WE AGAIN URGE JIANG ZEMIN TO STOP FOR A MOMENT AND RE-EVALUATE WHAT HE IS DOING GIVEN THE CURRENT SITUATION

1. Jealousy caused him to initiate the campaign

What Jiang Zemin opposes is not Falun Gong. What he opposes is other people not treating him as the "core" of the nation; what he opposes is promoting good moral values by living by example, and helping the people and other find happiness. Jealousy causes him to turn the most righteous Truthfulness, Benevolence, Forbearance into a target for attack. Fear causes him to forcibly enforce persecution against a cultivation practice, Falun Dafa, which 100 million people have already demonstrated to be beneficial to the minds and bodies of the people. In order to protect the darkness of his own heart, Jiang Zemin would rather revisit the damaging tactics that were used in the ten-year long Cultural Revolution and are already despised by the people and has started a campaign to persecute Falun Gong. One by one, he has created cruel policies based on "those who go along with me will thrive, those who go against me will perish," and he is enforcing them himself.

2. Ridiculously superstitious in private

Many people remember how, not long ago, the relevant departments of the government were honoring Falun Gong for its outstanding contributions to the health of the people and to the raising of moral values. After Jiang Zemin came to power, after much effort, he and a small group of schemers said that Falun Gong was heretical and evil. There are countless facts proving that Falun Gong is innocent, but Jiang Zemin's mind was made up. In his biased eyes, everything is telling him that Falun Gong is the greatest threat to his grip on power. A little known reason is that despite his narrow mindedness, Jiang Zemin is actually extremely superstitious: after the April 25^th incident, Jiang Zemin, thinking that the people had gone out of their way to displease him, was ready to start persecuting Falun Gong. However, suddenly there was that bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, so the plans for the crackdown had to be postponed. Amidst all the posturing and show of power during that incident, Jiang Zemin had someone secretly do a divination, which indicated that the embassy incident was created through the powers of the founder of Falun Gong. As such, he became even more determined to nip it in the bud.

3. A whole series of tactics commonly used in the politics of intimidation

Recently, according to sources, it is no longer possible to reason with Jiang Zemin with regards to the Falun Gong issue. It is said that when he hears the words ‘Falun Gong' mentioned, his entire body shudders and when he sees the words ‘Falun Gong' and sees Falun Gong practitioners, he hastily runs away. He sees Falun Gong practitioners' peaceful appeals and search for justice as a thorn in his side. In order to achieve the unattainable and vicious goal of ‘eradicating Falun Gong,' Jiang Zemin has pulled out a whole series of tactics used in the politics of intimidation:

Framing people and trumping up charges -- fabricating those 1,400 cases, and then having people off the street claim that Falun Gong harms people to death; misrepresenting the residence of another ‘Li Hongzhi' (with a different character for ‘Hong') as Master Li Hongzhi's house; inflating a lawful income to ridiculous proportions and claiming that Master Li is illegally amassing a fortune; saying a legal appeal is a protest and surrounding Zhongnanhai (the government residences) and opposing the government; saying that Master Li's correcting his date of birth was trying to "call himself a reincarnation of Jesus Christ," and so on and so forth.

Corporal punishment and enforcement through violence -- let's take a look at some of the wrenching statistics from this persecution: based on incomplete estimates, in the course of a year, there have been roughly a million instances of Falun Gong practitioners being detained, several thousand have been driven to hunger strike, about 10,000 have been injured to the point of disability, several hundred have been sent to mental hospitals, more than 10,000 are in labor reform camps, more than 400 have been given heavy prison sentences, and over 50 people have died as a result of cruel tortures.

Indiscriminate use of more than 40 types of torture methods -- piercing under the fingernails with bamboo strips; using smoke to choke people and using fire to burn them; forcing people to drink chili mixture; having people sit on the torture device called a ‘tiger bench;' having people sit in the agonizing ‘jet plane' position; forcing pregnant women to have abortions; stripping people naked prior to torture; making people inhale fumes from human excrement; splashing people with icy water and leaving them to freeze in the snow in the winter; slapping people in the face, punching them in the eyes, beating them to the point where they lose their hearing and their eyesight; twisting and breaking people's arms, breaking their noses, breaking their teeth, beating their heads until they're bloody, and beating them until their bodies are covered with wounds and bruises, and breaking their spines; using wooden sticks, electric batons, studded clubs, steel wire whips, and leather belts to beat people; punching people's chests and kicking their lower bodies; sending electric jolts through people's bodies through the crown of the head and the anus; handcuffing people's wrists such that they have one hand reach down from the shoulder and the other hand reach up from the back with the handcuffs cutting deeply into the flesh and tendons of the wrists, resulting in excruciating pain; shackling people's hands and feet together or shackling two or more people together so that they will pull in different directions, causing the handcuffs to become tighter and tighter; hanging people up with their arms and legs splayed out in a cross; withholding food and water from people and not letting them urinate or defecate; putting people onto the ‘dilao' torture device usually reserved for murderers; setting snakes and scorpions on people to bite and sting them; ordering hoodlums, prostitutes, robbers, murderers, heads of prisons, and the leaders among the prisoners to beat practitioners; hanging practitioners up to beat them, often to the point where practitioners will faint several times during a beating; forcing thousands of practitioners to resort to hunger strikes whereby a number have died from choking on salt mixtures that they were force-fed through tubes inserted down their throats; forcibly sending whole batches of completely normal people into mental hospitals and injecting them with poisons that damage the central nervous system, causing them to lose all signs of life in their eyes and have their motor functions become slow and impaired; the police have captured more than 50 people including Zhao Jinhua and Chen Zixiu and beat them to death; implementing ‘guilt by association' by sending practitioners' families, associates who may have been involved, and sympathizers to labor camps for ‘re-education.' The crimes are endless, and they are heart-wrenching.

The crackdown Jiang Zemin implemented since July of last year runs from the top leadership to the bottom. It was premeditated and it is systematic. There is also a whole set of orders given to subordinates: when dealing with Falun Gong, you absolutely should not be compassionate and soft on them; you can't go over-board when you're dealing with Falun Gong. They even said that murder and arson can be overlooked, just go get Falun Gong first.

They also made a list of things people at all levels of government weren't allowed to do: not allowed to receive people making appeals; not allowed to handle lawsuits that are filed; not allowed to have the prosecutor's department prosecute; not allowed to have lawyers defend; the masses are not allowed to bring evidence against unlawful action by law enforcers; People's Congress government representatives are not allowed to bring up the concerns of the people; media are not allowed to report on the facts and are not allowed to expose the situation of the persecution to the outside world. From the central government to the local government, they have the Party, the government, the military, Public Security, the laws, news media, intelligence agencies, and so on all systematically implementing their criminal orders.

Because this entire system itself violates the nation's constitution, violates the nation's laws, and goes against the will of the heavens and the people, they must feel self-conscious, knowing full well that they are doing wrong because they have not dared leave behind a shred of written documentation. Any person with a conscience who can think calmly for a moment won't find it difficult to see what "anti-humanity, anti-society, anti-science, anti-morality, endangering social stability, and obstructing the progress of humankind" means when they look at Jiang Zemin.

This kind of cruel persecution is escalating by the day. The dissemination of Jiang Zemin's recent order to "Eradicate before October 1" and Li Lanqing's (PRC Vice Premier) "Damage their reputation, cut them off financially, eradicate them within three months" is part of a new cycle of large-scale persecution mobilization orders and criminal plans. This is not only a serious challenge to the basic human rights of Falun Gong practitioners in China but also to people all over the world, and there is a great need to raise everyone's awareness and attention to this matter. In recent days, it has been heard from the inner circle of the group persecuting Falun Gong news of "large scale arrests prior to October 1^st." Moreover, cases of practitioners being lured from their homes and being sent directly to labor re-education camps have been rolling in from all over China, and the tortures and abuses within the camps have generally intensified. This kind of single-minded treatment of the people as the enemy and complete disregard for justice, the law, and the national interest will necessarily force more people to resolve to go to appeal to seek just treatment and to reclaim their basic rights of survival and the fundamental human rights granted by the constitution. Moreover, the brutal dictatorship that flies in the face of the objective need for progress will ultimately result in even more direct retribution from the heavens.

Now that the situation has developed to this point, with regard to the important problem of how to look at this Falun Gong issue which is a moral issue, no matter how it develops, we nonetheless would like to venture to advise Jiang Zemin to rethink this immediately and make some new decisions based on the current situation. Listen to the cries of the people -- governing the nation in accordance with the law is a necessary historical development. The wheels of history cannot be stopped.

September 19, 2000