By Li Fangping

(Clearwisdom.net) The 29th Olympic Games are scheduled to begin on August 8, 2008 in Beijing, China. The fundamental principles of the Olympic Charter reflect "the preservation of human dignity" and "respect for universal fundamental ethical principles." The Olympic Games have been a spectacular event where people have, in recent decades, come to expect that they can compete fairly, without worry of discrimination on the grounds of race, belief, or politics. The Olympics have become a sporting extravaganza for those who pursue peace and freedom, but can we really say that about the Beijing Games?

The Olympic flame has survived hundreds of years of human vicissitudes, and is about to be lit for the Beijing Olympics. However, the reality in today's China is a human rights disaster for Falun Gong practitioners and other dissident groups. This completely goes against the Olympic spirit.

For example, on February 20, 2008, Falun Gong practitioners Bai Shaohua and Yang Hui, were stopped by police while driving from downtown Beijing to the city's Huairou District. They were immediately taken to the Huairou Detention Center. Falun Gong practitioner Qi Wei and his newly married wife were also arrested just for lending his vehicle to Bai and Yang. Before these arrests, in the evening of January 25, Falun Gong practitioner Xu Na and her husband were stopped when driving and then body-searched; the police, after finding some materials that tell the facts about Falun Gong, detained Xu and her husband at the Tongzhou Detention Center.

Beginning in late January, police officers suddenly appeared everywhere in Beijing streets. They stopped vehicles and demanded that all individuals show their identification, a rarity in recent years until now. All of Beijing had been enveloped in a peculiar atmosphere.

From December 2007 to February 2008, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched several assaults to arrest Falun Gong practitioners, which resulted in the arrest of over one hundred practitioners in Beijing alone. In some places, the police hide in dark areas, such as stairway corners; they tell neighborhood committee members to knock on doors, and when the doors open, the police all rush in. In some cases, the police don't even show identification or evidence, and directly send the arrested practitioners to detention centers and forced labor camps.

Around the same time, film director Steven Spielberg announced his resignation from the position of Artistic Advisor for the Beijing Olympic Games. He said, "I find that my conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual." Some time before, Britain's Prince Charles announced that he would not attend the Beijing Olympic Games. People the world over are paying more attention to China's human rights record as the Olympics approach.

Spielberg's and Prince Charles' announcements were met with immediate criticism from Beijing's party mandarins, charging them with "turning a sports event into a political issue." Yet the CCP regime has itself told the Chinese people over and over in recent years that the Olympics is the "biggest political task" China now faces. This is yet another example of the double standards the CCP regime uses, saying one thing to the people in China, while claiming another to the outside world.

While the CCP deals with worldwide criticism of its human rights, it has at the same time intensified its persecution of dissidents in China. Among them, Falun Gong is most severely persecuted. Beijing, as the principal site of the Olympics, has become the main target of efforts to purge so-called "undesirables." This is a brazen betrayal of Olympic spirit.

The CCP has ignored people's complaints and freely taken land from people to build luxury stadiums, and it has also vowed to "wash" the Beijing sky blue regardless of the cost. Not only that, but huge amounts of financial and human resources have been dedicated to a bloody purge, trying to remove any person or group that might dare to protest to Olympic visitors and foreign media about the horrific conditions they face in China.

The CCP is trying to make Falun Gong disappear "for the sake of the Olympics." The CCP has repetitively emphasized "not politicizing the Olympic Games;" its objective of saying so is to silence all dissident voices so the Party can freely stage its own political coup.

However, through the brutal persecution of Falun Gong, the CCP has already nailed itself squarely onto the pillar of history; its denials are in vain. Bloody Harvest, a report by David Kilgour, former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and David Matas, a human rights lawyer, details the CCP's frenzied persecution of Falun Gong practitioners over the past several years. Most of the persecution documented happened after the regime obtained the right to hold the Olympic Games. Mr. Kilgour compares the CCP's hatred of Falun Gong with the Nazis' hatred of the Jewish people. Mr. Matas said that among the CCP's human rights violations, "the persecution of Falun Gong is the severest." Their report reaches the chilling conclusion that perhaps tens of thousands of practitioners have been killed to have their organs harvested for huge profits in the international organ transplant market.

As early as in May 2000, 14 months before its application for hosting the Olympics, the CCP issued a secret notice under the excuse of "being better prepared for a successful 2008 Olympics Games," which required various sectors to "strike hard on illegal organizations." Targets included "those who gather with more than three people and refuse to listen to advice." The way to deal with "organizers of illegal organizations" and "Falun Gong practitioners" was to "arrest them first; make up the paperwork later." Such conduct itself violates the Constitution. The "strike hard" campaign lasted from May 2000 to December 2007. The massive scale of this campaign is rare even for the bloodthirsty CCP. The last eight years have witnessed the never-ending horrific persecution of Falun Gong.

During the 17th General Assembly of the CCP in 2007, the 610 Office in Beijing recruited some retired cadres, to monitor Falun Gong. A single Falun Gong flyer in your house was enough to get you sent to a forced labor camp.

Around December 19, 2007, the CCP used their Internet agents to collect personal data of Falun Gong practitioners via email and forums, and as a result, arrested a number of Falun Gong practitioners in the Beijing area.

According to the Legal Evening Press, police in Beijing started to work as agents to handle temporary residency registration work and carried out a large-scale ID checks of the transient population, demanding that everyone from outside Beijing register for a temporary residency card. The police conducted this special project under the slogan of "getting a card according to law; creating peaceful Olympics together," claiming it would last for 39 days, and that its purpose was to create a "safe and harmonious environment" for the Olympics.

In China, it is widely known that for the most part, aside from criminal outlaws, the only people who don't have valid residency or ID cards are enemies of the state. Historically, the enemies have been whatever was the current class of people targeted for elimination. At various times the enemies have been landlords, rich peasants, capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists. Today, the "enemies" are peasant laborers unhappy with their lot, anyone who dares to protest government policies, and Falun Gong practitioners. Clearly, the strict checks of ID cards, cars, residencies and the check points set up at crucial junctions aim to clear out these people.

The CCP completely betrayed the promise it made to the international community to improve its human rights situation when it won the right to host the Olympics eight years ago. Instead, it has become more and more rampant in human rights persecution to "clear the field".

Looking at the CCP's bloody history, one can see that it is not the first time that the CCP launched a movement in order to control the people and to consolidate its dictatorship and deceive the masses. According to the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, "In August 1966, the Red Guards expelled Beijing residents who had been classified in past movements as "landlords, rich farmers, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists" and forced them to the countryside." Official statistics, which are believed to greatly underestimate the totals, showed that 33,695 homes were searched and 85,196 Beijing residents were expelled and returned to where their parents had originally come from. Red Guards all over the country followed suit, expelling over 400,000 urban residents to the countryside. Even high-ranking officials, whose parents were landlords, faced exile to the countryside.

In today' Beijing, the CCP repeats its old tricks and its means are even more cruel and deceptive, yet the more outrageously the CCP acts the more clearly the world's people can see its true evil nature.

Since August of last year, the Human Rights Torch Relay has visited dozens of cities. Beginning in Athens, the birthplace of the Olympics, the Human Rights Torch Relay will visit 30 countries on five continents; over one hundred cities. The relay very effectively raises awareness of China's human rights atrocities, particularly the persecution of Falun Gong.

The whole world regretted allowing the 1936 Olympic Games to continue in Germany once the horrors of the Holocaust were later revealed. Will the world allow a similar travesty of justice to be repeated with the Beijing Olympics of 2008?

Let's help end the persecution of Falun Gong, and put an end to the nightmare of Communist repression in the world.

March 13, 2008