20 years ago…
the Chinese Communist Party
turned these people
into so-called “enemies of the state”.
And this is how they did it.
Welcome back to China Uncensored.
I’m Chris Chappell.
You know, life can be tough for China’s communist leaders.
When things are too happy and peaceful for your citizens,
they may start to question whether they really need
your extremely authoritarian leadership anymore.
And that’s why it’s important to remind them:
“You need us,
because we’re at war with a dangerous enemy!”
Sure, today that enemy is the landlords,
and tomorrow the enemy will be
the people protesting the landlords,
but that doesn’t matter.
The important thing is:
There's an enemy.
It’s like the Chinese Communist Party
is constantly playing Mortal Kombat,
but they always win
because their opponents are actually The Sims.
Believe me, it’s not pretty.
And this is the story of how 20 years ago,
the Communist Party manufactured a new enemy:
Falun Gong.
Just look at these people practicing Falun Gong!
Training to violently overthrow the leadership by...
closing their eyes and standing there!
Are they just going to keep standing there?
Yep. That’s what Falun Gong does.
They stand there.
Then they sit there.
So boring.
And by boring, I mean DANGEROUS!
Because this week marks the 20th anniversary
of how the Chinese Communist Party
turned Falun Gong practitioners into so-called
“enemies of the state.”
This is the event they used:
On April 25, 1999,
ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners appeared in Beijing,
at the central government compound called Zhongnanhai.
Think of Zhongnanhai as the White House
plus the US Capitol,
except that the public is never allowed inside.
The Chinese Communist Party later claimed t
hat Falun Gong practitioners “besieged” Zhongnanhai,
which is why they had no choice
but to launch a nationwide crackdown
on this “dangerous enemy.”
But actually,
they had already been planning the crackdown for years.
There were definitely people,
high level officials in the public security apparatus in China
that were getting nervous about Falun Gong,
simply because of its sheer size.
Falun Gong was first publicly taught by Li Hongzhi in 1992.
Falun Gong has exercises like Tai Chi or yoga,
and it also has meditation and a spiritual aspect.
Falun Gong became super popular.
By 1999, the Chinese government estimated
there were 70 to 100 million people practicing Falun Gong.
That’s more people than there were
members of the Chinese Communist Party.
I started practicing Falun Gong in 1996...
in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun.
Every morning on the university's sports field,
there were thousands of people
practicing different qigong exercises.
The biggest group was Falun Gong.
The vice chancellor of my university
and many professors were also practicing Falun Gong.
They would do the Falun Gong exercises with us every morning.
In the early ’90s, the Chinese government
invited Falun Gong’s founder Li Hongzhi
to join a number of government-sponsored events.
Here he is speaking at the Ministry of Public Security.
And here’s an article in the People’s Public Security Daily
that praises Li for his contributions “in promoting
the traditional crime-fighting virtues of the Chinese people.”
Which....sounds less like he’s teaching a meditation practice,
and more like he’s teaching people how to be Batman.
But the point is, official state-run media were promoting Falun Gong.
If you took a walk in the park this morning,
you can see that the recent hard work
the government has put into public health activities
has not been wasted.
Every morning from 5 to 6 am
the city's green grass, parks, and public squares
become a morning exercise heaven.
I’m not sure what I find more shocking.
State run media praising Falun Gong,
or the fact that these people were getting up at
5am every morning to exercise!
But for a long time in China,
it was really common to see
people in parks practicing qigong.
Qigong includes Tai-chi, Falun Gong,
and hundreds of other practices
you’re probably never heard of.
Because it was a form of qigong,
it really slipped through the cracks
of the Communist Party's already
fairly strict controls over religion,
and was able to spread throughout China,
and also controls in civil society.
By 1996,
there were already millions of people
practicing Falun Gong.
And some Chinese officials started to get nervous.
So the authorities did what they do best.
They suppressed stuff.
They banned the Falun Gong books.
They tapped a few phone lines.
Raided some homes.
Sent spies to the outdoor practice sites.
You know, the usual.
The goal was to gradually undermine Falun Gong.
The government's official policy was that people were
allowed to freely practice qigong and other physical exercises.
So under this circumstance,
why were public security bureaus in different areas
targeting Falun Gong?
Why were the books banned?
You could already feel a faint atmosphere of suppression.
But things were about to get much worse.
On April 23, 1999,
Chinese authorities beat up and arrested
45 Falun Gong practitioners in the city of Tianjin.
Local authorities said if other practitioners wanted to get them freed,
they’d need to go to Beijing to appeal to the central government.
What those authorities didn’t count on was,
on April 25, 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners
would actually take them up on that,
heading to the National Appeals Office near Zhongnanhai.
Frank Shi was one of them.
We all felt that more than 40 Falun Gong practitioners
being beaten and arrested in Tianjin was very relevant to us.
If we didn't take a stand,
it was very likely that the same thing would eventually happen to us.
Probably not even Falun Gong practitioners
realized how many people would come that morning.
But with tens of millions of people practicing,
one person decided to go appeal,
and that guy tells his cousin,
and he tells his friend,
and pretty soon there were 10,000 people.
And even that was only about one in every
100 Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing.
If you think about it like that,
if they really wanted to “besiege” Zhongnanhai,
you’d think they could have gotten
at least a hundred thousand people to show up.
But only 10,000 people showed and they...
stood there.
And they also...
sat there.
I would term what happened on April 25th,
around Zhongnanhai,
more of like a sit-in or an appeal than necessarily a protest.
If you look at the imagery and the video footage
and talk to people who were there,
there weren't loud slogans being shouted,
there wasn't any kind of a protest march or anything like that,
that you would think about a protest,
that usually we see protests and demonstrations
that are a little more vocal include.
Instead, you saw people basically lining up quietly,
a lot of them were sitting,
some were standing,
some were doing the Falun Gong meditation,
some were sitting and reading.
It was a pretty quiet type of sit in appeal.
There were police on the street.
They seemed very relaxed.
There wasn't much for them to do.
The practitioners were very orderly.
They even left space on the sidewalk.
They didn't hold up traffic or cause any disturbances,
so the police didn't have much to do.
The Falun Gong practitioners had three main requests.
One: Release the Tianjin practitioners.
Two: Allow the Falun Gong books to be published again.
And three: Let people practice Falun Gong
without police harassment.
All the requests that the people
were making were related specifically to Falun Gong
and having the freedom to practice Falun Gong...
There were no demands whatsoever
that related to the Party's role in power more broadly.
That morning, Premier Zhu Rongji came out of Zhongnanhai
and spoke to the Falun Gong practitioners in person.
Zhu was one of the top officials in the whole country.
And Frank Shi was one of three practitioners
who got the chance to meet with him.
According to Shi,
Zhu Rongji thought the situation had already been resolved.
As he was walking he said,
"Haven't I already written a comment on your situation?"
When we heard this, we were very surprised.
We had never heard of this.
This shows that at the time,
Premier Zhu's comments had been withheld
by another faction within the government.
See, while Premier Zhu Rongji was trying to resolve the situation,
others at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party
were working on escalating it.
At the time, we believed in and had confidence in the government.
We hoped the government could solve the issues that we raised.
Most of us thought that the central government,
the high-level government officials,
just didn't understand the actual situation with Falun Gong.
We thought it was just one or two lower-level
government departments that were treating Falun Gong like this.
But it wasn’t just some misunderstanding.
It turns out—surprise!—
that asking the Chinese government
to follow Article 35 of its own constitution
was way too much to expect.
That’s because Falun Gong had unknowingly made
an enemy at the very top of the Chinese Communist Party—
the chief toady himself, Jiang Zemin.
He saw the way in which people were able to mobilize,
even peacefully,
to line up in Beijing on behalf of Falun Gong,
and that really freaked him out.
I think that showed him a level of loyalty
that Falun Gong practitioners had,
that he might have already been aware of,
and a little jealous of the kind of reputation
that Falun Gong's founder had,
and the way in which people really believed,
genuinely believed his teachings,
in a way that people did not believe Communist Party teachings,
or repeat Jiang Zemin's own
or whatever Communist Party slogans were at the time.
See, unbeknownst to Frank Shi,
or any of the other practitioners who were there,
that peaceful appeal at Zhongnanhai
had been manipulated by other
higher ranking members of the Communist Party
from the very beginning.
Police had ordered the practitioners to line up
along the two sides of Zhongnanhai.
They would later use this footage to claim
Falun Gong practitioners had surrounded the government—
that Falun Gong was a “dangerous enemy”
that wants to overthrow the Communist Party.
Presumably by...doing this at 5 am.
Of course the practitioners had to listen to the police's orders.
You stand where the police tell you to stand.
So they led a group of practitioners to the gates of Zhongnanhai,
as if practitioners were "surrounding Zhongnanhai."
But the Appeals Office was actually in the opposite direction,
on the north side.
So from this it looks like a group of people
completely knew about this matter
and arranged for practitioners to stand in front of Zhongnanhai.
The Chinese government and the propaganda apparatus
like to frame it as an effort to surround the government,
to be anti-government,
and to try to overthrow the Communist Party
or challenge their authority on power.
If we were "besieging" Zhongnanhai,
[Zhu Rongji] wouldn't have come out to meet us.
But Jiang Zemin was controlling the narrative.
Shortly after,
he wrote a letter to the Central Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party.
He said, “Today’s event is worth our reflection.
All of sudden, more than 10,000 people
surrounded the gate of the center of the nation’s authority...
Can’t we, the communists
with our belief in Marxism, Materialism, and Atheism,
win over that suit of stuff aired by Falun Gong?”
Yeah! How dare people have another belief!
They must be trying to overthrow us!
Finish them!
Jiang Zemin followed that with another letter in June 1999,
calling for the creation of a special task force
for the sole purpose
“to break and wipe out Falun Gong.”
This is the top party leader.
Even though we know that there
were other people high up in the party,
including the premier at the time,
that disagreed with Jiang on this point, again,
once he made that decision
the apparatus just started running,
and there was really not much to stop
this all-out assault on Falun Gong.
So what began as a peaceful appeal,
was manipulated and used by Jiang Zemin
and other Chinese authorities as an excuse
to justify a nationwide crackdown.
In July 1999,
the Communist Party outright banned Falun Gong.
They launched a nationwide anti-Falun Gong propaganda campaign,
and began rounding up millions of practitioners,
detaining them in labor camps, and torturing them.
After meeting with Premier Zhu Rongji on April 25,
Frank Shi was monitored by his university and the police.
Someone accessed his dang’an,
a political file that’s kept on every Chinese citizen.
His Falun Gong books disappeared from his computer.
Even rough drafts of his research papers
were taken from the trash
and used as evidence against him.
After the official crackdown started,
he was arrested and tortured.
Eventually he fled to the United States.
Ultimately, Falun Gong wasn’t targeted
because of that appeal in April 1999.
But the government propaganda blaming Falun Gong
was even repeated over and over by Western media.
Like this CNN article from 2002:
“Falun Gong's tight organization was seen on April 25, 1999,
when about 10,000 Falun Gong members besieged
the government compound in Zhongnanhai, Beijing.”
Good job, CNN—
getting your words straight from Chinese state-run media.
So the narrative became that Falun Gong
was somehow asking to be persecuted.
But even without the april 25 appeal,
Chinese authorities would have probably figured out some excuse.
They’re creative like that.
Whether or not we went to petition the government,
sooner or later they would have persecuted Falun Gong.
Before April 25,
they were already looking for excuses to target the practice.
And in the 20 years since,
the Chinese Communist Party is not just persecuting Falun Gong.
They're persecuting the Tibetans.
They're persecuting the Uighurs.
The Tibetans never went to petition,
but they were persecuted.
Uighurs never went to petition,
but millions have been put in concentration camps.
Other religious groups in China, like Christians,
are also being persecuted.
So regardless of whether there was an April 25 appeal,
the Chinese Communist Party would have persecuted all religions.
This is an innate part of their type of belief in atheism,
and in the evil nature of the Communist Party.
There are millions of kind hearted Chinese people
who have been persecuted.
They haven't done anything illegal.
The Communist Party is quite evil.
They actually just want to persecute everyone.
Yeah, if you’re Tibetan, or Uighur, or Christian, or Falun Gong:
Don’t take it personally!
It wasn’t something you did!
The Party just wants to persecute everyone.
Even Chinese officials can’t escape these days.
Yes, more than a million Party members
have been purged since 2015.
In communist China,
everyone is eventually equal...ly persecuted.
Thanks for watching this episode of China Uncensored.
Once again I’m your host Chris Chappell.
See you next time.