural
farmers, and human rights advocates. A self-taught lawyer, Gao
Zhisheng repeatedly has angered Chinese authorities by taking
on case that authorities deem to be ``sensitive,'' and by
exposing human rights abuses.
It is worth noting what both international human rights
standards and provisions in Chinese law say about the rights of
members of spiritual movements.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18,
says,
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought,
conscience, and religion. This right includes freedom
to change his religion or belief and freedom, either
alone or in community with others, and in public or
private, to manifest his religion or belief in
teaching, practice, worship, and observance.
Article 19 says,
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and
expression, and this right includes freedom to hold
opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and
impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers.
Article 20 says,
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful
assembly and association.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
Article 18, says,
Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought,
conscience, and religion. This right shall include
freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his
choice, and freedom, either individually or in
community with others, and in public or private, to
manifest his religions or belief in worship,
observance, practice, and teaching. No one shall be
subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to
have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.
Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be
subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by
law and are necessary to protect public safety, order,
health, or morals, or the fundamental rights and
freedoms of others. The State Parties to the present
Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of
parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure
the religious and moral education of their children in
conformity with their own convictions.
The Constitution of the People's Republic of China, Article
35, states,
Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy
freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of
association, of procession, and of demonstration.
Article 36 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of
China states,
Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy
freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public
organization, or individual may compel citizens to
believe in or not to believe in any religion, nor may
they discriminate against citizens who believe in or do
not believe in any religion. The state protects normal
religious activities. No one may make use of religion
to engage in activities that disrupt public order,
impair the health of citizens, or interfere with the
educational system of the state. Religious bodies and
religious affairs are not subject to any foreign
domination.
With that in mind, it is my great pleasure to introduce our
panelists today. James Tong, professor, UCLA Department of
Political Science, and chief editor of the Journal of Chinese
Law and Government. Professor Tong previously served as the
vice chairman of UCLA's Department of Political Science and
director of UCLA's Center for East Asian Studies. His
publications include ``Revenge of the Forbidden City: The
Suppression of the Falun Gong in China, 1999-2000,'' and a
number of articles and edited volumes on central and provincial
religious policy documents in China, ethnic conflict, and the
1989 democracy movement in Beijing. He has served as a World
Bank consultant, briefed the U.S. Commission on International
Religious Freedom, and has participated in a previous CECC
roundtable on religious regulations, and we're very pleased to
have you back here today.
Ethan Gutmann, to my left, is Adjunct Fellow at the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is currently
completing a comprehensive history of the clash between Falun
Gong and the Chinese State, and in addition has begun
preliminary research into, quote, ``the Chinese Uyghur conflict
and the underlying ambiguity of the Chinese Communist Party's
stance toward the Islamist global challenge.'' He is the author
of, ``Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce,
Desire, and Betrayal.'' He is formerly a senior counselor at
APCO China and a visiting fellow at the Project for the New
American Century. He has written widely on Chinese military
development, human rights, the U.S. business scene in Beijing,
and on recent hacking for the Wall Street Journal, Investor's
Business Daily, The Weekly Standard, and a number of other
prominent publications. We are very delighted to have you here
today.
To my right is Mark Shan, of the Program in Philosophy,
Theology and Ethics at Boston University. Mr. Shan has written
about the house church movement in China, focusing on Christian
theology and social ethics. He has published two books, ``The
Future Direction of Churches in China,'' and ``The History of
Christianity in Xinjiang.'' He also serves as consultant on
religious and political issues in China for organizations in
the United States, and he is the primary founder of a newly
established Chinese Christian Theology Association based in
Boston. Originally from Xinjiang, China, Mr. Shan now resides
in Boston where he is pursuing his Christian theological
studies at Boston University, and we are delighted to have you
with us today.
Also to my right is Sarah Cook, Asia Research Analyst at
Freedom House, and assistant editor for the ``Freedom on the
Net'' index on Internet and digital media freedom. She has
served as East Asia Analyst for Freedom House's ``Freedom of
the Press'' and ``Freedom in the World'' reports. Her research
has covered human rights and media developments in East Asia,
Indochina, and the Middle East, including fact-finding trips to
Hong Kong and Taiwan. Her comments and writings have appeared
on CNN, the International Herald Tribune, and the Far Eastern
Economic Review. Before joining Freedom House, she co-edited
the English translation of ``A China More Just,'' a memoir by
human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng. She was twice a delegate to
the United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva,
working on religious freedom in China, and she is currently
completing an article on the Chinese Communist Party's creation
and use of the 6-10 Office to suppress Falun Gong and other
banned spiritual groups.
All of our panelists' statements are on the table outside
and will be available online. I would also like to take this
opportunity to call your attention to an additional statement,
also available on the table outside, by Ms. Caylan Ford, who is
here with us today, a volunteer with the Falun Dafa Information
Center. This statement has been submitted for the record and
will be available to the public with the other statements from
this roundtable.
With that, I would like to turn the floor over to Professor
Tong. Thank you.
Professor Tong?
[The prepared statement of Ms. Ford appears in the
appendix.]
STATEMENT OF JAMES TONG, PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL
SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES
Mr. Tong. My talk today will be on how the Chinese regime
views the threat posed by the Falun Gong in recent years, and
also how it differentiates different types of Falun Gong
members and offenses that they impose legal and also political
sanctions, and also a few remarks on the implications on the
larger issues on religious freedom in China.
On July 22, 1999, when China announced a ban on Falun Gong,
there were between 2.3 million to about 80 million Falun Gong
practitioners in China. This wide range results from the fact
that there is no clear and formal definition of a Falun Gong
practitioner because, unlike Christians, the Falun Gong has no
rite of formal induction into the religious community.
Different levels of Falun Gong organizations also do not
maintain a membership roster, so there is no accurate count on
the number of Falun Gong practitioners in China before the ban
of July 22, 1999.
These Falun Gong practitioners were organized into about
28,000 practice sites throughout China and they were further
grouped into about 1,900 guidance stations, and further grouped
into about 39 main stations. Every morning, they would gather
together in the city parks and other public places for
breathing exercises.
Since July 22, 1999, these breathing exercises and daily
assemblies have virtually disappeared. Also disappeared were
the special convocations. These were larger congregations that
the Falun Gong practitioners gathered together on special
congregational anniversaries, and also training seminars
lasting three to four days, where they learned special
breathing exercises, meditation techniques, and also Falun Gong
doctrine.
These three public forums of organized activities of the
Falun Gong movement in China have been successfully and
effectively suppressed in China, and so have been their
publications. On July 22, 1999, there were at least 11 million
copies of Falun Gong publications. They belonged to about 11
Falun Gong titles. These were confiscated.
On the seventh day of the ban, on July 29, they were
collected together and set ablaze or turned into paper pulp in
17 major cities in China. In sum, the Chinese regime has been
effective in suppressing the public forms of organized
activities of the Falun Gong movement in China.
There still have been periodic reports of overt defiance by
Falun Gong practitioners in China. These include the staging of
protest rallies in the national and provincial capitals,
displaying the banner of the Falun Gong in public, and also
engaging in sabotage of media organizations in China, but these
have been rare in China in at least the past seven or eight
years.
There are three related developments that demonstrate that
fact. The first is the annual report of the chief procurator in
China. This is the equivalent to the Attorney General of the
United States. Every year, the annual procurator report would
list what are the major law enforcement problems in China in
that year. In the first five years of the ban on Falun Gong,
from 1999 to 2003, the Falun Gong was listed as one of the
major law enforcement problems in China, but it has no longer
made that list since 2004.
Below the national level, each of the provincial
procurators would also make an annual report that mirrors
largely the national trend. So in 1999, the procurator of 29 of
the 31 provinces mentioned that the Falun Gong was a major law
enforcement problem in that province in that year; in 2000, 28
provinces; 2001, 21 provinces; and since then, there has been a
precipitous decline. In 2004, there were only seven provinces,
and in 2008 there were only two provinces where the provincial
procurator list the Falun Gong as a serious, major law
enforcement issue in that province.
The second related development is the end to the followup
and mopping-up operations conducted by the regime. Since the
initial blitz in July 1999, there was a second followup
campaign in the summer of 2001 where, for four months, the
public security agents would fan out and try to ferret out
fugitive Falun Gong leaders. They would try to locate where the
hideouts were. They would also try to search and confiscate
Falun Gong publications.
In addition, some provinces conducted single-day operations
on Falun Gong special days. And in some strong Falun Gong hold-
outs there were 100-day campaigns where public security agents
would systematically go through all Internet cafes, printing
presses, photocopying vendors, and rental properties to try to
locate Falun Gong practitioners and inventories of Falun Gong
publications. None of these followup campaigns have been
reported since 2003.
Then the third development is the reorganization of the
special agency dealing with the Falun Gong. Forty days before
the official ban on July 22, the June 10 office was established
at different levels of government, both at the national and at
local levels. Their business was exclusively to deal with the
Falun Gong.
In April 2002, these offices' mission was broadened to
include not only other spiritual movements and cults, but also
collective protests and rallies organized by non-religious
groups, including, workers who are on strike, and demonstrating
peasants who were evicted from their farmland.
In other words, all three developments combined suggest
that by 2003 or 2004, the Chinese regime did not see the Falun
Gong as a major law enforcement problem and a security threat
posed to the regime.
My second set of remarks are focused on what type of Falun
Gong practitioners and what type of offenses the regime deemed
unacceptable, that it levied the legal and political sanctions.
Let me begin with a reiteration of the basic fact that
there were at least 2.3 million Falun Gong practitioners in
China in July 1999. That is four times the total population of
Washington, DC. If we take the largest estimate, 80 million
Falun Gong practitioners, that is about a quarter of the total
population of the United States. There is no way that the
Chinese regime had the judicial capacity to process all these
cases.
In 1998, the year just before the ban, the entire judicial
system in China handled only 400,000 criminal cases that
involved 600,000 individuals. If we look at only the three
major offenses that the Chinese State charged Falun Gong
practitioners with, these include offenses that endanger the
state security, endangering the social order, and obstructing
social order. In 1998, the judicial system in China only
processed 74,000 of these cases. At this rate, it would have
taken them 31 years just to clear 2.3 million cases. So they
have to differentiate on what types of Falun Gong members they
will levy legal sanctions.
On the same day that they announced the ban, they
differentiated them into four different categories. The first
type are the rank and file Falun Gong practitioners who have
only participated in breathing exercises. For these, no legal
sanction was levied.
The other three types were core members who have committed
illegal activities. If they would renounce the Falun Gong,
write a written statement stating their official withdrawal
from the Falun Gong, and also render an account of their
activities, there was also no legal and political sanction. For
political sanction, if they are a government official, or work
in a government enterprise, they would not be dismissed, they
would not be demoted, their year-end bonus would not be cut,
their benefits would not be affected. If they are a member of
the Chinese Communist Party, they will not be expelled from the
Party. As for legal sanction, if they have broken a law, but
would renounce the Falun Gong, and withdraw from the Falun
Gong, they would not be prosecuted, according to that formal
announcement.
The next category are core leaders who have committed
serious errors, that is, they have facilitated the organizing
of the protests or they have distributed, or even printed,
illegal Falun Gong publications. If they renounce the Falun
Gong and withdraw from Falun Gong, if they would also make a
conscientious confession, and accrue merit, that is, if they
would persuade other Falun Gong members to withdraw from Falun
Gong, if they would point out who are the Falun Gong leaders,
if they would incriminate these leaders, if they would tell the
authorities where the publications are hidden, then they would
also receive no sanction.
The last type were what the Chinese regime considered to be
unrepentant core leaders who have committed serious mistakes.
These are the ones who would receive political and legal
sanctions. If they have violated what the Chinese State
considered to be laws, then they would be prosecuted, they
would be incarcerated or sent to labor reform.
My last remarks are on the implications for religious
freedom in China. Religion in China is still a managed
religion. The Chinese State claims the authority to define what
is religion and what is not religion, what is a religious
organization, and what is a cult. It also claims the authority
to define what is normal religious activity from what is
considered to be illegal religious activity. At every level of
government there is a religious affairs bureau that manages the
religious affairs within its jurisdiction.
But this capacity to manage religion has been eroded by
market reforms. On the supply side, market reform has created
political space where spiritual movements can survive outside
the control of the Party state. In the Maoist era, virtually
the entire working population worked for government-owned
enterprises. They lived in government-owned housing. They
relied on government-issued food and clothing coupons. But that
is no longer the case under market reforms. These spiritual
movements can now find alternative means of employment in the
non-state sector. There is a housing market. The ration coupons
have also ended.
On the demand side, market reforms have also created social
conflict that the Chinese Government needs to attend to. It is
not only the rising crime wave that the procurator at both the
national and provincial levels stress. These are organized
crime, robberies, bank heists, and drug trafficking. There is
also the rising wave of collective protests.
In 1994, there were 10,000 of these collective protests.
These are unemployed workers, workers who do not receive
pensions, People's Liberation Army [PLA] soldiers that have
been discharged with minimum severance pay. These groups have
staged collective protests. In 1994, there were 10,000, about
30 incidents per year. But 10 years later in 2004, there were
74,000 of these collective protests. In one month alone, in May
2004, there were 2,180 of these collective protests, and each
one had participants of 500 or more.
So when compared to these collective protests and the crime
wave with people demonstrating in the streets or outside the
government offices, both the Falun Gong as well as other
spiritual movements would be viewed as rather tame in the eyes
of the Chinese regime.
Finally, market reform has also made religious policy a
collateral beneficiary. In the Maoist era, there was a
convergence of religious policy with overall political,
economic, and social policies. But 30 years into the market
reform, there is a divergence between religious policy on the
one hand and the political, economic, and social policy on the
other.
China today is no longer a Communist State. The major
Communist anniversaries are no longer celebrated. The 150th
anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto has
no People's Daily editorial. The 90th anniversary of the
Bolshevik Revolution is not celebrated.
China is not a Leninist economy where there is no private
ownership of production and where there are no labor and
capitalists markets. Today there are 150 million account
holders in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. When we
compare 150 million account holders with 72 million Chinese
Communist Party members, we can say that there are at least
twice as many capitalists as Communist members in China.
In other words, there is divergence between the religious
policy and overall political, economic, and social policy in
China today. The Chinese regime has to bridge this divergence.
It has to adjust its clock in religious policy so that it will
be run on the same time zone as the political, economic, and
social policy.
So on this note, I will conclude my set of remarks. Thank
you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Tong appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much, Professor Tong. Thank you so
much.
I would now like to turn the floor over to Ethan Gutmann.
STATEMENT OF ETHAN GUTMANN, ADJUNCT FELLOW, FOUNDATION FOR
DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES
Mr. Gutmann. Thanks. I want to thank the CECC, but my
remarks need to go beyond the pro forma on this point. The
Chinese Communist Party portrays Falun Gong as an evil cult and
as a terrorist entity. The Chinese State's diplomatic arm has
made it clear that the Falun Gong issue is non-negotiable. It
is relevant that this appears to be the first U.S. Government
hearing or roundtable directly focusing on Falun Gong in a
decade.
As a former Beijing business consultant, I do not rely on
Chinese official statistics. For example, if you attempt to
generate a population figure for the laogai system--labor
camps, prisons, black jails, detention centers, and psychiatric
hospitals--you get a figure well below a million. Yet if one
counts every detention node and makes common-sense estimates,
as Laogai Foundation researchers do every year, you get a more
credible figure of 3 to 5 million.
According to the U.N. Rapporteur on Torture, Falun Gong
comprises half of those prisoners, but this figure might be
high. Much of my research is based on interviews with refugees
and defectors. I do not ask them for estimates of the laogai
system, but no matter how traumatized they are, I do expect
them to remember how many Falun Gong were in their cell block.
After interviewing over 120 individuals, including
defectors from inside Chinese security and well over 50 laogai
refugees, I estimate that Falun Gong comprises between 15 to 20
percent of the laogai system. That is about half a million to a
million Falun Gong in detention on average, representing the
largest Chinese security action since the Maoist period.
Now we often perceive China's human rights problems as an
entrenched structure, something similar to how Solzhenitsyn
describes the Soviet gulag as a large plumbing system. But the
Party's campaign against Falun Gong more closely resembles a
blitzkrieg in an increasingly global war, marked by physical
assaults in the United States--and I'm happy to talk about
this--Chinese operatives posing as refugees, and coordinated
hacking of Chinese dissident networks and U.S. Government
entities.
We should understand how that war began, we should
understand the casualty rates, and we should understand the
stakes of our neutrality. So I thank the CECC again, and
especially Toy Reid, for making this roundtable a reality.
I was in Beijing on July 20--really, July 22, I think, as
Professor Tong points out--1999 when the official crackdown
began and sound trucks flooded the streets. Western reporters
were flooding the zone, but they had little cooperation from
either the Party or Falun Gong at the time, so journalists had
trouble simply penciling in the first question of any news
report: What is Falun Gong?
Falun Gong, simply put, is a Buddhist revival movement. It
has moral passion, it has occasional talk of miracles, it has
``Are you running with Me, Master Li? '' individualism, and it
has a reflexive mistrust of establishments and outsider
agendas.
This Buddhist aspect may be unfamiliar and exotic in the
West, but as Arthur Waldron puts it: ``Anyone who knows Asian
religion will instantly see that Falun Gong fits into a
tradition that extends back before the beginning of recorded
history.'' What made Falun Gong stand out from other Qi Gong
exercises and meditation practices was a moral system--
compassion, truthfulness, and forbearance--unmistakably
Buddhist in origin.
The revivalist aspect helps explain why Falun Gong insists
on being called practitioners rather than followers. Actually,
they don't follow well. If you ask 10 Falun Gong practitioners
for a definition of Falun Gong, you will get 10 different
answers and probably 10 days of heated discussions. Yet it was
that same do-it-yourself mentality that allowed Falun Gong to
attract 70 million practitioners--according to the 6-10
Office--and skip over the barriers of Chinese society: class,
education, rural/urban, civilian/military, and Party
membership.
Go back to 1995 and follow a diminutive old woman around
Yuan Ming Park in West Beijing. Ding Jing was a Falun Gong
coordinator, meaning she taught the exercises, and she kept
practice sites clean. Among the sites were three locations. One
catered to employees from China Central Television; two, the
Xinhua News Agency; and three--very well attended--attracted
Party officials, their wives, and employees of the Public
Security Bureau.
From a Marxist perspective, which venerates the seizure of
power using this exact template, Ding's tidy practice sites
represented something terrifying. In 1996, ``Zhuan Falun,'' in
essence the Falun Gong bible, was taken out of print.
Given the amorphous, floating world in which practitioners
traveled--largely perceived as amorphous and floating anyway--a
world without membership lists, central authority, or any real
hierarchy other than on paper, practitioners did not panic. But
Luo Gan, the head of the Public Security Bureau, began to use
Falun Gong's perceived infiltration of his own department to
gather, to report, and to study. Where no hierarchy existed,
the Party, seizing on small clues such as Ding's phone calls,
would map one. Where no political objectives existed, the Party
would create them.
Until 1997, the Chinese media stayed neutral. Local Party
leaders would show up at Falun Dafa rallies. Now critical
language began to appear in the Party-controlled media. These
were flares in the night's sky, indicating the Party was trying
something out. The Falun Gong had a method to handle this: Show
up en masse, stay silent, and then stand around until someone
talks to you. This technique smoothly reversed the various
negative reports, articles in 1997, a Beijing TV segment in
1998. In Tianjin in 1999--it failed.
Now, I do not know if the article has been handed out yet,
but you can certainly find it on the Web if it has not made it
here, and you may be able to pick it up on the way out: ``An
Occurrence on Fuyou Street.'' Employing interviews from both
sides, my article tracks the events from Xinjiang on April 22
to Beijing on April 25, 1999. Essentially, the demonstration
was a set-up. From the portable surveillance cameras on Fuyou
Street to the armed military unit at the Forbidden City, it was
a Party bait-and-switch to create momentum for a state-level
crackdown.
A former district-level official--``Minister X,'' that's
what I call him--recalls the Party's decision to eliminate
Falun Gong was circulated internally long before any public
ban, and he was told to stop granting business licenses to
Falun Gong practitioners. A Falun Gong source saw a similar
communique at Tsinghua University in 1998. A former official of
the 6-10 Office--the secret agency created to eliminate Falun
Gong--noting the level of detail in practitioner files,
believes that operations must have begun by at least 1998.
Without understanding the initial integration of Falun Gong
into the Party and the Party's initiative in starting the war--
essentially creating the dilemma that threatens the Party
today--one cannot understand the ineffectiveness of the Falun
Gong response. Practitioners wanted to believe that it was a
misunderstanding. So practitioner appearances at the petition
office and signed letters were followed by mass detentions and
the first deaths in custody.
Beginning in 2000, based on the safe house occupancy in
Beijing, I estimate that well over 150,000 practitioners made
their way into Tiananmen Square to protest over a year's time.
Collectively, that is a remarkable number. But they trickled in
at 500 to 1,000 per day, and they stood up and unfurled their
banners according to the dictates of their soul rather than any
sort of preconceived strategy.
Would a mass strategy even have been possible? Well, I have
provided another article--``Hacker Nation''--on 6-10
surveillance:
Before 1999, Falun Gong practitioners hadn't
systematically used the Internet as an organizing tool.
But now that they were isolated, fragmented, and
searching for a way to organize and change government
policy, they jumped online, employing code words,
avoiding specifics, communicating in short bursts. But
like a cat listening to mice squeak in a pitch-black
house, the ``Internet Spying'' section of the 6-10
Office could find their exact location, having
developed the ability to search and spy as a result of
. . . a joint venture between the Shandong Province
public security bureau, and Cisco Systems.
That's right out of my article, and there is a lot more in
there as well.
Following capture and initial interrogation under the 6-10
Office, the laogai system then operated to break the will and
``transform'' the practitioner, culminating with a public
denunciation of Falun Gong. But it was within the laogai itself
that the first effective resistance began.
Wang Yuzhi was a tough, successful Beijing businesswoman.
And when the crackdown started she transformed her office into
a secret Falun Gong printing press. It was broken up, her
assets were seized, Wang ran, and was eventually caught.
The low-ball casualty figure of over 3,000 practitioners
who have died by torture is reasonably well-documented. Some
practitioners simply refused to renounce their belief, others
hoped that the over-crowded prisons might contribute to the end
of the persecution, and others wanted to just set an example to
fellow inmates.
But Wang made it personal, so personal that some of the
guards force-feeding her began wearing paper bag masks so she
could not identify them. It became a chess game between the
practitioner and the torturers. Both sides knew that Wang's
screams of rage were becoming legendary throughout the laogai
System, and indeed, to practitioners throughout the world. Both
sides knew that checkmate, actually killing Wang, would leave a
pyrrhic victory for the state.
The underlying ambiguity of the laogai position was
expressed in the following maneuver. Rather than writing up a
report of transformation failure, or the euphemism ``death by
suicide,'' many labor camps and psychiatric centers would wait
until the torture reached lethal levels and then suddenly free
the dying practitioner--especially after the so-called
Tiananmen self-immolation and the Changchun television
hijacking and I would welcome questions on those incidents.
But Wang Yuzhi lived. Considered terminal on release, she
fled China and went on to purchase printing presses for The
Epoch Times. Today she will smile at you with her one good eye.
This is the face of insurgency, and to such a face, the Party
turned toward a more permanent solution.
The final article that I have made available, ``China's
Gruesome Organ Harvest,'' documents a pattern of retail-organs-
only physical examinations carried out throughout the laogai
system. I can find no rational medical explanation for these
procedures, and I conclude that the commercial harvesting of
Falun Gong is real. That finding has since been confirmed by a
Taiwanese surgeon who arranges transplants on the Mainland.
One addition. While the Bush Administration's consistent
focus on house Christians may have had a ``Schindler's List''
effect, inhibiting widespread harvesting of Christians, members
of at least one sect, Eastern Lightening, were examined for
harvesting. According to interviews by my colleague Jaya
Gibson, so were some Tibetan prisoners.
Yet harvesting of political and religious prisoners
probably began in Xinjiang. A Uyghur policeman witnessed
preparation for a procedure in 1994, and I recently interviewed
a Uyghur surgeon who, in 1995, was ordered to take his medical
team into the outskirts of Urumqi and remove a prisoner's
organs while the heart was still beating.
Perhaps harvesting began as a purely black-market
operation, but ultimately prisoners who would not transform--
the Wang Yuzhis of this world, if you like--became too
dangerous to release. But the Party had an outlet, the organ
tourists of Japan, Europe, and the United States.
Now, the fact that China is the one currently pulling up
the reins on Western organ tourism highlights Falun Gong's
stunning lack of success in making its case in the United
States. I mean, one would expect that it would be Congress who
would be preventing organ tourists from going over to China,
but it's not. It's the Party, and they seem to be pulling back
on organ harvesting.
Let me explain what I think happened in the United States.
For many in the Bush Administration at least, it took one
outburst from Wang Wenyi on the White House lawn to establish
that Falun Gong could never be reliable allies. For many
Democrats, it took one Chinese-planted Wikipedia reference
alleging Falun Gong was anti-gay to ward off sympathy. Yet
Falun Gong teachings on this point are essentially
indistinguishable from traditional Christianity, Judaism,
Islam, and Buddhism.
Practitioners have some responsibility here, too. In the
West, they simultaneously watch two screens. They watch a
Western one and they watch a Chinese one. But for them, China
is always the default. And fear of the Party's manipulative
abilities on that screen run very deep indeed. Hence, we see
the definitional problems, we see the alienating public torture
displays and the rest, and we see Daoist demarcations of good
and evil. Again, all of these are aimed at the Mainland.
Yet Falun Gong's tunnel vision did create one unprecedented
success. Along with the construction of the greatest dissident
media apparatus in modern Chinese history, a small group of
Falun Gong engineers, based out of a North Carolina suburb,
devised an Internet lifeline to transmit information in and out
of China. Along the way, they facilitated the only unblocked
Internet transmissions out of Iran during the aborted Green
Revolution.
If the press is correct, the State Department is
considering awarding these engineers, now known as the Global
Internet Freedom Consortium, significant funding to do more. If
my Falun Gong sources are correct, the Consortium is concerned
about taking a sum too small to make a difference, in exchange
for the inevitable Party propaganda point that they are now
U.S. agents.
Yet the Party is pushing the two sides together. The State
Department must end Chinese hacking, and the only way State can
do it is by threatening China's Big Brother Internet. Falun
Gong has perhaps a half a million to a million in captivity; as
much as 1 out of 10 Falun Gong may have already been lost to
the surgical knife.
So the answer to this dilemma will not be found in parsing
Wikipedia. And the question is no longer--``What is Falun Gong
and how do they define themselves? '' But rather--``What are
Falun Gong's actions? What has the Falun Gong achieved? Against
what sort of odds? '' And here, I believe that the evidence of
a decade, from the laogai to the North Carolina suburbs, speaks
for itself.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Gutmann appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Mr. Shan?
STATEMENT OF MARK SHAN, PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY AND
ETHICS, BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Shan. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, CECC
members, staff, and interns.
The roundtable host, the CECC, asked the question, ``What
factors influence the Chinese Government's policies toward
spiritual movements and drive its treatment of members of
spiritual groups? The Chinese Government has allowed space for
some spiritual movements to operate in China, but has banned
other groups such as Falun Gong. Why does the Chinese
Government consider some spiritual movements a threat? ''
These questions touch the root of Chinese political/
religious culture. My following remarks are trying to find out
a rationale behind these policies, yet have no intention to
justify the policies.
For a better understanding, first I need to introduce a
concept in traditional Chinese political ideology which
influenced throughout the history of China, and that is ``the
Mandate of Heaven.'' The concept officially started by the Zhou
Dynasty in 11th century B.C. to justify their replacement of
the Shang Dynasty.
Because the concept justified all successful overthrows,
just as it justified all dynasties that clung to power, the
concept has lasting influence and has even survived into modern
and contemporary China. For instance, in the modern period, a
famous revolution was called The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace
Movement, led by Hong Xiuquan in the middle of the 19th
century. Again in the modern time, another man, Sun Zhongshan,
famous for leading a revolution against the Qing Dynasty, also
can reflect this kind of concept.
Because of the spiritual feature of this political concept,
spiritual or religious movements in Chinese history make it
easy to challenge the ruling of dynasties through spiritual and
moral approaches. So the Chinese Governments have been
sensitive throughout its history to the political/spiritual
touch and are not tolerant of any spiritual movements shaking
their ruling authority, before the Chinese people especially.
In addition, Chinese Governments have tended to keep state
and religion separated through promoting a non-religious
system, Confucianism, throughout much of their history. Indeed,
this is an efficient way to keep religious or spiritual
movements out of politics.
Throughout Chinese history, all the Chinese Governments set
up this forbidden area: do not touch politics. Do not play
around with the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. The only
politics you can touch are the politics that support rulings of
government. So based on the understanding of this concept, we
can find out the rationale behind the political religious
policy of China today, which is why the Chinese Government
treats different spiritual movements differently.
For example, the Protestant Christian house churches and
the Catholic underground house churches. They are persecuted,
but the Protestant and the Catholic churches that are
officially public through the Three-Self Patriotic System
[TSPM] enjoy more freedom.
Tibetan Buddhism is under suppression because of its
feature of the religion/politics combination in its doctrine
and tradition. But Buddhism and Daoism in other parts of China
enjoy much more freedom because they touch no politics. Islam
among Uyghurs is under suppression because of the Xinjiang
political situation, the problems there, but Islam among Hui
people enjoys more freedom.
This is true not only inside the same spiritual traditions
or religious traditions, but also if we compare government's
treatments among different spiritual movements or religions in
China.
Now we are going to talk about the Falun Gong movement. The
Falun Gong movement was suppressed a lot, as Mr. Tong and Ethan
mentioned. Actually the Falun Gong movement is only one branch
of the Qi Gong, but the Falun Gong even was suppressed more
than other Qi Gong branches. So, why? Because on April 25,
1999, the siege of the Chinese Communist Party headquarters in
Beijing by the Falun Gong movement members, more than 20,000,
really touched the nerve of politics.
We also see, after the Falun Gong movement went abroad
here, there is one famous slogan from the Falun Gong movement.
It says, ``Heaven eliminates the Chinese Communist Party,''
encouraging people to withdraw from the Communist Party. This
is another interpretation of the concept of the Mandate of
Heaven.
So that is why a human rights Christian lawyer in China,
Gao Zhisheng, has received the most serious, inhumane
persecutions, even compared to other persecuted lawyers,
because he is trying to defend religious freedom and the human
rights of some Falun Gong practitioners.
The CECC also asked another question: ``What does the
Chinese Government's treatments of the spiritual movement mean
for the future of religious freedom in China? ''
This is another interesting question. A sociologist, Dr.
Yang Fenggang, proposed a triple color model that analyzes the
religious situation in contemporary China. Through this formula
we can see that he divided three markets: the red market, which
means official, permitted religions; a black market means
officially banned religions; and a gray market, religions with
ambiguous legal status. Through this formula we can pretty much
answer this question from this perspective.
The red market means religious or spiritual movements which
do not touch on politics, so they have the most freedom, like
non-Tibetan Buddhism and Daoism. A black market religious
market means the banned ones, such as the Falun Gong movement
and some branches of Islam in Xinjiang--some branches--which
touch on politics, challenging the Communist Party authority;
so they have the most suppression.
The gray market, which is ambiguous in their political
interest, are things such as non-institutionalized Protestant
house church entities. The Catholic underground church is a
little bit different because they are closer to the black
market because of the political feature extending from the
Vatican court.
The gray market of the non-institutional house church
movement has grown large and will grow larger, when others are
encouraged or suppressed. Of course, there is a dilemma. If
this house church movement, the gray market, grows really
large, then it becomes more political.
In China, also, this kind of house church movement, the
people, they are trying to deal with the policies in a unique
way. So in church settings in China, they focus on teachings,
like Biblical teachings, such as ``Blessed are those who are
persecuted,'' ``Love your enemy and even love the
persecutors.'' Also, they emphasize in their teachings that
they do not touch politics. They do not touch politics. The
president of ChinaAid, Bob Fu, was arrested in Beijing and was
trying to argue, we do not touch politics; we support church/
state separation; something like that.
But of course, China is trying to suppress the house church
movements and its Christians too, because they learn lessons
from Eastern Europe. When those Communist countries collapsed,
Christianity played an indirect role.
So together, I think in China, Christianity, in the gray
market and also even in the red market, TSPM churches, they are
going to transform the condition of religious freedom in China
significantly in the future, especially through something we
call the new non-institutionalized religious citizen community,
established in the whole nation, but it is not kind of an
hierarchical, administrative, visible system.
Those are my remarks.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Shan appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much, Mr. Shan.
And now, finally, we'd like to hear from Sarah Cook. Thank
you.
STATEMENT OF SARAH COOK, ASIA RESEARCH ANALYST, FREEDOM HOUSE
Ms. Cook. Good afternoon, everyone. One of the topics I was
asked to speak about is the story of Gao Zhisheng, who you can
see here [holds up copy of ``A China More Just'']. As Doug had
mentioned, he's a leading Chinese human rights lawyer and has
been a vocal advocate for religious freedom in China,
particularly of Falun Gong practitioners.
Several years ago, I had the real honor of co-editing this
English edition of his memoir, and so as I was thinking about
how I would begin today, I tried to think about what Gao would
say if he were here himself. He has disappeared, as Doug had
mentioned, so that is why he can't be here today. I think the
first thing he would say is a real heart-felt thank you.
First, thank you to the Commission for organizing this
panel, thank you to the U.S. Government for taking an active
interest in the human rights abuses happening to Chinese
people, and thank you to all of you in the audience who are
here to listen to what the four of us have to say.
Second, I think he would likely try to convey the real
urgency of the current situation and the ongoing brutality of
the treatment suffered by large numbers of Chinese people
generally, but of Falun Gong practitioners in particular. One
of the things that is very clear from his writings is that
account after account after account of torture that he heard
while interviewing Falun Gong practitioners left a very
profound impression on him and really served as a catalyst for
his taking the risks that he has taken in order to defend them.
So I am just going to briefly read a short portion from one
of the things he had written:
With a trembling heart and a trembling pen, I record
the tragic experiences of those who have been
persecuted in the last six years. Of all the true
accounts of incredible violence that I have heard, of
all the records of the government's inhuman torture of
its own people, what has shaken me most is the routine
practice of police assaulting women's genitals. Almost
all those who have been persecuted, be they male or
female, were stripped naked before being tortured. No
words can describe our government's vulgarity and
immorality.
Now, while not spoken in quite such detailed and colorful
language, Freedom House's findings generally correlate to what
Gao had found. But before I move on to some of the specific
details that have arisen from our reports over the last 10
years, I did want to take a step back to address a slightly
different angle about why this kind of suppression might take
place. It doesn't, indeed, happen in a vacuum.
Rather, what has been happening to Falun Gong and spiritual
movements who are banned in China is really part of a much
broader, elaborate machinery of repression that systematically
tries to control and deny independent thought and expression in
a range of areas throughout Chinese society. In many ways,
Freedom House's reports in recent years have found that this
repression has been getting worse in certain areas.
As Professor Tong had mentioned, the dynamic in China right
now is very different from what it was like during the Cultural
Revolution. But some of the underlying principles and
institutional dynamics remain the same in the sense that the
decision of what is approved or forbidden can be made
arbitrarily by Party leaders based on their own perceptions of
the threats to their monopoly on power or legitimacy, whether
these threats are real or imagined.
As someone who follows Chinese media very closely, I see
this dynamic played out on a day-to-day basis with the kinds of
propaganda directives that the Communist Party's Propaganda
Department issues to media outlets throughout China, where
there will be certain items that one day will be permitted and
the next day will not be permitted.
So whatever the specific timeline of events that happened
in the mid- to late 1990s surrounding Falun Gong or some of the
other Christian groups that Mr. Shan mentioned, overall, one
way of thinking about the situation is that Party leaders were
able to ban these groups because: (A) they could, and there was
no institutional mechanism like an independent judiciary to
stop them from being able to do that; and (B) because the
Communist Party generally is very reluctant to tolerate groups
or individuals who place any authority, spiritual or otherwise,
above their allegiance to the Party.
Sometimes people use the term ``political'' to
differentiate between incidents that trip the Party's wire or
not. But I personally find this idea of whether one is giving
allegiance to the Party first or is willing to make changes
based on the Party's demands to be more helpful in terms of
thinking about what really touches the nerves of the Communist
Party.
So for Tibetans, it is the authority of the Dalai Lama. For
persecuted human rights lawyers like Gao Zhisheng, it's the
authority of the law and the idea of placing the authority of
the law above the authority of the Party. For Falun Gong
practitioners, it is a dedication to teachings centered on
truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, and the idea that
these are the primary principles that one should follow in day-
to-day life, rather than perhaps something that the Communist
Party may or may not tell one to do.
To me, one of the crucial elements that helps to understand
this dynamic is this idea of ``transformation'' that Ethan
Gutmann mentioned. Whether it is Falun Gong practitioners, or
in some cases people like Gao Zhisheng and others, this very
real focus on transformation and on reeducation, which means
that people are not necessarily being arrested because they're
organizing politically or organizing into some kind of group.
Rather, certainly in the more spiritual cases, the efforts by
the authorities are to get these people to change how they
think.
It is very Orwellian, when you talk to practitioners and
others who have been persecuted in this way. It is very much
like the Party is torturing you to get you to say 2+2=5. If you
keep saying 2+2=4, even if you know 2+2=4, then that in itself
can create a conflict and is one of the things that the Chinese
Communist Party finds threatening.
I just thought that might be another angle that could be
helpful for thinking about these kinds of questions. In terms
of some of the findings that Freedom House reports have
indicated over the past 10 years, I went through many of the
reports and I am just going to talk about a few of the aspects,
and then I'll turn a little bit more in detail to Gao
Zhisheng's story.
First, is this issue of large-scale detentions and
widespread surveillance. According to our findings, perhaps
after a lull because there was such an intense level of
detentions and surveillance in the early years of the
persecution, in the last couple of years, with the run-up to
the Olympics and with a series of politically sensitive
anniversaries, and as part of a much broader crackdown and
intensification of the Communist Party's efforts to control
Chinese society, we saw an intensification of the pressure on
Falun Gong practitioners. There is a range of abuses, though.
Some are arrested and some are not. Some are put under
surveillance. But we certainly saw an intensification of those
efforts targeting that group.
Second, is ongoing torture and deaths in custody. At
Freedom House, we do not have the resources to maintain a
comprehensive record of these deaths, but every year there are
several well-documented cases of Falun Gong practitioners who
are picked up and then killed in custody. There was one Beijing
musician, in early 2008, who was stopped by police with his
wife and the officers found Falun Gong literature in their car
and the two were detained. He died in custody 11 days later. He
was in his early forties. His wife was subsequently sentenced
to three years in prison.
So there are cases like that, and as Ethan had mentioned,
there are overseas Falun Gong groups who have collected pretty
detailed accounts, even though it has not been fully
independently verified, of over 3,000 cases similar to this
young man's.
The third thing that we've observed is the sentencing of
practitioners to long prison terms following unfair trials or
to reeducation through labor camps by bureaucratic fiat. I
would tend to agree with Ethan's efforts to try to understand
what the real number is of people who are detained in these
camps.
There was a fascinating study by the Chinese Human Rights
Defenders group, if anyone would like to look it up, from
February 2009, where they went and spoke to petitioners who had
recently been released from labor camps and interviewed them.
Many of these people said that, in addition to the petty
thieves and drug addicts who make up many of the people in the
reeducation through labor camps, Falun Gong practitioners
constituted a significant percentage of the people in those
camps and there were quite a large number of Christians in some
of those facilities as well.
Some of the conversations I have personally had with people
who came out of these camps included their talking about 140
religious prisoners, mostly Falun Gong practitioners, sometimes
several hundred within an individual camp. So when you look at
the nationwide labor camp population and you start to do the
math, thinking about how many hundreds of camps there are in
China, the number gets up very high, into the tens of
thousands, quite quickly.
The last thing, as I mentioned earlier, is that I do quite
a bit of research on Chinese media and the Internet. Clearly,
Falun Gong is one of the permanent taboo topics and really one
of the most systematically censored on the Chinese Internet.
But what you also see happening is that people who try to
spread information anyway end up getting imprisoned and they
could be Falun Gong practitioners or non-Falun Gong
practitioners. There was a recent case of a Chinese democracy
activist who was sentenced to three years in prison because he
had been caught with DVDs that had information related to Falun
Gong on them.
So it is in the context of this kind of large-scale
persecution of religious minorities that Gao Zhisheng and some
of the other lawyers who have sought to represent Falun Gong
practitioners come into the picture. Just a little bit of brief
background on Gao: He was born in rural Shaanxi Province, where
there are these cave dwellings, and that's where he grew up.
In the late 1980s, he was selling vegetables on the streets
of Xinjiang Province and saw an advertisement that China wanted
to train more lawyers. So, with just a middle-school education,
he taught himself law, and in 1995, he passed the bar exam.
Almost immediately he started taking pro bono cases for the
full gamut of vulnerable groups, from coal miners, to workers.
He very quickly became known nationwide and was actually named
by the Ministry of Justice itself as one of the Top 10 Lawyers
in China in 2001.
So it was in this context that, in 2004, Falun Gong
practitioners started approaching him to see if this lawyer
could help them, and he was hired by an adherent who had been
sentenced to a labor camp. He tried to file for judicial
review, to have that person's case reviewed, because the man
had done nothing wrong, other than being known as a Falun Gong
practitioner.
He went to the judges and the judges would not even look at
the case. They would say, ``Don't you know we don't take Falun
Gong cases? '' So what he decided to do as recourse was to
write a letter to the National People's Congress. But the
incident also sparked his interest in doing a more systematic
investigation into what was happening to this group. It was as
a result of those investigations that, in October and December
2005, he wrote the two open letters to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao
that Doug mentioned earlier.
As Doug mentioned, in response, he and his family have been
put under increasing pressure and abuse themselves. I will not
go through all of the details of the last few years since Doug
had spoken about it, but he disappeared several times and was
held in incommunicado detention. It was really only in early
February 2009, in an incredible feat of courage, that we
learned the full details of the torture he had suffered during
one of his previous detentions.
He issued a letter that was published overseas after he
managed to sneak it out. In it, he chronicles being stripped
naked and shocked with electric batons on his genitals, among
other acts of torture. The guards, at least the way he
describes it, told him that the conclusions of his
investigations into what had happened to Falun Gong
practitioners were indeed accurate, and in fact, the very
torture methods they were using on him were ones that had been
``perfected'' on Falun Gong practitioners previously.
Similar to this point of ``transformation'' that I was
talking about, they continuously tried to pressure him that if
he would simply write some kind of article attacking Falun
Gong, denouncing the previous letters he had written and
praising the Party, then the torture would cease.
Eventually he was released, but almost immediately with the
release and publication of this letter he was abducted again.
His family fled to Thailand from China and is now in New York,
but he has remained disappeared throughout most of 2009. Many
of his friends, colleagues, and lawyers thought he had actually
been killed in prison. He resurfaced in March 2010, and then
disappeared again in April 2010.
Ironically, Gao actually never got a chance to represent a
Falun Gong practitioner in court, but there are over 20 lawyers
who have followed his lead--and he really broke open this
taboo--and have done so.
In response, they have also faced temporary or permanent
disbarment or being beaten. In at least one case, a lawyer,
Wang Yonghang, was imprisoned for seven years under the same
legal provision--that is, this vague legal provision--used to
justify the imprisonment of his Falun Gong clients.
The treatment of these lawyers raises two broader points
related to the future of religious freedom, but also the future
of the rule of law. First, what you see very clearly is that
the tactics that are used and developed to suppress one group
can be quickly applied to others. From the vague legal
provisions, to ``black jails,'' to torture and transformation
methods, we have seen these spreading.
In fact, when you speak to the lawyers and you ask them why
they are taking on these super-sensitive cases that are clearly
putting them and their families at tremendous risk, it is
because, at least the way they explain it, that they feel very
strongly that if this can happen to a group like Falun Gong
practitioners then it can happen to anyone. Especially, since
many of them are Christians, they feel that it could also
happen to Christians and that the only way to protect believers
is to create the kind of independent institutions and rule of
law that will protect citizens from the Party's arbitrary
actions.
Second, I think the more depressing side of it is that the
Communist Party's very intransigent and harsh response to these
lawyers really points to the limitations for progress toward
the rule of law under the current Communist Party leadership.
According to experts like Jerome Cohen, even reforms that had
taken place in previous years have been backsliding.
The point I want to conclude with is actually optimistic,
believe it or not, because parallel to this increased
repression that we've seen is also a growing rights
consciousness among ordinary citizens. In fact, you could argue
that the increasing insecurity of the regime and its increased
repression is in response to this growing and more assertive
Chinese citizenry. Along with workers, bloggers, and
journalists, Falun Gong practitioners are also those, as Ethan
mentioned, who have used incredible ingenuity and creativity to
challenge the repression against them.
So I am just going to end with one last quotation from Gao,
where he reflects, in terms of his own observations, on the
effects that some of these actions, whether it is through the
Internet or other types of grassroots efforts to talk to the
Chinese people and try to convince them to change how they
think about Falun Gong.
More and more people around me, including
professional scholars, government staff members, and
ordinary Chinese citizens have begun to question the
rationale behind the campaign against these believers.
This has been a palpable change. These people have come
to realize how unjust, inhumane, and lawless the
government's violent persecution of the Falun Gong
people is. This rapid, widespread change in attitude
stands in stark contrast to the government's static,
outdated practices.
Now, if you talk to a lot of Chinese people, largely
because of the media censorship and fears of repercussion, you
can get all kinds of answers related to what they think about
Falun Gong. But it's still quite interesting to hear from
somebody like Gao Zhisheng, who is tapped into the grassroots
level of society that at least with some of the people in the
circles that he was interacting with, there had been a change
in how they were thinking about this group.
So, I just wanted to say thank you, and to end on the last
thought that I really do hope that at some point Gao Zhisheng
will be able to be here himself to share with you what he has
to say.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Cook appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much, Sarah.
Thank you to all four of our panelists for some outstanding
presentations.
I would like to open the floor up, for the time remaining,
for questions.
Ms. Ford. I submitted written testimony for the record and
it's outside. But going to this basic question raised by the
panel, of how do we understand the causes of the suppression in
China and what are some of the prospects for reconciliation
between Falun Gong and the Communist Party. In order to
understand those questions, it's valuable to look back at 1999
and really try to understand what the social dynamics were that
led to the ban on Falun Gong.
Mr. Grob. Would you stand, please, and turn around?
Ms. Ford. You've heard a few different explanations for why
Falun Gong was initially targeted, and those include peaceful
demonstration at Zhongnanhai in April 1999, which as Ethan has
alluded to, may have been something of a bait and switch. We
also heard about sort of institutional reasons; Falun Gong is a
large, independent civil society organization, and in China you
simply don't have large, independent civil society
organizations--let alone spiritual or religious groups. There's
also the size of Falun Gong, a few million on the very low end,
up to, by some estimates, 70 to 100 million at the high end.
This represents an enormous number of people who are operating
outside of official sanction.
I could go on. Scholars have posited a number of other
explanations in the broader historical context. But in my view,
I think you need to look at the nature of the Party itself. The
Party is essentially a theocracy. It's a theocracy, except that
it's purely a secular one. But it's essentially a religion. The
fact that people don't believe in the Marxist religion doesn't
make that any less so, it just means that the appeal of the
theology is more tenuous. And so the Falun Gong, not
deliberately but just by its mere existence and its spiritual
orientation, poses a challenge to that. Falun Gong is
associated with the Buddhist school of thought, so it
implicitly challenges the atheism of the party.
Falun Gong, for instance, holds a belief in divine
authority, where Marxism believes in human agency. Falun Gong
teaches that morality, compassion, and virtue are measures of
progress and value, where the Communist Party believes in
material progress. When Falun Gong was first banned in 1999,
the official editorials from the state-run press actually
posited that this was the cause of the ban; they put forth a
dichotomy between theism and atheism, and suggested that Falun
Gong's spirituality and emphasis on virtue and the divine was
incompatible with the official ideology. I think probably the
most candid statement came from an editorial in Xinhua on July
27, 1999, which said simply that the truth, compassion, and
tolerance principles preached by the Falun Gong have nothing in
common with the Socialist ethic and cultural progress we are
trying to achieve. There are more of these kinds of remarks in
my written testimony. But I think this underlies the fact that
Falun Gong is not a legitimate threat, it's not political, and
it's certainly never sought to be a political threat to the
ruling party. What the Communist Party fears is people who
derive moral authority from something other than itself.
So I think this sort of understanding is just useful in
evaluating, what are the prospects of reconciliation, what are
the prospects for ending the persecution. I'll stop there
because I know that we're somewhat over time. So, thanks for
the opportunity to share that.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much for those remarks.
Yes, please. Mr. Geheran?
Mr. Geheran. Hi. I'm Jim Geheran with Intiatives for China.
Thank you. This is a most wonderful panel here. What I'm
hearing is that it's the very nature of the Chinese Government
that they see anything that poses principles or an organization
that is hedging on their power is a threat and is fair game to
be stamped out. So the conclusion that I'm hearing is that the
Government of China, despite its claims of harmony and
stability, has succeeded in alienating just about every segment
of Chinese society, whether it's religious, labor, or whatever.
My question to you, if anyone cares to comment on it, is:
Where is all this alienation going? Where is this frustration
being parked if so much of the Chinese population is being
alienated, and what are the consequences for stability that the
apparent policy of the American Government is just to look the
other way? Are we setting ourselves up for another revolution?
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Professor Tong, would you like to comment?
Mr. Tong. I think this is an important political agenda
among the Party leadership. I don't think anyone knows the
answer. They don't have any solution to it. The way they try to
handle the problem is to manage the problem and not to
eradicate it. They try to localize it so that either labor
movements or discharged PLA soldiers or persons would not form
cross-county, cross-city, or cross-province coalitions. That
is, I think, the best that they can do. So, I will leave it at
that.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Other questions? Yes, sir?
Audience Participant. [Inaudible]--from Human Rights--I
have a question about the----[inaudible].
Mr. Grob. Thank you for those remarks.
Any other questions, comments from the audience?
Audience Participant. A question for Mr. Gutmann.
[Inaudible.]
Mr. Gutmann. I certainly take James Tong's point that there
is, over time, less official Chinese recognition of Falun Gong
as a problem. I think that has some basis. I mean, if I were
saying that there were a million in detention in 2004, it might
well be half a million now.
But last I checked--and I was still doing interviews on
this in 2008, interviewing people who were fresh out of labor
camp, fresh out of the laogai --they were not reporting any
kind of decrease in the prison population, the laogai system
population overall. Now, you might say, well, these are
refugees, and so on. Maybe, but I wasn't pushing them for that
answer.
I'm asking them the same questions. I'm going round the
question a different way, but I'm coming back to the same
point: How many of your people were in your cell block? How
many other kinds of people were in your cell block? It might
take a day before I'd even approach that question, just to get
to the point where they were relaxed enough to just answer it
casually, which is what I'm after. And from those responses, I
do not sense a major decrease in Falun Gong populations.
I think your point is well taken. Falun Gong has pointed to
the Beijing roundups, the Shanghai roundups before the Olympics
and other events--events that get a lot of press. But frankly,
most of the prisoners are coming out of the provinces. They're
not coming out of Shanghai and Beijing. That's where the big
numbers are, and those numbers are fairly unchanging.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Other questions? Yes, in the back.
Audience Participant. [Inaudible.]
Mr. Grob. Professor Tong, then Mr. Shan.
Mr. Tong. Indeed, that is happening. So Mr. Grob earlier
made reference to the rule of law. You cannot have rule of law
that would promulgate specific and arbitrary legislation, for
manufacturers and consumers, or for individual entrepreneurs
and for foreign investors, but denying it to the religious
communities--you cannot protect the economic interests and
assets of the accountholders of the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock
Exchanges, but denying it to religious groups, and not
protecting their economic interests.
Now religious personnel can collect fees for performing
religious functions. Religious organizations can collect
donations from both individuals and corporations both
domestically and also internationally. One of the reasons is
that if they allow non-government organizations like those in
Legal Aid, women's groups, the disabled, and environmental
protection, to receive gifts, both from individuals and
corporations, both domestically as well as from international
organizations, they cannot deny religious communities from
receiving it.
This is also what is happening. The rule of law cannot
discriminate. This is what is happening to the religious
communities as well. This is why I say that the religious
policy is the collateral beneficiary of market reforms. So
today, in the past 10 years, every year, there were over 100
Protestant and Roman Catholic priests, nuns, and seminarians
that are in the United States. Right now there are 300 Roman
Catholic priests and seminarians in the Philippines alone.
There are Roman Catholic priests that serve as chaplains in top
universities in China. There are Roman Catholic priests
teaching philosophy in top universities in China. There is a
Roman Catholic priest, a foreigner, who serves as the director
of a leprosy sanitarium in China. In these areas, China has
relaxed its religious policy.
Even for the five official religions--the State
Administration of Religious Affairs has established a sixth
division. It used to be just the five divisions each for an
official religion. They have established a sixth division for
the other unofficial religions. In some provinces the Eastern
Orthodox religion is now an official religion. In some
provinces, some folk religions are also officially recognized.
Mr. Grob. Thank you, Professor Tong.
Mr. Shan, would you like to add?
Mr. Shan. Yes. I think the Chinese Government is open to
economics. They have developed a strong national capitalist
system which is different from Western capitalism. As that lady
mentioned, when we talk about, is it possible that the Chinese
can give much more room to religion as economics; first we need
to consider the feature of the government, the Communist
system.
So, I mean, the Chinese Government, the open market for
economics; it's basically something that's not new. Before the
Communist Party took over China, in all of China's history,
China has been a free market country, or nation. But yet, every
Chinese Government is sensitive to any religions or spiritual
movements who touch politics. ``Touch politics'' means trying
to use spiritual or religious ideas to justify or to deny the
rulings of the government.
So though they even allow some freedom through a series of
religious systems and policies, they are still very careful
with those religions, especially toward religion called
monotheist religions: Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism.
These monotheist religions are really powerful. They have
played important roles in the whole world's history, so the
Chinese Government knows that, even without the lessons from
Eastern Europe. The Chinese Government and the Communist Party
will continue to suppress or restrict those religions.
Mr. Grob. Thank you.
Ms. Cook?
Ms. Cook. The term that Professor Tong used about managing
is really very relevant, because what you see the Communist
Party doing, is that there is this divide-and-conquer strategy,
this fragmentation of issues, and this idea that in order to
maintain overall control you don't necessarily have to control
everything. So what you can see is that maybe certain groups
will be allowed to be in this legal gray zone, while other
groups will be subjected to horrific and systematic campaigns.
I think my underlying point was that you have a dynamic
that is arbitrary, and that can change at any time. In my
personal opinion, looking at some of the dynamics related to
the house church movement now, there are some worrying signs--I
obviously very much hope it does not go in the direction of
what has happened to Falun Gong practitioners--but there are a
lot of similarities to what the dynamics were surrounding Falun
Gong in the late 1990s, even just in terms of the sheer number
of believers.
Also, it is interesting, this question of whether people
view themselves as political, because whether you talk to Falun
Gong practitioners or you talk to petitioners who are trying to
protest some kind of injustice, they often, at least initially,
wouldn't necessarily see their actions as being political.
They see their appeals as being an effort to address some
kind of grievance that they've encountered personally. In the
case of Falun Gong practitioners, there was the appeal on April
25--and Ethan can talk about this, if we have a moment for him
to talk about his version of events. Or, if you have a chance
to read his article, it really is fascinating in terms of the
description of his account of what happened on April 25.
Falun Gong practitioners weren't necessarily there to ask
for an overthrow of the Chinese Government. They were there
because they wanted to try to register as a group, because they
previously tried to register repeatedly and weren't allowed;
they were there to ask for the release of people who had been
arrested, as Ethan described, in Tianjin; and they were there
to ask that the books of their spiritual teachings that had
been banned be allowed to be published again. That's very
similar to the requests you see petitioners coming to Beijing
over--because they've been evicted from their home, or their
child died in the earthquake in Sichuan Province and they want
some kind of compensation.
So it's interesting because you see this process that a lot
of individuals are going through, where it starts like that,
where they just have a grievance that relates to something in
their personal life that they don't at all think of as
political, but as they start to encounter the system and
encounter the intolerance of the system vis-a-vis their efforts
to find justice for this grievance, that's when you see people
starting to question the authority of the Party.
If you talk to Falun Gong practitioners now, they'll still
say, ``Oh, no, we're not political.'' They'll explain it in the
sense that ``We don't want any political power, we don't want
to replace the Communist Party.'' But there is a sense that so
long as the Communist Party is in power it's going to be very
difficult for Falun Gong practitioners to have full freedom of
religion. There are real difficulties there in terms of what
you might do upon coming to that conclusion.
I think the only other quick point I wanted to make is that
there is also an economic dimension to the persecution. That
relates to the incentive systems, where you see, even at very
low levels, notices on official Web sites offering rewards to
members of the public who will turn in a Falun Gong
practitioner who they notice putting up a posting.
This defector Ethan mentioned who had come from the 6-10
Office and whose media interviews I've read talks about rewards
for people who transform Falun Gong practitioners. Other
evidence points to quotas for the number of transformed Falun
Gong practitioners and promotions being determined based on
that.
So one of the things that you see is that these incentive
systems almost take on a life of their own. That's clearly an
element in some of these issues related to organ transplants,
in terms of the creation of a market and the incentives that
that creates.
That economic dimension is something to think about. It's
something you see in other areas of Chinese society in terms of
the way the Communist Party manages its control. You see that
with censorship, as a certain commercialization of censorship
where the risk that newspapers face, that Internet companies
face if they transgress political directives that are handed
down by the Party are not just political punishments. It is not
just that you're going to be fired, it's that your business
could be shut down and that there are very real economic
implications to that.
So one ends up with these economic incentives that actually
drive some of the political repression that we're seeing, and
that's part of the sophistication and the difference, perhaps,
between the China that we see today and the Soviet Union during
the Cold War. So, I'll just end there. I know that was a bit of
a long comment, but I hope that's helpful.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much, Sarah.
Ethan, did you want to jump in?
Mr. Gutmann. Just very briefly. Minister X--I can't give
his name--was a financial minister at the provincial level and
he described Party meetings in 1998 and early 1999. The
explanation given for eliminating Falun Gong was really simple.
It was just that Jiang Zemin had a problem. Tiananmen Square
would not go away. It interfered with his legitimacy. They had
to have a new target. It was that simple.
I'm not saying that's the ultimate explanation and I'm not
saying it's a perfect explanation, but inside the Party, that
was the explanation. One of the tensions you feel on this panel
about the overall subject is this: Is the Falun Gong crackdown
indicative of how China is handling religious affairs? It's not
clear. There are some ambiguities there. The Falun Gong
crackdown, in some ways, can be seen as a stand-alone.
Yet I hate to use Chinese proverbs here, but you kill the
chicken to scare the monkey, or if you like, a Western proverb
from the New York Review of Books--the anaconda in the
chandelier. The proverbs mean much the same thing, which is
that they are setting an example. They are making it very clear
that there are parameters. And you don't know when the anaconda
is going to come down, and you don't know when the chicken is
going to be slaughtered. That condition applies to religious
believers and it applies to just about every other group in
China as well.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much. We are over time. That was
somewhat discretionary on my part. The problem with having four
eloquent and knowledgeable panelists together with a collection
of eloquent and knowledgeable members of the audience, is it
makes my job as time-keeping taskmaster much more difficult.
So I'd like to wrap it up and just ask one last time if any
of our panelists have a 15-second final thought that they would
like to add.
Ms. Cook. I do.
Mr. Grob. Please.
Ms. Cook. I thought somebody in the audience might ask the
question, well, what do we do about this? So I was trying to
think about what might be some of the recommendations I could
offer. I think there are a few things that might be worth
keeping in mind, though these maybe touch a little bit more on
the micro level than the macro level.
One recommendation relates to international attention to
individual cases and the difference that it makes. Really, Gao
Zhisheng would not be alive, and there are many other former
prisoners of conscience that I have spoken to who would not be
alive today, if it had not been for the international attention
to their cases. As badly as Gao was treated, I think they would
have treated him even worse if they knew that they could just
make him disappear and no one would ask any questions.
Of course, that is the problem for some of the anonymous
Falun Gong practitioners who may have had their organs
harvested. So, I think that's one thing to just keep in mind,
that the advocacy for individual cases really makes a
difference.
Another thing in terms of perhaps U.S. Government policy is
that one of the real difficulties when dealing with an issue
like this--and it's amazing to be able to get a panel like this
to take place--but this really is a topic that, because of the
sensitivity of the Communist Party, there's very little good
research on it. It's something we encounter in doing our
research. So, my recommendation would be to try to find a way
to fund really detailed assessments of individual cases. So how
do you verify individual cases?
In some ways, the lawyers can be a channel for that because
you can find ways in which the lawyers can maybe anonymously be
able to talk about what happened to their clients--who has
actually been imprisoned, for how many years in a way that
might be possible to verify or cross-reference with some of the
reports coming from ChinaAid on Christians or from the Falun
Dafa Information Center on Falun Gong.
The last thing I would say is just that the things also
happen outside of China. I could talk a whole lot--I'm sure
Ethan could, too, and others here as well--about the lengths
the Communist Party goes to outside of China to try to censor
conversations like the one we're having here, whether it's
about this topic or it's about the Uyghurs, or it's about
Tibetans, or it's about any other topic that the Communist
Party finds sensitive. It's amazing how many incidents there
are of events that have been planned and at the last minute get
called off. So from that perspective, I really do commend the
CECC for holding this panel.
So, for anybody who engages in these kinds of issues or
comes across this, one of the experiences I have seen is that
you can call the Communist Party's bluff. So when that call
comes from the Chinese official saying, ``Oh, you know, don't
hold this event,'' then you can call their bluff. There also
have been cases where such incidents went to court, and courts
in Israel and Taiwan ruled that Falun Gong practitioners should
be able to exercise their right to free expression.
So I'll just end on that note. Maybe other people on the
panel have thoughts, but I felt this would perhaps be a
slightly more optimistic way of ending the discussion. That
way, we're not just thinking in terms of ``Oh, my gosh, look at
these terrible things that are happening in China,'' but also
in terms of what we can do about it sitting over here.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Any others?
Mr. Gutmann. Since Copenhagen, the Obama Administration has
done pretty close to a 180-degree turn on China. The State
Department is seriously considering giving the Global Internet
Freedom Consortium money. We don't know if the press reports
are totally accurate, but this is very significant, a big
change. Frankly, I believe that for all these causes, but
particularly for religious causes--and I'm not just talking
about Falun Gong here--a free Internet is essential.
If my small voice can make any difference in encouraging
this development, hopefully it'll move through. We really are
seeing a concerted effort to overcome the Big Brother
Internet--not just temporarily, not just in China, but as a
template for the world.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much, Ethan.
Professor Tong?
Mr. Tong. This year is the 500th anniversary of the death
of Mateo Ricci, one of the first Roman Catholic missionaries
who entered China. I think the lesson from all of this is this:
for spiritual religious movements that want to spread and grow
inside China, one should think about strategy. Then, in the
Catholic church, the question they were faced with was whether
they would insist on doctrinal purity, that is, outside the
church no salvation, and also ancestral worship in China as
well, because the Roman Catholic church forbade it.
But for Ricci and fellow missionaries, this was less of an
issue as finding the right strategy. There are certain things
that need to be emphasized, there are certain things that need
not. It could also be the case that you are wrong, your
doctrine could be wrong. So for Ricci, who waited 16 years just
to find an audience with the Chinese Emperor, he waited. He did
not insist on these doctrines. Finally, many colleagues of his
Jesuit order found employment in the court. So the question is,
one needs to find common ground and what is possible and what
is not possible under the existing circumstances in China. That
is, I think, worth considering.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much, Professor Tong.
Mr. Shan, would you like to have the last word?
Mr. Shan. Yes. Thank you. I think, related to Sarah's
comment, what should we do to improve the situation of
religious freedom in China, I think of course we should be
optimistic in our wish and desires, but I would think that we
should have a practical method or agenda to do that. We will
say, okay, once China becomes a democratic country, it will
solve the problems. That is true. But actually, from a
sociology perspective, we know in Western countries, especially
in Europe, how democracies came out. It was based on the
citizen country built first, which means that citizenship
should be first founded and established in a country according
to law, then the next step would be democracy.
So China is still not a real citizen society. But if you
become a citizen society first, even without democracy,
religious freedom, except political freedom, will be improved,
like Taiwan, before their democracy, and Singapore was a
dictatorship country, but they all allow religious freedom
because they are a citizen society. A citizen society feature
would be fourfold: you have civil rights, social rights,
political rights, and religious rights. So I think that's
something we should put effort in for the first step.
Mr. Grob. Well, thank you very much.
This month marks the 47th anniversary of the famous civil
rights address by President Kennedy in which he quite notably
said that, ``The rights of every man are diminished when the
rights of one man are threatened.'' It is in that spirit that
we address this issue.
The entire transcript of this proceeding, including
statements submitted by our panelists for the record, and the
discussion here today will be published and available online
through our Web site and in hard copy. We look forward to the
continuation of this discussion on this important topic.
With that, thank you to our panelists. Thank you in the
audience. This roundtable is adjourned. [Applause.]
[Whereupon, at 3:58 p.m. the roundtable was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of James Tong
JUNE 18, 2010
Thanks you for inviting me to participate in this roundtable. My
remarks will focus on three issues. The first is how the Chinese
Government views the level of political and security threat the Falun
Gong presents in recent years. The second is what type of Falun Gong
practitioners and their activities the Chinese Government considered
illegal and unacceptable, and ground for legal sanction. The third are
the implications for the Chinese Government positions on religious
freedom at large.
I. THE DIMINISHED SECURITY THREAT OF THE FALUN GONG IN CHINA
Last July was the 10th anniversary of the banning of the Falun Gong
in China. In the past decade, the Chinese state has been effective in
suppressing the public forms of the organized activities of the Falun
Gong. Before the imposition of the ban on July 22, 1999, there were
between 2.3 to 80 million practitioners of the Falun Gong. They were
organized into 39 main stations, 1,900 guidance stations, and 28,000
practice sites. Every morning, these assemblies of Falun Gong
practitioners conducted breathing exercises in city parks and town
squares. They also gathered in special convocations in sports arenas
and auditoriums on special anniversaries. There were also training
sessions lasting 3-4 days where practitioners learnt more advanced
breathing exercise, meditation techniques and Falun Gong doctrine.
Since July 22, 1999, these three forms of organized activities (morning
assemblies, large convocations, training seminars) can no longer be
seen in public. All known Falun Gong organizations (main stations,
guidance stations, practice sites) are duly registered and the
assemblies disbanded. Their leaders were arrested, went into hiding or
self-exile. The rank and file practitioners were registered, and
required to write severance papers where they declared their official
withdrawal from the Falun Gong. Its publications met a similar fate.
Before the official ban, the Falun Gong published 11 titles. Total
distribution of these publications by the Beijing head office (Falun
Dafa Research Society) was over 11 million copies. As part of the ban,
all copies of these Falun Gong publications were seized, their existing
stock confiscated. On the 7th day of the ban (July 29), mass rallies
were held in 17 major cities where these publications were set ablaze
or turned into paper pulp. In sum, these organized activities of the
Falun Gong, as well as their publications enterprise, did not outlive
the official ban on the Falun Gong imposed on July 22, 1999.
There are still periodic reports in official media on arrests of
Falun Gong practitioners for staging protests in provincial and
national capitals, sabotaging media broadcasts, displaying Falungong
banners in public places, but these acts of overt defiance have become
rare in recent years. These can be seen in three developments. The
first is the annual report of the Chief Procurator (the equivalent of
the Attorney-General), which enumerates the major law-enforcement
problems in China in the given year. From 1999-2003, the Falun Gong was
listed as a major law-enforcement problem nation-wide. But from 2004
on, it was dropped from the list. Below the national level, each of the
31 provinces also issues its annual procuracy report, and these largely
mirror the national trend. From 1999 to 2001, a great majority of the
31 provinces (29 in 1999, 28 in 2000, 21 in 2001) list the Falun Gong
as a major law-enforcement problem in their province. But from 2004 to
2008, there was a monotonic decline from 7 in 2004 to 2 in 2008.
The second related development is the absence of followup campaigns
to consolidate the gains of the crackdown and to mop up Falun Gong
remnants and resurgent elements. After the initial nationwide
blitzkrieg in late July, 1999, a four-month nation-wide Strike at the
Falun Gong campaign was launched in summer, 2001, to ferret out
fugitive Falun Gong leaders, underground Falun Gong hide-outs,
inventories of Falun Gong publications they had missed in the first
security-round-up. For some Falun Gong strongholds, local law-
enforcement agencies conducted single-day campaigns every quarter, or
on Falun Gong special occasions. Other localities organized sustained
100-day campaigns to systematically check all printing shops,
photocopying vendors, Internet cafes and rental properties for
suspicious Falun Gong activities. From 2003-2008, no such followup
campaign aimed at crushing the Falun Gong has been reported.
The third related development was the re-reorganization of the
special law-enforcement agency that deals with the Falun Gong. To
prepare for the crackdown, a special agency called the ``June 10''
Office was established at both the central, provincial, and municipal
levels, and even within universities and large state-owned enterprises,
with the exclusive mission to organize, manage and coordinate the
business of arresting, registering, detaining, interrogating Falun Gong
practitioners, and dissolving Falun Gong organizations. As the name
suggests, most were established on June 10, or 40 days before the
crackdown on July 22, 1999. Their full office titles were ``the Office
dealing with the Falun Gong'' or the ``Office dealing with the problem
of Cults.'' After April 2002, close to three years after the crackdown,
most of these offices were renamed ``Offices to maintain social
stability.'' Their mission was broadened to encompass other serious
sources of social stability in the locality, including the protests of
laid-off workers, those who have lost their pensions, peasants evicted
from their land by real-estate developers, tenants with disputes
against landlords in housing projects. In combination, such absence of
followup campaigns, the lack of reference to the Falun Gong as a local
serious security problem in national and provincial procuracy reports,
the reorganization of the June Offices to deal with other local
security issues, suggest that the Falun Gong has ceased to be a serious
political threat and security problem for the regime since 2003 or 2004
to 2008, both at the national and provincial levels.
II. DIFFERENTIATION OF OFFENCES BY AND SANCTIONS OF FALUN GONG
PRACTITIONERS
Next, I want to address the question of what type of Falun Gong
practitioners and what type of offences warranted regime sanction. Let
me begin with the simple fact that there was wide-ranging estimates of
the number of Falun Gong practitioners in July 1999 before the official
crackdown. The estimate varies because there is no clear definition of
what is a Falun Gong practitioner. Unlike Christians, there is no rite
of formal induction into the religious community. Falun Gong
organizations also did not keep a roster of its practitioners. Even at
the conservative low-end estimate of 2.3 million, mass detention and
incarceration of Falun Gong practitioners was out of the question. 2.3
million is 4 times the total population of Washington DC. Even for an
authoritarian state, the Chinese judicial system lacked the capacity to
process 2.3 million cases. There were not enough judges and prosecutors
to prosecute, indict, convict and sentence 2.3 million cases, public
security agents to enforce coercive detention, and the prison and labor
reform systems to house them. In 1998, the year before the crackdown,
the total number of criminal cases prosecuted in Chinese courts was
400,000, and total number of defendants was under 600,000. These
include all cases--homicide, assault, robbery, fraud. At that rate, it
would take the Chinese courts at least 4 years to process the 2.3
million cases. If we use the smaller number of only cases pertaining to
endangering state security, endangering social order, obstructing
social order (the usual alleged crimes that Falun Gong practitioners
were charged), the Chinese court system in 1998 processed under 74,000
cases of such offences. At that rate, it would take them 31 years to
clear the 2.3 million cases. Clearly, lacking the capacity to process
all these cases, they need to differentiate among Falun Gong
practitioners.
On the same official notice announcing the ban issued on July 22,
1999, Falun Gong practitioners were divided into four types. For the
great majority, rank and file members, there would be no disciplinary
action taken, provided they would sign a document renouncing the Falun
Gong and withdrawing from the congregation, after which their names
would be entered into a registry. Disciplinary action refers to
dismissal or demotion from positions held in government agencies or
enterprises, denial or reduction of staff benefits, expulsion from the
Chinese Communist Party, and prosecution in case of alleged criminal
offences. The triage applies to three types of core leaders. The first
group were those who had participated in illegal activities--
participating in protest rallies and distributing Falun Gong
publications on the official black list. If they would also renounce
and withdraw from the Falun Gong, and provide an account of these
activities, then no disciplinary action would be taken. The second type
of core leaders were those who had committed serious errors, not only
participating in, but facilitating protest rallies, not only
distributing, but printing Falun Gong publications. If they would also
renounce, withdraw from the Falun Gong, account for their activities,
and in addition, provide a conscientious confession and self-
examination, and accrue merit (persuading other practitioners to
confess, informing authorities where the hide-outs were, finger-
pointing other core leaders), then no disciplinary action would be
taken. The third type is where the sanctions and disciplinary actions
would be imposed. These were the core leaders who planned and organized
``political turmoil,'' viz, protest rallies in front of party and
government headquarters and other public places without permission, and
who remained unrepentant (refusing to renounce or withdraw from the
Falun Gong, not providing information about the Falun Gong activities
and leaders), then they would be dismissed from the Party, or
government post, sent to labor reform institutions, or prosecuted in
trial if criminal laws were violated.
III. IMPLICATIONS FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN CHINA
The foregoing analysis suggests several implications for the larger
issue of religious freedom in China. The first is religion is still a
managed religion in China. The state claims the right to manage
religion. It claims the authority to define what is religion and what
is a cult, what is official religion and what is not official religion,
what is normal religious activities and what are not. There are
religious affairs bureau at the national, provincial, municipal, and at
county levels in China. The state requires the mandatory registration
of all religious organizations and religious venues, and approval of
the publishing and distribution of the Christian Bible.
Second, the capacity of the party-state to manage religion has been
eroded by market economy. On the supply side, the market economy has
created political space where heterodox spiritual movements can survive
outside the control of the party-state. In the Maoist planned economy,
where virtually the entire working population were employed in
government owned enterprises, lived in public housing,
relied on government issued ration-coupons to get their daily
necessities, religious believers who defied state rule could find no
job, no housing, no food, no clothing. With the establishment of
private and foreign owned enterprises, the end of rationing and the
creation of the housing market, religious believers do not have to
choose between practicing their faith and their maintaining their
livelihood.
On the demand side, 30 years of the market economy has fostered
other social issues that pose threats to the social order and that
compete for administrative attention and action. The annual procuracy
report lists a rising crime wave, manifested in organized crime,
murder, robbery, kidnapping, drug trafficking as serious law-
enforcement problems. Aside from rising crime, the regime has to
contend with another source of social instability. Market reform has
created sources of social conflict that did not exist in the Maoist
era--unemployed workers, those who lost their pensions because their
companies went bankrupt, discharged soldiers who could not live on
their meager severance pay, peasants evicted from their farms because
the township secretary colluded with real-estate developer. In 1994,
there were 10,000 of these collective protests with 50 or more
participants. The number was increased to 74,000 in 2004, or more than
200 incidents per day. In May 2004 alone, there were 2,180 collective
protests each with 500 or more participants. With demonstrators in the
street or outside their offices, these are much more urgent problems
that the regime had to take care of. In comparison to organized and
violent crime, or collective protests, religious congregations are much
more tame, and it is not in the interest of the regime to drive them to
the street to join other demonstrators.
Third, a more benign religious policy is also the collateral
beneficiary of market reforms. Before China launched its market
reforms, there was convergence between its religious policy with the
larger political, economic and social policies. China was a Communist
state, subscribing to Communist ideology. Its 1973 Party Constitution
states that the CCP is committed to the overthrow of capitalism and its
replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its economic system
was a centrally-planned, socialist economy, with no private ownership
of means of production. There was no labor market and no capital
market. In its social system, there was no civil society, no
independent NGOs. Internationally, there was no foreign direct
investments, nor foreign economic presence in China, and were few other
links with the global community. There was a thus a close fit of its
religious policy with other policies of a Leninist state--where the
state had virtual total control over the economy and society, including
religion. But with 30 years of market reform, there is increasing
divergence between its religious policy with its political, economic
and social policies. Politically, China has ceased to be a Communist
state. Major Communist anniversaries, like the 150th anniversary of the
publication of the Communist Manifesto, the 100th death anniversary of
Karl Marx, the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, were not
commemorated with a People's Daily editorial in post-reform China. In
Orwellian fashion, the current version of the Party Constitution was
changed to remove references to the overthrow of capitalism and the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its economy is
arguably a market economy, almost fully integrated with the global
economy, with thriving labor and capital markets. There are now 150
million investment account holders in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock
exchange, while there are only 72 million CCP members. One can say that
there are twice as many capitalists as communists in China today.
Socially, there is an emerging civil society, with over 200,000
registered social organizations, many are independent NGOs, some with
international connections. There are thriving gay and lesbian
communities in major cities, where open gay marriages are celebrated in
downtown Beijing. Thus there is a increasing divergence between its
political, economic and social policies with its religious policy,
which is anachronistic,
belonging the antiquated bygone Leninist era. Especially for a
centralized, hierarchical system where first principles matter, China
needs to reconcile its religious policy that is divergent with the more
forward looking and progressive political, economic and social
policies.
And in some important ways, it has. At least since the promulgation
of the New Regulations on Religious Affairs of March 2005 if not
earlier, the Chinese regime has granted increasing institutional
autonomy to religious organizations and circumscribed the authority of
the state to manage religion. Religious organizations are no longer
required to accept the leadership of the CCP, to pledge support of
socialism and patriotism, as some earlier religious regulations
stipulated. The onerous requirement for mandatory, annual re-
certification of religious venues was dropped. House fellowship
Christians is allowed by a majority of provinces. The authority to
certify religious personnel, to examine and admit candidates for
religious schools, to determine the curriculum of seminaries, to
appoint and dismiss prelates of religious venues, to set the number of
religious personnel in religious venues and the number of religious
venues in each locality, now rests with religious organizations and not
with the local religious affairs bureaus. The economic interests of
religious communities are protected. Religious personnel can collect
fees for performing religious functions. Religious organizations can now
receive donations from both individuals and corporations, and from both
domestic and foreign individuals and institutions. They can also invest in income-generating property and collect rents. When religious property has to
be relocated or demolished in eminent domain cases like highway
constructions, they need to be compensated by fair market value that is
independently appraised. In addition, religious organizations are not
only permitted, but encouraged to engage in philanthropy and social
welfare programs. Both the Protestant and Catholic churches now operate
nursing homes, hundreds of clinics, plus mobile dental and
ophthalmology units. The Catholic church has two leprosy sanatoriums.
There are thriving YMCAs in major cities, offering athletic programs,
vocation training courses, foreign language classes.
Just as significant, Chinese Christian churches have developed
vital links with the global church. Many foreign religious leaders,
including American evangelicals, superiors of Roman Catholic male
religious orders have visited China multiple times, celebrated mass,
gave retreats, and held conferences. Beyond visits, many faculty from
Protestant and Catholic divinity schools in Europe, Canada and the
United States have also taught in Protestant and Catholic seminaries in
China. Outside seminaries, there are foreign Catholic priests who serve
as a director of a leprosy sanatorium, chaplains in Chinese
universities for American and European exchange students, professors
with long-term contracts teaching philosophy and foreign languages in
top Chinese universities. Conversely, hundreds of protestant and
Catholic priests, nuns and seminaries have enrolled in degree programs
in European, Canadian and U.S. divinity schools, after applying for and
were granted exit visas and Chinese passports as religious personnel.
One U.S. Catholic male religious order has sponsored over a hundred
Chinese Catholic priests, nuns and seminarians to study in U.S.
theologates. Upon completion of their European and North American
divinity studies, some Chinese Christians now hold important positions
in the church hierarchy. The present dean of the national Union
Theological Protestant Seminary in Nanjing has a doctorate degree in
divinity in Stockholm. The Seminary will have a new campus on 33 acres
granted by the government, with a construction cost of 140 million
yuan, some of it as grant or loan by the government.
To conclude, there is still no religious freedom in China of the
kind as in the United States. The state still manages, monitors, and
often intervenes in affairs of religious organizations. Outside the
five official religions, the fate is worse. Unregistered temples and
churches have been demolished, their property and publications
confiscated, their prelates jailed. But compared to that of the Maoist
era, or even of the past two decades, there has been conspicuous and
substantial progress. Whether one views the degree of institutional
autonomy of religious organizations, the protection of their economic
interests, their ability to operate social welfare programs, and their
freedom to foster links with their universal community, there are
positive developments in all these fronts, some unprecedented in the
history of the People's Republic. There are increasing signs that
religious policy is converging with the political, economic, and social
policies of the market reform era in China.
Thank you.
______
Prepared Statement of Ethan Gutmann
JUNE 18, 2010
I want to thank the CECC, but my remarks need to go beyond the pro-
forma on this point.
The Chinese Communist Party portrays Falun Gong as an evil cult and
a terrorist entity. The Chinese State's diplomatic arm has made it
clear that the Falun Gong issue is non-negotiable. It is relevant that
this appears to be the first U.S. Government hearing or roundtable
directly focusing on Falun Gong in a decade.
As a former Beijing business consultant, I do not rely on Chinese
official statistics. For example, if you attempt to generate a
population figure for the laogai
system--labor camps, prisons, black jails, detention centers, and
psychiatric hospitals--you get a figure well below a million. Yet if
one counts every detention node and make common-sense estimates, as the
Laogai Foundation researchers do every year, you get a more credible
figure of 3 to 5 million.
According to the UN rapporteur on torture, Falun Gong comprises
half of those prisoners, but this figure might be high. Much of my
research is based on interviews with refugees and defectors. I don't
ask them for estimates of the laogai system, but no matter how
traumatized they are, I do expect them to remember how many Falun Gong
were in their cell-block. After interviewing over 120 individuals,
including defectors from inside Chinese security and well over 50
laogai refugees, I estimate that Falun Gong comprises between 15 to 20
percent of the laogai system. That's about half a million to a million
Falun Gong in detention on average, representing the largest Chinese
Security action since the Maoist period.
We often perceive Chinese human rights problems as an entrenched
structure. But the Party's campaign against Falun Gong more closely
resembles a blitzkrieg, in an increasingly global war, marked by
physical assaults in the United States, Chinese operatives posing as
refugees, and coordinated hacking of Chinese dissident networks and
U.S. Government entities.
We should understand how the war began, the casualty rates, and the
stakes of our neutrality. So I thank the CECC--and especially Toy
Reid--for making this roundtable a reality.
I was in Beijing on July 20, 1999, when the official crackdown
began and sound-trucks flooded the streets. Western reporters flooded
the zone, but with little
cooperation from either the Party or Falun Gong, journalists had
trouble simply penciling in the first question of any news report: What
is Falun Gong?
Falun Gong, simply put, is a Buddhist revival movement: moral
passion, occasional talk of miracles, are-you-running-with-me-Master-Li
individualism, and a reflexive mistrust of establishments and outsider
agendas.
The Buddhist aspect may be unfamiliar and exotic, but, as Arthur
Waldron puts it: ``. . . anyone who knows Asian religion will instantly
see that Falun Gong fits into a tradition that extends back before the
beginning of recorded history.'' What made Falun Gong stand out from
other qigong exercises and meditation practices was a moral system--
compassion, truthfulness, and forbearance--unmistakably Buddhist in
origin.
The revivalist aspect helps explain why Falun Gong insist on being
called ``practitioners,'' rather than ``followers.'' Actually, they
don't follow well. Ask 10 Falun Gong practitioners for a definition of
Falun Gong, and you will get 10 different answers and 10 days of heated
discussions. Yet it was that same do-it-yourself mentality that allowed
Falun Gong to attract 70 million practitioners and skip over the
barriers of Chinese society: class, education, rural/urban, civilian/
military, and Party membership.
Go back to 1995, and follow a diminutive old woman around Yuyuantan
Park in West Beijing. Ding Jing was a Falun Gong coordinator, meaning
she taught the exercises, and kept practice sites clean. Among the
sites were three locations: One catered to employees from China Central
Television; two, the Xinhua News Agency; the third--very well-
attended--attracted Party officials, their wives, and employees of the
Public Security Bureau. From a Marxist perspective, which venerates the
seizure of power using the same template, Ding's tidy practice sites
represented something terrifying. In 1996, Zhuan Falun, in essence, the
Falun Gong bible, was taken out of print.
Given the amorphous floating world in which they traveled--a world
without membership lists, central authority or hierarchy--practitioners
didn't panic. But Luo Gan, the head of the Public Security Bureau,
began to use Falun Gong's perceived infiltration of his own department
to gather, report, and study. Where no hierarchy existed, the Party,
seizing on small clues such as Jing's phone calls to other
practitioners, would map one. Where no political objectives existed,
the Party would create them.
Until 1997, the Chinese media stayed neutral. Local Party leaders
would show up at Falun Dafa day rallies, and chuck little children on
the chin while the cameras rolled. Now critical language began to
appear in the Party-controlled media--flares in the night sky
indicating that the Party was trying something out.
Falun Gong had a method to handle this. Show up en masse. Stay
silent. Then stand around until someone talks to you. The technique
smoothly reversed various negative reports--articles in 1997, a Beijing
TV segment in 1998.
In Tianjin 1999, it failed. I've made my article ``An Occurrence on
Fuyou Street'' available. Employing interviews from both sides, it
tracks the events from Tianjin on April 22 to Beijing on April 25.
Essentially, the demonstration was a set-up. From the portable
surveillance cameras on Fuyou Street, to the armed military unit at the
Forbidden City, it was a Party bait-and-switch to create momentum for a
State-level crackdown.
A former district-level official, ``Minister X,'' recalls that the
Party's decision to eliminate Falun Gong circulated internally long
before any public ban, and he was told to stop granting business
licenses to practitioners. A Falun Gong source saw a similar communique
at Qinghua University in 1998. A former official of the 6-10 Office,
the secret agency created to eliminate Falun Gong, noting the level of
detail in practitioner files, believes that operations must have begun
by 1998.
Without understanding the initial integration of Falun Gong into
the Party, and the Party's initiative in starting the war--essentially
creating the dilemma that threatens them today--one cannot understand
the ineffectiveness of the Falun Gong response. Practitioners wanted to
believe that it was a misunderstanding. So appearances at the petition
office and signed letters were followed by mass detentions and the
first deaths in custody.
Beginning in 2000, based on the safe house occupancy in Beijing, I
estimate that well over 150,000 practitioners made their way to
Tiananmen Square to protest over a year's time. Collectively, a
remarkable number, but they trickled in at 500 to 1,000 per day, and
they stood up and unfurled their banners according to the dictates of
their soul rather than any preconceived strategy. Would a mass strategy
have even been possible? I have provided another article, ``Hacker
Nation,'' on 6-10 surveillance:
Before 1999, Falun Gong practitioners hadn't systematically
used the Internet as an organizing tool. But now that they were
isolated, fragmented and searching for a way to organize and
change government policy, they jumped online, employing code-
words, avoiding specifics, communicating in short bursts. But
like a cat listening to mice squeak in a pitch black house, the
``Internet Spying'' Section of the 6-10 Office could find their
exact location, having developed the ability to search and spy
as a result of . . . a joint venture between the Shandong
province public security bureau and Cisco Systems.
Following capture and initial interrogation under the 6-10 Office,
the laogai system then operated to break the will and ``transform'' the
practitioner, culminating with a public renunciation of Falun Gong. But
it was within the laogai itself that the first effective resistance
began.
Wang Yuzhi was a tough, successful Beijing businesswoman. When the
crackdown started she transformed her office into a secret Falun Gong
printing press. It was broken up, her assets were seized, Wang ran, and
was eventually caught.
The low-ball casualty figure of over 3,000 practitioners who have
died by torture is reasonably well-documented. Some practitioners
simply refused to renounce their belief; others hoped that overcrowded
prisons might contribute to the end of the persecution. Others wanted
to set an example to fellow inmates.
But Wang made it personal--so personal that some of the guards
force-feeding her began wearing paper bag masks so she couldn't
identify them. It became a chess game between the practitioner and the
torturers. Both sides knew that Wang's screams of rage were legendary
throughout the laogai , with rumors seeping out to practitioners
scattered throughout the world. Both sides knew that checkmate--
actually killing Wang--would leave a pyrrhic victory for the state.
The underlying ambiguity of the laogai position was expressed in
the following local maneuver: Rather than writing up a report of
transformation failure, or the euphemism ``death by suicide,'' many
labor camps and psychiatric centers would wait until the torture
reached lethal levels, and then suddenly free the dying practitioner--
especially after the so-called Tiananmen ``self-immolation'' and the
Changchun television hijacking (and I welcome questions on those
incidents).
But Wang Yuzhi lived. Considered terminal on release, she fled
China, and went on to purchase printing presses for the Epoch Times.
Today she will smile at you with her one good eye. This is the face of
insurgency, and to such a face, the Party turned to a more permanent
solution.
The final article that I have made available, ``China's Gruesome
Organ Harvest,'' documents a pattern of retail-organs-only physical
examinations carried out throughout the laogai system. I can find no
rational medical explanation for the procedures, and I conclude that
the commercial harvesting of Falun Gong is real. That finding has been
confirmed by a Taiwanese surgeon who arranges transplants in China.
One addition: While the Bush Administration's consistent focus on
House Christians may have had a Schindler's List effect, inhibiting
widespread harvesting of Christians, members of one sect, Eastern
Lightning, were examined for harvesting. According to interviews by my
colleague Jaya Gibson, so were some Tibetan prisoners. Yet harvesting
of political and religious prisoners probably began in Xinjiang. A
Uyghur policeman witnessed preparation for a procedure in 1994, and I
recently interviewed a Uyghur surgeon who, in 1995, was ordered to take
his medical team into the outskirts of Urumqi and remove a prisoner's
organs while the heart was still beating.
Perhaps harvesting began as a purely black-market operation. But
ultimately prisoners who would not transform--the Wang Yuzhi types--
became too dangerous to release. But the Party had an outlet, the organ
tourists of Japan, Europe, and the United States.
Now the fact that China is the one currently pulling the reins up
on Western organ tourism highlights Falun Gong's stunning lack of
success in making its case in the United States. For many in the Bush
administration, it took one outburst from Wang Wenyi on the White House
Lawn to establish that Falun Gong could not be reliable allies. For
many Democrats, it took one Chinese-planted Wikipedia reference
alleging Falun Gong was anti-gay to ward off sympathy (Falun Gong
teachings on this point are essentially indistinguishable from
traditional Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism).
Practitioners in the West simultaneously watch two screens, a
Western one and a Chinese one. But for them, China is always the
default--and fear of the Party's manipulative abilities runs deep.
Hence we see the definitional problems, the alienating public torture
displays and Daoist demarcations of good and evil--again, aimed at the
mainland.
But Falun Gong's tunnel vision created one unprecedented success.
Along with the construction of the greatest dissident media apparatus
in modern Chinese history, a small group of Falun Gong engineers based
out of a North Carolina suburb devised an Internet-lifeline to transmit
information in and out of China. Along the way, they facilitated the
only unblocked Internet transmissions out of Iran during the aborted
Green Revolution.
If the press is correct, the State Department is considering
awarding these engineers (now known as the Global Internet Freedom
Consortium), significant funding to do more. If my Falun Gong sources
are correct, the Consortium is concerned about taking a sum too small
to make a difference, in exchange for the inevitable Party propaganda
point that they are U.S. agents.
Yet the Party is pushing the two sides together. The State
Department must end Chinese hacking by threatening China's Big Brother
Internet. Falun Gong has perhaps a million in captivity. As much as 1
out of 10 may have already been lost to the surgical knife.
The answer to this dilemma will not be found in parsing Wikipedia.
The question is no longer--What is Falun Gong? How do they define
themselves? But rather--What are Falun Gong's actions? What has Falun
Gong achieved? Against what sort of odds? And here, I believe the
evidence of a decade--from the laogai to the North Carolina suburbs--
speaks for itself.
______
Prepared Statement of Mark Chuanhang Shan
JUNE 18, 2010
The roundtable host, the CECC, asks that ``what factors influence
the Chinese Government's policies toward spiritual movements and drive
its treatment of members of spiritual groups. The Chinese Government
has allowed space for some spiritual movements to operate in China, but
has banned other groups, such as Falun Gong. Why does the Chinese
Government consider some spiritual movements a threat? ''
The above questions touch the root of Chinese political-religious
culture. Through an analysis on the origin of the traditional political
concept of the Mandate of Heaven and its modern applications, and the
case of severe persecution of the Christian lawyer Gao Zhisheng because
of his defending the religious freedom of Falun Gong movement, we may
gain more understanding of the rational of the current Chinese
political-religious culture.
I. ``THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN'' IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE POLITICAL IDEOLOGY
When the Zhou king's advisors persuaded him to attack the Shang
dynasty (1766-1045 B.C.) he refused saying, ``you do not know the
Mandate of Heaven yet,'' but he launched the invasion after he heard
Shang king did horrible things to his people as a tyrant because that
showed the disapproval of Heaven of the Shang king, and Heaven began to
support the Zhou king to replace the former.\1\
After the conquest, the Zhou dynasty (1045-256 B.C.) issued a
number of proclamations, preserved in the Classic of Documents,
persuading the Shang people to submit to their conquerors in the name
of Mandate of Heaven. Zhou rulers argued that:
Heaven, charged certain good men with rulership over the
lineages of the world, and the heirs of these men might
continue to exercise the Heaven-sanctioned power for as long as
they carried out their religious and administrative duties with
piety, rightness, and wisdom. But if the worth of the ruling
family declined, if the rulers turned their backs upon the
spirits and abandoned the virtuous ways that had originally
marked them as worthy of the mandate to rule, then Heaven might
discard them to elect a new family or lineage to be the
destined rulers of the world.\2\
The later historians such as Sima Qian and thinkers such as
Confucius and Mozi interpreted the Mandate of Heaven as a justification
to overthrow evil rulers and start a new dynasty.\3\ Therefore, the
concept proved to have lasting influence and fit neatly into the later
scheme of the Chinese dynastic cycles, ``because it justified all
successful overthrows just as it justified all dynasties that clung to
power.'' \4\ In this theoretical frame, many historical events are
judged as the outcome of Divine favor or disfavor including natural
signs and disasters.\5\
In Chinese history, the emperors may hold different religious
faiths personally, such as Buddhism, Daoism or even Nestorian/Catholic
Christianity, but the Mandate of Heaven stayed as an unchangeable law
in political ideology to justify their governance.
In modern Chinese history, the great revolt against Qing Dynasty by
the Christian sect ``The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace Movement'' (1850-
1864) was led by Hong Xiuquan who viewed himself as ``the second son of
God'' and ``the younger brother of Jesus Christ'' sent by God to
eradicate demons and demon worship and ``the overthrow of the Manchu
would help bring in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.'' \6\ Sun Zhongshan
(Sun Yat-sen 1866-1925) was a Christian and the first president of the
Republic of China (1912-1949). He was a founder of the Guoming Party
and in his process of overthrowing the Qiang dynasty referenced the
book of Exodus in the Bible and spoke of Jesus as a liberator who
motivated him as he said ``Moses did that, I can too,'' and ``Jesus is
a revolutionary, so am I,'' etc.\7\ He also claimed that ``God sent him
to struggle with evil for the Chinese . . . and liberating Chinese from
bondage.'' \8\ He also said ``I am a Christian having fought demons
more than forty years . . .'' \9\ The concept the Mandate of Heaven has
even survived into the Communist China. For example, during the 1989
student movement which led to the Tian-an-men Square massacre, ``many
commentators remarked that the Communist Party has lost the Mandate of
Heaven.'' \10\
Because of this spiritual feature of the political concept,
spiritual or religious movements in Chinese history make it easy to
challenge ruling of dynasties through spiritual moral approaches, thus
Chinese Governments are sensitive to the political-spiritual touch and
are not tolerant of any spiritual movements shaking their ruling
authority before the Chinese people. In addition, Chinese Governments
have tended to keep state and religion separated through promoting non-
religious Confucianism throughout much of their history, and that is an
efficient way to keep religious or spiritual movements out of politics.
II. AN ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT DEGREES OF FREEDOM AND SUPPRESSION OF
CURRENT SPIRITUAL-RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN CHINA, AND THE PERSECUTION
CASE OF CHRISTIAN LAWYER GAO ZHISHENG\11\ (REFER TO CECC SUBMISSION 1,
2: STORY OF GAO ZHISHENG)
``The legal existence of the religious complexities totally relies
on the co-operation and the acceptance of the leadership with the
government, and the government grasps the very final right to choose
the partnership.'' (Ding, August 1995. Volume 15, No. 88)\12\
Though the Chinese Communist government is strongly atheist without
believing in any spiritual things they are still sensitive to any
spiritual movements that touch on politics being seen as a way of
challenging their authority. On the other hand, the government tries
hard to leave more room for those spiritual religions that respect
their authority and abide by the religious policies, mostly in a way of
promoting patriotic nationalism today. For instance, the Protestant
Christian House Churches and Catholic Christian Underground Churches
are persecuted, but the Protestant and Catholic Churches in the
official Three-self Patriotic System (or TSPM) enjoy more freedom.
Tibetan Buddhism is under suppression because of its feature of
religion-politics combination, but Buddhism and Daoism in other parts
of China enjoy comparatively much more freedom because they touch no
politics. Islam among Uyghurs is under suppression because of the
Xinjiang political problem, but Islam among Hui enjoys more freedom.
This is true, not only inside same spiritual traditions, but also if we
compare government treatments among different spiritual movements or
religions in China.
Similarly, the Qi-gong Movement has many branches. Some were
suppressed but others are allowed more freedom. A Qi-gong branch, the
Zhong-gong, was also suppressed and its leader Zhang Hongbao before his
death in 2006 established a shadow government of China in the United
States. Falun Gong, another branch of Qi-gong Movement, in its siege of
the Party headquarters in Beijing on April 25, 1999, by more than
20,000 Falun Gong practitioners, was the main factor for the Chinese
Government to crackdown against the Falun Gong.\13\ The large number of
public protest challenges to the government touched on politics
seriously. One of Falun Gong's protest slogans after they went abroad
is ``Heaven Eliminates Chinese Community Party'' which is an
interpretation of the concept of the Mandate of Heaven.
Among human rights Christian lawyers in China Gao Zhisheng received
the most serious inhuman persecution because he was an attorney
defending the religious freedom and human rights of some Falun Gong
practitioners. The Falun Gong movement was suppressed more than other
spiritual movements in China as CECC has pointed out. Therefore, when
Gao Zhisheng did not gave up representing the Falun Gong members in
China, the government attack of revenge on him has become severe.
At this roundtable, CECC also asks: ``what does the Chinese
Government's treatment of spiritual movements mean for the future of
religious freedom in China? ''
The sociologist Yang Fenggang proposes a Triple-color Market Model
to analyze the religious situation in contemporary China: ``a red
market (officially permitted religions), a black market (officially
banned religions), and a gray market (religions with an ambiguous
legal/illegal status). The gray market concept accentuates non-
institutionalized religiosity (2006, Purdue University).'' His three
propositions are: ``to the extent that religious organizations are
restricted in number and in operation, a black market will emerge in
spite of high costs to individuals; to the extent that a red market is
restricted and a black market is suppressed, a gray market will emerge;
the more restrictive and suppressive the regulation, the larger the
gray market.'' \14\
This model can be applied to conditions in China today by stating
that a red market means that religions or spiritual movements which do
not touch on politics have the most freedom (e.g. non-Tibetan Buddhism
and Daoism); a black market means that banned ones (such as Falun Gong)
which do touch on politics in a way of challenging the Communist
government authority suffer the most suppression. A gray market
ambiguous in their political interest, such as non-institutionalized
Protestant House Church Christianity (Catholic Underground Church is
closer to the black market because of its political feature extended
from the Vatican), will continue to grow larger as others are
encouraged or suppressed.
III. CONCLUSION WITH A SPECULATIVE ANALYSIS ON THE ROLE OF CHRISTIANITY
FOR FUTURE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN CHINA
Chinese Governments through the history have not tolerated
spiritual or religious movements which ``touch on politics'' because
the moral claims they hold make it easy to powerfully challenge the
authority of the government through the concept of the Mandate of
Heaven when a government does not benefit all the people or is seen as
corrupt.
Interesting to note, Christians in China see in the Bible the
mandate to pray for the government to prosper so that they may prosper
also.\15\ While the Protestant Christian House Churches maintain
spiritual and moral standards of behavior and its church setting
teachings emphasize ``we do not touch politics,'' \16\ ``blessed are
those who are persecuted for righteousness'' or even ``love your
enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:10,44)'' as the
followers of Jesus Christ, they are not a direct political threat to
government and seem to have a bright future in China even under
attempts of the government to restrict or suppress them. One important
reason for the tighter restriction and suppression is the lesson
learned by Chinese Government from Eastern Europe's Communist regimes
which collapsed with Christianity playing an indirect role.
The founder and president of ChinaAid Association with the mission
of help the persecuted churches and promote religious freedom in China,
Bob Fu, a pastor and theologian, pointed out that ``House churches
which are committed to the sole headship of Christ in the church and to
evangelism must operate as illegal groups conducting so-called `illegal
religious activities,' and consequently must suffer the administrative
penalties inflicted by the state.'' \17\
Together Christianity in the gray market House Church and the red
market TSPM Church is transforming the condition of religious freedom
in China through the ``new non-institutionalized religious citizen
community'' \18\ established in the whole nation.
(Refer to CECC Submission 3: 2009 Annual Report of ChinaAid
Association.)
--------------------------
\1\ Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire, a history of China to 1600,
(New York-London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 40-41.
\2\ Compiled by WM. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, Source of
Chinese Tradition, Volume I, from earliest times to 1600, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), 27.
\3\ Valerie Hansen., 41.
\4\ Ibid.
\5\ Ibid.
\6\ Richard Hooker, Ch'ing China: The Taiping Rebellion, http://
www.wsu.edu/dee/CHING/TAIPING.HTM
\7\ Wang Zhongxin, Sun Zhongshan and Christianity, Christianity and
China, Volume IV, (The Blessings Foundation, Inc. CA, USA), 15.
\8\ Ibid.
\9\ Ibid., 15-16.
\10\ Valerie Hansen., 41.
\11\ More information on www.freealim.com
\12\ cf. Bob Fu, God and Caesar: Church and State Relations in
Communist China, Professor in Religion and Philosophy at Oklahoma
Wesleyan University for the 2003-2005 academic years.
\13\ James W. Tong, Revenge of the Forbidden City: The Suppression
of the Falungong in China, 1999-2005.
\14\ Fenggang Yang, The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion In
China, The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 93-122 2006 Midwest
Sociological Society.
\15\ Jeremiah 29:7 ``Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city
to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it,
because if it proper, you too will prosper.'' See also, Romans 13:5-6
``Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only
because of possible punishment but also because of conscience . . . for
the authorities are God's servants . . .''
\16\ When Bob Fu was arrested and interrogated in Beijing 1996
because his leadership of a house church, he answered the police after
he was put in the jail: ``I didn't preach anything about politics in
our church, because I believe the separation of the church and state.''
The police answered: ``I want you to know that you must talk politics
everywhere.'' That meant the government wants the house church to
support the communist politics everywhere.
\17\ Bob Fu, God and Caesar: Church and State Relations in
Communist China.
\18\ ChinaAid Association, 2009 Annual Report of Persecution by the
Government on Christian House Churches within Mainland China, Part V 1.
Church as a Corner Stone of Chinese Citizen Society.
SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD #1
Excerpt from www.FreeGao.com
``Christian human rights Attorney Gao Zhisheng was seized by a
dozen police officers and last seen in public on February 4, 2009. Gao
has been repeatedly kidnapped, arrested, imprisoned and tortured by
Chinese authorities for defending the persecuted. He has been an
unyielding and iconic advocate for justice in the Chinese courts and
was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.
On January 21, 2010, the Chinese Government publicly acknowledged
Gao Zhisheng to be in their custody, for the first time since his
abduction more than 365 days ago. In response to a reporter's inquiry,
Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu said: ``The relevant
judicial authorities have decided this case, and we should say this
person, according to Chinese law, is where he should be.'' Mr. Ma then
added, ``As far as what exactly he's doing, I don't know. You can ask
the relevant authorities.''
The Ministry's comments brought a glimmer of hope to Gao supporters
around the world. Since December 2009, rumors of Gao's death from
torture in prison have spread uncertainty. Just one week before Mr. Ma
spoke to the media, Gao's older brother, Gao Zhiyi, was informed by a
police officer that Gao Zhisheng had gotten ``lost and went missing
while out on a walk'' in September, 2009. The news of his death, then
alleged disappearance, devastated Gao's wife and children.
Finally, on January 20, 2010, an Australian newspaper reported from
an inside source that ``Gao is still alive at present . . . he's not
missing.''
SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD #2
Excerpt from ChinaAid's newsletter, distributed by ChinaAid on May 10,
2010, via email
``ChinaAid thanks you for your continued support of Gao Zhisheng.
We have learned that Gao was last seen on April 15-16 visiting his in-
laws in Xinjiang. He did not return to his Beijing apartment the
following week, as he was scheduled to according to the family. He has
not been seen or heard from him since.
``ChinaAid is actively searching for Gao and news of his condition
and whereabouts. With no news in over three weeks, we fear Gao Zhisheng
has been forced to disappear again. We will continue to press for
information, and keep all Gao supporters updated with the latest
confirmed news. We thank you for your continued prayers and support for
Gao Zhisheng, and will not relent until Gao has been released, and is
able to reunite with his family in the United States.
``As we continue to press for Gao Zhisheng, ChinaAid remains
committed to defending other persecuted faithfuls in China. Hundreds of
thousands suffer persecution for their faith, and in extreme cases,
like that of Uyghur Christian Alimujiang Yimiti, it takes a global
effort to call for justice.''
SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD #3
Excerpt from the 2009 ChinaAid ``Annual Report of Persecution by the
Government on Christian House Churches within Mainland China,'' Part V,
Section 1. Church as a Corner Stone of Chinese Citizen Society
``In his classical book ``Citizenship and Social Class'' (1964), T.
H. Marshall defined modern citizenship as ``a personal status
consisting of a body of universal rights, i.e., legal claims on the
state, and the duties held equally by all legal members of a nation-
state (Marshall; Brubaker 1992).'' He also defined three basic rights
of modern citizenship: civil rights, political rights and social
rights.
Many scholars agree that the legal requirements for an emergent
capitalist society were chiefly responsible for the birth of modern
citizenship rights and that ``the struggle to extend citizenship in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries was carried on primarily by English
working class through such important democratic movements as Chartism,
the Factory Movement, and trade unionism,'' yet Margaret R. Somers
argues that the ``social and political movements of those tumultuous
industrializing epochs were built primarily on the efforts, political
identities, and social activities of rural industrial working peoples
in the pastoral regions (Somers 1993, Michigan University).'' For
Somers, ``varying patterns of institutional relationships among law,
communities and political culture were central factors in shaping
modern citizenship rights,'' and she argues that citizenship as an
instituted process rather than a status.''
To apply the above theories to China, we should admit that Chinese
society is just starting to evolve into a citizenship society. Based on
the 2009 report of persecution on House Church Movement in China, we
also need to add religious rights, which were not such a concern for
19th and 20th century Christian Europe, to the three citizenship rights
listed above. Then, to apply these four central rights theory we can
see three major elements in the institutional process contributing to
the construction of a Chinese citizenship society based on the emerging
national capitalism since 1979. In the last 20 years these have been:
the Western Law infrastructure borrowed by China, a Church Movement
Community, as well as traditional symbolic political culture
originating in Communist ideology, Confucianism and other ideas, which
have stimulated needs for citizenship (Shan Chuanhang, 2008, Boston
University, with an acknowledgment to Dr. Nancy Ammerman). The
community used to be in the three major elements formula was an
intellectual one but it faded away from the instituted process after
1989's brutal suppression and replaced by church movement community.
The Christian communities (mostly House Church Movement and Three-
Self Church) in China grew fast in an invisible model because of
persecution, yet it emerges as a new social and spiritual block in
society, through not giving up meeting together. Beijing Shouwang,
Shanghai Wanbang, Chengdu Qiuyu zhifu and Guangdong Liangren house
churches were all typical examples in 2009 of churches that did not
give up meeting together under severe pressure from the government.
Christian communities, similarly to the pastoral regions of Europe in
19th and 20th centuries, can also shape powerfully a Chinese
citizenship society with a possible future ``plausibility structure''
(Peter L. Berger, 1966, Boston University).
______
Prepared Statement of Sarah Cook
JUNE 18, 2010
Good afternoon.
One of the topics I've been asked to speak about is the story of
Gao Zhisheng, a leading Chinese human rights lawyer and vocal advocate
for religious freedom, particularly for Falun Gong practitioners.
Several years ago I had the honor of co-editing the English translation
of Gao Zhisheng's memoir A China More Just. So, as I was considering
how to begin today, I tried to think of what Gao would say if he were
here today himself. There are two points that he would probably
emphasize.
First, he would give a heartfelt thank you. Thank you to the
Commission for organizing this panel. Thank you to the United States
government for taking an active interest in the human rights abuses
taking place in China. Thank you to those in the audience who care for
the Chinese people.
Second, he would likely seek to convey the urgency of the current
situation and the brutality of the treatment suffered by large numbers
of Chinese people generally, but also of Falun Gong practitioners in
particular. It is clear from his writings that the account after
account of severe torture he heard from the Falun Gong victims he had
interviewed left a profound impression on him and served as a key
catalyst in his advocacy on their behalf.
With a trembling heart and a trembling pen, I record the
tragic experiences of those [Falun Gong practitioners] who have
been persecuted in the last six years. Of all the true accounts
of incredible violence that I have heard, of all the records of
the government's inhuman torture of its own people, what has
shaken me most is the routine practice of assaulting women's
genitals. Almost all who have been persecuted, be they male or
female, were stripped naked
before being tortured. No words can describe our government's
vulgarity and immorality.\1\
While not spoken in quite such colorful language, Freedom House's
findings generally reflect what Gao had discovered.
But before moving onto some specific details, I'd like to take a
step back to address the question of why this is happening and to point
out that the repression of Falun Gong and spiritual movements in China
cannot be viewed in a vacuum. Rather, it is part of an elaborate
machinery of suppression that arbitrarily and systemically denies
independent thought and expression in a range of areas in Chinese
society. Moreover, Freedom House's findings indicate that this
repression is, in some respects, getting worse.
In the past few decades, the Communist Party's tactics for
suppressing free thought have become more sophisticated. But the
underlying principle and institutional dynamic remains the same: the
decision of what is approved or forbidden is made arbitrarily by Party
leaders and that decision is generally based on their perception of
threats to their monopoly on political power or legitimacy, whether
these threats are real or imagined. This dynamic is reflected in every
set of media censorship directives issued by the Communist Party's
Propaganda Department that gets leaked and posted online, but it
applies equally to spiritual movements.
Thus, whatever the specific timeline of events in the mid to late
1990s, one angle for explaining the banning of Falun Gong and other
smaller spiritual groups is that Party leaders did so: a. because they
could and there was no institutional mechanism like an independent
judiciary to stop them; and b. because the Communist Party generally
has a low tolerance for groups or individuals who place any authority,
spiritual or otherwise, above their allegiance to the Party.
For persecuted Tibetans, this authority is the Dalai Lama; for
persecuted human rights lawyers--whom I'll get to in a moment--it is
the law; for persecuted Falun Gong adherents, it is the dedication to
spiritual teachings centered on the values of truthfulness, compassion,
and tolerance. The Party's emphasis on ``transforming'' Falun Gong
practitioners--similar to its ``patriotic education'' campaigns in
Tibet--is one indication of this pursuit of suppressing independent
thought.
Since 1999, Freedom House's annual and other publications have
recorded the ongoing rights abuses suffered by those who practice Falun
Gong in China. Several aspects of the persecution stand out from a
review of those findings. I'll mention them briefly here and am happy
to followup on in more detail during the Q and A.
First, large scale detentions and widespread
surveillance. These appeared to intensify in 2008 and 2009 even
from the already high levels experienced over the past decade.
Falun Gong practitioners were a key target in what amounted to
a broader crackdown surrounding the Olympics and a series of
politically sensitive anniversaries. In addition to detention
and monitoring, this phenomenon included regular citation in
official statements on ``strike hard'' campaigns and in offers
of monetary rewards to members of the public for turning in
individuals distributing information related to Falun Gong.
Second, ongoing torture and deaths in custody. While
Freedom House does not have the resources to maintain a
comprehensive record of such deaths, well-documented individual
cases come to light each year, while overseas Falun Gong groups
have gathered detailed accounts of over 3,000 people killed in
the last decade. In one high-profile case from 2008, Beijing
musician Yu Zhou died in custody 11 days after being detained
for possessing Falun Gong literature in late January; his wife,
Xu Na, was sentenced in November to three years in prison.\2\
In January 2009, Chongqing resident Jiang Xiqing died while
held at a ``reeducation through labor'' camp for practicing
Falun Gong; lawyers seeking to investigate his death were
detained and beaten.\3\
Third, the sentencing of practitioners to long prison
terms following unfair trials or to ``reeducation through
labor'' camps by bureaucratic fiat. Based on interviews with
recently released detainees, a February 2009 study by the
Chinese Human Rights Defenders group reported that in addition
to petty thieves and drug addicts, Falun Gong practitioners
constituted a significant percentage of those incarcerated in
the camps, as did Christians in some facilities.\4\ Given a
nationwide labor camp population numbering in the hundreds of
thousands, if not more, and former prisoners' accounts of
hundreds of religious prisoners in individual camps, this
translates into potentially tens of thousands of detainees.
Fourth, Falun Gong is a permanent taboo for Chinese
media outlets and one of the most systematically censored
topics on the Internet. In addition to the well-known use of
technical filtering to block access to Falun Gong-related
websites, tests conducted as part of a recent Freedom House
study of Internet freedom in China found that entries
containing the keyword ``Falun Gong'' (as well as ``June 4'' or
the ``Dalai Lama'') could not be displayed on Chinese blog
hosting services, including the simplified Chinese version of
Microsoft's MSN Space Live service and Skype's Chinese version,
Tom.\5\
Those who seek to spread information despite these
restrictions risk detention and imprisonment. Several well-
documented cases have emerged in recent years of Chinese
citizens imprisoned simply for downloading, printing, or
possessing Falun Gong-related materials, either for their
personal use or for sharing with others. These included victims
who were not Falun Gong practitioners. For example:
In November 2008, Liu Jin, a former university
librarian, was sentenced to three years in prison in
Shanghai after she downloaded information about Falun
Gong from the Internet and passed it to others, which
her lawyer argued was a common occurrence.\6\
In March 2009, Zhang Xingwu, a retired professor
and Falun Gong practitioner from Shandong province, was
sentenced to seven years in prison after security
forces broke into his home and confiscated VCDs and
religious texts related to Falun Gong.\7\
Last month, grassroots democracy activist Ren
Ming from Shenzhen was reportedly sentenced to three
years in prison for distributing CDs bearing a Falun
Gong symbol.\8\
It is in this context of a persecuted religious minority facing
large scale, brutal treatment from the authorities on the one hand, and
silence, if not cooperation, from most of society on the other, that
Gao Zhisheng and other lawyers' efforts to represent Falun Gong
practitioners become relevant.
As brief background on Gao, he was born in rural Shaanxi province
and grew up in his mother's cave dwelling. In the late 1980s, he was
selling vegetables on the streets of Xinjiang province when he came
across and advertisement that the government was seeking to train
lawyers. So, with just a middle school education, he decided to teach
himself and in 1995, he passed the bar exam. In addition to his regular
cases, he immediately started taking pro bono ones for the gamut of
China's vulnerable groups. He soon became known nationwide and in 2001,
was named one of China's top 10 lawyers after a legal debate
competition sponsored by the Ministry of Justice.
It was in this context that in 2004, Gao was one of the first
lawyers to break the Falun Gong taboo. He was hired by an adherent who
had been sent to a labor camp and was stunned that judges repeatedly
rejected his efforts to file for judicial review. He writes about
visiting multiple courts in one day and being told by three judges:
``Don't you know we don't take Falun Gong cases?'' With legal avenues
closed, Gao decided to write an open letter to the National People's
Congress and a few months later, he conducted the first of two in depth
investigations into the persecution of Falun Gong. In October and
December 2005, he wrote two open letters to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao,
detailing the torture he had uncovered and urging them to end the
atrocities.
In response, as many here probably know, he and his family were put
under escalating pressure and abuse themselves: from 24-hour
surveillance to having his law firm shut down and license revoked, to
an attempt on his life and repeated incommunicado detentions. In
December 2006, Gao was sentenced in a one day trial to three years in
prison. But this was suspended and the Chinese authorities have instead
used ``disappearance'' rather than imprisonment as their preferred
tactic against him.
It was only in February 2009, that, in an incredible feat of
courage, we learned the full details of the torture he had suffered
during his previous detention. In a letter he managed to send abroad,
Gao chronicled being stripped naked and shocked with electric batons on
his genitals, among other acts torture. Guards reportedly told him that
the conclusions of his investigations were accurate and that these were
indeed the torture methods ``perfected'' on Falun Gong practitioners,
all the while pressuring him that if he simply said a few negative
comments about Falun Gong and/or praise to the Party, the torture would
cease.\9\ Almost immediately with the release of the letter, Gao was
abducted again. His family managed to flee China to Thailand, but Gao
remained ``disappeared'' throughout much of 2009. As the months went
on, his family, friends, and fellow lawyers grew increasingly fearful
that he had been killed in custody. In March 2010, the authorities
allowed him to resurface following an intense international campaign on
his behalf. But after the international limelight faded, he disappeared
again in April. He hasn't been heard from since.
Ironically perhaps, Gao never actually had the opportunity to argue
in defense of a Falun Gong client in court. But, at least 20 lawyers
have followed in his footsteps and done so. In response, they too have
been temporarily or permanently disbarred, beaten, abducted, shocked
with electric batons, held in a cage at a police station, and in at
least one case, imprisoned for seven years under the same arbitrary and
vague legal provision used to justify imprisonment of his Falun Gong
clients.
The authorities' mistreatment of these lawyers reflects two broader
implications of the campaign against certain spiritual groups for the
future development of religious freedom and rule of law in China.
First, the tactics and strategies developed to suppress one group
can be quickly and easily applied to others. From vague legal
provisions, to ``black jails,'' to certain torture and
``transformation'' methods, the lawyers and others have remarked on how
elements first used against Falun Gong practitioners are then applied
to other victim groups, including the lawyers themselves. It is evident
from the writings and comments of Gao and other lawyers that the reason
they take such a risk defending Falun Gong and other persecuted
religious believers is because they feel very strongly that if the
current system is not able to protect these innocent people from such
severe abuses, others are at risk at well.
Second, the Communist Party's intransigent and harsh response to
these lawyers highlights its general reluctance to institute genuine
rule of law. Indeed, as Jerome Cohen has repeatedly noted in his
writings, in the past two years there appears to have been a
backsliding on even previous, limited reforms, while Party control over
the judicial system has tightened.
This reality raises complex questions of what actions the United
States government and other members of the international community
might be able to take to improve the situation for individuals like Gao
or Falun Gong practitioners. While not comprehensive, I hope that the
following three recommendations may prove helpful as a starting point
for such a discussion:
1. Continue to lobby for the release of individual prisoners
of conscience: As harshly as Gao Zhisheng has been treated by
Chinese security forces, there is little doubt that his
situation would be even more dire without the intense
international pressure that has been applied to the Chinese
regime on his behalf. Other former prisoners whom I have
interviewed and who were the subject of international appeal
campaigns--including Falun Gong practitioners--have repeatedly
testified to the noticeably less harsh treatment they received
compared to their fellow, more internationally anonymous,
detainees.
2. Support initiatives to independently research and verify
more individual cases: Central to the ability to advocate on
behalf of individuals and to gauge the full scale of abuses
targeting spiritual movements is the capacity to verify
individual cases of religious prisoners. Despite the
sensitivity of the issue and difficulty in obtaining
information about Falun Gong or Christian prisoners, there are
avenues for doing so. Increased support, including funding, for
groups taking the initiative to compile credible prisoner lists
could translate into real protection for members of these
persecuted minorities.
3. Remain vigilant in the face of Chinese official pressure
to self-censor outside of China: Although this is not the focus
of today's discussion, pressure to self-censor beyond China's
borders is a daily reality for Falun Gong practitioners--
similar to Tibetans, Uighurs, and others--who seek to organize
events that might expose abuses in China or challenge the
Communist Party's dominant narrative about the country's
current reality. It is critical that outside China, hosts of
cultural, academic, or other events be vigilant in protecting
the right to free expression for all, including those whose
voices are systematically silenced within China.
There is one last point I'd like to make before I conclude--on a
more optimistic note. Parallel to the increased repression we've seen
in China in the past few years has been a growing rights consciousness
on the part of ordinary citizens. Indeed, one might argue, the
insecurity of the regime in the face of a more assertive citizenry is
one reason for the expanded repressive apparatus. As with workers,
bloggers, and journalists, Falun Gong practitioners have also been
among those using incredible ingenuity, creativity, and courage to
challenge the repression against them, primarily by trying to convince
fellow citizens of the justice of their cause.
Having begun with quoting Gao, I'd like to conclude with a few his
words on the potential affect of their efforts.
More and more people around me, including professionals,
scholars, government staff members, and ordinary Chinese
citizens have begun to question the rationale behind the
campaign against these believers. This has been a palpable
change. . . . These people have come to realize how unjust,
inhumane, and lawless the government's violent persecution of
the Falun Gong people is. This rapid, widespread change in
attitude stands in stark contrast to the government's static,
outdated practice. It is really quite thought-provoking.'' \10\
I hope that at some point in the future, Gao will be able to be
here himself to speak these words. Thank you.
----------------
\1\ Gao Zhisheng, A China More Just, Broad Press USA (2007); pg.
137
\2\ Freedom House, ``China,'' Freedom in the World 2009: http://
www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=363&year=2009&country=7586
\3\ Freedom House, ``China,'' Freedom in the World 2010: http://
www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=22&year=2010&country=7801
\4\ Chinese Human Rights Defenders, ``Re-education through Labor
Abuses Continue Unabated: Overhaul Long Overdue,'' February 2009:
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dclarke/public/CHRD--RTL--Report.pdf
\5\ Freedom House, ``China'' Freedom on the Net 2009: http://
www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=384&key=197&parent=19&report=79
\6\ Ibid.
\7\ Freedom House, ``China,'' Freedom of the Press 2010
(forthcoming)
\8\ Chinese Human Rights Defenders, ``China Human Rights Briefing
Weekly: May 18-24, 2010,'' May 26, 2010; available at http://
blogs.amnesty.org.uk/blogs--entry.asp?eid=6592
\9\ Gao Zhisheng, ``A Letter from the Twenty-first Century
Dungeon--Over Fifty Days of Endless Inhumane Tortures in the Hands of
the Chinese Government,'' published by China Aid on February 9, 2009;
http://chinaaid.org/pdf/
Human%20Rights%20Lawyer%20Recounts%20Torture.pdf
\10\ Gao Zhisheng, A China More Just, Broad Press USA (2007); pg.
86
Submission for the Record
----------
Prepared Statement of Caylan Ford, Falun Gong Practitioner and
Volunteer Analyst and Editor, Falun Dafa Information Center
JUNE 18, 2010
I would first like to thank you for the opportunity to submit this
statement, and more importantly, for your efforts to shed light on this
topic. My name is Caylan Ford, I am a practitioner of Falun Gong, and
also a volunteer analyst and editor with the Falun Dafa Information
Center. Today I would like to speak to the question of how Falun Gong
perceives the persecution in China today, both in terms of its origins
and its meanings, as well as the forces that will contribute to its
eventual end. I should add the caveat that all Falun Gong practitioners
have their own interpretations and understandings of these questions,
but I will do my best to illuminate broad collective understandings.
I'll first address the causes of the suppression in China. This is
an issue that defies easy comprehension. Journalists, scholars, and
other observers have offered a number of compelling explanations to
help account for why the Chinese Communist Party viewed the peaceful
and apolitical Falun Gong as such a threat. The size of the practice is
the first thing that comes to mind. By 1999, widely cited government
estimated put the number of Falun Gong practitioners in China in excess
of 70 million people. That's larger than the membership of the
Communist Party at the time, and it's likely the largest independent
civil society group in the history of the PRC.
Second, Falun Gong existed outside of official sanction; in March
of 1996, because Falun Gong refused to charge money for the practice
and wished to exercise autonomy over its activities, it withdrew from
the state-run Qigong Research Association. Subsequent attempts to
register with the government in another form were rebuffed, and so
Falun Gong was, for three years, a vast popular religion with no
oversight by the state. Third, some of the personalities involved--
namely Luo Gan and then-Party chief Jiang Zemin--were uniquely
suspicious or jealous of Falun Gong's popularity, and as Willy Lam
suggested in 2001, Jiang may have intended the suppression to be a
means of consolidating personal power.
There are other explanations as well that place the crackdown
against Falun Gong in the context of broader cycles of ``fang and
shou'' (relaxation and tightening) in Chinese politics. That is, after
a remarkable period of tolerance toward qigong practices in the 1990s,
the Communist Party again sought to reign in the influence and autonomy
of these groups.
All of these explanations likely contain some truth. Yet even taken
together, they cannot account for the ferocity with which the
suppression of Falun Gong has been pursued. For that, one must look to
the very foundations of the Communist Party's rule, and understand how
Falun Gong's spiritual message, however benign, undermined the sources
of the Communist Party's legitimacy.
The PRC, in a sense, a kind of theocracy, only its religion is a
secular one. The Party's mandate to rule derives from its claim to
possess exclusive knowledge of certain Truths. The Marxist/Leninist
ideology, including its vision of history and definitions of progress,
serve as the ideological basis for Communist Party rule. That no one
really believes in Marxism in contemporary China does not make this
less so; it only means that the Party's ideological standing is more
tenuous than in past decades, and its eagerness to suppress others may
be more acute.
Falun Gong, and other independent religious groups, challenges the
Party's ability to command faith and allegiance. The Communist Party
believes in the primacy of human agency. Falun Gong believes that human
agency is subordinate to divine authority. Where Mao Zedong spoke of
struggling against the heavens, Falun Gong reconnects with a
traditional Chinese aspiration to live in harmony with the Dao. Where
Communism explains human behavior as a function of material
determinism, Falun Gong's beliefs hold that human beings are innately
good, that they are driven by conscience and compassion. And where the
Party has sought to enhance its legitimacy over the last two decades by
fostering economic growth, Falun Gong stresses that virtue is the
source of true value.
For approximately one week immediately following the ban on Falun
Gong, carefully crafted editorials in Xinhua and the People's Daily
which explained the ban focused on Falun Gong's moral philosophy. An
editorial appearing in Xinhua on July 27, 1999, proclaimed that ``
`truth, kindness and tolerance' principle preached by Li Hongzhi has
nothing in common with the socialist ethical and cultural progress we
are striving to achieve.''
Another wrote that ``Marxist dialectic materialism and historical
materialism represent the world outlook and methodology of the
proletariat, and . . . the scientific theories of Marxism established
on the basis of this world view should serve as the spiritual pillar of
communists. Falun Dafa as created by Li Hongzhi preaches idealism and
theism . . . and thus is absolutely contradictory to the fundamental
theories and principles of Marxism.'' And so on.
These editorials lasted little more than a week before eventually
giving way to more incendiary attacks. But while they lasted, they
provided a candid glimpse at why the Party viewed why Falun Gong with
such trepidation. It is not because Falun Gong practitioners sought
political power (they didn't), nor was it merely because of their size
or independence from the state. Rather, Falun Gong offered a compelling
moral philosophy, rooted in China's spiritual traditions, that was seen
by Jiang Zemin as undermining the already faltering appeal of the
party's ideology, and that cast the Party's moral deficiencies in stark
relief.
And so, because China's rulers believed themselves to be at odds
with the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance and with the
theistic spiritual orientation of Falun Gong, they have pursued its
adherents with incredible resolve.
Understanding this dynamic can help answer another important
question: why have so many Chinese Falun Gong adherents--tens of
millions, by some estimates--persisted in exercising their faith when
confronted with the full force of China's persecutory apparatus bearing
down on them? Why don't they simply denounce Falun Gong? The objective
of the imprisonment and the violence, after all, is forced religious
conversion; if adherents recant, they are freed from detention. If they
don't, they are held extrajudicially and subjected to painful
punishment. And yet the choice for millions of Falun Gong adherents has
been to persist in spite of the threats; to continue practicing Falun
Gong, and in many cases to risk their lives in order to tell their
compatriots about the persecution and the practice.
To be clear, Falun Gong practitioners don't invite martyrdom. They
seek not to be tortured; they want out of labor camps. But given the
choice between recanting their faith or being tortured, most still
choose the latter. What motivates them?
The answer has already been alluded to. Falun Gong is suppressed
because the Party fears that if people believe in divine authority, if
they seek moral and personal inspiration from a religious belief
system, then the Party loses control. The Communist Party dictates that
a person's life belongs to the cause of Communism; a person possessed
of a spiritual faith, by contrast, believes that life originates with
and is connected to something which transcends this physical existence.
They are thus far more impervious to control or coercion with threats,
violence, with material incentives; they are their own people, their
hearts and minds not the property or subject of the state.
Falun Gong's capacity to resist elimination in China lies precisely
in its belief, one shared by all religions, that life goes on in the
hereafter, and that the state in which you exist in the next life is
connected to how you choose to live in this one. Falun Gong's faith
holds that the virtues of Truth, Compassion, and Tolerance describe the
intrinsic nature of the universe itself; that they are eternal and
undying. And if a person seeks to live in line with these principles,
they are connecting to something far greater than themselves. If a
person lives a life of honesty, of courage, of compassion and justice,
then in that act alone they forge something that is everlasting; they
achieve a kind of immortality.
To observers who do not believe in an afterlife, who are pure
pragmatists, Falun Gong's response to persecution as folly. But even if
you don't believe in a life hereafter, there is still something to be
said for living a life devoted to principles, or to believing that
maybe virtue is its own reward. Posterity seldom remembers pragmatists.
The great figures of history are men possessed of principles who made
immense personal sacrifices in defense of justice. Were they
pragmatists, people who put their own immediate interests ahead of
principles, we would not know their names, nor would we be able to
enjoy their legacy.
This explains why Falun Gong adherents have resisted suppression in
China, and why they have not folded in labor camps and under threat of
violence. The same rationale also explains how Falun Gong has responded
to the persecution.
At some point in the last decade, you have likely encountered some
manifestation of Falun Gong's response to persecution: the silent
vigils of meditation kept outside Chinese embassies or consulates, the
appeals of a young woman whose sister is held in a labor camp in China,
or the rallies and marches meant to raise awareness of persecution in
China. You have likely heard about the media outlets that some Falun
Gong adherents started to provide an alternative to Chinese state-run
television and newspaper, or about how software developed by American
Falun Gong practitioners is now used to circumvent government
censorship of the Internet from China to Iran, Syria to Burma.
Some of these activities--and especially Falun Gong practitioners'
efforts to encourage people to denounce their affiliations to the
Communist Party--bear distinctly political overtones. This has given
rise to the belief in some circles that the Falun Gong community has
become a political force in China, or even that it seeks power for
itself.
But look more closely at Falun Gong's resistance and you find that
it lacks the qualities of a true political movement. While most Falun
Gong adherents believe that good government should be one that respects
freedom of speech, of press, rule of law and that institutionalizes a
separation of church and state, few of us would be likely to describe
the solution to our suppression in China as lying in institutional or
political change. Falun Gong has never sought to prescribe what China's
government (or any other government) should look like. Its adherents do
not covet political power or influence, and they do not participate in
debates on other social or political issues. To put it plainly, Falun
Gong adherents ascribe relatively little importance to political
institutions in general.
When the persecution began, Falun Gong initially responded somewhat
incredulously, believing that the authorities had simply made a
mistake. These were people who based their self-identity on being law-
abiding, peaceful people, and they
believed that if they simply explained themselves, the suppression on
Falun Gong would be lifted.
Adherents' response was characteristic of what political scientist
Kevin O'Brien describes as China's ``rightful resisters'': people who
did not want to challenge the government, but instead wanted it to
uphold its own laws and protect existing social contracts. These are
people who, rather than going underground to engage in subversion,
sought the government's attention and made appeals to its institutions
and leaders in good faith. To that end, Falun Gong practitioners from
across the country traveled to local petitioning offices where they
hoped to explain why Falun Gong was no threat to the government and
request that their rights be restored. It did not turn out well. The
local appeal offices became gateways to labor camps and prisons.
Practitioners soon began looking beyond their local government
offices and toward Beijing, calling for dialogue, reconciliation, and
understanding. Yet the results were no better. On any given day from
late 1999 to early 2001, hundreds of Falun Gong adherents from around
the country would turn up on Tiananmen Square to stage silent protests,
to meditate, or to unfurl banners proclaiming Falun Dafa's goodness and
innocence. They referred to these demonstrations never as protests, but
as ``appeals,'' implying that they still held out hope that the
leadership would change its mind. Nonetheless, they were met with
brutal reprisals, and the violence and the scale of the suppression
only escalated.
In late 2001, and continuing to this day, Falun Gong adherents
shifted focus. The Communist Party was committed to its course, but
perhaps the people of China could be persuaded. If the people refused
to be complicit, there would be no police willing to arrest
practitioners, no teachers willing to turn in their students (or vice
versa), no judges willing to be compromised. Denied any voice in the
official media, the daily protests on Tiananmen Square gave way to
autonomous underground printing houses in nearly every county and
district in the country--China's equivalent of the Soviet Samizdat, one
could say. From their living rooms, adherents would establish secure
Internet connections, access websites outside China using proxy
servers, download usually censored literature on the persecution of
Falun Gong, and use it to produce homemade leaflets which they would
distribute by nightfall. Falun Gong adherents living outside China
worked to give scale to these efforts, creating censorship-
circumvention software, launching Chinese-language radio and satellite
television, and so on. The belief guiding these efforts is that all
people are inherently good; that if they can merely know the truth,
their consciences will steer them toward justice.
But persuading Chinese citizens to not be complicit in the
persecution is a difficult task. Decades of political campaigns have
the Chinese citizenry that the best course of action is to lay low, to
keep one's head down, to follow orders, lest they also be targeted.
Falun Gong's challenge is to convince people to put justice, and for
the possibility of a better future ahead of their short-term interests.
The best way we know to do that, from our own experiences in labor
camps and detention centers, is to appeal to people's connection to
eternal truths and virtues; to things which are lasting, and greater
than any one of us.
And so, while the efforts to encourage renunciation from the
Communist Party may appear politically driven, look closer and you will
find that the message is not that Falun Gong should be in power, or
that democratic revolution should be fomented. The message is that
virtue and integrity--the cornerstones of China's Confucian and
Buddhist traditions--must return to China. The message is that China's
greatness, and the value of the Chinese people, lies precisely in the
value that its culture places on moral courage, on compassion, and on
justice.
I began by addressing how we understand the origins of the
persecution against Falun Gong in China, and I will conclude by sharing
how we hope it might end. If you ask a Falun Gong practitioner in China
what they would do if freedom of belief were afforded to them, they
will probably tell you that they'd like to go back to practicing
meditation in the parks in the morning. They don't want political
power, even after all that has transpired. And the way we hope to bring
this about is by convincing the people of China that their greatness as
a country and as a people is not based on their money, or their power
projection. Their value comes from the fact that they are a people of
justice and compassion. They are a people who will not stand by
passively as their neighbors are imprisoned and tortured, and are a
people who can sacrifice short-term interests in defense of what is
right. In our best-case scenario, the persecution will end when the
Chinese people decide that they are better than this.