French Magazine "La Revue d'Etudes": The Second "Cultural Revolution" in China (Photos)
(Clearwisdom.net) In an article about Asia published in the June
edition of the French magazine "La Revue d'Etudes", there was a false
description of Falun Gong. A French couple who practice Falun Gong sent a letter
to the magazine to let them know the truth. The magazine published the
practitioners' letter in its September edition, and also carried a story about a
Falun Gong practitioner who was persecuted in China. The Persecution Against Falun Gong: The Second Cultural Revolution in China By Alexis & Sandra Genin A reader conveyed his opinions about a special article we published in the
June edition this year about Southern and Eastern Asia. Ever since 1999, Falun Gong has been subjected to suppression by the
Chinese authorities. Back then, Falun Gong's popularity among the general
public in China made it unacceptable to certain political leaders, who
considered Falun Gong a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party. Since it
was banned on July 20th 1999, Falun Gong has been brutally persecuted for five
years. However, Falun Gong established a paradigm of peaceful resistance for
the Chinese people in the face of brutal suppression. Neither arrest nor
torture has changed Falun Gong. Falun Gong (Falun Dafa) is one of the numerous conventional Qigong
practices in China. It became popular in the early 1990's. In the beginning,
the Chinese Government supported Falun Gong because it has outstanding effects
on curing illness and reinstating morality. Because it took off so quickly, Falun Gong became an unprecedented
phenomenon. In 1998, the Chinese Government estimated that there were eighty
million people practicing Falun Gong. This number partly explained why it
suffered from persecution later on. In 1999, China's president, Jiang Zemin
banned Falun Gong in the name of "disturbing public order". The
accusation was changed in the later stages and Falun Gong was named an "[Jiang's
slanderous term deleted]". In the end, Falun Gong was framed as
China's enemy because of "connections with foreign powers". In China, the persecution against Falun Gong and the Cultural Revolution
are very similar. The suppression policy was carried through to all cities.
China's citizens were encouraged to expose Falun Gong practitioners. Regular
propaganda on TV was used to instigate public hatred against Falun Gong
practitioners, who were slandered as criminals who would commit all kinds of
crimes. The purpose was to mislead the Chinese people so that they would
attack and eradicate the so-called "internal enemy". The imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners were brainwashed. The brainwashing
stations were established in every district of China's major cities and
counties. Some people might be missing for several months, during which time
neither their colleagues nor their families knew where they were. Those
practitioners who refused to give up their belief even under the pressure of
poisonous drugs and physical torture were sent to labor camps or prisons. The
reward or punishment of Chinese officials is directly linked to how
successfully they "convert" Falun Gong practitioners, while the
conversion is usually unscrupulous. Death is treated as suicide Under Jiang's order, torture has become a systematic tool to break Falun
Gong practitioners' wills, in an attempt to destroy them mentally. Jiang's
order is "defame them, cut them off financially and wipe them out
physically". The torture can be of various forms, including beating,
electrical shocks, torturing by devices that can fracture limbs or damage
teeth, forced water infusion into the mouth, freezing, imprisonment in a dark
room alone without any light for months, or being locked up in a tiny cell,
inside which practitioners can neither stand straight nor lie down. Thousands of people have died because of torture. Among them, more than
eight hundred people's names have been identified. According to the statistics
of the Chinese authorities, more than seventy-three thousand Falun Gong
practitioners were imprisoned in labor camps. However, experts familiar with
China believe that this number should be five times higher. In the past five years, Falun Gong practitioners stayed steadfast and
peaceful in the face of the persecution. In China, they continued to clarify
the truth about the persecution and their cultivation to the Chinese people
via pamphlets, phone calls, or even TV broadcasts. Outside China, they
publicized the situations of torture and persecution on the Internet. This is the first time in modern Chinese history that a dictator failed to
destroy a group even though he has resorted to all means of violence. Falun
Gong practitioners resist the persecution, and hold fast to their belief in
"Truthfulness, Benevolence, Forbearance". Qigong is a cultural heritage from thousands of years of China's history.
It teaches the philosophical principles of the Dao School, Buddha School and
Confucianism. The common characteristics of the conventional ways are virtue
and benevolence (in Asia, body and mind are considered to be one unit.) The
reason why Falun Gong can attract so many people in China is that it enables
the Chinese people to inherit this traditional culture, and provides a path
leading towards wisdom and cultivation. However, Falun Gong is not a religion.
Throughout Falun Gong's spread, it continues to be free of charge and there is
no need to register. Extracts from a Testimony, January 2004 ....However, our mental suffering is even more intolerable than the
physical pains. We kept being worried every day. We had no idea what would
happen on that day. When an imprisoned practitioner was taken away by the
police, we would be worried about him/her because we wondered if he/she would
come back. We wouldn't know if he/she had come back until the roll call every
night before we were allowed to sleep. Even so, it was always possible that
somebody had disappeared after we woke up the next morning, and no traces were
left behind. Fellow practitioners encouraged one another when we met in the
morning. Even though it could be as simple as an eye expression or a smile, it
was an enormous encouragement. Under such mental pressure, many people's hair
turned white. For example, I have to dye my hair now. "Zhang Siying does not want any money. He insists on practicing Falun
Gong. Doesn't that mean he is abnormal?" said Wang Tianyi, the Economy
& Trade Commissioner of Chuan-Hui District (the government official in
charge of enterprise management) who also took the lead in persecuting Falun
Gong. On the next day, Wang Tianyi summoned several people and kidnapped Zhang
Siying to a psychiatric hospital at Zhoukou City for continuous persecution.
Several days later, Zhang's elderly mother tried all she could to locate the
psychiatric hospital, and visit Zhang. Zhang told his mother, "They tied
me up with ropes, and administered an injection to me. Right after the
injection, I lost consciousness." Zhang's mother found the doctor, and
asked what the injection was for since her son was not ill at all. The doctor
replied, "The injection is to clear his mind." The torture they applied on Yu is called "Emergency Braking". The
prisoner was asked to stand about half a meter away from and face the wall,
and bend down at a 90-degree angle. When he was kicked abruptly from behind,
his head would bang against the wall. Yu was tortured in this way many times.
A deep, bloody fissure developed on his head. He suffered from serious
cerebral concussion. Under such terrifying repeated torture, Zhang became
extremely weak. To evade the responsibility of causing severe injury on Yu's
mind and body, the director of the detention center, Qu Xiufeng, told others,
"Yu is a good person, and we treat him well. It is too bad that he became
insane after practicing Falun Gong-- he knocks his head on the heater." At the Lihe 18th Female Forced Labor "Re-education" Camp of
Zhengzhou city The restraining clothes are made of coarse material. Once the clothes are
put on Falun Gong practitioners, the clothes are tightened up on the back. The
sleeve has a leather belt and is about twenty-five centimeters longer than the
practitioners' arms. The guards force Falun Gong practitioners to wear the
restraining clothes, twist their arms behind their backs and tie them up with
their hands crossed. Subsequently, they raised practitioners' arms to the
height of the shoulders and hung them up at the wrists with their legs
bundled. At the same time, they blocked practitioners' mouths by stuffing
cloth in to them; they put earphones in place and then played tapes that
slandered Falun Gong. According to a testimony, those practitioners who were
tortured like this would have broken arms and dislocated ankles, shoulders,
wrists and elbows as a result. Some practitioners who were tortured for an
extended period of time had broken spines. Their lives were always at critical
risk. On May the 22nd 2003, a female Falun Gong practitioner in her forties
was tortured in this way for a whole day. When she was taken down from the
hung position her body was cold. To cover up the crime, the police ordered two
prisoners (one a drug addict and the other a criminal), Yan Ping and Fu Jinyu,
to take her body to the hospital next door for injections. They claimed the
Falun Gong practitioner died because of various diseases and cremated her body
right away.
Chinese version available at
http://www.yuanming.net/articles/200410/35726.html
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