A Third-Party Commentary: The Chinese Ruling Party is Aware of the Existence of International Laws?

By Heng He

(Clearwisdom.net) I was struck speechless when I watched the feature story on CCTV and a commentary on People's Daily about Falun Gong members tapping into the government's Sinosat-1 satellite. [CCTV and People's Daily are both government run media in China.] Since when did the Chinese Ruling Party start to play the victim's role?

At the end of the 60's, I was sent to rural areas of China with many other middle school graduates during the Cultural Revolution. I took along a self-assembled short wave radio and tuned into the broadcasts of The Voice of America (VOA) every night. Back then there was a lot of radio interference [from the Chinese government], so it took the patience of a saint to pick up short wave signals from VOA. As a rule of thumb, when there is noise on a certain frequency, there is a signal (because the Chinese government interferes with VOA signals with noise.) Of course, back then we knew nothing of the international laws about the radio transmission of public information. Even if I knew about the laws at the time, it would not have helped me anyway -- listening to VOA was considered a crime by the Chinese government, and those who were found doing it were thrown in prison.

In 1976, the Cultural Revolution ended. In 1977, I passed the exam and entered college. We all thought that we would have a brighter future, both economically and politically. I totally forgot to listen to VOA until one day, there was a meeting of all students. A government order was read at the meeting: "Listening to the enemy's radio station, VOA, is strictly prohibited. Those who violate this rule will be punished or even dismissed from school." When I returned to the dorm, I found that the interfering noises that had been reduced or even disappeared after the end of 1976 had become much louder. However, the Chinese government did improve in this respect: at least one would not be thrown into prison for listening to VOA.

In 1989, the number of people listening to VOA peaked. I was in a remote city, thousands of miles from Beijing. Every day, I gathered with some other young people and listened to VOA and BBC to learn what was happening in Beijing. One night, one of my buddies knocked on my window and told me about some news he heard on BBC about XXX being forced to resign. Of course, I immediately spread this rumor. Two things happened afterwards. One was that a person in our work unit reported us to our superiors (about listening to "enemy's radio stations" as a major crime). Another is that the rumor I spread that night was investigated, and the guy who knocked on my window was very scared. The incident showed that even 13 years after the Cultural Revolution, listening to "the enemy's radio station" was still a major crime in China.

Now, although the Jiang regime has signed a series of international agreements, they are still systematically interfering with many international radio stations, including BBC and VOA. Furthermore, the Chinese government has established the largest Internet Police force in the world to block the free flow of information. Half a million overseas websites are blocked. The Jiang regime is also waging large-scale attacks on overseas Falun Gong websites. The Chinese government has been doing for decades exactly what it accused Falun Gong of: violating international laws and disrupting the safe transmission of public information. To me, slandering Falun Gong using this method is Jiang's last resort: it shows how desperate he really is.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.cc/mh/articles/2002/7/13/33228.html

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