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declaring that the atheist ideology of the Communist Party must
“defeat” Falun Gong.
In the months that followed, Jiang formed a new department called
the Falun Gong Control Office. The office was charged with overseeing
the eradication of Falun Gong and was given extrajudicial power to
execute its mandate. Lawyers were prohibited from representing
Falun Gong cases, and on July 22, 1999, the government issued an offi-
cial ban on the practice of Falun Gong. It also prohibited citizens from
protesting the ban.
Reports of the crackdown that followed alleged the arrests and
detentions of hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong followers in pris-
ons, labor camps, and mental hospitals. There have also been consis-
tent reports of beatings and torture of Falun Gong practitioners, and
two-thirds of all Chinese torture cases reported through the United
Nation's special rapporteur on torture have involved Falun Gong
practitioners. The U.S. Department of State estimates that Falun Gong
adherents comprise as much as half of China's reeducation-through-
labor camp population.
In 2006, persistent reports emerged alleging that China's organ
transplant industry has been supplied in part with the organs of non-
consenting Falun Gong prisoners. Assessing the veracity of these
reports is difficult, but later in 2006 Canadian human rights lawyer
David Matas and former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour
concluded that large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong
practitioners were fairly common in China.
Falun Gong's response to persecution has been nonviolent, focusing
primarily on grassroots education campaigns. Perhaps their most
common form of resistance has been through the establishment of a
network of largely autonomous, underground printing houses that
produce and distribute literature about the persecution throughout
China. Falun Gong practitioners outside China have established dissi-
dent media outlets, including a Chinese-language satellite television
station, to broadcast information to mainland China. In 2001,
Chinese-American Falun Gong practitioners developed now-widely
used software to circumvent China's Internet blockade. In late 2004,
some Falun Gong dissidents began circulating a series of critical com-
mentaries on the Chinese Communist Party. Falun Gong practitioners
claim that many millions of Chinese have severed all affiliations with
the Party as a result of these critical commentaries.
Falun Gong maintains a robust presence in North America and fre-
quently sponsors media campaigns, cultural events, and protests
against the Chinese Communists' restrictive policies against their
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