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What is Falun Gong? According to The World, “Falun Gong arose out of the “Qigong boom” of the late '80s. Qigong is an umbrella term for a number of practices involving meditation, slow-moving exercises and regulated breathing. Qigong groups exploded during this time, attracting tens of millions of mostly urban and elderly Chinese.” Falun Gong differed from most qigong groups in that it combined exercises with moral and spiritual teachings. Adherents aim to cultivate “truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance” and refine their “Xining,” or moral character. Falun Gong’s spiritual leader is Li Hongzhi.
Praise, Criticism, Protest, and the Final Crackdown
The Chinese government initially praised Li for “promoting rectitude in society.” However, soon enough, they started to attack Qigong for instilling superstitions in the minds of the people. The government went ahead and started to train people to go and dismantle the practices of Qigong from the inside out, and used the media to publish articles attacking Qigong, including Falun Gong, labelling them as dangerous “feudal superstition. This led to the practitioners being harassed by the government; Falun Gong followers reacted by peacefully demonstrating at the offices of newspapers and television stations.
On April 25, 1999, some 20,000 Falun Gong adherents protested the practitioners gathered near the Zhongnanhai government compound in Beijing to demand an end to official harassment. The then-party general secretary Jiang Zemin was so enraged by the boldness and scale of the protest — the largest since the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989 — that he demanded that the movement and the whole Falun Gong group be “defeated.”
From July, 1999 to November, 1999
On July 20, 1999, security forces were deployed to detain several thousand leading Falun Gong practitioners. A few days later, the group was made illegal for “advocating superstition, spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances, and jeopardizing social stability.” Reportedly, more than 50,000 individuals were detained within the first week of the group being declared illegal.
These five months were when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) swept out most of the followers of Falun Gong. The group was declared illegal, government employees were banned from practising Falun Gong, publications of Falun Gong were destroyed, lawyers were forbidden from defending Falun Gong practitioners without ‘prior permission’, and all practitioners were deemed dangerous to the state. Practitioners were imprisoned for instigating activities of splitting China and endangering national unity and peace. It was widely regarded as a huge step backward for China and their judiciary.
Turning Point
On January 23, 2001, five people set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square. The government immediately declared that the five were Falun Gong practitioners who were driven to suicide. Falun Gong sources disputed these claims, and said that violence or self-harm goes against the teachings. instead claiming that they were staged. Many inconsistencies were also found in the official account of events, leading many to believe that this event may have been staged to discredit Falun Gong.
This event garnered worldwide sympathy for the Falun Gong group. Yet, at the same time, this is when the propaganda against the group increased in China. Using this event, the government instilled the idea that the group was dangerous into the public. Posters, leaflets, and videos were produced detailing the supposed negative effects of Falun Gong practice, and anti–Falun Gong classes were scheduled in schools.
This led to the public opinion being against the group, and marked the beginning of the systematic use of violence to eradicate the group.
Censorship
The censorship of Western media was also a part of the propaganda campaign against the Falun Gong group. Reporters and journalists were detained, and were forced to hand over their investigations. It is estimated that at least 50 representatives of the international press have been arrested since July 1999, and some of them were beaten by police; several Falun Gong followers were also imprisoned for talking with foreign journalists. Because of the difficult reporting environment, by 2002, Western news coverage of the persecution within China had completely ceased.
Transformation of the Followers
The Communist Party largely focuses on the "transformation" of Falun Gong practitioners. It is described as "a process of ideological reprogramming whereby practitioners are subjected to various methods of physical and psychological coercion until they recant their belief in Falun Gong."
This “transformation” process occurs in prisons, labour camps, re-education centres, and other detention facilities. In 2001, the Chinese government implored that no practitioner should be allowed to escape the measures that should make them renounce their faith. Those sent to labour camps are “first ‘broken’ by beatings and other torture.”
Former prisoners recall how guards said that "no measures are too excessive" to prompt renunciation statements, and practitioners who refuse to renounce Falun Gong are sometimes killed in custody. Over 3,700 (named) Falun Gong practitioners have reportedly died as a result of torture and abuse in custody, usually after they refused to renounce their beliefs, but this is likely only a small representation of the actual number of deaths in custody.
The guards are given set quotas regarding how many Falun gong followers must be transformed successfully. Completion of quotas could mean promotions and bonuses, whereas failure to do so can lead to demotions.
In order to reach transformation targets, the government authorized the use of “systematic torture and violence” against the practitioners, including shocks with electric batons and beatings. According to Amnesty International, detainees who put up a fight against the transformation are tortured with increasing severity. The "soft" methods include sleep deprivation, threatening family members, and denial of access to bathrooms. The more grave treatment can comprise beatings, 24-hour surveillance, solitary confinement, shocks with electric batons, forced feeding, "rack" torture, and the “tiger bench”.
Since 2000, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture has identified 314 cases of torture in China, where more than 1,160 individuals are represented. Falun Gong comprised 66% of the reported torture cases. Numerous forms of torture are allegedly employed, including electric shocks, suspension by the arms, shackling in painful positions, sleep and food deprivation, force-feeding, and sexual abuse.
Reeducation Through Labour (RTL)
The government created a nationwide network of re-education centres to "transform the minds" of Falun Gong practitioners. In 2007, the US Department of State declared: “The centres are run extrajudicially, and the government officially denies their existence.” The facilities are known as "transformation through re-education centres," or "legal education centres." Some of the programs are temporary - established in schools, hotels, military buildings, or work units - while others operate as private and permanent jails.
In 2012 and early 2013, a series of news reports and exposés exposed the violation of human rights at the Masanjia Forced Labour Camp, where almost half of the inmates were Falun Gong practitioners. In early 2013, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping announced that RTL would be abolished and the camps will be shut down. However, human rights groups found out that many RTL facilities have simply been renamed as prisons or rehabilitation centres.
Practitioners who refuse to recant their beliefs may be forced into psychiatric hospitals, where they suffer beatings, sleep deprivation, torture by electrocution, and injections with sedatives or anti-psychotic drugs. Certain detainees are hospitalised because their prison or RTL sentences have “expired”, however they have not been fully “transformed” by their education.
Organ Harvesting
In 2006, allegations emerged that many Falun Gong practitioners had been killed to supply China's organ transplant industry. The Kilgour-Matas report called attention to the extremely short wait times for organs in China—signifying that organs were being procured on demand. A significant increase in the number of annual organ transplants in China beginning in 1999 could be paralleled with the onset of the persecution of Falun Gong.
In June 2019, an independent tribunal sitting in London, named “The China Tribunal” was founded. Its goal was to inquire into forced organ harvesting from the prisoners of conscience, amongst others, in China. It stated that the members of the Falun Gong group continued to be murdered by China for their organs. The tribunal said that it had clear evidence that forced organ harvesting has been taking place in China at least for the past 20 years. China has denied such accusations, saying that they stopped using organs from executed prisoners in 2015.
International Response
The response of the international community to the systematic persecution of the Falun Gong followers was one of immense shock towards the treatment of the Falun Gong practitioners by the CCP.
Falun Gong gained a massive following internationally, which also led to the opening of media outlets like Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty Television, which reported heavily the atrocities of the CCP on the Falun Gong followers. The reportings of such media outlets also were used by the courts of Argentina and Spain in 2009, as they indicted senior Chinese officials for genocide and crimes against humanity for their role in orchestrating the suppression of Falun Gong.
Reeducation Through Labour (RTL)
The government created a nationwide network of re-education centres to "transform the minds" of Falun Gong practitioners. In 2007, the US Department of State declared: “The centres are run extrajudicially, and the government officially denies their existence.” The facilities are known as "transformation through re-education centres," or "legal education centres." Some of the programs are temporary - established in schools, hotels, military buildings, or work units - while others operate as private and permanent jails.
In 2012 and early 2013, a series of news reports and exposés exposed the violation of human rights at the Masanjia Forced Labour Camp, where almost half of the inmates were Falun Gong practitioners. In early 2013, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping announced that RTL would be abolished and the camps will be shut down. However, human rights groups found out that many RTL facilities have simply been renamed as prisons or rehabilitation centres.
Practitioners who refuse to recant their beliefs may be forced into psychiatric hospitals, where they suffer beatings, sleep deprivation, torture by electrocution, and injections with sedatives or anti-psychotic drugs. Certain detainees are hospitalised because their prison or RTL sentences have “expired”, however they have not been fully “transformed” by their education.
Organ Harvesting
In 2006, allegations emerged that many Falun Gong practitioners had been killed to supply China's organ transplant industry. The Kilgour-Matas report called attention to the extremely short wait times for organs in China—signifying that organs were being procured on demand. A significant increase in the number of annual organ transplants in China beginning in 1999 could be paralleled with the onset of the persecution of Falun Gong.
In June 2019, an independent tribunal sitting in London named “The China Tribunal" was founded. Its goal was to inquire into forced organ harvesting from the prisoners of conscience, amongst others, in China. It stated that the members of the Falun Gong group continued to be murdered by China for their organs. The tribunal said that it had clear evidence that forced organ harvesting has been taking place in China at least for the past 20 years. The Chinese government has denied such accusations, saying that it stopped using organs from executed prisoners in 2015.