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We Must Immediately Stop the Brutality That Suffocates Our Nation’s Conscience And Morality

Third Open Letter to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao

December 12, 2005

Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, and all other conscientious fellow Chinese citizens:

I, Gao Zhisheng, send you my greetings from Changchun City.

I would first like to convey my deepest mourning for the innocent fellow Chinese citizens killed by the Guangdong regime, and my condolences and support for the family members of the victims. At the same time, I would like to express my strongest protest for the brutality of slaughtering our kind countrymen. I strongly urge that the highest authorities follow the basic principles recognized by civil societies, punish the murderers and those responsible, and extend condolence and compensation to the families of the victims.

Winter in Changchun is extremely cold. Although in "hiding" in a room that doesn’t have water most of the time, my blood is boiling hot. The reason isn’t because I am again writing an open letter to Hu and Wen. Instead, simply being able to work for the future of one of the greatest nations in the world is enough to make any ordinary citizen’s blood boil.

On October 18, also with red-hot enthusiasm, I wrote an open letter to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, two fellow countrymen of mine, urgently calling on their government to "stop persecuting believers of freedom and mend ties with the Chinese people." The next day, I received blatant threats over the phone at home. Starting the third day, at least 10 cars and 20 plainclothes police began circling, monitoring, and following my entire family every day, 24 hours a day. The 15th day after I wrote the letter, the Beijing Judicial Bureau illegally closed my law firm. It is very regrettable how our country treats a citizen who openly makes suggestions.

Another strong reaction prompted by the open letter was that the Falun Gong practitioners from various parts of China who had been persecuted had written me and invited me to their area to learn more about their true situation. Quite a few of these letters were from the cities of Changchun and Dalian. Since November 29, I spent almost 24 hours a day continuously traveling between Jinan City, Shandong Province; Dalian City and Fuxin City, Liaoning Province; and Changchun City, Jilin Province, to conduct another round of investigations. Different from my usual experience of traveling solo, I was honored to be accompanied by Professor Jiao Guobiao.{mospagebreak}

Meanwhile, flocks of plainclothes police were still hovering around my home night and day, creating an atmosphere of terror and severely suppressing my entire family. On November 29, I escaped the tight surveillance by more than 20 plainclothes police and spent 15 days investigating the truth in my own way. I especially would like to say here that we try our best to tell the truth of how this nation is being continually, brutally persecuted, especially at this time. This is also to remind our entire nation of the severity and urgency of the problems we are facing. It is time for our nation and each and every one of us to seriously face our problems. Any excuse or delay by any means is committing a crime to our entire nation!

In this letter, I will not avoid any of the real problems I have seen, even if this means I may be immediately arrested when this letter is publicized. The 15 days of investigation again showed me the painful truth. The "610 Office" is-at least can be called-a gang that exists within the political power of the nation, yet is higher than the political power. It is a gang that can control and regulate all political resources. Although it is an organization that exists outside of the constitution and the regulations of the country’s power structure, the "610 Office" is using many powers that are only supposed to be used by agencies of the national government, and even many powers that are beyond the agencies of the national government. It is using powers that don’t belong and have never belonged to the nation since the beginning of political civilization of mankind on this earth.

We can see that the power symbolized by the number "610" continues to "interface" with the public through ways such as destroying a person’s physical body and spirit, through shackles, chains, electric shock tortures, and "tiger benches." The nature of this power has become that of a criminal gang. It continues to torture our mothers, sisters, children, and our entire nation. Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen, as members of our nation who are in special positions at this time, especially as perceived by the majority of the public as being conscientious, should face everything together with all of us.

At this moment, with a trembling heart and a trembling pen, I am writing down the tragic experiences of those who have been persecuted in the last six years. Among the true accounts of the unbelievable brutality, among the records of the regime’s inhuman torture of its own people, the immoral acts that shocked my soul the most were the lewd yet routine practice of attacking women’s vaginas by "610 Office" staff and the police. Almost every woman’s genitals and breasts or every man’s genitals have been sexually assaulted in the persecution in a most vulgar fashion. Almost everyone who has been persecuted, be it man or woman, was first stripped naked before he or she was tortured. No language or words could describe or re-create our communist government’s vulgarity and immorality in this respect. Who, with a warm body, could afford to stay silent when faced with such truths?{mospagebreak}

At 4:20 p.m. on October 28, 2005, Ms. Wang Shouhui (mother) and Mr. Liu Boyang (son) from Changchun City were followed by "610" staff and were illegally arrested. The two were brutally tortured by the police. At about 8 p.m., 28-year-old Liu Boyang died from the torture. About 10 days later, his mother was also tortured to death. The bodies of the unfortunate duo are still in the hands of the "610" officials. It took the "610" officials three days after Liu’s death to inform his father, while Ms. Wang’s time of death remains unclear. Liu’s father looked for a lawyer in his city, but no one dared to accept his case. The elderly man said, "In a society like this, it is harder to live than to die. Living brings more pain. After I take care of their burials, I’ll follow them and leave, too."

Ms. Wang Shouhui, her husband, and her son (Liu Boyang) began practicing Falun Gong in 1995. Since the persecution started on July 20, 1999, they were harassed constantly by police from Zhengyang Police Station of Luyuan District and officials from the Zhengyang Street Administration Office. Ms. Wang was illegally detained in October 1999 and sent to Heizuizi Forced Labor Camp in February 2000. At the forced labor camp, she was tortured with an electric baton eight times. She was also forced to work during the day. For five days and nights, she was prohibited from sleeping and was required to stand up. She was tortured using a "death bed" several times. The most serious time, she was beaten with two electric batons for over one hour while tied to the "death bed." She did not have even one part of her body and face intact. She was released only after she was found to be near death from torture.

On April 11, 2002, Ms. Wang was walking in the street when she was again abducted by the police from Zhengyang Police Station of Luyuan District. She was blindfolded by the police from the First Division of the Changchun Police Department and was taken to a secret torture room in Jingyueshan, Changchun. She was tortured on the "tiger bench" for two days and one night, during which time she was also beaten with two electric batons on the breasts. Three men used their fists to punch her face, chest, and back. As a result, Ms. Wang’s left cheekbone was fractured and she vomited a great amount of blood. Later, her lungs were infected. While at the police hospital, Ms. Wang’s four limbs were restrained when she received infusions. She was prohibited from using the restroom. Instead, the hospital forcefully inserted a tube into her bladder, but did not give her care. She could not move for five days and five nights. Subsequently, her bladder was permanently damaged and she could no longer control her bladder.{mospagebreak}

On June 27, 2002, Ms. Wang and her family were again abducted to the Zhengyang Police Station by the Luyuan District Police Department Political and Security Division. Ms. Wang was tied into a ball for an entire evening. Later, when she was illegally detained at the No. 3 Detention Center in Changchun City, the guards locked her handcuffs to her ankle shackles for 18 days and force-fed her for a month. She was then sent to the provincial police hospital, where her limbs were restrained and she was force-fed for over 30 days. She wasn’t released until she was on the verge of death. At the same time, several police from Zhengyang Police Station brutally tortured, beat, and kicked Liu Boyang. They also slapped his face with leather shoes, tied him with a rope, put a plastic bag over his head, tied his arms behind his back, and hung him up using handcuffs. When Liu was hanging in the air, they shook his feet or dragged his feet down. Mr. Yuan Dachuan, a police officer conducting the torture, said blatantly, "I have killed quite a few Falun Gong practitioners with torture. I don’t have to bear any responsibility if I beat you to death." Every time they were tortured, the mother and son could hear each other’s screams, which shook heaven and earth, ghosts and spirits!

On October 29, 2002, Liu Boyang was sent to two years of forced labor at Chaoyanggou Forced Labor Camp in Changchun City. In December, the police forced him to sit on cold cement floors all day long and prohibited him from sleeping at night. During the day, he was forced to attend brainwashing classes. In June 2004, when his term was over, the forced labor camp refused to release him and found some excuse to extend his term by another 47 days. Liu was a graduate of a medical university. He was a good person, and was kind to children and respectful to the elderly. Every year he was a model worker at the hospital. A woman surnamed Wang told me the above experiences of Ms. Wang and Mr. Liu almost in one breath.

Sun Shuxiang, a 48-year-old Changchun resident, was illegally arrested nine times in six years. Below are some of the experiences she described during her illegal sentence in forced labor camps.

"One day in the latter part of 2001, the policeman named Li Zhenping from No. 8 Section of Xingye Street Police Station came to my home with another man. They persuaded my husband to divorce me. When I said, ‘No,’ Li kept hitting my face until it was swollen. My eyes started to bleed, and I suddenly could not see anything. He asked again if I would agree to divorce and if not he would send me back (to the forced labor camp). Under their constant terror, my husband divorced me. My good family was thus broken by the regime authorities. Till now, I am still in exile."{mospagebreak}

"In July of 2002, I was in my father’s home. A plainclothes policeman suddenly broke into the house and asked if I was Sun Shuxiang. Before I answered him, I was kidnapped. The next day, police from No.1 Section of Changchun Public Security Bureau put me in a car and drove me on bumpy road for about two hours. Two police took me to a dark and terrifying basement, and took off the blindfold from my head. Eight or nine police all rushed into the room. On a table there were three electric batons of large, medium, and small sizes, a bundle of rope, and on the other side laid three tiger benches. Two police forced me onto a tiger bench, and placed my hands on the armrests to which each had a handcuff attached. The handcuffs were turned onto my hands. The armrests on the tiger bench had a row of holes with various sizes to fit different wrist sizes. The police skillfully fixed an iron rod of a thumb’s thickness on the two armrests, pressing against my chest and abdomen area and making it impossible for me to move. One police pointed at the torture tools and said to me, ‘Do you see that? If you cooperate, we can finish business in over an hour. Otherwise, we will have you taste all kinds of instruments. What happened to Liu Zhe and others (who were killed)? Very few can come out of here alive.’ "

"A seemingly polite policeman slapped my face twice, and asked me if I knew any fellow practitioners. I said no. He took an electric baton, stuck its two claws in between my ribs, and started to electrify me. He asked again for my fellow practitioners’ phone numbers, and I said nothing. He then used the electric baton over my fingertips, while asking me which practitioners I knew. He used the electric baton over my arms and then my head, and then to the other side of my body. After one round over my body, he slowly traced my body with another round with the electric baton. They then changed to using a higher-voltage, fully charged electric baton, and started from my toes and went over my body. I still remained silent. They started with the toes of the other foot to go over my body from the other side. I was still silent. They then used the electric baton on my eyes. I felt my eyes were going to pop out of the sockets, and I could not see anything. I still refused to tell them anything, and they returned to electrifying my ribs. The pain was unbearable. The electric baton moved to my chest, as they asked me with which practitioners I had remained in contact. The pain made it impossible for me to speak, and the familiar faces of practitioners appeared in front of me one by one. I had one thought: No matter what, I would not tell about any practitioners. Since as soon as I told about anyone, that person would be arrested and tortured. The police stuck the electric baton inside my mouth. My mouth was all burned and swollen, and blisters covered the outside. They said to me as they were electrifying me, "If you do not speak, we will pry open your mouth." They again stuck the electric baton inside my mouth. After a day and a night’s torture, I was just about to die…"{mospagebreak}

"In the beginning of 2004, I stayed temporarily at Ms. Xing Guiling’s home. One evening at midnight I heard loud pounding on the door. The double door was quickly broken. In terror, I saw a bunch of police with iron hammers and guns, shouting, "Do not move, otherwise you will be killed." We were arrested and taken to Luyuan Branch of the Public Security Bureau, and locked up in a small iron cage. I was tied onto a tiger bench. They started to beat Xing Guiling in front of me, using a leather belt to strangle her neck. She cried heart-wrenching cries. I saw Xing Guiling was beaten down; when she was down, they kicked her. When she got up, they beat her down again. They beat and kicked her, asking her to reveal her contacts with other practitioners. They kept torturing her over and over; they took their leather belt and strangled her again, till she could not breathe. The police shouted, "I will show you if you don’t tell." Xing Guoling was tortured till only one breath left, but she did not reveal a single practitioner’s name. They then started to torture me. After three days’ and nights’ torture, they sent us to the No. 3 Detention Center."

"On August 4, 2003, I was again arrested by the police. They took me to the Nanguan Branch of the Public Security Bureau. A pockmark-faced policeman grabbed my hair and kept hitting my head on the wall. I was getting so dizzy. He then forced me to sit on a tiger bench and cuffed my hands tightly. Another policeman started to hit my arms, and my wrists began to bleed from being tightly bound by the handcuffs. They used iron rings to chain my ankles, and then stepped on the rings, making them tighter and tighter. My ankles were painful beyond tolerance. They then used a plastic bag to cover my head, and tied it over my neck, suffocating me. When they saw that I was about to die, they took off the bag. After a while, they covered my head again, and took it off before I passed out. They did this three times, while at the same time kept pressing the rings tighter into my ankles. It was so painful that I started to have a seizure. My ankles were broken and bleeding. I passed out. They used cold water to bring me back, and sent me to the No. 3 Detention Center. There, I refused to eat and drink to protest, and went into a coma. After 27 days, I had just one breath left. They notified my family members to take me home."

Liu Shuqin, a 60-year-old lady from Changchun, was arrested and sent to forced labor camps five times in six years. This old lady calmly told us the barbarous torture she was put through.

"I was first arrested in February of 2000. The police violently hit and kicked us into the police car, which took us to Balipu Detention Center. I was locked up for 15 days without any legal procedures. Altogether more than 10 of us were arrested, and all experienced unspeakable torture. After that, the Neighborhood Committee and the police continued to harass me. On December 31, 2000, I was arrested the second time when I went to Beijing to appeal to the government. I held out a banner that read "Falun Dafa is Good," and the Tiananmen police hit my back violently with electric batons, forcing me onto a police car. Later I was thrown into a dungeon with walls covered with ice and frost. The police forced me to take off all my clothing, and ordered someone to shoot water on me from a big pipe. They left me on the bare floor naked, with nothing to cover my body. The toilet in the room stunk so much and smelled so badly. Every day, several police came to interrogate me. They did not allow me to sleep at night. After 38 days of interrogation, they did not get anything out of me."{mospagebreak}

"On December 31, 2001, several practitioners and I hung banners outside to expose the lies of the communist government about Falun Gong. Someone reported us and we were arrested. The police from the ‘610 Office’ beat me violently nonstop. At midnight that day, I was sent to the No. 3 Detention Center. There, a policeman punched my eyes with his fists. My eyes became blurry and I could not see anything. They hit my head a few more times. Faced with their brutal behavior, I told them good and evil will be repaid. The police asked inmates to bring a heavy chain (28 kg) and put in on my ankles. I was detained for 22 days, during which I was tortured. It was worse than death. Later on, the police extorted a lot of money from my family before they released me."

"On February 28, 2003, a few days after my release, a bunch of police from the Luyuan Branch stormed into my home again. A policeman named Yuan Dachuan went through our drawers and took away over 4,000 yuan (about US$500) cash without leaving any receipts. Another police pocketed a bottle of foreign perfume my child brought to me from overseas. When Yuan Dachuan was taking my money, I criticized his behavior of robbery. He punched me, and handcuffed me. They did whatever they liked in my home and the house was all messed up. They kidnapped me to the torture chamber at the Luyuan Branch, and tortured me with the tiger bench for two hours. They then tied me up with a thin rope, with my hands on my back. The police tightened the rope on me. With my whole body tied up, I was pushed out of the torture chamber. Another group of people threw me into a car. They used my down coat to cover my head so tightly that I almost suffocated. After about 20 minutes, the car stopped, and we arrived at another torture chamber (later on I knew this was at the Chaoyang Branch). The room was filled with torture instruments. As soon as we arrived there, they forced me onto the tiger bench, and about six policemen handcuffed me, chained my ankles, and fixed a steel rod across my chest (on the tiger bench). A young policeman used a foot-long iron rod to hit my left hand, which was cuffed to the tiger bench. After a dozen strikes, my hand was swollen severely and turned black and blue. They asked me to tell about other practitioners; I said I would not say anything. At this time, more than 10 police cuffed my hands behind me. They kept pulling the handcuffs and the ankle chains, and pushing the iron rod against my chest. Stretched under such a strong force, I felt as if my tendons and bones were about to break; I could not breathe. The pain was so unbearable that I fainted a few times. When I lost consciousness, the police poured cold water on me. After I returned to consciousness, they continued to torture me. I was tortured like this for a day and night, fainting and waking up. As the handcuffs and ankle chains were pulled by the police, they kept piercing into my flesh. Blood was mixed with flesh over my wrists and ankles, leaving a large pool of blood on the floor. The police inflicted on me, an old lady, such savage torture. There was unbearable pain in every nerve and bone of my arms, hands, feet and legs. My whole body was unable to move."{mospagebreak}

"On March 1, they sent me to the third detention center. They checked my heart and blood pressure-none functioned well; my legs could carry me. Even so, I was still sentenced for two years in a forced labor camp. In a coma, I was carried to Heizuizi Forced Labor Camp. I had to be carried to go to the bathroom. The police Liu Lianying from the second team started to persecute me, saying that I was pretending to be unable to walk. Liu barbarously electrified me with an electric baton on my legs, chest, and heart-all over my body. At the time, a criminal convict, Yi Liwen (who had a good relationship with Liu), could not bear to see it; she took away the electric baton and said, "Don’t electrify her anymore. Look at her bad shape." Liu Lianying then stopped. Since I could not walk, the police often cursed me; they used all their conversion experts to try to transform me, and the police took turns to brainwash me. After a day’s labor, they would not let me sleep, but conducted brainwashing to force me to sign this or that paper. I firmly refused. They tortured me like this for two months, and my blood pressure often reached over 200 and I suffered from a serious heart disease. Seeing that I refused to be transformed, Jia Hongyan used prostitution convicts to torture me, monitoring me on a 24-hour basis, at my side even during eating and sleeping. They attempted to force me to transform, beating and cursing me almost every moment and every day. They did not allow me to speak; if I did they would curse me. Every day, my body and heart suffered from great pain. Over a year of persecution has inflicted great harm to my body and mind. My body was numb, and my arms did not move well. I was diagnosed with brain infarction and atrophy. I was originally very healthy, but the one year’s persecution had turned me into such a state. Just because I want to be a good person, I have endured such inhumane torture for such a long time."

With a slow and gentle voice, Zhang Zhikui calmly narrated his experience of being persecuted in Changchun City:

"After July 20, 1999, I went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. Because I clarified the truth of Falun Gong to residents in Beijing, I was arrested by the police in Beijing and transferred to the police of Changchun City’s liaison office in Beijing. There, they tied my hands and feet together onto a wooden club and hung me between two tables by putting the two ends of the wooden club onto the two tables respectively. I swung back and forth. Whenever the wooden club broke, I fell to the floor. As for other practitioners who were also arrested there, the police beat them with leather belts or hung them up. They beat my thighs with a white wood rod. Later on, all of us practitioners were sent back to Erdaohezi District Police Substation in Changchun City. At that time, there were 10 or more practitioners. After we arrived there, the head of the Political Protection Department lifted me up and forced me to take off my pants in front of other male and female people’s presence. Then, the head of the Political Protection Department beat my head with a leather belt. My head became numb, there was ringing in my ears, and I almost lost consciousness. He asked for my name and when I went to Beijing. I was barely conscious following the beating, so I couldn’t remember anything. However, he continued beating me. And then, he stamped my feet with his leather shoes, grinding my toes with the heel of his leather shoes. He just observed the expressions in my eyes while he was doing this to me. I endured the severe pain and began to sweat profusely. He left me then and began to beat up other practitioners. After I was sent to Tiebei Detention Center, the guards instigated the criminals there to strip me and beat me. The criminals kicked me hard, ramming me into the wall of the restroom. I could barely get up from the ground. Immediately two pots of cold water were poured onto my body. Again they kicked me hard. My arms and legs bled, and there was a big wound on one leg. One month later, they released me without any documents and did not follow procedures."{mospagebreak}

"At the end of November 1999, I went to China’s Supreme Court in Beijing to peacefully appeal for Falun Gong. The officials of China’s Supreme Court informed police and they arrested me there, sending me to the police of Zhaoyuan City’s (Shandong Province) liaison office in Beijing. On my way back, they removed my belt and forced me to walk with my hands holding up my pants. They beat me as we walked. Upon my arrival at the liaison office, they again beat me severely with a strap, and they continued beating me for several hours during the night. The next day, they sent me back to Zhaoyuan City, Shandong Province. Upon my arrival at Zhaoyuan City Detention Center, the police instigated the criminals there to beat me. The criminals there saw that I did my duties actively and positively. They were all moved and didn’t beat me any longer. Eventually, they sent a mute criminal to beat me up. One day, the guard there ordered me to extend my head out through a small hole in the iron gate of my cell, and then he trampled my head with his feet, beating my head as well. The practitioners in other cells all shouted at him together, "Do not beat people!" Afterwards, they sent my sister and me to Xinzhuang Township Police Station. Following July 20, 1999, my whole family was arrested. They detained my sister and me in the small dark solitary confinement cells under the staircases respectively. The solitary confinement cells were so small that we couldn’t stand up straight inside them. They only allowed us to go to the restrooms once in the evening, and they locked us up like this for 10 days for each incarceration. After that, they sent us back to the Zhaoyuan Detention Center and kept us there for a month. They tortured my sister and me like this back and forth for a total of six times. All these events made us feel that it is difficult to either live or die."

"On October 1, 2000, I went to Culture Square in Changchun City to unfurl a banner and I was arrested. All the news media in China lied. They did not speak a truthful word for us. Therefore, we wanted to clarify the truth in this way. Police Chief Liang and other policemen stripped my coat off and wrapped my head with it. They cuffed my hands from behind, dragged me down from upstairs, and then escorted me to a car. The car traveled for about two hours and I felt that it was far away from the town. After we arrived at the destination, I was escorted to a house where the coat on my head was removed. I felt terrible. There was a tiger bench in the room. I knew we were on a mountain and I heard the wind swooshing. Police Chief Liang and other policemen stripped all my clothes off and they forced me onto the tiger bench. My hands were tied behind my back to the crabstick. They inserted an iron stick at my chest, my thighs and my legs respectively. Both ends of these sticks were fixed to the tiger bench so that my whole body was tightly locked onto the tiger bench and I could not move. My feet were put in iron hoops and immobilized. Then Police Chief Liang took out a sharp knife, one-foot long, and rubbed it on his pants a couple of times. He threw the knife to the table and ferociously said to me: "Zhang Zhikui, I want you to die here; today I’ll torture you to death and dig a hole and bury you. Nobody will know or find you." After saying that, Liang went outside. At least three policemen started to recharge the electric batons and another two policemen grasped my hands that were tied to the stick behind me; then they stretched my hands around my head from behind to front. I heard my bones cracking nonstop, and my bones got broken. {mospagebreak}This torture was repeated several times and caused excruciating pain. Later, an iron barrel was buckled onto my head; they hit the barrel violently with steel pipes. The intense tremor and harsh noise made my head blast. After I suffered for a long period of time, the policemen burned my back with cigarettes and I lost consciousness due to the unbearable pain. Then they poured cold water on me to bring me back. Finally they lit candles and used them to burn my back. After they scorched the flesh on my back, they poured the hot wax on it. The pain caused my body to shiver and jump continuously. All I could hear was the cracking of the tiger bench that was shaken by my convulsions. Because there was not any good skin remaining on my body, the policemen started to shock my private part with electric batons and pierce it. Afterwards they used an iron stick to smash my private part. I passed out and I did not know how much time passed before I came to consciousness. After one night’s torture, my face swelled and was several times the original size. My whole body was drenched in blood. I looked badly mangled. Because I twisted my body due to the pain, as a result the skin and flesh at my ankles were broken, and the bones and muscles were exposed. However, when they saw that I was awake, they again dragged me outside. It was more than 10 degrees below zero Centigrade outdoors and they poured cold water on my naked body. They abandoned me where I lay and returned to the house. Half an hour later they came out to see if I was still alive. I did not know how much time passed before morning arrived. I was already at the brink of death. I was carried to the Changchun City Police Department. There were many small cells, each with a tiger bench inside. There were female Dafa practitioners on every tiger bench. Most of them had passed out, with their lower bodies naked or with only a cloth covering the body."

"I was sent to the Tiebei Detention Center for further torturing. I began a hunger strike for five days and they stopped the torture then. After I stayed in the detention center for 40 days, they sent me to the Fifth Division of the Chaoyang District Forced Labor Camp. There, I went on another hunger strike. Over 10 practitioners joined me in the strike. There were 500 Dafa practitioners detained in the division. After seeing that we were on a hunger strike, the division head led some criminals to brutally beat us. The scene was horrendous. Finally the Dafa practitioners who were on the hunger strike were taken to the first division where the Dafa practitioners were most brutally persecuted. A criminal named Xu Hui often assaulted Dafa practitioners. One Dafa practitioner over 60 years old used to be a mid-level officer, but because he did not wear a prisoner’s uniform he was beaten by Xu Hui until he was on his last breath. However, he still did not stop beating him. I almost lost confidence in life, since I had endured for a very long time the ineffable pains. All the unbearable persecution and torture happened in the afternoons, in the evenings, and even in the middle of the night."

"If the Falun Gong practitioners made even a little bit of a sound when they were asleep, their inmates would beat them up. All of this made the Falun Gong practitioners not even dare to go to sleep. I sometimes couldn’t stop coughing at night; therefore, the inmates beat me for the whole night. They didn’t allow me to cough at all. I didn’t dare to drink water in the evening, since they didn’t allow Falun Gong practitioners to go to the restroom at night. Once I couldn’t help myself from going to the restroom, and I went quietly. When I came back, Xu Hui beat me up until I was almost on my last breath. He kicked me very hard in the area of my kidney, causing my kidney to move from its natural position. I couldn’t move for several days. Once, there was a Dafa disciple in his twenties named Sui Futao. The criminals found out that he had hidden our Teacher’s articles in his clothing, so they had hit him with a wrench over 50 times. Not long after that, this practitioner was beaten to death."{mospagebreak}

"My younger sister was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, and at the same time, her husband was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Furthermore, only because they practiced Falun Gong, their 9-year-old child was expelled from school under the order given by the ‘610 Office.’ Among the Falun Gong practitioners who kept in touch with me, eight or nine practitioners had been beaten to death. Their names were Wang Shouhui, Liu Boyang, Liu Haibo, Liu Chengjun, Xu Shuxiang, Wang Kefei, Yu Lixin, and Deng Shiying. As for the names of other practitioners who were persecuted to death, I can’t even remember their names right now! All these are the extremely cruel facts!"

"Zhang Shuchun is my second younger sister. When the police tried to arrest her, she jumped downstairs. Her broken ribs pierced some of her organs. Her legs and arms were broken too. She immediately passed out. Soon many passersby stopped to look at her and asked what happened. The police from the ‘610 Office’ said, ‘She had a fight with her husband about a divorce.’ Since she was the so-called ‘Wanted Criminal,’ the police took her to a hospital. However, the doctors at the hospital thought it unnecessary to try to save a Falun Gong practitioner. They said, ‘Just throw her out’ and surprisingly, the police did throw her out in a suburb area. Later, she was saved by some kind-hearted people. But the police put her back on the ‘Wanted’ list again."

Wang Yuhuan is a female Falun Gong practitioner who the Changchun police arrested. She was detained at forced labor camps nine times in the past six years. She said:

"You won’t believe this. But at the forced labor camp, in order to collect money, police tried to sell sleeping space. The price was 2,000 yuan (about US$250) per month. Once you bought it, you would have the right to lie down on your back when sleeping. Otherwise, you would have to lie on your side since the cell was small. Meanwhile, those who bought the space were entitled to beat us up. As Falun Dafa practitioners, we wouldn’t spend so much money to buy sleeping spaces. As more criminals bought sleeping space, the rest of the people had less space for sleep and it became more painful to sleep."

"In August 2000, I was sent to Heizuizi Forced Labor Camp. Police there tried to force me to "transform." I had to work 18 hours every day. The workload was very high. It was to make products for export. Besides working, they forced me to write "repentance" reports. The criminals in my cell would beat me up if I refused to do so. In order to "transform" me, Sun Mingyan, the police-in-charge of the Six Squad, sat on my head and electrically shocked my head and face with an electric baton for more than one hour. My hair was scorched and my face and neck were severely burned. I was bruised all over my face and body. When I was released in November 2001, I still wasn’t able to pick up a bowl. The ‘610 Office’ also illegally took 2,000 yuan (about US$250) from me when I was released."{mospagebreak}

"On March 5, 2002, some Dafa practitioners successfully broadcast a video clip about the truth of Falun Dafa on TV. The Central ‘610 Office’ ordered a large-scale arrest in Changchun. I was arrested then. Police arrested over 5,000 Dafa practitioners at that time. Each cell at the detention center had to hold at least 50 people. They even detained Dafa practitioners in bathrooms because of limited space. The First Department of the Changchun Public Security arrested me on March 11, 2002. They locked me in a 1.3 meter [4.27 ft.]-high iron-cage at the police substation near Nanguan District Caishen Temple. I couldn’t stand up at all. On the night of March 12, Gao Peng and Zhang Heng and some other policemen from the First Division of the Criminal Squad, interrogated me. They handcuffed my hands behind my back and put a cloth bag on my head. They used a rope to tighten up the bag on my neck so that I couldn’t see anything, and I could hardly breathe. Then they tied me up using ropes and put me in the trunk of the police car. They drove to a mountain where they brutally tortured Falun Dafa practitioners at will. Many fellow practitioners were tortured to death in this place. Mr. Liu Haibo was stripped of all his clothes and forced to kneel down. Police pushed in the longest electric baton they could find into his bottom and gave his organs electric shocks. Liu died instantly. Liu Haibo was a college graduate."

"Liu Yi, a doctor from the Liyuan District Hospital, was in his 30s when he was tortured to death in this devil’s hole. Twenty-three practitioners were tortured to death there. I knew many of them. The police simply buried their bodies in a hole. Xiang Min, a good-looking Dafa practitioner, was carried back after a round of torture. She told me that the police sexually harassed her by touching her buttocks while giving her electric shocks. Close to 30 practitioners were tortured to death in that round of arrests."

"It took them over two hours to drive me to this notorious place on a mountain. I heard them stop the car. Then they dragged me out, beating me up at the same time. The police kept cursing me and said they would torture me to death that day. They shoved me into trees and I stumbled my way to a building after 10 minutes or so. We went upstairs and downstairs, eventually entering a room. They took the cloth bag off of my head. The police said, ‘Let’s wait and see how you die today. Nobody has walked out of here alive!’ I was in a small room of about 50 square feet. There was a small desk with three long electric batons with claws on them. There was also a rope and a bed. Later, I found out that the bed was for the police to lie down and rest while cursing us, when they got tired from beating us up. I saw a tiger bench and many police were busy preparing to torture me. I heard wind blowing angrily. Next, a few police forced me onto the tiger bench. They tied me to the bench with my hands cuffed behind my back and behind the bench. They fastened the iron rods at the side of the tiger bench till I couldn’t move, and they tied down my ankles with two large iron rings. Every five minutes, they would start a round of torture on me. They moved my arms back and forth, and I could hear my bones cracking. The huge pain made me almost faint. My sweat and tears came out immediately from the pain. They pushed my head toward my legs. Because I was tied down on the tiger bench, I felt my neck bones breaking and the iron rods piercing into my breast and stomach. Every second I was about to suffocate. They tied ropes on the iron rings and pulled the ropes harshly. My ankles hurt so much. The pain all over my body made me tremble. They repeated the torture like this every five minutes. My sweat and tears and blood soaked my hair and clothing. Later, I fainted because of the unbearable pain. They then poured cold water or boiling water on me to bring me back. The boiling water burned my whole body badly. I couldn’t stand the slow killing and intense suffering. I wished they would kill me with a gun."{mospagebreak}

"After inhumanely torturing me over four hours on the tiger bench, which had rendered me rather weak, they put an iron barrel on my head. Each of the seven police smoked three cigarettes at the same time and puffed smoke into the barrel. This was suffocating and I fainted. They poured cold water on me. When I was barely awake, they used the burning cigarettes to scorch my eyeballs. I would struggle a little when I began to gain consciousness. After that, they punched my head, face, nose, and teeth. They knocked out my two incisor teeth. My face swelled up and turned to dark purple. They also pierced into my ears using thin sticks. I couldn’t hear anything for the next two weeks. Eventually, they wore out from torturing me and went to sleep at 2 a.m. that morning."

"In March of 2002, they tortured me three times within 17 days in that devil’s hole. Each time, the torture was more brutal. The last two times happened at midnight. Every time, seven or eight police came and took me from the cell and sent me back barely alive. One time, the police didn’t want the others to see how badly I was tortured. They dressed me up in thick clothing. However, blood still came out. Then the police dressed me with more clothing but the blood soaked the clothing and came out again. Practitioners there couldn’t go to sleep because of the horror and concerns over the other fellow practitioners."

"The police ‘interrogated’ all the practitioners on the blacklist of the ‘610 Office’ every day. They tied up each practitioner, put a cloth bag over their heads, and cuffed their hands behind their backs. Then they would throw them into the trunk of the police car and drive to the mountain, to the devil’s hole where they viciously tortured them."

"The relentless torture destroyed my body and health. They had to lie about my poor conditions to get the No. 3 Detention Center to accept me. On the following day, I was sent to the Province Hospital and then the No. 3 Military Hospital for physical examination. The results indicated that my body sustained injury nearly everywhere and was in a critical condition, and thus I did not meet the minimum health standard to be detained. That afternoon, police had taken Ms. Guo Shuaishuai and me back to the prison hospital and launched a new bout of persecution there. We were tied onto a bed. Police injected me with some drug, which made me unable to feel my legs since then. My legs became ice-cold and completely numb. Practitioner Jiang Yong was persecuted here, too. He passed away after seven months of being tortured. Police also injected him with an unidentified drug and drew a large tube of blood from him every day. These injections and blood loss emaciated Yong. He died during a force-feeding."

"It was terrible to witness the entire process of a person being tortured to death. The guards continuously force-fed Ms. Guo for over two months; the hard feeding tube was left in her throat the entire time. Because she was unable to bear the force-feeding, Ms. Guo swallowed the 1.5-meter [4.92 ft.] feeding tube. She tossed and turned in bed due to the excruciating pain. The prison hospital refused to release her in fear of her exposing the evil persecution, so it intensified the torture. Guo and I were stripped naked and tied with limbs spread apart on a bed. Police and male inmates lewdly stared at us every day. One male prison doctor pinched and struck Ms. Guo’s vagina. Unable to bear the extreme torture, Mrs. Guo swallowed the spoon that was inserted into her mouth. She again tossed and turned in bed due to the pain. The prison doctor cut open her stomach to retrieve the spoon. He deliberately made an unnecessarily long incision, stretching from the chest all the way to the vagina. He roughly sutured the extremely long cut and sent Ms. Guo to die at home. Ms. Guo never recovered from the barbarous physical and psychological torture."{mospagebreak}

"Ms. Zhao Xiaoqin and I were sent to the prison hospital the same day. ‘610′ officers knocked her unconscious and threw her off the building. The throw broke her left arm, caused a bump the size of a bowl on her head, and made her insane. The prison doctor did not change the cast on her arm the entire summer. Consequently, her arm festered, and bugs crawled around it. Seeing Ms. Zhao’s suffering broke my heart. I also witnessed other atrocities in this persecution. We, the female practitioners, were all stripped naked and tied with limbs spread apart on a bed board for over 26 days. We suffered incessant humiliation and sexual assault from male police, doctors, and inmates."

"I was transferred back to the No. 3 Detention Center for refusing to renounce Falun Gong. The Detention Center refused to accept me, because it heard that I would die soon, and it feared to take responsibility for my death. Outraged police hung me on a door for six hours and beat me. I was taken back to the prison hospital for more persecution. I went on a hunger strike to protest. On the 15th day, a prison doctor cut open my vein and placed an IV needle in it. My blood seeped out and stained the bed and floor. Already accustomed to the bloody persecution, the police and prison doctors were not at all disturbed by my excessive bleeding. Each day, they administered 10 bottles of unidentified thick fluid to me. They let me urinate and defecate on the bed, and they left me in a pool of urine and feces for over 50 days. The full extent of the misery is beyond description. My veins collapsed due to the hunger strike, so the thick fluid could not pass through. The head surgeon just shook the bottle and squeezed the fluid into my vein. I passed out many times because of the excruciating pain."

Mr. Yang Guang, another practitioner, suffered even more frightening persecution. I quote part of the letter a witness wrote to me.

"Mr. Yang Guang lived in Changchun City, Jilin Province. He has been illegally detained since January 2000 and has suffered severe torture under the hands of Director Liang and officers in the Changchun Public Security Bureau. He was tortured with electric batons, the tiger bench, straightjacket, big hang up, plastic-bag suffocation, force-feeding of strong alcohol. Persecutors occasionally torture him for 40 hours on end. The torture left Mr. Yang with a deaf left ear, disabled arms, paralysis from the waist down, necrosis in his right hip, a broken right leg, deformed feet, festered toes, kidney failure, and hydrothorax (fluids accumulated in his chest). Despite his life-threatening condition, Mr. Yang was sentenced to 15 years in Jilin Prison."

"Mr. Yang is held in the so-called ‘Naked District,’ which is the section for disabled inmates in the prison. Here inmates are forbidden to wear pants all year long, so that cleaning is kept minimal. Inmates made the paralyzed Mr. Yang a special wheelchair out of steel pipes, four casters, and boards for the back and sides. The seat has a hole in the center, like a toilet seat. Whenever Mr. Yang needs to go, inmates would push his chair to the bathroom. Because of the side boards on the chair and his disabled arms, Mr. Yang cannot clean himself afterwards. Urine, feces, and filthy odor enshroud Mr. Yang all year long. This ‘Naked District’ receives no sunlight. The conditions are utterly inhumane. This district is boiling hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. The space for sleeping is less than 60 cm [24 in.] square. The food is disgusting and extremely lean."{mospagebreak}

"When Mr. Yang needs cleaning, inmates wheel him to the water room and spray him with a pressure hose, and then wipe him with a mop that has nails sticking out. Inmates call this a ‘cosmetic shower.’ The prison authorities subjected Mr. Yang to these intolerable conditions to force him to renounce Falun Gong. Mr. Yang, however, remained firm in his belief. He was put into solitary confinement. He was only let out when he was on the brink of death. Mr. Yang was then transferred to a special district in the Tiebei Prison in Changchun. He was given absolutely no medical treatment. Nonetheless, the prison still extorts 1,000 yuan (US$125) a month from Mr. Yang’s family."

"Mr. Yang has an 86-year-old mother in his home who does not know that her son has been tortured to such a horrid extent. Whenever she sees people, she would sadly implore, ‘Guang is a good person. Where is he now, I want my son!’ Mr. Yang’s wife divorced him, because there is no income to support the family. Mr. Yang has also suffered extreme psychological trauma. Relatives demanded his release, but the prison, the Ministry of Justice, and the Prison Management Bureau refused."

Dalian practitioner, Chang Xuexia, is a graceful and quiet girl. She lowered her head in shame while recounting her painful and humiliating experience in a forced labor camp.

"I was arrested for the first time for appealing for Falun Gong. I was illegally detained for 39 days in a rehabilitation center in Dalian. In January 2003, the authorities again forced me to renounce Falun Gong. They locked me in a small metal cage and brought in a variety of instruments of torture. Ms. Wang Yalin, the main persecutor of Falun Gong practitioners in the rehab, goaded several inmates to hang me by the wrists with my feet barely touching the floor. Wang ordered inmates to ‘Fix her well, all of you!’ "

"The swarm of inmates struck and kicked me from every side. I passed out. They dropped me on the floor and forcefully stepped on my face and arm to see if I was faking. When I woke up, I could not move my left arm, for my elbow was dislocated. Inmates who refused to torture me were transferred and their sentences extended. I was hung up again. This time inmates put Teacher’s picture inside my underwear, wrote blasphemous words against Dafa and Teacher on my face. They also beat me with a hard wooden plank. The bruises have not yet faded after a whole year."

"I still refused to renounce Dafa. They stripped me naked, and several inmates began pinching my breasts, plucking my pubic hair, stabbing my vagina. They used a brush that usually cleaned the water tank. They then put a basin under my lower body to see if I was bleeding. Since no blood came out, the inmates switched to a larger brush and repeatedly stabbed my vagina with it. I could not bear the excruciating pain any longer and succumbed to their demand of not doing the Falun Gong exercises in the camp."{mospagebreak}

"What I had suffered in the camp was not the most brutal. Another practitioner named Ms. Wang Lijun was tortured in the small metal cage three times. Inmates tied many knots on a thick rope and pulled it back and force in a sawing motion across her vagina. Her entire lower body swelled up. The head police then ordered inmates to jab her swollen vagina with the thorny end of a broken mop stick. This torture caused Ms. Wang’s vagina to bleed profusely. Her abdomen and vagina were so swollen that she could not pull up her pants, or sit, or urinate. Ms. Wang still could not sit upright two months after the sexual torture. Her legs were also disabled. I also witnessed these inmates applying this same torture to a virgin. The head police also put venomous bugs on female practitioners’ bodies."

"My name is Wei Chun (alias). I am 35 years old and live in Dalian. I started to practice Falun Gong in 1998. Because Falun Gong teaches people to live the principles of ‘Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance,’ I have improved greatly, both mentally and physically. I can forgive others easily and elevate my moral character at the same time. In July 1999, the communist government started to oppress Falun Gong. I could not ignore its abuse of our basic human rights, so I went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong in March 2000. When I got on the train, and I was stopped and asked by a policeman to curse Mr. Li Hongzhi. I refused, so I was arrested. Afterwards, I knew that whoever traveled to Beijing at that time, whether by train or by bus, had to curse Mr. Li or Falun Dafa; otherwise they would not be allowed to travel."

"I was taken to the Dalian Drug Rehabilitation Center and detained for seven days. When I was sent back to my work place, my supervisors demoted me to cleaning the factory in the morning and reflecting on my mistakes in the afternoon. They wanted me to renounce my beliefs and write statements slandering Falun Gong. I refused, so I was forced to quit my job. In April 2000, I found other employment. On March 15, 2001, Chen Xin and other policemen from the No. 1 Division of the Dalian Public Security Bureau abducted me from my work place. They did not allow me to sleep for five days and nights. My hands were handcuffed behind my back the entire time. They put lit cigarettes into my nostrils and mouth. My mouth was filled with cigarettes. At one time, a policeman hit my head with an iron club. Afterwards, I was sent to the Dalian Detention Center and sentenced to labor for two years. On May 18, I was sent to the Fifth Team at Dalian Forced Labor Camp for re-education."

"On June 4, Mr. Liu Yonglai, Mr. Qu Fei, Mr. Huang Wenzhong, and myself were brought to the 4th floor. We were forced to defame Mr. Li, Falun Gong, and Falun Dafa. If we did not do so, they would punish us with electric shocks. If we did so, they would take us downstairs to write the ‘three letters’ defaming Falun Gong and Mr. Li, with introspection, and a pledge to not practice Falun Gong again. They took off all of Liu Yonglai’s and my clothes, and handcuffed us together face to face. They used six electric batons on both of us, and shocked us on our heads, backs, thighs, genitals, both sides of our chests, and necks. We clenched our teeth, and struggled to avoid the electric shocks. As a result of struggling, the handcuffs became progressively tighter. They eventually cut into our flesh and cut through to our bones. It was extremely painful and we bled a lot."{mospagebreak}

"The electric shocks continued for about one hour, and then they separated us. They handcuffed Liu’s hands behind his back, and made him crawl on the grass. They put two chairs on his back and asked two criminals to sit on the chairs. Then, another six criminals used six fully charged electric batons and repeatedly shocked his back, buttocks, neck, calves, soles of his feet, and genitals at the same time. They even pulled out his penis to electric shock it separately. As for me, I was tied to a chair. The legs of the chair and the back of the chair were both tied with several electric batons. Then, they tightly tied me on the back of the chair with a rope. Another criminal held an electric baton to my head. Six batons were used to simultaneously shock me. My entire body was in convulsions. I felt that I would rather be dead than alive. I cried out in despair. My hopeless cries could be heard throughout the entire building. There were many Falun Gong practitioners on the 2nd and 3rd floors. It is said that they all wept when hearing my shrill cries."

"The torture continued for about an hour. Then, I exchanged places with Liu. He was forced to sit on the electric shocking chair while I crawled on the grass. Again, I was shocked with six electric batons at the same time for about one hour. I felt that I could no longer bear it, but I’d rather die than betray my belief, my conscience, and not defame my Master and Falun Dafa. So I started to hit the ground with my head in hopes of inducing unconsciousness. Every time the six electric batons touched me at the same time, I felt as if countless arrows were piercing into my heart."

"I felt that I had died several times. After the electric batons were discharged, they would change to new ones with more voltage. I finally started to fear, so at last, I submitted. Later, Liu could no longer endure it, either. He also submitted. The policemen who led the criminals to shock us were Qiao Wei, Zhu Fengshan, Jing Dianke and others. I don’t remember all the criminals’ names. Afterwards, I was told that when Huang Wenzhong was shocked, his face was burned and bloody. Qu Fe’s cheeks were beaten with shoes so severely that they swelled up like a bread loaf. After we were taken downstairs, we wrote the Guarantee Statements to renounce Falun Dafa. When we went back to the team, we had to write a full page with the same three sentences every day, defaming Master Li, Dafa, and Falun Gong. Meanwhile, we had to shout the three statements out every day. It was strangling my soul. The pain it brought to me was far greater than the torture to my body. But if we opposed it or refused to do so, we would be taken to the 4th floor to be electric shocked until we submitted again."

"Afterwards, a Falun Gong practitioner called Li in class 3, could not endure the spiritual torture and chose to commit suicide by hanging himself. He was rescued. At that time, I did not want to live another moment. I was too humiliated. However, I did not want to endure the electric shocks anymore. I was afraid that I could not bear them. Nevertheless, I did not want to do such immoral things as defame our Master and Dafa. I told Liu that if any practitioner dared to take his own life, the guards would not dare to persecute us like this. He said that he would sacrifice his life for the others. One day, when we were cleaning outdoors, Liu walked to the 3rd floor from the back of the building and jumped down head first. He died instantly. Soon thereafter, many Falun Gong practitioners recanted everything they wrote and said that what they had written violated their conscience and that the facts were twisted because of being tortured and were invalid. They would firmly protect their beliefs and the truth. Because of this, the police put these practitioners who had recanted the three statements into the same class and put them into forced labor. They got up at 5:00 a.m. and worked until 11:00 p.m. every day. Then, they sent these nine practitioners to Guanshan Forced Labor Camp to start a new cycle of persecution."{mospagebreak}

"I realized that I could not cooperate with the guards any longer, so I stopped wearing prison uniforms, stopped marching, stopped singing, and started a hunger strike to protest the persecution. The whole class also started a hunger strike to protest with me. We were later separated, and I was sent to the Third Brigade where I continued the hunger strike. When a chief prosecutor asked me why I started a hunger strike, I said that I had no other means, no court dares to accept my case, they are all Jiang Zemin’s judges and courts, and no one dares to represent us. I can only use my life to protest the persecution against me, to protest Jiang Zemin and the Party’s persecution of Falun Gong. I have a son. When my son asks me in the future, ‘What did you do during that most severe persecution of just people,’ I don’t want to tell him that I submitted. I want to be a person who would ‘rather die with honor than survive in disgrace.’ On the 15th day of my hunger strike, they released me on October 24, using the excuse that I needed outside medical treatment in fear that I might die in the reformatory."

As we listened to those who had escaped death in this persecution, one by one, we were literally breathless. Some of the true stories were told by those who had escaped death from the persecution several times. Their stories would even move a devil to tears. The unprecedented and unrivaled bloody scenes, the vicious inhuman natures, and the most tragic torture techniques, all so vividly terrifying. Facing these fellow countrymen, while they peacefully shared their stories of the barbaric persecution one after another, we must ask of those who wear the national emblem and the country’s uniform to maintain the peace: "In the six years of the past 60 years of communist rule, how many such inhuman acts have you perpetrated and concealed?"

Where did our system fail? It has bred so many vicious public officials who live among us, have been supported by us, who were raised by parents like ours, and have families like ours! The tragic experience of our fellow countrymen fully illustrates that, in our society, there is a group of public officials who persistently disregard the basic moral values of human society, and have been continuously using methods that are completely distant from basic human morality and human nature. They covertly scheme their dirty deals that are causing the very destruction of our nation’s human nature, basic morals, kindness, and conscience. All fellow countrymen, including Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, must admit that none of us can deny that our system is constantly and progressively creating such a shameful reality, and is revealing the totally immoral character of the system.

Hu, Wen, and all fellow Chinese countrymen: This is a time of introspection for our nation! There isn’t a group of people on this planet or in all of history who have suffered on such a large scale, and endured such a severe and disastrous persecution in peacetime, because of their faith. This ongoing disaster has cost thousands of innocent people their valuable lives, and hundreds of thousands of people have been deprived of their freedom. The facts that we have seen show us that all those who have been deprived of their freedom have also suffered physical and mental torture that is unbelievable to the civilized world. This completely inhuman persecution has caused over 100 million Falun Gong followers and their families to suffer from interrogations and threats, deprivation of employment, work opportunities and income, confiscation of assets to various extents, and a persecution that extends to various other means. How absurd, dangerous, and immoral this is! This is a continuous fight against the entire Chinese people, human civilization, and the moral foundation of the people all over the world!{mospagebreak}

My law offices and entire family are making it clear that the ongoing

Some Comments On Communism in China

Some Facts About Communism

Suppose you meet someone at a party, right here in Ottawa, and he tells everyone that he is a Nazi. How welcome would he be? But suppose someone else at the party tells everyone that he is a Communist. Someone might say, "Oh, how interesting!" Something is wrong in Canada. People have forgotten what communism is. I would like to mention four facts about communism. They do not constitute a formal definition. They are just some of the things I would like to point out to people at that party.

Fact #1 The sole aim of communism is to gain and hold onto power

No moral principle can get in the way of this end. Lies and deceit are justified in the pursuit of power. Mao showed this. Before 1949, he promised land to the peasants. They never got it; the state took it over.

Even mass killing is permissible. Some say that there have been 65 million victims of the Maoist regime. The government of China killed 65 million people because to communists, seeking and holding onto power is all that matters.

Fact #2 Communism tries to gain total control

One way to express this is to say that the party swallows up the state and the state swallows up the society. "The party swallows up the state" means that a freely elected parliament becomes a rubber stamp for the party. "The state swallows up the society" means that the state either destroys or takes control of all independent groups-labor unions, religious groups, businesses, and schools.

Or it tries to do so. But in reality communism can’t control everything. No state can fully monitor every person in his private life—every act, every conversation, every thought. There just can’t be enough secret police, and they can’t build enough jails. This was true even under Stalin and Mao.

Let me tell you about a very small experience I had which illustrates this. In 1980 I was in Berlin, and I took the train into the Communist part of the city. While I was there, a couple of teenagers asked me what I thought of the German Democratic Republic. I said, "You need a revolution!" They hushed me up, but they also grinned: They wanted me to say that. My point is that even in a dictatorship, those who oppose it can sometimes say what they think.

Fact #3 Communism uses war to gain power

The Soviet Union did this after the war. Its soldiers stayed on in Eastern Europe after they had driven the Germans out, to ensure that those countries would be controlled by Stalin.{mospagebreak}

And recently we read in The Epoch Times the horrifying words of General Chi Haotian, the man who carried out the massacre at Tiananmen Square. He said quite clearly that if it is necessary to save the party, China should start a nuclear war which would kill many millions.

Fact #4 Communism is an anti-religious religion

We know that communism is atheistic, and that it claims to be the enemy of all religion.

It has, however, many of the features of religion. One of these is that religious belief is based on faith. Religious people will agree that belief in God, for example, cannot be justified by logic and evidence.

Today, in China, faith in communism and in the religion of communism, is all but dead.

But there was a time when this was not so. Before Mao came to power in 1949, many in China fell for his golden promises. They had faith.

Even in Western countries, in the 1930s and the early 1940s, many thousands had faith in communism. This was so even in Canada, where a Communist was once elected to Parliament. His name was Fred Rose. He was elected in 1943. In 1945, he was re-elected. In 1947, he was exposed as a Soviet spy and went to prison.

How could so many have believed in communism? Didn’t they know that World Communism has killed millions of people? Didn’t they know what Stalin and Mao were really like? The history of communism was not a big secret; anyone could have read about it and learned the truth.

The fact is that they didn’t want to know. They thought they had a higher land of knowledge—knowledge based on faith. It was a faith in a future society where there would be no exploitation of man by man, where people would be happier than they had ever been. It is this faith that marks communism as a religion—a fraudulent, deluded religion, but a religion, nonetheless.

The Western Response to Communism

Given these facts about communism, how has the West responded?

One response is something called appeasement. This term become popular in the 1930s, when the challenge was not communism but Nazism. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried appeasement when he gave Hitler some of what he demanded, hoping that he would not take any more. "An appeaser," said Churchill, "is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." Hitler then conquered most of Europe. Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was a disaster. It was totally discredited.{mospagebreak}

Or was it? In our time, in our relations with communism, we have seen a revival of appeasement. For years, the United States and the West sought something called "detente." The idea was to speak tactfully, expand trade, and thus "reduce tensions." Once again, appeasement didn’t work. The Soviet Union and the Cold War just went on and on.

Then along came Ronald Reagan. He didn’t want war. But he knew something that many others did not realize: That the West could defeat the Soviet Union, and that this could be done without starting a war. To this end, he abandoned detente.

Instead, he embarked on an expensive weapons program which the Soviets could not afford to match.

He cut back on trade, which made the Soviet economic crisis even worse than it was.

He increased the transmitting power of Radio Free Europe to counter Soviet jamming of the airwaves.

The important thing about Reagan’s policy is that it worked. The Soviet Union is no more, and much of the credit for its demise goes to him.

But now, in spite of the miserable history of appeasement, and in spite of Reagan’s success, something unbelievable is happening: The Canadian government, in its approach to China, is trying appeasement again!

Our government has increased trade, in order to improve ties with China.

Right now the Prime Minister is entertaining Chairman Hu Jintao as an honored guest. Mr. Martin is out to lunch. What we need is a policy like Reagan’s.

For example, we should give money to Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts into China. This would encourage the people, by providing them with honest news.

We should stop all aid to China. Right now our tax money is being sent to shore up a government which is arming to the teeth, which is spying on us, and which is the most murderous government in history.

We should also eliminate all trade with China.

It should be illegal for any Canadian to invest in China.{mospagebreak}

It should be illegal for any Chinese business to invest in Canada.

The Future of Communism in China

Given the facts about communism, and given Canada’s appeasement of China, what is the future of communism there? Whether we appease the communists or not, communism in China is doomed. No one knows exactly when or how it will end. But the leaders have clearly put themselves in an impossible situation.

As an economic system, communism didn’t work in China. For a number of years, the Chinese leaders have been promoting capitalism. But capitalism only works if people can exercise initiative and energy. Communist terror in Chinese boardrooms would hardly encourage bold initiatives. The government knows that, and it has given up some of the power which is the sole aim of communism. Clearly this is a defeat.

These men are in a trap. Their power is shrinking, and not only because of their encouragement of business. Nowadays, a protest happens somewhere in China every seven minutes. The protest may be against corruption, or it may be against the ecological damage caused by government policies. But the authorities, if they crack down, will bring back the economic stagnation which they wanted to overcome. If, on the other hand, they allow change to continue, they will only undermine their own power.

One of the things they fear most is Falun Gong, an organization which is in some ways like the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Solidarity, of course, began as a labor movement. But its membership grew, and it became the greatest challenge to the Polish government. Falun Gong began as a program of exercise, meditation, and the pursuit of humane ideals. But its character has changed with circumstances, and has grown to the point that now no one knows how many members it has. Some say there are 60 million; others say there are many more. Its members have endured torture and persecution, but they have not given up. They have become the largest group in China resisting communism. Thus, although Solidarity was a movement of Roman Catholics whereas Falun Gong emerged from Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, each began as an effort for mere social reform, and each was transformed into a fundamental challenge to the political system. The similarity of the two movements, therefore, is not theological but sociological. In an sociological sense, Falun Gong is the Chinese Solidarity movement.

With the Chinese leaders under so much pressure, what will they do? No one knows, of course, what will happen. But maybe the experiences of Mikhail Gorbachev enables us to make a prediction. He took tentative steps toward liberalization. The people, in response, expressed their support, and he brought about further liberalization. After a few years, the toothpaste of communism was out of the tube, and nobody could squeeze it back in.{mospagebreak}

Of course, Gorbachev didn’t want to end communism. He wanted to reform it. But remember what John Paul II said: Gorbachev was a good man, but he wanted to reform communism, and communism cannot be reformed.

Let’s remember that a free country can be reformed. I was in Berkeley, California, in the late 1960s. It was a radical time. There were demonstrations and riots, and even talk of revolution. Yet there was never the slightest chance that the U.S. government would be overthrown. A free society permits protest. It is resilient. It can reform itself. But communism is not resilient. With all its huffing and puffing, it cannot stand up to challenge. When Gorbachev tried to reform it, it collapsed.

Surely, communism in China may go the way of communism in the Soviet Union. Someone like Gorbachev will appear, and make some gesture toward liberalization, in fact, someone like Gorbachev has appeared: Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. He wanted liberalization. He supported the Tiananmen protesters, and he was punished for that. But there are other liberals among the leadership, and there will be another Chinese Gorbachev.

The future of China is assured. The people will become bolder, the old leaders will become more disheartened, and freedom will come to China. Soon.

Barclay D. Johnson is a retired professor of sociology in Canada. The articel is based on his speech at the "Focus on China" forum held at the University of Ottawa on September 8, 2005. The author wishes to thank Simha Murphy, Elaine Loubser, and Barbars Grisdale for their critical comments of this speech while preparing it for publication.

Yao Wenyuan: The Last Member of The Gang of Four Dies

The official Xinhua News Agency reported on January 6, 2006, that Yao Wenyuan, the final surviving member of the Gang of Four, who terrorized China during the violent 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, died on December 23, 2005, at the age of 74. It didn’t explain the delay in reporting Yao’s death.

Yao played an important role in launching the Cultural Revolution in China. His article on "The destitution of Hai Rui" (Chinese: 海瑞罢官), ordered by Mao Zedong, marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution on November 10, 1965. In April 1969 he joined the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), working on official propaganda. He was arrested in October 1976 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, serving his sentence in Qincheng jail outside of Beijing, where the Gang of Four once held victims in solitary confinement. After Yao was released in 1996, he lived for a short time at his home in Shanghai. Then he was forced to move to Kunshan, Jiangshu Province, where he wrote his memoirs entitled, "Recollection and Reflection" (《回顾与反思》). The content of his memoirs has been circulated in Chinese on several websites.[1]

Mao Zedong reportedly gave the Gang of Four its name. He appointed three of the members, including Yao, Mao’s third wife, Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao to the Cultural Revolution’s leadership group and picked the fourth member, Wang Hongwen, to be his successor. After Mao launched the decade-long Cultural Revolution, the violence pitted neighbor against neighbor, wrecked the economy and forced millions of middle-school to university youth, intellectuals, and government officials to work in the countryside. Nearly every Chinese family can tell of a relative or friend who was beaten and harassed. One report states, "Statistics compiled from county annals show that 7.73 million people died of unnatural causes during the Cultural Revolution."[2] However, Western scholars have estimated that between 16.4 and 29.5 million people died because of the Cultural Revolution.[3]

One month after Mao’s death in 1976, the four were arrested, marking the end of the decade-long Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four received most of the official blame for the violence and the killings as the communist government tried to shift attention away from the role played by the Communist Party, its chairman Mao Zedong, and other political leaders, including thousands of CCP officials.

In 1981, the four deposed leaders were subjected to a show trial and convicted of anti-Communist Party activities. During the trial, Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, was extremely defiant. She protested loudly and burst into tears several times. Zhang Chunqiao refused to admit to any wrongdoing as well. Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen expressed repentance and confessed their crimes against Deng Xiaoping. Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao received death sentences that were later commuted to life imprisonment, while Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen were sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Last May 2005, Xinhua reported that Zhang Chunqiao had died of cancer in April 2005. It was the first official word in decades on a man previously widely thought to have been long dead. Jiang Qing never repented. She hanged herself in Beijing in May 1991. The fourth and youngest gang member, Wang Hongwen, died of liver cancer in a Beijing hospital in 1992.{mospagebreak}

The Chinese Communist Party have never allowed the suffering that the Chinese people went through to be discussed openly. To do so could gravely threaten the Party’s legitimacy and re-open the wounds of a group of people whose lives were so badly disrupted that they think of themselves as a lost generation.

Steven Tian is a correspondent for Chinascope.

References:
[1] http://www.edubridge.com/erxiantang/library/yaowenyuan.htm
http://www.peacehall.com/news.gb/z_special/2005/09/200509181404.shtml
[2] http://english.epochtimes.com/news/4-12-23/25124.html
[3] http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/wim/mythsofmao.html

In the Days of Being Followed By Beijing Plainclothes Police

[Editor’s note: On October 18, 2005, famous Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng wrote a letter to the head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong. In response, the authorities closed his law office and took away his law license. Three days after his open letter, Gao was surrounded and followed by plainclothes police and vehicles wherever he went, 24 hours a day. Gao disregarded this intimidation and published his diaries on the overseas website of The Epoch Times, recording all the details of what the Beijing police department had done to him and his family on a daily basis. On November 29, he successfully escaped from the police following him and traveled between Shandong, Liaoning, and Jilin provinces to visit a handful of Falun Gong practitioners in the following 15 days. He was totally shocked by the extreme brutalities committed by the communist government against its own citizens. The private investigation prompted his third open letter to the Chinese leaders (page 28) and his decision to openly renounce his membership in the Chinese Communist Party (page 45). Below we have translated a few of his recent diaries that detailed his days of being surrounded by the Beijing police.]

The Chinese Authorities Ended the Last Day of 2005 with Disgrace and Indecency

December 13, 2005
—On how the plainclothes police constantly stalk me

O n the last day of 2005, the Chinese authorities, cowardly and shameless, once again spent the whole day monitoring my family, adding one more day to their record of disgraceful treatment of an ordinary Chinese family by using their mafia-like surveillance.

Some readers might be offended by the strong words I have been using, but anybody who has personally experienced or witnessed how the plainclothes police shamelessly stalk a 12-year-old child will agree that even the words I used above can hardly accurately describe their indecent character. I can’t find words in any language to describe how rude and indecent they are.

Four plainclothes police stalked my daughter this morning when she was on her way to an activity. At noon, while my daughter was playing with her friend, they again waited outside the friend’s home and frequently popped their heads in to check on her. In fact, my wife and I have been trying to downplay the situation with our daughter by telling her that lately there’s nobody stalking her anymore, although we’re very clear what’s actually going on every day. Those who ordered and executed this decision are apparently shameless, because stalking children is simply truly disgraceful behavior for a grownup.{mospagebreak}

This morning, a friend of mine borrowed my car to run some errands. The experience amazed him. He could not figure out why so many cars followed him. "It’s ridiculous," he said. He told me that he could not comprehend that the spies would openly stalk people as if it were the right thing to do. "It’s unbelievable!" he exclaimed.

Today my wife and I spent the whole day meeting with petitioners in my office. As expected, scores of plainclothes police followed us when we were going between our house and the office. Some of them were so bored waiting downstairs that they took turns ringing my doorbell, or threatening the petitioners. When two of the Beijing residents left after visiting us, two policemen stalked them also.

In the evening, my wife and I went to a restaurant for a dinner appointment with a few media, including the Associated Press. As soon as we left our home, nine cars followed us, but with their headlights turned off! I ignored their mysterious behavior. When we came to the corner of a narrow street, I suddenly stopped my car. I took out a piece of paper and a pen and slowly wrote down the license number of each car. The police were too stunned to respond. When I went up to each car and wrote down their license number, all the plainclothes police inside the cars covered their faces with their elbows. It was no different from the scenes shown on TV when they film people who the police catch seeing prostitutes.

It was even more interesting when we arrived at the restaurant. They got on the same elevator with me and my wife. All of them raised their collars to cover their faces. The hostess was watching in shock. When we stepped out of the elevator, we found another dozen plainclothes policemen were waiting for us outside our reserved room. During the dinner, they constantly popped their heads in. It was added amusement for our dinner party.

When we were leaving after the dinner, a friend of mine noticed that the plainclothes police hidden in the car were videotaping us. We were "escorted" home afterward.

As the last page of 2005 turns, the plainclothes policemen manifest the cowardly and shameless nature of the executors who remain hidden behind the scenes. They are extremely nervous and filthy. I have to ponder what the next page will look like on the first day of 2006.

Can Someone Save the Plainclothes Policemen And Those Behind Them?

January 14, 2006
—The 79th day of the Chinese regime’s stalking my family like mafia gangsters{mospagebreak}

After 79 days of stalking my family, the plainclothes police are losing control. They have not accomplished their goal, so they have lost patience with me. Moreover, I can sense that their operators are becoming less and less confident in themselves as well.

Since I was tied up in an interview with the reporter from Germany’s Mirror Weekly, I had to ask a friend of mine to drive my wife and child for shopping. As usual, since it is Mr. Gao Zhisheng’s car, the plainclothes police were extremely nervous. Seven cars with no license plates quickly followed my car. According to my friend, these cars followed closely wherever he drove. While my wife and child were shopping, the plainclothes police and their cars with no license plates surrounded my empty car, doing nothing but waiting for two hours.

It was interesting that as soon as I stepped out of my home this morning, still within my residential community, two dozen plainclothes policemen immediately came forward to "accompany" me. When we passed the farmers’ market, the stall owners, who have witnessed the stalking every day, winked at me, while about a dozen young men at the auto repair shop nearby all came out to watch the show. Most of them know me personally. One of them asked me, "Aren’t you afraid of being stalked by so many plainclothes policemen every day?" I pointed at the camcorder in my palm and said, "I have an amazing ‘weapon.’ As soon as I aim it at them, they will all be scared away." As I was speaking, I suddenly turned back and raised my camcorder at those plainclothes policemen. It was a really amazing and amusing scene! Dozens of them quickly scurried away. Many onlookers stopped and watched with curiosity. Apparently they lost their battle yesterday in their attempt to stop me from videotaping them.

These plainclothes policemen were at their wits’ end, but they were still reluctant to leave me alone. Whenever I turned my head, they would all cover their heads and run away. Over a hundred onlookers were watching and laughing at them. By the fourth time I turned my back, the onlookers saw a really unexpected scene. All the plainclothes policemen were wearing women’s silk scarves over their faces, covering everything but their eyes. Apparently this was the last resort. After yesterday’s incident of being videotaped, they got an order from their bosses to keep their faces covered. Whistling and shouting, two hundred onlookers were very excited and amused by the ridiculous spectacle of these plainclothes policemen. This was the first time in the last three months that the plainclothes police brought laughter to the local residents. Someone shouted, "Plainclothes brothers, please make sure you come back tomorrow!" The onlookers’ excitement reached a new high.{mospagebreak}

Right after lunch, reporters from Kyoto News came to visit me. When I walked downstairs, I felt something strange—the crowd of young plainclothes policemen had all disappeared. A sad feeling came over me. Having closely "accompanied" me for 79 days, how could they leave me alone like this? While I was still pondering what was going on, about the same number of young women suddenly appeared before my eyes. They were winking their eyes at me and talking to one another. The experience of being stalked for almost 80 days has trained me well in judging my surroundings. Wherever I go, no matter how many people there are, I can quickly recognize which one is a plainclothes policeman, even if it is his first time. I started shooting my camcorder at those young women. Their performance was even more magnificent than their male colleagues. All of them turned around and covered their faces with their hands, leaned against the wall, and stood still. The indication was obvious: Though they are shameless, they do not want their faces to be captured on tape—an "improvement" over their male colleagues. Their arrival added nothing but "entertainment" to our family, especially to me.

This government has degenerated to such an extent that it relies on using gangs to prolong its life! Their dirty practice in the past few weeks in stalking my family has been truly unprecedented. In the past 79 days, I could sense how they were constantly changing their strategy. The more they changed, the dirtier their strategy became. However, one thing remained the same—the stalking never stopped.

Listen, those hiding behind the plainclothes police, no matter how sophisticated your techniques are, they are simply the means that gangs use and you will eventually hurt yourselves. Using your dirty tricks leaves you no way out. Only by stopping your crimes against private citizens, against civilization, against humanity and against the basic dignity of mankind, can you meet the requirements of, and lay the foundation for a peaceful accord with the Chinese people. Otherwise you will come to an unfortunate end. Let history be the witness!

Beijing Police Department: A Group of Mostly Gangsters

February 15, 2006
—The 88th day of the Chinese regime’s using gangster means to encircle my family

There are quite a few people at the Beijing Police Department who are decent and have good moral quality, some of whom are my friends. They are indeed good people.

Personally, I have never been hostile to any individual. As of today, there has been no concrete or clear individual enemy in my heart. However, since October of 2005, the leadership at the Beijing Police Department has been determined to treat me as their enemy. This only proves that their moral characters are distorted, and their humanity incomplete. There is no other reasonable explanation for their practice.{mospagebreak}

The Beijing Police Department authorities’ dirty practices since October of 2005, including the constant shadowing, intimidation, and persecution of my family, have been too many to enumerate. In fact, their conduct has become unbelievably irrational.

As soon as a friend of mine returned to Beijing after accompanying me to spend the Chinese New Year in my hometown, the authorities at the Beijing Police Department called him in. They threatened, "You will receive the same bad end as Gao Zhisheng."

On February 11, I returned to Beijing together with my nephew who was looking for a job. He is the only child of my third younger brother. Since my third younger brother and I have been dependent on each other for survival ever since our childhoods, we have been very close to each other. Naturally I take his only child as mine. Since the authorities have broken the child’s dream of joining the army, I took him by car directly to a barbershop for him to learn haircutting. Early this morning, the authorities at the Beijing Police Department called in the owner of the barbershop. A dozen officers interrogated the girl for over a dozen hours, using such incredible obscenities!

I have met this girl three times for less than three hours altogether. As a Christian, she was once very concerned about the fate of Pastor Cai Zhuohua when the authorities brutally persecuted him. According to her, she got to know me while attending the court hearing of Pastor Cai’s case. In November of 2005, a friend of hers from her hometown was bitten by his landlord’s dog. As he tried to settle the case, he found out that the dog’s owner was even more vicious than the dog. He was so frustrated and desperate that he committed suicide, leaving behind a young child. She brought the child to me at a Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant. Within less than an hour, numerous plainclothes policemen surrounded us. That was the first contact I ever had with her. We met for the second time in December, when she brought her relatives from Hebei Province to my office for legal consultation. It was at that meeting that I learned she owned a barbershop. The third meeting, lasting about 20 minutes, happened recently when I returned to Beijing from my holiday trip.

A dozen uniformed policemen from the Beijing Police Department, including the son-in-law of the department director, interrogated the girl for a dozen hours, nonstop! Their illegal and obscene interrogation began like this: "What’s your relationship with Gao Zhisheng? Do you know what he is? It’s very dangerous that you had contact with him! We can arrest you and put you in prison for a few years at any time!" The main theme of their repeated intimidation and interrogation was questioning the girl to determine whether she had any unusual relationship with me! Without revealing their true goal, they repeatedly hinted to the girl, "The police have very detailed information about you. (We know) You have another place to live. We even know where the seed money for your barbershop came from. We just want to give you a chance to confess." Then they took away her cell phone and searched the address book that was on her phone.{mospagebreak}

When they returned the cell phone to her in the afternoon, they threatened her again: "We can put you in prison for a few years just because of your knowing Gao Zhisheng. However, we learned from your cell phone that you also knew Fan Yafeng, Teng Biao, and Zhang Xinshui. Do you know who these people are? They are all rights activists, who can be arrested and sentenced at any time." After a dozen hours of interrogation when they were about to release her, the uniformed rogues made the following illegal demands: "1. If you tell Gao Zhisheng about our conversations, we will arrest you right away. Our people are all over the country. Wherever you go, we can easily arrest you. Do you know what a judge’s hammer is used for? We can use it to kill whomever we want, and to hit (imprison) anybody with it for as many years as we wish." They repeated this statement at least five times. "2. From now on, do not keep in touch with Gao Zhisheng. Don’t ask why. This is a principle. If anyone keeps in touch with Gao, we’ll take care of him or her. You better believe this. 3. From now on, never turn off your cell phone or change the telephone number. Never leave your barbershop. You must report to us whenever we call you in. We know how to ensure the rules are followed."

If government employees anywhere else in the world performed such shameful scandalous acts as the rogue policemen at the Beijing Police Department did, except for the countries under the rule of ruffians such as Kim Jong-il and Fidel Castro, the officials of the whole police system would be too ashamed to hold their jobs. Uniformed and in the name of government, these gangsters at the Beijing Police Department commit so many bad deeds, have become so lawless, and disrespect human civilization and morality so much that they are the tragedy of our time as well as a tragedy to themselves.

The stupidity of the rogues at the Beijing Police Department demonstrates that they have been constantly shadowing me in secret, the kind of shadowing that I don’t always know about.

Today the secret police and their rogue employees continued to follow my whole family. I went to the train station to pick up my wife and child only to find a bunch of plainclothes policemen wandering around the platform and following us until we returned home.

Translated by CHINASCOPE from The Epoch Times 

 

Chinese Lanterns

China’s paper lanterns have been a part of Chinese culture since 250 B.C. Their significance lies beyond just decoration, as they have the ability to communicate births, deaths, social status, and forthcoming dangers. During times of peace, the size and elevation of lanterns hanging outside of the houses indicated people’s social status in society. One was able to show off wealth by having an exquisite lantern made of silk velvet hang outside of the house. In addition, the placement and color of the lanterns allow onlookers to acknowledge the current status of a household. For example, one can tell of a birth or marriage because a red lantern will be placed outside the doorway. Furthermore, a blue lantern symbolizes declining energy. Thus, one can tell that there is an illness in the family. Since the color white represents death, the family would place a white sash across the top of the doorway with two white lanterns, one on each side. This states that the household is in mourning.

In addition to the status of a household, lanterns also play an important role in military communication. This was an essential aspect of communication during the time when the Chinese Empire was divided into three warring kingdoms. The military strategist and war hero Zhu Geliang (nicknamed Kung Ming) made a special lantern that enabled all the neighboring allies to recognize the presence of attack or danger. He made this with a strip of kerosene-soused cloth or paper that was ignited and placed into a lamp that floated upward into the sky.

During the Cultural Revolution, lanterns, which were classified as traditional Chinese art, were banned and forbidden to be used. This lasted for the next decade. Thus, the end of the Cultural Revolution signified a period of joy with great celebrations and exciting festivals. The celebration of ShangYuan, the Lantern Festival, resumed. In ancient times, the people of China would raise their lanterns in hopes of catching a glimpse of the deceased ancestors who were believed to pass over on their journey to heaven. Today, this nationwide celebration that falls on the 15th of the first month of the Chinese New Year is also known as the second New Year. Elaborate sets of lanterns are made by expert makers, and usually, there is competition for the most beautiful lantern.

Today, the basic Chinese lantern remains unchanged in its design. The candle that is placed in the center of the lantern is surrounded by a sleeve or a frame that is assembled from pliable bamboo, sturdy redwood, or inexpensive wire. In order to prevent a huge flame, thin or oiled paper and gauze or silk fabric covers the flame and enables a soft glow.

Despite the invention of electricity and the terror of the Cultural Revolution that resulted in the collapse of all traditional Chinese art, the Chinese lantern is an enduring symbol of long life and serves as the supreme representation of good luck.

China’s Auto Industry: The Joys and Sorrows

China has become the third leading car manufacturer in the world. In 2005 alone, China manufactured 5.6 million cars. However, an over-investment in the Chinese car industry has led to an excess production capacity and decreased profits.

According to figures disclosed by the China Association of Automobile manufacturers on December 9, 2005, in the first 11 months of 2005, China manufactured 5.15 million cars, a 10 percent increase over the same period in 2004. During the same time, 5.14 million cars were sold, an increase of 12 percent compared to the same period a year ago. Both the number manufactured and the number sold surpassed the totals of 2004 by 10 percent or more.

Even though both the total manufactured and the total sold has increased by such a large margin, the authorities have been worried about overinvestment and excess production capacity in China’s automobile industry. One study done by China’s National Development and Reform Commission shows while there are 117 automobile factories, over 90 of which produce less than 10,000 automobiles a year, they are nowhere close to reaching economies of scale. In the first 10 months of 2005, although the total manufactured increased by 9.2 percent, profits dropped 36.7 percent. Of those firms that had losses, the total losses increased by 86.2 percent.

The Auto Industry in China (2005 Jan-Nov, Unit: 1,000 cars)

  Total Cars  Over the Previous Year Passenger Cars Over the Previous Year  Commercial Cars  Over the Previous Year
 Manufactured
 5,145  10.20%  3,523  16.40%  162.2  -1.10%
 Sold
 4,138  12.10%  3,515  19.50%  162.2  -1.20%
Source: The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM)

In 2003, China’s automobile production capacity usage rate reached 68 percent. Since 2003, many automobile factories have increased their capacity. In the first half of 2005, the automobile production capacity reached 8 million per year. It is estimated that, by the end of 2005, the capacity increased by another 2.2 million, reaching a grand total production capacity of 10.2 million automobiles per year. At the same time, factories are making investments which will cause production capacity to increase by another 10 million cars. Since the automobile production cycle usually takes more than 18 months, overinvestment in 2003 has already led to overcapacity in 2005. In 2005, China’s car production capacity usage rate already dropped to 55 percent. Since the capacity is more than the necessity, and even though in 2005 the sale of automobiles increased, due to overcapacity, the substantial increase in fixed costs has caused profits to drop. Presently, the increase in automobile production seems to have surpassed the growth in the average Chinese citizen’s ability to purchase. The result of this overcapacity of production, along with the heightened intensity of competition will, without a doubt, cause the car manufacturing industry profits to decline.{mospagebreak}

Moreover, the fact that foreign businesses are entering into the Chinese automobile industry has made competition more intense. The 51 Fortune 500 companies that have automobile production as a main sector have all set up factories in China. Presently, multinationals have become the main body of the Chinese automobile industry. This is rarely seen anywhere else in the world.

China has just stepped into the world of cars. At present, there are only an estimated 3 cars for every 100 people, far lower than the international scale of 13 cars per 100 people. As the Chinese economy grows, more and more Chinese citizens will become car-owners. In 2005, there were 35 million cars. The growth of the Chinese car industry will most probably be maintained at above the growth rate of China’s GDP. The demand for cars by the 1.3 billion Chinese citizens will increase in the future, year by year. However the Chinese car industry still has many insufficiencies in human capital, R&D, materials, technology, credit system, sales, and other areas. China will need to break through many barriers and surpass many difficulties for its auto industry to be both successful and competitive.

Mengyang Jian and Tianlun Jian are economists based in Boston.

My Life as a Migrant Worker

It was in late 1980. When I told my mother that I had been accepted by a prestigious high school, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she turned her back to me and sat on the threshold. Since then, we never mentioned the subject again. My 14-year-old brother had to quit school at that time. We became the youngest migrant workers in our county.

Back then, in the county capital, one could make one yuan (US$1 is about 8 yuan) for a 12-hour shift carrying rocks at a construction site. After weighing different options, my brother and I decided to seek job opportunities elsewhere. Therefore, right after the Chinese New Year in 1981, we left our tearful mother and began our journey as migrant workers.

Our first stop was Yan’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province. As we walked on the street with our bedding on our backs, we felt lost and scared. Soon we learned that one could make only 1.2 yuan a day for carrying rocks but would often end up without getting paid at all. We finally went to Huang-ling County, which is 200 kilometers (125 miles) away from Yan’an.

We worked as lumberjacks for the first six months and then did road construction for three months. We put ourselves in harm’s way and endured nine months of inhuman labors. Then one day, after a long day’s work, we went back to the place where we usually ate and slept only to find that the foreman and his relative, who used to cook for us, had both disappeared. They had left without paying us a penny. Everyone burst into tears. My brother was screaming. I walked over, held him in my arms, and we both cried.

After nine months, still penniless, we made a tough decision to become coal miners.

"Mining’s dangerous; mining’s tough. Nine out of ten will not survive." For generations, that’s how the locals described a miner’s miserable life. No one would want to go down into the mines if he had any other choice for making a living.

My brother and I picked a mine where we could make one yuan for each ton of coal we hauled out.

I had two worries. I worried about the possible collapse that could kill or injure my brother. I also worried that someone might bully him. It had happened before. Every time I heard some loud scolding, my heart would jump into my throat. I would pause and listen carefully to make sure that it was not my brother who was being berated.

The foreman used different excuses for delaying our pay. He kept promising that we would eventually get paid in full. The local miners were not easily pushed, and they usually got paid in full every month.{mospagebreak}

My brother was only 14 at the time but was more productive than I was. I had never hauled more than nine tons of coal a day, but his daily output was never below 12 tons. The highest was 17 tons.

During those days, we were physically exhausted but mentally excited. We were living in an abandoned, doorless, windowless cave dwelling. Every day we marked on the wall the amount of money we would bring home to our mother. We wrote numbers that only we could understand.

Whenever we thought about this, we had joyful tears in our eyes. However, these numbers never turned into real money. After six months of slave labor, my worst nightmare came true.

The coal pit collapsed. My brother was wailing with pain. I forgot my own fear and rushed to my brother’s rescue. Carrying him on my back, I scrambled to a safe place. I put him down on the ground and ran like a crazy man to our dining place where I found some newspapers. I quickly ran back and burned the newspapers. I scooped up the ashes and put them on my brother’s wound. Then I carried him out of the pit.

We barely made it to a place to rest. Before I had a chance to lay my brother down, the owner kicked us out.

That started another miserable chapter in our lives. I had to work for the local farmers in exchange of crackers and water to save my brother.

After more than 40 days of rest, my brother was fully recovered. By then, 19 months had gone by since we had left home, and we were still penniless despite the fact that we had worked like slaves. We decided that my brother would go to Xi’an to look for work, and I would stay where I was.

I talked to the farmer I was working for and asked to be paid in advance for 20 days of wages-14 yuan (0.7 yuan a day)-so I could pay for my brother’s bus ticket to Xi’an.

My work with the farmer ended 23 days later. The farmer himself was also poor. When I was ready to leave, to my surprise, he held me in his arms and burst into tears. "How come your life is so miserable? You’re such a nice kid. You could have simply disappeared after you got paid in advance. But instead, you worked for me for three additional days." He tried to squeeze two yuan into my hand and pushed me to hit the road. I refused to take the money. I bowed to his family for having taken good care of my brother and left.

What I did afterward was, in hindsight, a big mistake.{mospagebreak}

I could not get over the fact that my brother and I had been kicked out of the coal mine without getting paid a penny. I thought that I had the right to ask the owner, named An, to pay us. Besides, I was penniless and could not go home anyway. So I put in quite some effort to find out where An lived. To please An, I volunteered to harvest his crops during the day and slept in his cowshed at night. Of course it was a senseless move. I wasted another 40 days and became really desperate.

I did some hard thinking during those 40 days. I realized that being a migrant worker offered no light at the end of the tunnel. I decided to go home first and then join the army.

It was not an easy decision to make. However, it paled in comparison to the difficulties of actually getting home. I was penniless, and home was 400 kilometers (250 miles) away. Nevertheless, I began the journey. This was my only hope for survival.

I walked about 45 kilometers (28 miles) the first day and reached the downtown of Huangling County. The only thing I was thinking about was how to get something to eat, since I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink on the road. I went to a few state-owned cafeterias to beg for food. I even took my clothes off, hoping to exchange them for some food. None of my efforts worked. In despair, I walked on the narrow street of Huangling with an empty stomach.

My spirits lit up when I saw an army officer stepping off a military truck across the street. Back then, people truly believed the propaganda that "the People’s Liberation Army serves the people wholeheartedly." I walked over to my "beloved" officer, squatted down, and grabbed his leg.

While tears ran down my cheeks, the words poured out about my ordeals. But when I looked up, I found that my "beloved" PLA officer was not listening at all. He was staring at a girl walking toward him. Apparently he wasn’t even aware of my presence. Disappointed, I quickly left him.

All I could do was to sleep at the entrance of the long-distance bus station so I could follow its route home the next day. I didn’t know how long I had slept. I felt someone’s hand on my head. I didn’t even have the energy, physical or mental, to feel scared.

"Hey kid, why are you sleeping here in such cold weather?" Someone squatted down next to me.

"I’m starved to death," I answered.

"Poor kid, come with me."{mospagebreak}

I followed him to a cave dwelling. He turned the light on, and I saw he was an old man. On his shoulder, he was carrying a mason’s tool commonly seen in this area. It was made of half a basketball. He put me down on his bed. All I can remember now is he went to the other room and came back with some flour on a plate. He poured the flour into a washbowl and started to knead the dough. Soon, there was a half washbowl of noodle soup in front of me. I gobbled it up and hit the pillow, drifting to sleep in the darkness.

I had no idea how long I slept until the old man woke me up. "Kid, let’s get up. It’s time to go." I opened my eyes and saw him smoking a pipe in front of me. "Here is the bus ticket to Yan’an. Here is five yuan. That’s all I can offer. I’m also poor. I make only 1.5 yuan a day. Take the money, OK?"

Without saying a word, I took the money and followed the old man to the bus station.

I arrived in Yan’an in the afternoon. I spent 14 fen (2 U.S. cents) for seven dumplings and another five fen for a cooked lamb hoof. I spent the night in front of the bus station again.

When I got up the next morning to follow the bus to Suide County, my legs were numb from sleeping on the icy ground overnight. I didn’t have any feeling in my legs until I had walked quite a while.

After walking about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles), I saw a man by the roadside busily working on his truck. Subconsciously, I picked up his bucket. Seeing that he did not stop me, I sensed that I was close to something I had been hoping for. Twice I walked half a kilometer to fetch water for him.

We didn’t say a word to each other. When the truck was ready to leave, he signaled to me to get on. I was so excited that I was ready to climb onto the passenger’s seat, but he grabbed me and pointed to the back. I understood him and got in the back.

After a long day’s journey, I reached Suide County. I was only 95 kilometers (60 miles) away from home!

The driver never said a word to me during the entire journey. He pulled the truck over and asked where I wanted to be dropped off. I asked him to drop me off at the long-distance bus station if it wasn’t too much trouble. I was afraid of getting lost.

I slept again in front of the bus station. By midnight, I was awakened by some heavy kicks. Someone was shouting at me, "You petty thief! Who allowed you to sleep here? We’re the militia patrol. You’re arrested."{mospagebreak}

They started to search my body. Obviously they were disappointed with the results. One of them fiercely kicked me again and cursed, "You wretch! Do you carry any ID?"

I didn’t say a word. I was relieved that the 4.8 yuan I had hidden in my shoe were safe.

Apparently they didn’t want to carry around a penniless kid as they continued on their patrol. They turned me over to the old man who was the guard at the bus station. "We’ll deal with you in the morning!" they warned me and left.

The fire the old man was using to keep warm reminded me how cold it was outside. It wasn’t until then that I realized that the warmth had drained from my body. Actually I had to thank the patrollers for "arresting" me because without them, I might have died from the cold.

I had nothing to fear anymore. I couldn’t be in any worse situation. Nonetheless, I worried that what might happen next could destroy my chance to join the army. I cried and begged the old man to let me go. I told him that I wanted to change my fate by joining the army.

The old man didn’t utter a word. When I finished talking, he left the room and locked the door from outside. I figured he was tired of my story.

To my surprise, the old man soon returned. He took out two big boiled yams and started to roast them on the fire. Still, he did not say anything. I began to have an uneasy feeling.

When the old man finally opened his mouth, my fate took a drastic change.

"Come, kid. Hurry up and eat up the yams while they’re still hot. Then leave here as soon as you finish eating. It’s almost dawn. If those patrollers come back and see you, they’ll beat you up badly. Those bastards dare to do anything. I work here and I’m old. They can’t do anything to me."

Although I had no intention of seeing the patrollers again, I had to thank them for taking me from the freezing outdoors to the heated indoors. Furthermore, after having nothing to eat or drink for nearly 40 hours, I was able to fill my stomach again.

When dawn came, I was a dozen kilometers away from Suide County.{mospagebreak}

When I was about a dozen kilometers away from Mizhi, I saw a grain truck from Jia County (my hometown) slowly climbing a slope. Without any hesitation, I threw my bedding on the back and climbed onto the truck. But when the truck reached the flat road, I sensed that something was wrong. The truck was slowly pulling over to the roadside. It was going to stop!

I quickly tossed my bedding on the road, jumped out of the truck and ran toward the wheat field as fast as I could until I couldn’t run anymore. The driver finally caught me and kicked me. I started to cry but not because of his kicking. I was pouring out all my grievances with my tears.

"Can’t you stop crying?"

I was surprised that the guy didn’t leave.

"Maybe I shouldn’t have kicked you. I frequently haul relief grain on this road. On this slope, people often climb onto my truck and steal the grain. I thought you were one of them. Now tell me where you want to go."

That good-hearted driver gave me a lift to Jia County!

I had planned to get home in 20 days. Instead, it took me only three days. I was penniless when I left Huangling County. By the time I got home, I had 4.8 yuan. When I gave the money to my mother, whom I had not seen for nearly two years, her face was covered with tears.

In November 2003, the Power Plant in Huangling County retained me for a legal case. Thus I was able to revisit the place where I had worked as a coal miner 22 years earlier. I went to the village where An, the owner, used to live. An’s family was quite influential in the area back then. An had died in his early 50s several years earlier. His brother was a hunchback. After so many years, I recognized him immediately when I saw him.

"Boss An the Second," I addressed him as I had back then.

He looked me up and down with a wooden face. "Do I know you? Who are you? No one has called me that for many years."

His wife suspected that I was some town government cadre. "What do you want from him?" she asked. Calmly I recounted the ordeal my brother and I had suffered in the mine pit and how we had been kicked out.{mospagebreak}

Still showing no expression on his face, An the Second turned around and lowered his head. "You can’t make up a story like this. There was no such thing. I’m not the guy you are looking for."

I told him that I didn’t come for money. Also, 20 years of time had turned a sharp cut into a dull memory.

Walking from memory, I found An’s house and pointed out the locations where the coal miners used to cook and sleep. An the Second actually smiled. He tapped my shoulder and said, "Kiddo, this is fate. This is fate."

Then he began telling me his story.

By 1982, he had saved more than 300,000 yuan (US$37,500). His son, who’s one year younger than I am, got married in late 1982. His grandchild suffered serious polio, and he spent all his savings on his grandchild’s medical bills.

"I finally got it all figured out and quit the business," he said. "Take it easy now. Man never has the final say."

Written on January 30 and 31, 2006, in the cave dwelling in northern Shaanxi.

Translated by CHINASCOPE from The Epoch Times.

Nine Hot Issues in 2005

1. Beijing Keeps Tight Control Over Former Chinese Leader Zhao Ziyang’s Death

When former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Zhao Ziyang died on January 17, 2005, the CCP took a pragmatic and opportunistic approach in dealing with his memorial by allowing a limited number of people to mourn him. His mourners, however, were but a fraction of those from all levels of society who are discontent with the Party. They bravely broke the CCP’s taboo to gain a little bit of freedom-the right to express their grief.

In 1989, Zhao Ziyang was a central figure in openly opposing the use of force to suppress the pro-democracy protestors. In typical CCP tradition, guns lead the Party, and the Party directs the government. Party Chief Zhao Ziyang was helpless to stop the June 4 Massacre and was ousted for "supporting the turmoil" and "splitting the Party." As a result, Zhao was forced to join the ranks of the many CCP general secretaries who had lost power in the CCP’s brutal political struggles.

In the past 15 years since Zhao was stripped of his position, political dissidents have continued to demand that the government redress the June 4 event and restore Zhao Ziyang’s freedom and his reputation. The CCP power holders, however, who have reaped benefits from the June 4 crackdown, have continued to suppress the voices of dissent. The CCP made it taboo even to mention Zhao Ziyang-a taboo that was broken by Zhao’s death. In a number of ways, Zhao’s passing has created occasions for political expression.

The overseas media reported on several topics: the CCP’s evaluation of Zhao Ziyang, the Party’s control of the memorial activities for Zhao, reactions from Zhao’s family and his supporters, public memorials for Zhao overseas, and the CCP’s suppression of dissidents during this politically sensitive time.

The taboo on discussing Zhao was broken when some individuals within the CCP published memorial articles that openly supported Zhao and criticized the Party for the June 4 Massacre. Although they do not hold high positions, their influence should not be underestimated. According to the Hong Kong-based Ming Pao newspaper, Hu Jiwei wrote a 2,000-word memorial entitled "Deeply Mourn Zhao Ziyang" that criticized the CCP’s house arrest of Zhao as a violation of the Party’s constitution, state laws, and humanity. Hu Jiwei was once the People’s Daily chief in the 1980s and a member of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress before he was demoted for supporting Zhao Ziyang.

People outside the Party who hold diverse opinions have appealed for democratic reforms and for redressing the June 4 event. Although their voices have been suppressed in China, they have gained attention in the international community with the help of modern media and communications. Their voices for democracy exert pressure on the Chinese communist regime. Typical among them are the "Tiananmen mothers," whose children were murdered during the June 4 Massacre, and such dissidents as Bao Tong, Li Rui, Liu Xiaobo, Yu Jie, and Zhang Lin.{mospagebreak}

The CCP did not allow people to publicly mourn Zhao Ziyang, controlled who could attend his memorial service, and, in his official eulogy, criticized Zhao for making mistakes in 1989. Turning a eulogy into an opportunity for criticism is a rarity in the world. Former U.S. Presidents Nixon and Reagan both made mistakes during their terms in office, but at their memorial services no one blamed Nixon for the Watergate scandal or criticized Reagan for his secret weapon deals with Iran.

2. Pop Culture Fever Challenges CCTV’s Dominance

The pop culture fever created by regional Chinese television stations is challenging the dominant position of CCTV, the television station run by China’s central government. Both the Super Girl contest and the Korean soap drama I, introduced by the provincial Hunan Satellite Television Station, have gained unprecedented popularity among Chinese viewers. The ensuing culture fever is shaking the elite position that CCTV has enjoyed over the years.

Produced by Hunan Satellite Television, Super Girl enables amateurs to compete in a televised Karaoke contest much like the American Idol show. The competition is open to any female regardless of age, beauty, or talents. The recent contest attracted 120,000 applicants from five cities—girls and women ranging in age from 4 to 89. The winner was chosen by viewers who cast their votes through a cell phone Short Message Service, with each phone number allowed a maximum of 15 votes. The grand finale drew 400 million television viewers and tallied eight million votes sent via cell phone for the Super Girl finalist.

On the day of the finale, there were 2.4 million postings about the show on the Sina.com Internet discussion forum. Television ratings for the finale reached a record high for a provincial level television station, second only to CCTV. Li Yuchun, the winner of the contest, has become a household name in China and made the cover of Time magazine’s September issue as one of "Asia’s Heroes" in 2005.

Super Girl owes its popularity to the public’s desire for free participation, a fair contest, and democratic voting. For "the girl next door," being on a televised show is no longer merely a far-fetched dream. The contest promotes free expression, as conveyed by the show’s logo-"If you want to sing, sing."

The contest took off in a country where the people don’t even have the right to elect their president. As one person put it in an online posting, "I don’t think that I will ever get to vote for a president in this lifetime, so I will choose a girl that I like." Moreover, the contest has sparked the desire for popular entertainment rather than the dull programs characteristic of the Party-controlled media.

Along with the success of Super Girl, Hunan Satellite Television bought the broadcasting rights for Dae Jang Geum (Jewel in the Palace), a 70-episode South Korean television drama. Dae Jang Geum was a runaway hit in China in 2005 following its success in Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan. On October 2, the Central News Agency reported that since the show’s broadcast in the mainland, it has reached an 18 percent rating, with close to 18 million viewers.{mospagebreak}

Dae Jang Geum focuses on the life of Jang Geum, the first female royal physician in Korean history. Chinese fans are fascinated by the slow-paced Korean show. Besides the appeal of the exquisite Korean court food and fashions, and the beauty of Lee Yong Ae, the actress who plays the title role, fans attribute the success of Dae Jang Geum to its rich cultural content.

Freelance writer Shan He has pointed out that the popularity of Dae Jang Geum is not simply due to the story of Jang Geum’s suffering, endurance, and triumph over hardship, but rather her purity, kind nature, feminine character, and especially her compassionate way of resolving conflicts. The show highlights the true nature of humankind and reawakens in viewers the inherent longing for truth, compassion, and tolerance.

Dae Jang Geum‘s success drew criticism from China’s television industry, fearful of "cultural infiltration" that threatens its market share of domestic television dramas. Based on the Report of China’s TV Drama Market (2005-2006), China produces 40,000 episodes of TV drama series each year, with 7,000 eventually making it to living rooms across China. But none has come close to the success of Dae Jang Geum.

Many have criticized China’s television industry for its formulaic programs and lack of refined taste. Fans indicate that even though Chinese television drama has matured over the years, with grand historical scenes, complex story lines, top-quality productions, elaborate costumes and stage settings, productions still lack the most important ingredient—uplifting cultural content—which Dae Jang Geum amply provides.

3. The Fate of the CCP: Will It Survive or Fall Apart?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) turned 84 years old in 2005, its fate in serious question. This was evidenced by two dramatic events that marked 2005: The ongoing drive to "Resign from the CCP" movement and the CCP’s "Maintaining the Advanced Nature of the Party" movement.

The "Resign from the CCP" phenomenon started in late 2004 with the publication of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, which triggered this tidal wave. The Nine Commentaries is a compilation of a series of nine editorials first published between November 19 and December 4, 2004, by the overseas media group The Epoch Times. This book presents the untold, uncensored history of the CCP and lays out in detail the massive crimes of the CCP. It calls on the Chinese for self-introspection and moral purification, and predicts the disintegration of the Communist Party when the majority of Chinese make a conscious choice to distance themselves from it.

In responding to the call, many Chinese started to resign from the Party in late 2004 after reading the Nine Commentaries. They included some well-known figures such as Mr. Meng Weizai, who is a retired artist and former director of the Party’s Propaganda Department Art Bureau, and Ms. Huang Xiaomin, who is China’s swimming medal winner in the Seoul Olympics.{mospagebreak}

The wave of resignations picked up momentum in 2005, when the "Global Service Center for Resignations from the CCP" was established. The Service Center has set up websites; hotlines; and systems for receiving faxes, voicemail, and emails so that Chinese people can safely, anonymously (using pseudonyms), and publicly renounce their affiliations with the Chinese Communist Party. By end of the 2005, over 6.7 million Chinese had used the service to declare their resignations from the Party.

Of the 6.7 million resignations, a portion of them were from people who were not Party members but wanted to renounce any affiliation they had ever had with the Communist Party. Under the reign of the CCP, almost every Chinese has had some affiliation with the Party, beginning with the Red Pioneers in elementary school, the Communist Youth League as teenagers and young adults, and on to the workers’ unions that pledge loyalty to the Party. It’s understandable that even non-Party members also feel strongly and have chosen to publicly "resign from the Party."

The 6.7 million resignations might have only represented those who could access modern communications. Others in China chose to register their conscious choice by posting their resignation declarations in public places.

By contrast, the CCP followed tradition by launching a political movement. In January 2005, the CCP Politburo gathered three times to discuss the upcoming campaign to "Maintain the Advanced Nature" of the Party. Hu Jintao told the senior CCP leaders that this campaign "concerned the fundamental survival of the Communist Party." His warning underlined the critical challenges that the CCP was facing: the death of communist ideology, severe corruption inside the Party, and increasing tensions between the people and the Party.

The CCP campaign set out to reclaim its "superiority" and "legitimacy" by relying on its tried and true methods of propaganda, brainwashing, and internal purges. In the months that followed, Party Committees in the cities organized their members to attend a total of 40 hours of study sessions devoted to Marxist theory and CCP documents. At the end of the sessions, the members were required to write their own reports and to pledge loyalty to the Party before they could be "re-certified." June 2005 began the second phase of this campaign involving 1.8 million grassroots Party organizations all over the country.

Both movements attempted to win people over, but each used a very different approach. The official CCP campaign inundated the Chinese media, "Advanced Nature" became a common theme in Chinese editorials, and the red hammer and sickle flag was visible on most official websites. Party members were compelled to participate in order to be "re-certified." Nevertheless, this was a hard sell to the Chinese people. Soon after the campaign started, in private conversations the meaning of the phrase "xian-jin-xing" for "advanced nature" turned into "advanced sex," because the combination of those three Chinese characters could be interpreted either way.{mospagebreak}

The Nine Commentaries, on the other hand, was suppressed by the CCP at every opportunity. Nevertheless, it found its way to the Chinese people, who were very receptive. Modern technology certainly helped: from proxy Internet servers to encrypted emails, from shortwave radio broadcasts to satellite television, from CD discs in regular mail to overseas faxes and telephone calls, many Chinese people received the Nine Commentaries and started to spread the idea of resigning from the Party.

How long can the CCP survive and how soon before it disintegrates? The year 2006 may provide us a more definitive answer to this question.

4. China Comes Down Hard on Citizens Who Stand Up for Their Rights

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) failed to control social unrest in 2005. The country saw a record number 87,000 social disturbances last year, topping the previous record of 74,000 in 2004. It marked a continued trend of people rising up in their efforts to weiquan (Chinese phrase for "guard the rights") against encroachment by corrupt communist government officials.

Two events should be recorded in the Chinese weiquan history of 2005: In Dongzhou Village the CCP ordered its paramilitary police to fire upon and kill farmer protesters, while in Taishi Village the CCP suppressed by force the citizens’ attempt to replace their village chief. Both villages are within a short distance of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province not far from Hong Kong.

The villagers in Dongzhou lost their means of livelihood after a power plant was built over their farmlands. When they did not receive fair compensation for their loss, they accused the government officials of corruption. The villagers staged peaceful protests in front of the plant for seven months until the regime authorities finally sent in paramilitary troops to crack down on them.

On December 6, while the villagers were mounting a sit-in demonstration, the police made a number of arrests and ordered the protesters to leave. When this had no effect, they detonated teargas bombs, but even this failed to drive people away. Then, at dusk, the police started to fire on the protestors, killing between 10 and 20 farmers.

The regime sealed off the Dongzhou area with tanks and troops, arrested more people, and tried to prevent the news of the killings from spreading. While the Chinese communist regime downplayed the number of deaths and laid blame on "a handful of plotters with ulterior motives who incited the masses into a confrontation with authorities," the shocking facts about the slaughter of peaceful protesters by the Chinese police still found their way out of the village. It was the first time since the Tiananmen Square Massacre that people again saw the CCP using troops and tanks against peaceful protesters.{mospagebreak}

The crackdown in Taishi Village occurred two months earlier. Although it was less bloody than the Douzhou tragedy, it touched upon a sensitive issue—village elections. For many years the experimental village elections in China have excited certain Western experts, who like to predict that someday, based on successes at the village level, the CCP will allow free elections at the national level.

Taishi is a small village of 2,000 people. The village chief, Chen Jinsheng, was also the Party secretary. Villagers began to suspect Chen of embezzlement in 2005. In accordance with Chinese election law, they drew up a recall petition and collected more than 400 villagers’ signatures. Their legitimate request, however, was met with resistance and opposition on the part of the communist authorities. The officials eventually sent in riot police to break up protests and made sure that the village’s Party secretary remained unchallenged as Taishi’s "elected" chief.

The Taishi story attracted worldwide attention on October 8, when the Chinese rights activist Lu Banglie was severely beaten after he attempted to take The Guardian‘s Shanghai correspondent Benjamin Joffe-Walt into Taishi. The attack was staged by a group of gangsters at the entrance to Taishi. They were hired by the authorities to "secure" Taishi. When Lu and Joffe-Walt arrived by car in Taishi, the mob dragged Lu to the curb where they kicked and punched him until he passed out. Lu did not die as believed earlier by his companions. The news of this violent incident alerted the world to the events in Taishi and revealed the limits set by the CCP in their experimental village elections.

These two events from late 2005 seem to indicate that the CCP is taking a tougher stance toward social uprisings. The Chinese people who are now choosing to rise up and "guard their rights," however, may not be so easily deterred by this CCP crackdown.

The Chinese rights movement benefited from several factors in 2005. Frequent reports by the overseas free Chinese media helped to spread important news and to connect Chinese people in the rights movement. An emerging wave of "resignations from CCP" provided moral strength to the Chinese who stood up for people’s rights against the regime. The involvement of Chinese scholars in some of the weiquan activities helped the participants to organize and to stick with legally sound and nonviolent strategies. It will no doubt be even harder in 2006 for the CCP to keep a tight lid on this boiling kettle, no matter how harsh the crackdown becomes.

5. Chinese Attorney Fighting for Rights

On November 24, 2005, the Beijing Justice Bureau ordered Mr. Gao Zhisheng’s law firm shut down for one year.{mospagebreak}

Mr. Gao has become the latest in a group of outspoken and fearless lawyers facing persecution because of their efforts in seeking justice in cases of religious freedom, official corruption, land seizures, and police abuses. Their opponent is usually the Chinese Communist Party.

The year 2005 was an eventful year in the Chinese legal community. It all started with Mr. Guo Guoting, a prominent Shanghai attorney with over 20 years of experience in international law and regarded as "The Conscience of Chinese attorneys" for his pro bono practice representing rights advocates and victims of Communist Party persecution.

On February 22, 2005, Mr. Guo was barred from a scheduled visit to his client Mr. Zhang Lin, a dissident writer imprisoned for articles he posted on overseas online news sites related to Falun Gong. The authorities in Shanghai searched Attorney Guo’s offices on February 23, 2005; seized his law license; and confiscated his computer and client files. On March 4, the authorities issued an order suspending his right to practice law for one year for "anti-constitutional speeches and acts." After over two months of house arrest and interrogations, Mr. Guo was let out of China in late May, with no permission to return.

Attorney Guo’s struggle might be viewed as a test to determine just how far China’s legal system has evolved into an independent force that can protect the rights of individuals against the Communist Party.

What happened to Mr. Gao Zhisheng, however, has much broader implications and the potential to eventually bring the Communist Party to its knees.

Mr. Gao was born to a farming family in Shanxi Province. Their home was a cave dug out of a hillside, and his family was so poor that neither he nor his six siblings were able to go to school. Later, with the help of a relative, he learned to read and write and joined the People’s Liberation Army in Xinjiang where he became a Communist Party member.

After he left the service, he took a self-study course in law and became a lawyer in Xinjiang. Throughout his career, he represented victims of official corruption and abuse, dissidents, and fellow rights lawyers.

It was his advocacy and representation of Falun Gong that brought about the shutdown of his law firm. Beginning on December 4, 2004, Mr. Gao wrote several open letters to the Communist Party leadership in which he described in detail how Falun Gong practitioners were tortured, raped, and brainwashed, all based on his interviews of these victims. "These calamitous deeds did not begin with the two of you," he wrote in a letter addressed to President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, "but they have continued under your political watch, and it is a crime that you have not stopped them."{mospagebreak}

On December 13, 2005, Mr. Gao published his announcement on The Epoch Times website that he had quit the Communist Party. Later he was baptized and became a Christian in an underground church.

As police surveillance of Mr. Gao and his family has intensified, support from people throughout China and from all walks of life has poured in. Everyday Mr. Gao receives numerous phone calls from individuals expressing their support. The public is watching, and Attorney Gao has now become a symbol of a widespread social movement that could bring down the Communist Party.

"In China, nothing can stop the momentum of the democratic mainstream nor can it delay the Chinese people’s pursuit of freedom, democracy, and rule of law," wrote Mr. Gao on December 31, 2005.

6. Harbin Water Crisis Following Chemical Plant Explosion Exposes China’s Hidden Environmental Foes

The toxic chemical spill into the Songhua River in Jilin Province was the largest industrial pollution accident in China in 2005. It is considered "probably one of the largest transboundary chemical spill incidents in a river system in recent years" by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in its Songhua River Spill Field Mission Report.

It all started on November 13, 2005, when an explosion occurred at a petrochemical plant located a few hundred meters north of the Songhua River in Jilin City, Jilin Province. The China National Petroleum Corporation, which is state-owned and reports directly to the central government, owns the facility.

The explosion led to five deaths and one person missing. One hundred tons of toxins, specifically benzene, aniline and nitrobenzene, spilled into the Songhua River. These toxic chemicals are known to cause cancer.

The spill posed a health threat to over six million people whose water supplies come directly or indirectly from the Songhua. The polluted water flowed about 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from Jilin City, passing two major cities (Harbin and Jiamusi) and nine county-level cities before it merged into the Heilongjing River at the China-Russia border.

The regime tried to cover up this disastrous incident and did not want to alert the population of the pollution threat.

Three days after the explosion, Xinhua, the state news agency, quoted the Jilin City Environmental Protection Bureau as saying that all tests proved negative for toxic substances in the air. It did not mention the disastrous river pollution that had already moved downstream.{mospagebreak}

Harbin City, with 3.5 million residents, is the largest city along the Songhua downstream from Jilin City. After the Jilin Petrochemical explosion on November 13, the residents in Harbin were kept in the dark for 10 days. By the time the public was finally informed of the occurrence of the incident, the polluted water had almost arrived at Harbin.

The Harbin water crisis brought the issue of China’s serious environmental pollution to the surface. In a nationwide investigation by the National Environmental Protection Bureau following the chemical plant explosion in Jilin City, it was revealed that serious hidden dangers of massive environmental pollution existed across the entire chemical and petrochemical industry due to inappropriate geographic distribution and structure. Among the 78 randomly inspected chemical and petrochemical companies, 30 of them are improperly located. Some highly pollutant plants under development are even located in densely populated areas or along the banks upstream of rivers, lakes, and seas that are sources for drinking water. Once a pollution incident happens, it will bring about severe consequences.

Such problems are not limited to the chemical industry. For instance, the rapid development of highways has also greatly damaged China’s ecological system.

The toxic spill of chemical pollutants into the Songhua River from the chemical plant explosion in Jilin City only further exacerbates the problem of the country’s water pollution. Water pollution in China is already at an alarming level. According to information from the First National Inland Lakes Symposium in east China’s Jiangxi Province on November 23, 2005, 70 percent of the country’s rivers were contaminated and 75 percent over-enriched. Currently, most of China’s rivers are menaced by shrinkage, disfunction, contamination, and other problems such as the decrease of swamp lands.

7. Growing Discontent with the Chinese Education and Healthcare Reforms

Exorbitant tuition and healthcare costs have become the major problems in people’s lives, and have caused widespread discontent, according to a 2005 research report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The seriousness of these problems is reflected in two Chinese news events.

Xinhua News Agency reported on September 21, 2005, that an 18-year-old girl, Deng Xin, was admitted to Medical School in Kunming, Yunnan Province. However, the good news soon turned to tragedy when Deng Min’s mother committed suicide by hanging herself. The mother was in despair after exhausting all her resources and not being able to raise the funds for her daughter’s tuition.{mospagebreak}

Yahoo Chinese news reported on August 8, 2005, that 42-year-old Chinese farmer Huang Maojin blew up a bus in Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian Province. Huang was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer but had no money to pay for treatment. The desperate man prepared explosives and carried out a reckless deed that killed himself and another person and injured 30 others.

The Chinese are known worldwide for their emphasis on the education of their children. Funding from the communist government for education, however, amount to a mere 3.26 percent of the GDP in China—a level far below the world average. Schools and colleges are encouraged by a central government policy to "create income." This policy has led to increased college admissions costs and steep increases in tuition and fees that are far outpacing the growth in income of average Chinese families.

Even in the richest Chinese city of Shanghai, people are complaining. On February 28, 2005, Chinese News Weekly published a report summarizing a sample survey done by the Shanghai Academy of Social Science on households in the Xuhui District of Shanghai. For all the surveyed households with children in middle school, high school, and/or college, school costs accounted for 39 percent to 52 percent of the total family income. A quarter of the surveyed families spent more than half of their annual income on their school-age children.

In poor and rural areas, many farmers cannot afford to have their children finish middle school.

In December 2005, the Chinese communist regime announced it would spend an additional 200 billion yuan (US$25 billion) on rural education. Premier Wen Jiabao in November promised to remove all tuition and fees in rural areas within two years. However, people are casting doubts on whether the central government’s policy will be carried out in the poor regions. At the end of 2005, the regime still owed more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.25 billion) in unpaid salaries to rural teachers.

Healthcare has also suffered from the regime’s negligent policies. After abandoning the old socialist healthcare system, the regime adopted a policy of allowing the Chinese hospitals to "make money." Government funding amounts to less than 13 percent of the budget of all publicly funded hospitals. The commercialization of the healthcare system has been accompanied by the moral corruption of the whole system. Hospitals routinely set up various unnecessary tests and examinations, and physicians intentionally prescribe the more expensive medicines, costs to be borne by the patients. It has become a common practice in the recent decade that doctors expect to receive "hong-bao" (cash in envelope) from their patients’ families. In 2005, Auditor General Li Jinhua disclosed a shocking set of data: In 2004 and 2005, 10 hospitals under the Ministry of Health in Beijing over-charged 11.27 million yuan (US$1.4 million), 27 percent on prescription medications and 73 percent on medical exams.{mospagebreak}

Hospitals shut out the poor and less-privileged citizens. Media reports of patients dying in front of hospital emergency rooms because they could not pay cash up front and therefore were denied emergency care are not uncommon. They have appeared in different cities all over the country.

China Youth Daily reported the results of a survey of 733 interviewees that showed 90 percent were discontent with the changes in the healthcare system over the past 10 years. Another survey conducted by the private Horizon Group in 2005 showed that 66 percent of the urban population and 80 percent in rural areas were not covered by any health insurance. Published data from the Ministry of Health revealed that 48.9 percent of Chinese citizens had chosen not to go to a hospital when they were sick, and 29.6 percent had decided not to be hospitalized when they should have been.

A report published by the Development Research Center under the State Council and World Health Organization in 2005 admitted that China’s most recent medical and health system reform has been a failure.

8. The Growth of Economic Disparity

China had another year of high GDP growth: 9.9 percent increase from 2004. At the same time, however, the gap between the rich and the poor in China further widened.

A report by the United Nations Development Planning Commission (UNDPC) revealed that the Gini coefficient has reached 0.45 in China. The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of inequality in which 0 expresses complete equality while 1 expresses complete inequality. Scholars generally regard a Gini reading of 0.4 as a warning sign of social disparity.

China’s Ministry of Labor and Social Security pointed out in a report that the income gap in China has now reached the second most serious "yellow-light" alert level, and unless effective measures are taken in the next five years, it will fall into the "red-light" danger zone.

The large gap is due to the disparity between the Chinese coastal cities and the vast rural inland. Official statistics provided by the Central Policy Research Office show that the current income gap between urban and rural residents may be as high as 3.3 to 1, which is the highest since 1978. Scholars say the gap could be much wider if subsidies and benefits for urban residents are taken into account.

The UNDPC said that the income gap between urban and rural communities in China is among the highest in the world and is already threatening social stability.{mospagebreak}

Income disparity in China is not just a story of the great urban-rural divide. The trend is also present within Chinese cities, even in the flashy showcase metropolises. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the income gap among residents in Beijing is widening and has significantly surpassed the warning limit. The city has registered a Gini coefficient of 0.5—higher than the national average.

Why has this fast economic development of around 10 percent annual GDP growth for the last 15 years not fairly benefited the population at large? It has to be that the system is not working. Of the 155 countries ranked by the World Bank’s Investment Climate Department, China’s rank is 100. The Chinese system, which lacks transparency, provides far too many opportunities for the privileged to rip off the average citizens.

For example, the Chinese stock market in 2005 saw its fifth consecutive bad year, and the Shanghai Index sank to its eight-year low in the midst of long-term economic growth. The companies were profitable, but the minority shareholders lost their money. Beijing controls two-thirds of the shares of China’s 1,400 listed companies. Its regulations seemed only to help the companies defraud its Chinese investors. For the 70 million individual Chinese investors, 2005 was a year full of bitterness and disbelief.

In another example, the revenue from state land sales failed to benefit the farmers on the land. According to the Ministry of Land Resources, Chinese cities earned more than 200 billion yuan (US$25 billion) in land sales in the past two decades, but most of that money did not benefit the farmers who lost their lands to the development of the cities. While the farmers are the actual land users, the state claims to own the land. By the most conservative Ministry estimations, at least 20 billion yuan (US$2.5 billion) from land sales were lost to corruption and embezzlement.

Those who have gotten rich easily and sometimes illegally are living in luxury and laundering their money by sending it to overseas safe havens. According to a survey conducted by China’s Ministry of Commerce, in recent years as many as 4,000 Chinese officials have fled overseas, taking with them approximately US$50 billion. The real figure is believed to be much higher.

Those who have not fled often send their children abroad in a bid to establish a foothold in the West in preparation for their own eventual flight. As a result, a whole new breed of Chinese students has become a dazzling phenomenon in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries, where these youngsters can afford to pay cash for new cars and big houses.

The Chinese communist leaders are eager to invest for GDP growth but unwilling to fund education and healthcare. As a result, the ordinary citizens have to shoulder the burden. The steep increase in tuition and healthcare costs is another factor contributing to poor Chinese families’ hardships.{mospagebreak}

9. Sino-U.S. Relations in Hindsight: The Peace of 2005

To many people, 2005 was halcyon by any definition with regard to relations between the United States and China. Absent any event resembling the bombing of Yugoslavia’s embassy in China or the collision of jet planes, there was no attention-grabbing incident that would have compelled commentators to quickly announce a "nadir" in the relationship. Equally disappointing, however, was the absence of any great "progress" in the relationship and therefore the opportunity for a celebration that could have invoked an outpouring of goodwill. A quiet year, you may call it. But uneventful it wasn’t.

All the old problems, if not amplified, persisted during 2005. To the frustration of many Americans, outspoken dissidents in China continued to be nabbed by the police without any qualms over legal proceedings. The police were sometimes helped by the information and technology offered up by U.S. technology firms, such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, which had chosen to curry favor with the authoritarian regime at the expense of the values upheld by their home country. People in China continued to protest various grievances, but the buzz of China’s economy drowned out the voices of protest. Out of more than 87,000 public protests in China last year, Americans might remember one, a tragedy in Dongzhou in Guangdong Province. It featured the Chinese police on a gory killing spree of its own people, reminiscent of the Tiananmen Massacre 17 years earlier.

China remains a communist totalitarian regime. After decades of generous supplies of foreign capital and technology, the Chinese economy boom has not led to its transition to a democracy. Rather, it has made the communist regime more powerful and more able to confront America.

"If Americans train their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu said at an official briefing in Hong Kong last July.

While Zhu’s statement drew loud protests in America, he drew equally loud applause in China, where the communist regime has convinced the population that America is the greatest obstacle to China’s growth.

However anxious the PLA generals may be to talk about or prepare for war, the communist leaders are biding their time. When Hu Jintao was in New York for the U.N. summit last September, "peaceful growth and development" were the words out of his month. After all, the regime needed the investment capital, the modern technology, and the vast market for goods made-in-China, which all have to come from the West in a time of peace.

Time does not seem to be in America’s favor, though. After "engagement" for more than a quarter of a century, the Communist tiger is stronger—and becoming harder than ever to contain.{mospagebreak}

President Bush redefined China as a "strategic competitor" not long after he arrived in the White House. He might have had a vision of China’s future and the role of the U.S. in shaping it, but that plan has not been actively pursued until recently.

During his visit to Asia last November, President Bush made several notable speeches that appeared to have Chinese listeners in mind. Before arriving in Beijing, Bush discussed freedom and democracy in Kyoto, Japan, "In the 21st century, freedom is an Asian value—because it is a universal value." After his visit to China, Bush spoke in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, "Mongolia has made the transition from communism to freedom, and in just 15 years, you’ve established a vibrant democracy and opened up your economy. You’re an example of success for this region and for the world."

It’s obvious that Bush wants China to follow its neighbors in embracing freedom and democracy, but he chose to promote those values only outside of China. If America’s long-term strategy is to bring freedom and democracy to China, 2005 did not find China ready to implement such values. While the U.S. has been obsessed with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other anti-terrorist initiatives, China’s duplicity in the unfruitful six-party talks and its closeness to North Korea, a party to those negotiations and a member of the "axis of evil," might have alerted some already-strained nerves in the U.S.

Indeed, as long as the fundamental differences between the two giants exist, there is little hope that frictions will fade away by themselves.

Ann Lee, Steven Tian, and Victor Gu are correspondents for Chinascope