Created: May 28, 2012
Last Updated: May 28, 2012
Today’s political situation in Beijing originated in a decision made 13 years ago
Epoch Times Editorial Board
Related articles: Opinion » Thinking About China
At a conference organized by the 610 Office in April 2003 in Hebei Province the torture method called “the straightjacket” was billed as an “advanced experience in transformation” and promoted for use throughout China.
The Falun Gong practitioner’s arms are bound and twisted behind him in a specially designed jacket. The guards then pull the arms over the shoulders to the chest, tearing the shoulder ligaments. The legs are tied up, the mouth gagged, and earphones placed in the ears. A rope is tied around the practitioners’ arms, its end is looped around the bars on a high window, and the guards hoist the practitioner off the ground.
The practitioners’ shoulders, elbows, and wrists instantly fracture. Meanwhile, recordings slandering the practitioner’s beliefs are pumped through the earphones at high volume. If the practitioner is left hanging for an extended period of time, the spine fractures, and the practitioner dies in excruciating pain.
There are officials who no longer wish to look the other way as these horrors continue.
After launching the campaign to “eradicate” Falun Gong in July, 1999, former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) head Jiang Zemin promoted only those people who were willing to order that hellish tortures like this be used on Falun Gong practitioners.
In China today, there are officials who no longer wish to look the other way as these horrors continue.
The crisis shaking the Chinese regime turns on whether or not CCP officials should continue persecuting Falun Gong. Underlying the heated struggle taking place behind the high red walls of the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai is a clear choice between good and evil.
Bloody-Hands Faction
When Jiang Zemin forced the decision to begin the persecution of Falun Gong through the Politburo Standing Committee, the committee’s other six members opposed him.
Once begun, the persecution was no more popular generally than it had been in the elite Standing Committee. But Jiang had ways to push his campaign forward.
Jiang had power, and with that power he could give permission. Greed, like that of the billionaire Bo Xilai, was a recommendation. A taste for rape, like that of the future domestic security czar Zhou Yongkang, could be indulged. A taste for blood, like that of the police chief Wang Lijun, who reported in a speech being thrilled at the awesome sight of forced, live organ harvesting, could be smiled upon.
The buffoonish and awkward Jiang could not lead men, but he could pander to them. Those who still had scruples learned to abandon them, as they plunged into moral depths decent human beings cannot imagine exist.
Blackmail, and coercion prodded Jiang’s recruits from behind as bribery and their various vices led them onward. In this way, Jiang formed the bloody-hands faction that carried out his persecution.
At his direction, these CCP bosses used the power he gave them to slander good and innocent citizens; to steal everything Falun Gong practitioners had of value, even taking farmers’ seeds; to detain practitioners by the millions, subjecting them to slave labor, little sleep, and rotten food; to break practitioners’ wills and destroy their faith in what they believed to be good and true; to wrack the practitioners’ bodies with nightmarish tortures; to abuse them sexually, rape them, and gang rape them; and, for the sake of a little profit, to strap practitioners alive and awake to a hospital table, cut them open, and tear their organs from their bodies (Detailed information at: organharvestinvestigation.net).
Click www.ept.ms/ccp-crisis to read about the most recent developments in the ongoing crisis within the Chinese communist regime. In this special topic, we provide readers with the necessary context to understand the situation. Get the RSS feed. Get the new interactive Timeline of Events. Who are the Major Players?
The guilt the members of the bloody-hands faction shared for these crimes was their common surety. Jiang could trust them with power because no member of the faction could hold the others responsible for what they all had done.
In China’s 5,000-year-long history much has been experienced, but the ridiculous Jiang has brought this nation to its darkest and most degenerate era.
Unsustainable
On Feb. 25 a Falun Gong practitioner named Wang Xiaodong was arrested after police found a Falun Gong compact disk in his home in Zhouguantun Village, Fuzhen Town, Botou City, Hebei Province, the province in northeastern China that surrounds Beijing.
After fruitlessly appealing to authorities for his release, his family walked through the village with a petition calling for Wang to be let go. In one day, 110 signatures were gathered. In a few days, 300 villagers had signed their real names and affixed their thumb prints in red wax. The local Party cadres added an official stamp.
The villagers and the local cadres all know very well that Falun Gong has been banned. They also know the consequences that can be visited on those who practice Falun Gong or those who simply help practitioners. Nonetheless, they stood up to be counted on Wang’s behalf.
The villagers’ fate reflects the strife in today’s CCP. Local security forces loyal to the bloody-hands faction are now harassing them, but, in a clear sign that the villagers have friends in high places, their petition was put before the Politburo Standing Committee.
Click www.ept.ms/ccp-crisis to read about the most recent developments in the ongoing crisis within the Chinese communist regime. In this special topic, we provide readers with the necessary context to understand the situation. Get the RSS feed. Get the new interactive Timeline of Events. Who are the Major Players?
For 13 years Falun Gong practitioners have waged the largest campaign of civil disobedience in the world. They have patiently gone to one individual after another to tell their story. They distribute fliers and compact disks and talk about their own experiences with the spiritual practice.
The practitioners tell how they live their lives according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. They explain how they have learned to think of others before they think of themselves and to take less seriously different passions and desires.
They tell of the extraordinary improvements in health they have experienced, with chronic, serious diseases completely healed. And they tell of families healed, with conflict replaced by harmony.
They patiently debunk the propaganda demonizing Falun Gong and tell of what is done to practitioners in brainwashing centers, labor camps, psychiatric hospitals, and in the often makeshift operating rooms used for organ harvesting.
Every minute of every day tens of millions of practitioners risk their lives in order educate their fellow Chinese about what Falun Gong is and how the regime has persecuted it.
In doing this, the practitioners want to hasten the day that the persecution ends, but they also have an even more noble purpose.
The practitioners believe in the truth of the traditional Chinese saying that good deeds are rewarded with good and evil with evil.
All of those who have supported the persecution are in danger of themselves becoming the persecution’s victims. They will suffer the consequences for the evil done in carrying out the persecution.
In reaching out to the people of China, the practitioners have especially sought to help those the bloody-hands faction has deceived into doing evil.
The Zhouguantun villagers are remarkable in what they did, but this village is not alone in rejecting the persecution. In some villages in China, a bell sounds in the morning to announce the Falun Gong exercises will begin. In other villages, the local security forces have quietly let practitioners know they are no longer hunting them down.
Before the persecution began, the people of China flocked to learn Falun Gong. Now, they are once more awakening to its goodness, in spite of the tricks and threats of the bloody-hands faction.
Like the villagers of Zhouguantun, the people of China are making a choice. They no longer want to be associated with the madness Jiang has brought upon the country. The petition in Zhouguantun bears this message between its lines: The persecution is unsustainable, and its ending is only a matter of time.
Failed Scapegoat
This shift in the people of China has been building year after year. Jiang and his faction could see how the people were turning their backs on the campaign against Falun Gong and knew what this foretold. One day the persecution would end, and the bloody-hands faction would be brought to trial for its crimes.
In February 2011 Hong Kong’s Frontline magazine published an article that purported to report the two things Jiang will regret throughout his life. One of those was said to be the persecution of Falun Gong. The article describes the dictator Jiang as taking a flexible stance toward democracy and political freedom. The regret expressed about the persecution makes its continuation after Jiang retired in 2002 seem to have been all the responsibility of his successor, Hu Jintao.
With that magazine article, Jiang or Jiang’s faction sought to tie Hu to the persecution and make him a scapegoat. If Hu were guilty, then Hu could never allow Jiang and his faction to be held accountable.
But the ruse fell flat. The recent changes in the CCP—including the removal of Bo Xilai from his Party posts and the investigation of Zhou Yongkang—indicate that Hu and Wen want to end the bloody-hands faction.
They still have time to reverse Jiang’s policy of persecuting Falun Gong. If Hu and Wen do so, they will usher in an historic change to China.
Failed Coup
The failure to co-opt Hu and Wen left the bloody-hands faction only one course: to continue trying to hold onto power in the CCP.
Jiang had arranged for his faction to dominate the CCP, even as he retired. At the 16th Party Congress in 2002, which marked the end of Jiang’s tenure as general secretary, Jiang went against Party custom and expanded the Politburo Standing Committee from seven to nine.
Jiang added Luo Gan and his long-time ally Zeng Qinghong and forced off the committee the highly respected Li Ruihuan. In addition, Jiang had the rule governing the Standing Committee changed. Instead of the Standing Committee obeying the general secretary, it would henceforth operate by consensus.
With these moves, Jiang assured that he would continue to call the shots in the CCP, even though Hu and Wen might hold the top offices in the Party and the government.
Click www.ept.ms/ccp-crisis to read about the most recent developments in the ongoing crisis within the Chinese communist regime. In this special topic, we provide readers with the necessary context to understand the situation. Get the RSS feed. Get the new interactive Timeline of Events. Who are the Major Players?
Luo Gan was head of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee (PLAC). In the 1980s the PLAC had been a small Party organ, but after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, the PLAC took on the role of suppressing domestic dissent and began to grow in power.
The 610 Office, tasked by Jiang with eradicating Falun Gong, was part of the PLAC and used its resources to enforce the persecution or, in those places where there was no 610 Office, the PLAC enforced the persecution directly. Jiang and Luo used the persecution as an opportunity to expand the size, power, and reach of the PLAC.
In 2007, at the 17th Party Congress, Luo retired and Jiang replaced him with Zhou Yongkang, who also became director of the PLAC. Zhou continued expanding the PLAC’s power. Today’s PLAC has authority over the 1.5 million-strong People’s Armed Police, the Public Security Bureau, the courts, the procuratorate, lawyers, the jails and labor camps, and the vast network of surveillance aimed at China’s population.
With a budget greater than the military, Zhou has turned the PLAC into a second power center within the CCP, threatening the ability of Party central to rule.
Knowing that Zhou would be forced to retire at the 18th Party Congress later this year, the bloody-hands faction prepared for Bo Xilai, then the Party chief of the province-level city of Chongqing in central-western China, to take his place on the Standing Committee and as director of the PLAC.
Bo was a safe choice to carry the standard of the bloody-hands faction because he was so deeply implicated in the persecution. While Bo Xilai was in Dalian City as mayor (1999-2001) and in Shenyang City, in northeast China’s Liaoning Province as governor (2001-2004), tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners from all over the country were jailed there.
Large numbers of practitioners died. Shenyang City was turned into an experimental site for organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners. Bo could never hold the other members of the faction accountable for their crimes in enforcing the persecution without destroying himself.
While Jiang had hoped Bo could in fact be named as Hu’s successor, according to the usual CCP procedures, Bo was two steps below the rank of general secretary. Leapfrogging Bo into that office was not considered possible.
Jiang reluctantly accepted Xi Jinping, the former governor of Zhejiang Province and the head of the Central Party School, in the belief that he was weak and could easily be pushed aside. Xi, though, had not taken part in the persecution, and Jiang could never rest easy at the prospect of Xi assuming power.
In a desperate effort to keep the bloody-hands faction in power, the idea was born of Zhou and Bo conspiring in a plot to unseat Xi after he took power.
This coup might have gone forward, except that Bo could not trust in the guilt of Wang Lijun, his right-hand man, after all. Bo feared what might be revealed in Party central’s investigation of Wang and turned on him. On Feb. 6 Wang fled for his life to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, the plot was revealed, and the CCP has since been locked in a bitter struggle.
An Opportunity
As the harassment of the Zhouguantun villagers demonstrates, the bloody-hands faction keeps fighting. If the faction cannot avoid losing power, it can continue for a time to create chaos.
The bloody-hands faction fights on because its members are deeply afraid. The little tyrants who calmly ordered the tortures and the organ harvesting now fear a solemn tribunal may soon pass judgment on them.
As the faction continues to lash out, Hu, Wen, and Xi will remain in danger and Chinese society will be in turmoil.
This agonizing period offers everyone a precious opportunity to display their righteousness, morality, and courage.
The CCP officials face urgent, life-and-death conflicts. As they fight among themselves, they may think they are fighting to preserve themselves and to hold onto power.
In fact, the fundamental choice facing the CCP officials is not about self-preservation or power. The choice is between good and evil.
The principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance are universal and constitute our humanity. In persecuting Falun Gong, the bloody-hands faction has set itself against human nature and against the moral basis of Chinese society.
To choose to continue such acts as hoisting up Falun Gong practitioners tied up in straightjackets is to choose barbarism over civilization. It is to choose to bring disaster and shame onto China.
To oppose the persecution of Falun Gong is to choose human flourishing and a future based on what is best in us.
Although the recent, dramatic events in China may be distracting, this choice is plain for all to see. Each CCP official must choose where he or she stands, as must each Chinese citizen.
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In addition, each government around the world and the world’s people must make the same choice.
This moment before the persecution ends allows for all to reflect on what has been displayed in China. It is a chance to choose a good future.
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This article was taken from:
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/opinion/the-choice-and-the-crisis-facing-the-chinese-regime-243646.html
2012-05-25
