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CHINA’S POLICIES TOWARD SPIRITUAL 

MOVEMENTS 

ROUNDTABLE 

BEFORE THE

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE 

COMMISSION ON CHINA 

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

JUNE 18, 2010 

Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.cecc.gov 

(II) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Opening statement of Douglas Grob, Cochairman’s Senior Staff Member, Congressional-Executive Commission on China ...................................................... 1 

Tong, James, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California-Los Angeles ................................................................................................ 4 

Gutmann, Ethan, Adjunct Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies ...... 8 

Shan, Mark, Program in Philosophy, Theology and Ethics, Boston University .. 13 

Cook, Sarah, Asia Research Analyst, Freedom House ......................................... 15 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS

Tong, James ............................................................................................................. 30 

Gutmann, Ethan ...................................................................................................... 34 

Shan, Mark ............................................................................................................... 36 

Cook, Sarah .............................................................................................................. 41 

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD

Prepared Statement of Caylan Ford, Falun Gong Practitioner and Volunteer 

Analyst and Editor, Falun Dafa Information Center ........................................ 45 

(1) 

CHINA’S POLICIES TOWARD SPIRITUAL 

MOVEMENTS 

FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010 

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE

COMMISSION ON CHINA, Washington, DC. 

The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2:03 p.m., 

in room 628, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Douglas Grob (Cochairman’s Senior Staff Member), presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF DOUGLAS GROB, COCHAIRMAN’S 

SENIOR STAFF MEMBER, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA 

Mr. GROB. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you 

very much for joining us here today. On behalf of Senator Byron 

Dorgan, Chairman, and Representative Sander Levin, Cochairman, 

and Charlotte Oldham-Moore, Staff Director of the CongressionalExecutive Commission on China [CECC], I would like to welcome 

you to this, the 14th Congressional-Executive Commission on 

China roundtable held during the 111th Congress. 

My name is Douglas Grob and I am Cochairman Levin’s Senior 

Staff Member. 

We have asked our distinguished panelists here today to examine 

the Chinese Government’s policies toward spiritual movements and 

the factors that drive Chinese Government officials’ treatment of 

members of spiritual groups. The Chinese Government has allowed 

space for some spiritual movements to operate in China, but the 

Communist Party has banned other groups, such as the popular 

spiritual movement, Falun Gong. Authorities have subjected members of Falun Gong and other banned groups to strict surveillance 

and, in some cases, imprisonment, detention outside the legal system, and other abuses. Why does the Chinese Government consider 

some spiritual movements a threat, and what challenges and prospects do Falun Gong practitioners face in China that adherents of 

other groups may not? And what does the Chinese Government’s 

treatment of spiritual movements mean for religious freedom in 

China? 

We still do not have a clear understanding of all the factors that 

prompt Chinese authorities to criminalize some spiritual movements as ‘‘cult’’ organizations. 

We will hear today of individuals subjected to abuse, in some 

cases including detention and imprisonment. These cases include 

those of Wang Chunyan, Qiu Shaojie, Cao Junping, Tian Zhongxia, 

Zhu Lijin, Li Yaohua, Chen Zhenping, Qiao Yongfang, and Yan 

2 

Dongfei. Other cases, some less well known, include the cases of Xu 

Na, Wang Zhiwen, Yang Xiyao, Zhang Binglan, Duan Youru, Li 

Zongbo, and others. These are Falun Gong practitioners, but there 

are cases of members of other spiritual movements labeled as cults 

in China as well, including Shi Hua, Gong Shengliang, Tong 

Houyong, Shu Wenxiang, Xie Zhenqi, and others. 

Another case that we will hear about today is that of Gao 

Zhisheng, a prominent Chinese human rights attorney who, in late 

March 2010, resurfaced after having disappeared for more than a 

year and who has now again disappeared. Gao’s case has attracted 

international attention due in part to his legal advocacy on behalf 

of religious minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, and ethnic minorities, rural farmers, and human rights advocates. A self-taught lawyer, Gao Zhisheng repeatedly has angered 

Chinese authorities by taking on case that authorities deem to be 

‘‘sensitive,’’ and by exposing human rights abuses. 

It is worth noting what both international human rights standards and provisions in Chinese law say about the rights of members of spiritual movements. 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, says, 

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, 

and religion. This right includes freedom to change his religion 

or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief 

in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. 

Article 19 says, 

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, 

and this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas 

through any media and regardless of frontiers. 

Article 20 says, 

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and 

association. 

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 

18, says, 

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. This right shall include freedom to have 

or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either 

individually or in community with others, and in public or private, to manifest his religions or belief in worship, observance, 

practice, and teaching. No one shall be subject to coercion 

which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion 

or belief of his choice. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed 

by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, 

or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. 

The State Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have 

respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal 

guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their 

children in conformity with their own convictions. 

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, Article 35, 

states, 

3 

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of 

speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, 

and of demonstration. 

Article 36 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China 

states, 

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of 

religious belief. No state organ, public organization, or individual may compel citizens to believe in or not to believe in 

any religion, nor may they discriminate against citizens who 

believe in or do not believe in any religion. The state protects 

normal religious activities. No one may make use of religion to 

engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health 

of citizens, or interfere with the educational system of the 

state. Religious bodies and religious affairs are not subject to 

any foreign domination. 

With that in mind, it is my great pleasure to introduce our panelists today. James Tong, professor, UCLA Department of Political 

Science, and chief editor of the Journal of Chinese Law and Government. Professor Tong previously served as the vice chairman of 

UCLA’s Department of Political Science and director of UCLA’s 

Center for East Asian Studies. His publications include ‘‘Revenge 

of the Forbidden City: The Suppression of the Falun Gong in 

China, 1999–2000,’’ and a number of articles and edited volumes on 

central and provincial religious policy documents in China, ethnic 

conflict, and the 1989 democracy movement in Beijing. He has 

served as a World Bank consultant, briefed the U.S. Commission 

on International Religious Freedom, and has participated in a previous CECC roundtable on religious regulations, and we’re very 

pleased to have you back here today. 

Ethan Gutmann, to my left, is Adjunct Fellow at the Foundation 

for Defense of Democracies. He is currently completing a comprehensive history of the clash between Falun Gong and the Chinese State, and in addition has begun preliminary research into, 

quote, ‘‘the Chinese Uyghur conflict and the underlying ambiguity 

of the Chinese Communist Party’s stance toward the Islamist global challenge.’’ He is the author of, ‘‘Losing the New China: A Story 

of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal.’’ He is formerly a 

senior counselor at APCO China and a visiting fellow at the Project 

for the New American Century. He has written widely on Chinese 

military development, human rights, the U.S. business scene in 

Beijing, and on recent hacking for the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The Weekly Standard, and a number of other 

prominent publications. We are very delighted to have you here 

today. 

To my right is Mark Shan, of the Program in Philosophy, Theology and Ethics at Boston University. Mr. Shan has written about 

the house church movement in China, focusing on Christian theology and social ethics. He has published two books, ‘‘The Future 

Direction of Churches in China,’’ and ‘‘The History of Christianity 

in Xinjiang.’’ He also serves as consultant on religious and political 

issues in China for organizations in the United States, and he is 

the primary founder of a newly established Chinese Christian Theology Association based in Boston. Originally from Xinjiang, China, 

4 

Mr. Shan now resides in Boston where he is pursuing his Christian 

theological studies at Boston University, and we are delighted to 

have you with us today. 

Also to my right is Sarah Cook, Asia Research Analyst at Freedom House, and assistant editor for the ‘‘Freedom on the Net’’ 

index on Internet and digital media freedom. She has served as 

East Asia Analyst for Freedom House’s ‘‘Freedom of the Press’’ and 

‘‘Freedom in the World’’ reports. Her research has covered human 

rights and media developments in East Asia, Indochina, and the 

Middle East, including fact-finding trips to Hong Kong and Taiwan. 

Her comments and writings have appeared on CNN, the International Herald Tribune, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. 

Before joining Freedom House, she co-edited the English translation of ‘‘A China More Just,’’ a memoir by human rights attorney 

Gao Zhisheng. She was twice a delegate to the United Nations 

Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva, working on religious freedom in China, and she is currently completing an article 

on the Chinese Communist Party’s creation and use of the 6–10 Office to suppress Falun Gong and other banned spiritual groups. 

All of our panelists’ statements are on the table outside and will 

be available online. I would also like to take this opportunity to call 

your attention to an additional statement, also available on the 

table outside, by Ms. Caylan Ford, who is here with us today, a volunteer with the Falun Dafa Information Center. This statement 

has been submitted for the record and will be available to the public with the other statements from this roundtable. 

With that, I would like to turn the floor over to Professor Tong. 

Thank you. 

Professor Tong? 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Ford appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF JAMES TONG, PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF 

POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA–LOS ANGELES 

Mr. TONG. My talk today will be on how the Chinese regime 

views the threat posed by the Falun Gong in recent years, and also 

how it differentiates different types of Falun Gong members and offenses that they impose legal and also political sanctions, and also 

a few remarks on the implications on the larger issues on religious 

freedom in China. 

On July 22, 1999, when China announced a ban on Falun Gong, 

there were between 2.3 million to about 80 million Falun Gong 

practitioners in China. This wide range results from the fact that 

there is no clear and formal definition of a Falun Gong practitioner 

because, unlike Christians, the Falun Gong has no rite of formal 

induction into the religious community. Different levels of Falun 

Gong organizations also do not maintain a membership roster, so 

there is no accurate count on the number of Falun Gong practitioners in China before the ban of July 22, 1999. 

These Falun Gong practitioners were organized into about 28,000 

practice sites throughout China and they were further grouped into 

about 1,900 guidance stations, and further grouped into about 39 

main stations. Every morning, they would gather together in the 

city parks and other public places for breathing exercises. 

5 

Since July 22, 1999, these breathing exercises and daily assemblies have virtually disappeared. Also disappeared were the special 

convocations. These were larger congregations that the Falun Gong 

practitioners gathered together on special congregational anniversaries, and also training seminars lasting three to four days, where 

they learned special breathing exercises, meditation techniques, 

and also Falun Gong doctrine. 

These three public forums of organized activities of the Falun 

Gong movement in China have been successfully and effectively 

suppressed in China, and so have been their publications. On July 

22, 1999, there were at least 11 million copies of Falun Gong publications. They belonged to about 11 Falun Gong titles. These were 

confiscated. 

On the seventh day of the ban, on July 29, they were collected 

together and set ablaze or turned into paper pulp in 17 major cities 

in China. In sum, the Chinese regime has been effective in suppressing the public forms of organized activities of the Falun Gong 

movement in China. 

There still have been periodic reports of overt defiance by Falun 

Gong practitioners in China. These include the staging of protest 

rallies in the national and provincial capitals, displaying the banner of the Falun Gong in public, and also engaging in sabotage of 

media organizations in China, but these have been rare in China 

in at least the past seven or eight years. 

There are three related developments that demonstrate that fact. 

The first is the annual report of the chief procurator in China. This 

is the equivalent to the Attorney General of the United States. 

Every year, the annual procurator report would list what are the 

major law enforcement problems in China in that year. In the first 

five years of the ban on Falun Gong, from 1999 to 2003, the Falun 

Gong was listed as one of the major law enforcement problems in 

China, but it has no longer made that list since 2004. 

Below the national level, each of the provincial procurators would 

also make an annual report that mirrors largely the national trend. 

So in 1999, the procurator of 29 of the 31 provinces mentioned that 

the Falun Gong was a major law enforcement problem in that province in that year; in 2000, 28 provinces; 2001, 21 provinces; and 

since then, there has been a precipitous decline. In 2004, there 

were only seven provinces, and in 2008 there were only two provinces where the provincial procurator list the Falun Gong as a serious, major law enforcement issue in that province. 

The second related development is the end to the followup and 

mopping-up operations conducted by the regime. Since the initial 

blitz in July 1999, there was a second followup campaign in the 

summer of 2001 where, for four months, the public security agents 

would fan out and try to ferret out fugitive Falun Gong leaders. 

They would try to locate where the hideouts were. They would also 

try to search and confiscate Falun Gong publications. 

In addition, some provinces conducted single-day operations on 

Falun Gong special days. And in some strong Falun Gong hold-outs 

there were 100-day campaigns where public security agents would 

systematically go through all Internet cafes, printing presses, 

photocopying vendors, and rental properties to try to locate Falun 

6 

Gong practitioners and inventories of Falun Gong publications. 

None of these followup campaigns have been reported since 2003. 

Then the third development is the reorganization of the special 

agency dealing with the Falun Gong. Forty days before the official 

ban on July 22, the June 10 office was established at different levels of government, both at the national and at local levels. Their 

business was exclusively to deal with the Falun Gong. 

In April 2002, these offices’ mission was broadened to include not 

only other spiritual movements and cults, but also collective protests and rallies organized by non-religious groups, including, 

workers who are on strike, and demonstrating peasants who were 

evicted from their farmland. 

In other words, all three developments combined suggest that by 

2003 or 2004, the Chinese regime did not see the Falun Gong as 

a major law enforcement problem and a security threat posed to 

the regime. 

My second set of remarks are focused on what type of Falun 

Gong practitioners and what type of offenses the regime deemed 

unacceptable, that it levied the legal and political sanctions. 

Let me begin with a reiteration of the basic fact that there were 

at least 2.3 million Falun Gong practitioners in China in July 1999. 

That is four times the total population of Washington, DC. If we 

take the largest estimate, 80 million Falun Gong practitioners, that 

is about a quarter of the total population of the United States. 

There is no way that the Chinese regime had the judicial capacity 

to process all these cases. 

In 1998, the year just before the ban, the entire judicial system 

in China handled only 400,000 criminal cases that involved 600,000 

individuals. If we look at only the three major offenses that the 

Chinese State charged Falun Gong practitioners with, these include offenses that endanger the state security, endangering the social order, and obstructing social order. In 1998, the judicial system 

in China only processed 74,000 of these cases. At this rate, it would 

have taken them 31 years just to clear 2.3 million cases. So they 

have to differentiate on what types of Falun Gong members they 

will levy legal sanctions. 

On the same day that they announced the ban, they differentiated them into four different categories. The first type are the 

rank and file Falun Gong practitioners who have only participated 

in breathing exercises. For these, no legal sanction was levied. 

The other three types were core members who have committed 

illegal activities. If they would renounce the Falun Gong, write a 

written statement stating their official withdrawal from the Falun 

Gong, and also render an account of their activities, there was also 

no legal and political sanction. For political sanction, if they are a 

government official, or work in a government enterprise, they 

would not be dismissed, they would not be demoted, their year-end 

bonus would not be cut, their benefits would not be affected. If they 

are a member of the Chinese Communist Party, they will not be 

expelled from the Party. As for legal sanction, if they have broken 

a law, but would renounce the Falun Gong, and withdraw from the 

Falun Gong, they would not be prosecuted, according to that formal 

announcement. 

7 

The next category are core leaders who have committed serious 

errors, that is, they have facilitated the organizing of the protests 

or they have distributed, or even printed, illegal Falun Gong publications. If they renounce the Falun Gong and withdraw from Falun 

Gong, if they would also make a conscientious confession, and accrue merit, that is, if they would persuade other Falun Gong members to withdraw from Falun Gong, if they would point out who are 

the Falun Gong leaders, if they would incriminate these leaders, if 

they would tell the authorities where the publications are hidden, 

then they would also receive no sanction. 

The last type were what the Chinese regime considered to be unrepentant core leaders who have committed serious mistakes. 

These are the ones who would receive political and legal sanctions. 

If they have violated what the Chinese State considered to be laws, 

then they would be prosecuted, they would be incarcerated or sent 

to labor reform. 

My last remarks are on the implications for religious freedom in 

China. Religion in China is still a managed religion. The Chinese 

State claims the authority to define what is religion and what is 

not religion, what is a religious organization, and what is a cult. 

It also claims the authority to define what is normal religious activity from what is considered to be illegal religious activity. At 

every level of government there is a religious affairs bureau that 

manages the religious affairs within its jurisdiction. 

But this capacity to manage religion has been eroded by market 

reforms. On the supply side, market reform has created political 

space where spiritual movements can survive outside the control of 

the Party state. In the Maoist era, virtually the entire working population worked for government-owned enterprises. They lived in 

government-owned housing. They relied on government-issued food 

and clothing coupons. But that is no longer the case under market 

reforms. These spiritual movements can now find alternative 

means of employment in the non-state sector. There is a housing 

market. The ration coupons have also ended. 

On the demand side, market reforms have also created social 

conflict that the Chinese Government needs to attend to. It is not 

only the rising crime wave that the procurator at both the national 

and provincial levels stress. These are organized crime, robberies, 

bank heists, and drug trafficking. There is also the rising wave of 

collective protests. 

In 1994, there were 10,000 of these collective protests. These are 

unemployed workers, workers who do not receive pensions, People’s 

Liberation Army [PLA] soldiers that have been discharged with 

minimum severance pay. These groups have staged collective protests. In 1994, there were 10,000, about 30 incidents per year. But 

10 years later in 2004, there were 74,000 of these collective protests. In one month alone, in May 2004, there were 2,180 of these 

collective protests, and each one had participants of 500 or more. 

So when compared to these collective protests and the crime 

wave with people demonstrating in the streets or outside the government offices, both the Falun Gong as well as other spiritual 

movements would be viewed as rather tame in the eyes of the Chinese regime. 

8 

Finally, market reform has also made religious policy a collateral 

beneficiary. In the Maoist era, there was a convergence of religious 

policy with overall political, economic, and social policies. But 30 

years into the market reform, there is a divergence between religious policy on the one hand and the political, economic, and social 

policy on the other. 

China today is no longer a Communist State. The major Communist anniversaries are no longer celebrated. The 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto has no People’s 

Daily editorial. The 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution 

is not celebrated. 

China is not a Leninist economy where there is no private ownership of production and where there are no labor and capitalists 

markets. Today there are 150 million account holders in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. When we compare 150 million 

account holders with 72 million Chinese Communist Party members, we can say that there are at least twice as many capitalists 

as Communist members in China. 

In other words, there is divergence between the religious policy 

and overall political, economic, and social policy in China today. 

The Chinese regime has to bridge this divergence. It has to adjust 

its clock in religious policy so that it will be run on the same time 

zone as the political, economic, and social policy. 

So on this note, I will conclude my set of remarks. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Tong appears in the appendix.] 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much, Professor Tong. Thank you so 

much. 

I would now like to turn the floor over to Ethan Gutmann. 

STATEMENT OF ETHAN GUTMANN, ADJUNCT FELLOW, 

FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES 

Mr. GUTMANN. Thanks. I want to thank the CECC, but my remarks need to go beyond the pro forma on this point. The Chinese 

Communist Party portrays Falun Gong as an evil cult and as a terrorist entity. The Chinese State’s diplomatic arm has made it clear 

that the Falun Gong issue is non-negotiable. It is relevant that this 

appears to be the first U.S. Government hearing or roundtable directly focusing on Falun Gong in a decade. 

As a former Beijing business consultant, I do not rely on Chinese 

official statistics. For example, if you attempt to generate a population figure for the laogai system—labor camps, prisons, black 

jails, detention centers, and psychiatric hospitals—you get a figure 

well below a million. Yet if one counts every detention node and 

makes common-sense estimates, as Laogai Foundation researchers 

do every year, you get a more credible figure of 3 to 5 million. 

According to the U.N. Rapporteur on Torture, Falun Gong comprises half of those prisoners, but this figure might be high. Much 

of my research is based on interviews with refugees and defectors. 

I do not ask them for estimates of the laogai system, but no matter 

how traumatized they are, I do expect them to remember how 

many Falun Gong were in their cell block. 

After interviewing over 120 individuals, including defectors from 

inside Chinese security and well over 50 laogai refugees, I estimate 

that Falun Gong comprises between 15 to 20 percent of the laogai 

9 

system. That is about half a million to a million Falun Gong in detention on average, representing the largest Chinese security action since the Maoist period. 

Now we often perceive China’s human rights problems as an 

entrenched structure, something similar to how Solzhenitsyn 

describes the Soviet gulag as a large plumbing system. But the 

Party’s campaign against Falun Gong more closely resembles a 

blitzkrieg in an increasingly global war, marked by physical assaults in the United States—and I’m happy to talk about this— 

Chinese operatives posing as refugees, and coordinated hacking of 

Chinese dissident networks and U.S. Government entities. 

We should understand how that war began, we should understand the casualty rates, and we should understand the stakes of 

our neutrality. So I thank the CECC again, and especially Toy 

Reid, for making this roundtable a reality. 

I was in Beijing on July 20—really, July 22, I think, as Professor 

Tong points out—1999 when the official crackdown began and 

sound trucks flooded the streets. Western reporters were flooding 

the zone, but they had little cooperation from either the Party or 

Falun Gong at the time, so journalists had trouble simply penciling 

in the first question of any news report: What is Falun Gong? 

Falun Gong, simply put, is a Buddhist revival movement. It has 

moral passion, it has occasional talk of miracles, it has ‘‘Are you 

running with Me, Master Li? ’’ individualism, and it has a reflexive 

mistrust of establishments and outsider agendas. 

This Buddhist aspect may be unfamiliar and exotic in the West, 

but as Arthur Waldron puts it: ‘‘Anyone who knows Asian religion 

will instantly see that Falun Gong fits into a tradition that extends 

back before the beginning of recorded history.’’ What made Falun 

Gong stand out from other Qi Gong exercises and meditation practices was a moral system—compassion, truthfulness, and forbearance—unmistakably Buddhist in origin. 

The revivalist aspect helps explain why Falun Gong insists on 

being called practitioners rather than followers. Actually, they 

don’t follow well. If you ask 10 Falun Gong practitioners for a definition of Falun Gong, you will get 10 different answers and probably 

10 days of heated discussions. Yet it was that same do-it-yourself 

mentality that allowed Falun Gong to attract 70 million practitioners—according to the 6–10 Office—and skip over the barriers of 

Chinese society: class, education, rural/urban, civilian/military, and 

Party membership. 

Go back to 1995 and follow a diminutive old woman around Yuan 

Ming Park in West Beijing. Ding Jing was a Falun Gong coordinator, meaning she taught the exercises, and she kept practice 

sites clean. Among the sites were three locations. One catered to 

employees from China Central Television; two, the Xinhua News 

Agency; and three—very well attended—attracted Party officials, 

their wives, and employees of the Public Security Bureau. 

From a Marxist perspective, which venerates the seizure of 

power using this exact template, Ding’s tidy practice sites represented something terrifying. In 1996, ‘‘Zhuan Falun,’’ in essence 

the Falun Gong bible, was taken out of print. 

Given the amorphous, floating world in which practitioners traveled—largely perceived as amorphous and floating anyway—a 

10 

world without membership lists, central authority, or any real hierarchy other than on paper, practitioners did not panic. But Luo 

Gan, the head of the Public Security Bureau, began to use Falun 

Gong’s perceived infiltration of his own department to gather, to report, and to study. Where no hierarchy existed, the Party, seizing 

on small clues such as Ding’s phone calls, would map one. Where 

no political objectives existed, the Party would create them. 

Until 1997, the Chinese media stayed neutral. Local Party leaders would show up at Falun Dafa rallies. Now critical language 

began to appear in the Party-controlled media. These were flares 

in the night’s sky, indicating the Party was trying something out. 

The Falun Gong had a method to handle this: Show up en masse, 

stay silent, and then stand around until someone talks to you. This 

technique smoothly reversed the various negative reports, articles 

in 1997, a Beijing TV segment in 1998. In Tianjin in 1999—it 

failed. 

Now, I do not know if the article has been handed out yet, but 

you can certainly find it on the Web if it has not made it here, and 

you may be able to pick it up on the way out: ‘‘An Occurrence on 

Fuyou Street.’’ Employing interviews from both sides, my article 

tracks the events from Xinjiang on April 22 to Beijing on April 25, 

1999. Essentially, the demonstration was a set-up. From the portable surveillance cameras on Fuyou Street to the armed military 

unit at the Forbidden City, it was a Party bait-and-switch to create 

momentum for a state-level crackdown. 

A former district-level official—‘‘Minister X,’’ that’s what I call 

him—recalls the Party’s decision to eliminate Falun Gong was circulated internally long before any public ban, and he was told to 

stop granting business licenses to Falun Gong practitioners. A 

Falun Gong source saw a similar communique at Tsinghua University in 1998. A former official of the 6–10 Office—the secret agency 

created to eliminate Falun Gong—noting the level of detail in practitioner files, believes that operations must have begun by at least 

1998. 

Without understanding the initial integration of Falun Gong into 

the Party and the Party’s initiative in starting the war—essentially 

creating the dilemma that threatens the Party today—one cannot 

understand the ineffectiveness of the Falun Gong response. Practitioners wanted to believe that it was a misunderstanding. So practitioner appearances at the petition office and signed letters were 

followed by mass detentions and the first deaths in custody. 

Beginning in 2000, based on the safe house occupancy in Beijing, 

I estimate that well over 150,000 practitioners made their way into 

Tiananmen Square to protest over a year’s time. Collectively, that 

is a remarkable number. But they trickled in at 500 to 1,000 per 

day, and they stood up and unfurled their banners according to the 

dictates of their soul rather than any sort of preconceived strategy. 

Would a mass strategy even have been possible? Well, I have 

provided another article—‘‘Hacker Nation’’—on 6–10 surveillance: 

Before 1999, Falun Gong practitioners hadn’t systematically 

used the Internet as an organizing tool. But now that they 

were isolated, fragmented, and searching for a way to organize 

and change government policy, they jumped online, employing 

code words, avoiding specifics, communicating in short bursts. 

11 

But like a cat listening to mice squeak in a pitch-black house, 

the ‘‘Internet Spying’’ section of the 6–10 Office could find their 

exact location, having developed the ability to search and spy 

as a result of . . . a joint venture between the Shandong Province public security bureau, and Cisco Systems. 

That’s right out of my article, and there is a lot more in there 

as well. 

Following capture and initial interrogation under the 6–10 Office, the laogai system then operated to break the will and ‘‘transform’’ the practitioner, culminating with a public denunciation of 

Falun Gong. But it was within the laogai itself that the first effective resistance began. 

Wang Yuzhi was a tough, successful Beijing businesswoman. And 

when the crackdown started she transformed her office into a secret Falun Gong printing press. It was broken up, her assets were 

seized, Wang ran, and was eventually caught. 

The low-ball casualty figure of over 3,000 practitioners who have 

died by torture is reasonably well-documented. Some practitioners 

simply refused to renounce their belief, others hoped that the overcrowded prisons might contribute to the end of the persecution, and 

others wanted to just set an example to fellow inmates. 

But Wang made it personal, so personal that some of the guards 

force-feeding her began wearing paper bag masks so she could not 

identify them. It became a chess game between the practitioner 

and the torturers. Both sides knew that Wang’s screams of rage 

were becoming legendary throughout the laogai System, and indeed, to practitioners throughout the world. Both sides knew that 

checkmate, actually killing Wang, would leave a pyrrhic victory for 

the state. 

The underlying ambiguity of the laogai position was expressed in 

the following maneuver. Rather than writing up a report of transformation failure, or the euphemism ‘‘death by suicide,’’ many labor 

camps and psychiatric centers would wait until the torture reached 

lethal levels and then suddenly free the dying practitioner—especially after the so-called Tiananmen self-immolation and the 

Changchun television hijacking and I would welcome questions on 

those incidents. 

But Wang Yuzhi lived. Considered terminal on release, she fled 

China and went on to purchase printing presses for The Epoch 

Times. Today she will smile at you with her one good eye. This is 

the face of insurgency, and to such a face, the Party turned toward 

a more permanent solution. 

The final article that I have made available, ‘‘China’s Gruesome 

Organ Harvest,’’ documents a pattern of retail-organs-only physical 

examinations carried out throughout the laogai system. I can find 

no rational medical explanation for these procedures, and I conclude that the commercial harvesting of Falun Gong is real. That 

finding has since been confirmed by a Taiwanese surgeon who arranges transplants on the Mainland. 

One addition. While the Bush Administration’s consistent focus 

on house Christians may have had a ‘‘Schindler’s List’’ effect, inhibiting widespread harvesting of Christians, members of at least one 

sect, Eastern Lightening, were examined for harvesting. According 

12 

to interviews by my colleague Jaya Gibson, so were some Tibetan 

prisoners. 

Yet harvesting of political and religious prisoners probably began 

in Xinjiang. A Uyghur policeman witnessed preparation for a procedure in 1994, and I recently interviewed a Uyghur surgeon who, in 

1995, was ordered to take his medical team into the outskirts of 

Urumqi and remove a prisoner’s organs while the heart was still 

beating. 

Perhaps harvesting began as a purely black-market operation, 

but ultimately prisoners who would not transform—the Wang 

Yuzhis of this world, if you like—became too dangerous to release. 

But the Party had an outlet, the organ tourists of Japan, Europe, 

and the United States. 

Now, the fact that China is the one currently pulling up the reins 

on Western organ tourism highlights Falun Gong’s stunning lack 

of success in making its case in the United States. I mean, one 

would expect that it would be Congress who would be preventing 

organ tourists from going over to China, but it’s not. It’s the Party, 

and they seem to be pulling back on organ harvesting. 

Let me explain what I think happened in the United States. For 

many in the Bush Administration at least, it took one outburst 

from Wang Wenyi on the White House lawn to establish that Falun 

Gong could never be reliable allies. For many Democrats, it took 

one Chinese-planted Wikipedia reference alleging Falun Gong was 

anti-gay to ward off sympathy. Yet Falun Gong teachings on this 

point are essentially indistinguishable from traditional Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. 

Practitioners have some responsibility here, too. In the West, 

they simultaneously watch two screens. They watch a Western one 

and they watch a Chinese one. But for them, China is always the 

default. And fear of the Party’s manipulative abilities on that 

screen run very deep indeed. Hence, we see the definitional problems, we see the alienating public torture displays and the rest, 

and we see Daoist demarcations of good and evil. Again, all of 

these are aimed at the Mainland. 

Yet Falun Gong’s tunnel vision did create one unprecedented success. Along with the construction of the greatest dissident media 

apparatus in modern Chinese history, a small group of Falun Gong 

engineers, based out of a North Carolina suburb, devised an Internet lifeline to transmit information in and out of China. Along the 

way, they facilitated the only unblocked Internet transmissions out 

of Iran during the aborted Green Revolution. 

If the press is correct, the State Department is considering 

awarding these engineers, now known as the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, significant funding to do more. If my Falun Gong 

sources are correct, the Consortium is concerned about taking a 

sum too small to make a difference, in exchange for the inevitable 

Party propaganda point that they are now U.S. agents. 

Yet the Party is pushing the two sides together. The State Department must end Chinese hacking, and the only way State can 

do it is by threatening China’s Big Brother Internet. Falun Gong 

has perhaps a half a million to a million in captivity; as much as 

1 out of 10 Falun Gong may have already been lost to the surgical 

knife. 

13 

So the answer to this dilemma will not be found in parsing 

Wikipedia. And the question is no longer—‘‘What is Falun Gong 

and how do they define themselves? ’’ But rather—‘‘What are Falun 

Gong’s actions? What has the Falun Gong achieved? Against what 

sort of odds? ’’ And here, I believe that the evidence of a decade, 

from the laogai to the North Carolina suburbs, speaks for itself. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Gutmann appears in the appendix.] 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much. 

Mr. Shan? 

STATEMENT OF MARK SHAN, PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY, 

THEOLOGY AND ETHICS, BOSTON UNIVERSITY 

Mr. SHAN. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, CECC members, staff, and interns. 

The roundtable host, the CECC, asked the question, ‘‘What factors influence the Chinese Government’s policies toward spiritual 

movements and drive its treatment of members of spiritual groups? 

The Chinese Government has allowed space for some spiritual 

movements to operate in China, but has banned other groups such 

as Falun Gong. Why does the Chinese Government consider some 

spiritual movements a threat? ’’ 

These questions touch the root of Chinese political/religious culture. My following remarks are trying to find out a rationale behind these policies, yet have no intention to justify the policies. 

For a better understanding, first I need to introduce a concept in 

traditional Chinese political ideology which influenced throughout 

the history of China, and that is ‘‘the Mandate of Heaven.’’ The 

concept officially started by the Zhou Dynasty in 11th century B.C. 

to justify their replacement of the Shang Dynasty. 

Because the concept justified all successful overthrows, just as it 

justified all dynasties that clung to power, the concept has lasting 

influence and has even survived into modern and contemporary 

China. For instance, in the modern period, a famous revolution was 

called The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace Movement, led by Hong 

Xiuquan in the middle of the 19th century. Again in the modern 

time, another man, Sun Zhongshan, famous for leading a revolution against the Qing Dynasty, also can reflect this kind of concept. 

Because of the spiritual feature of this political concept, spiritual 

or religious movements in Chinese history make it easy to challenge the ruling of dynasties through spiritual and moral approaches. So the Chinese Governments have been sensitive 

throughout its history to the political/spiritual touch and are not 

tolerant of any spiritual movements shaking their ruling authority, 

before the Chinese people especially. 

In addition, Chinese Governments have tended to keep state and 

religion separated through promoting a non-religious system, Confucianism, throughout much of their history. Indeed, this is an efficient way to keep religious or spiritual movements out of politics. 

Throughout Chinese history, all the Chinese Governments set up 

this forbidden area: do not touch politics. Do not play around with 

the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. The only politics you can 

touch are the politics that support rulings of government. So based 

on the understanding of this concept, we can find out the rationale 

14 

behind the political religious policy of China today, which is why 

the Chinese Government treats different spiritual movements differently. 

For example, the Protestant Christian house churches and the 

Catholic underground house churches. They are persecuted, but the 

Protestant and the Catholic churches that are officially public 

through the Three-Self Patriotic System [TSPM] enjoy more freedom. 

Tibetan Buddhism is under suppression because of its feature of 

the religion/politics combination in its doctrine and tradition. But 

Buddhism and Daoism in other parts of China enjoy much more 

freedom because they touch no politics. Islam among Uyghurs is 

under suppression because of the Xinjiang political situation, the 

problems there, but Islam among Hui people enjoys more freedom. 

This is true not only inside the same spiritual traditions or religious traditions, but also if we compare government’s treatments 

among different spiritual movements or religions in China. 

Now we are going to talk about the Falun Gong movement. The 

Falun Gong movement was suppressed a lot, as Mr. Tong and 

Ethan mentioned. Actually the Falun Gong movement is only one 

branch of the Qi Gong, but the Falun Gong even was suppressed 

more than other Qi Gong branches. So, why? Because on April 25, 

1999, the siege of the Chinese Communist Party headquarters in 

Beijing by the Falun Gong movement members, more than 20,000, 

really touched the nerve of politics. 

We also see, after the Falun Gong movement went abroad here, 

there is one famous slogan from the Falun Gong movement. It 

says, ‘‘Heaven eliminates the Chinese Communist Party,’’ encouraging people to withdraw from the Communist Party. This is another interpretation of the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. 

So that is why a human rights Christian lawyer in China, Gao 

Zhisheng, has received the most serious, inhumane persecutions, 

even compared to other persecuted lawyers, because he is trying to 

defend religious freedom and the human rights of some Falun Gong 

practitioners. 

The CECC also asked another question: ‘‘What does the Chinese 

Government’s treatments of the spiritual movement mean for the 

future of religious freedom in China? ’’ 

This is another interesting question. A sociologist, Dr. Yang 

Fenggang, proposed a triple color model that analyzes the religious 

situation in contemporary China. Through this formula we can see 

that he divided three markets: the red market, which means official, permitted religions; a black market means officially banned religions; and a gray market, religions with ambiguous legal status. 

Through this formula we can pretty much answer this question 

from this perspective. 

The red market means religious or spiritual movements which do 

not touch on politics, so they have the most freedom, like non-Tibetan Buddhism and Daoism. A black market religious market 

means the banned ones, such as the Falun Gong movement and 

some branches of Islam in Xinjiang—some branches—which touch 

on politics, challenging the Communist Party authority; so they 

have the most suppression. 

15 

The gray market, which is ambiguous in their political interest, 

are things such as non-institutionalized Protestant house church 

entities. The Catholic underground church is a little bit different 

because they are closer to the black market because of the political 

feature extending from the Vatican court. 

The gray market of the non-institutional house church movement 

has grown large and will grow larger, when others are encouraged 

or suppressed. Of course, there is a dilemma. If this house church 

movement, the gray market, grows really large, then it becomes 

more political. 

In China, also, this kind of house church movement, the people, 

they are trying to deal with the policies in a unique way. So in 

church settings in China, they focus on teachings, like Biblical 

teachings, such as ‘‘Blessed are those who are persecuted,’’ ‘‘Love 

your enemy and even love the persecutors.’’ Also, they emphasize 

in their teachings that they do not touch politics. They do not touch 

politics. The president of ChinaAid, Bob Fu, was arrested in Beijing 

and was trying to argue, we do not touch politics; we support 

church/state separation; something like that. 

But of course, China is trying to suppress the house church 

movements and its Christians too, because they learn lessons from 

Eastern Europe. When those Communist countries collapsed, 

Christianity played an indirect role. 

So together, I think in China, Christianity, in the gray market 

and also even in the red market, TSPM churches, they are going 

to transform the condition of religious freedom in China significantly in the future, especially through something we call the new 

non-institutionalized religious citizen community, established in 

the whole nation, but it is not kind of an hierarchical, administrative, visible system. 

Those are my remarks. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Shan appears in the appendix.] 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much, Mr. Shan. 

And now, finally, we’d like to hear from Sarah Cook. Thank you. 

STATEMENT OF SARAH COOK, ASIA RESEARCH ANALYST, 

FREEDOM HOUSE 

Ms. COOK. Good afternoon, everyone. One of the topics I was 

asked to speak about is the story of Gao Zhisheng, who you can see 

here [holds up copy of ‘‘A China More Just’’]. As Doug had mentioned, he’s a leading Chinese human rights lawyer and has been 

a vocal advocate for religious freedom in China, particularly of 

Falun Gong practitioners. 

Several years ago, I had the real honor of co-editing this English 

edition of his memoir, and so as I was thinking about how I would 

begin today, I tried to think about what Gao would say if he were 

here himself. He has disappeared, as Doug had mentioned, so that 

is why he can’t be here today. I think the first thing he would say 

is a real heart-felt thank you. 

First, thank you to the Commission for organizing this panel, 

thank you to the U.S. Government for taking an active interest in 

the human rights abuses happening to Chinese people, and thank 

you to all of you in the audience who are here to listen to what the 

four of us have to say. 

16 

Second, I think he would likely try to convey the real urgency of 

the current situation and the ongoing brutality of the treatment 

suffered by large numbers of Chinese people generally, but of 

Falun Gong practitioners in particular. One of the things that is 

very clear from his writings is that account after account after account of torture that he heard while interviewing Falun Gong practitioners left a very profound impression on him and really served 

as a catalyst for his taking the risks that he has taken in order 

to defend them. 

So I am just going to briefly read a short portion from one of the 

things he had written: 

With a trembling heart and a trembling pen, I record the 

tragic experiences of those who have been persecuted in the 

last six years. Of all the true accounts of incredible violence 

that I have heard, of all the records of the government’s inhuman torture of its own people, what has shaken me most is the 

routine practice of police assaulting women’s genitals. Almost 

all those who have been persecuted, be they male or female, 

were stripped naked before being tortured. No words can describe our government’s vulgarity and immorality. 

Now, while not spoken in quite such detailed and colorful language, Freedom House’s findings generally correlate to what Gao 

had found. But before I move on to some of the specific details that 

have arisen from our reports over the last 10 years, I did want to 

take a step back to address a slightly different angle about why 

this kind of suppression might take place. It doesn’t, indeed, happen in a vacuum. 

Rather, what has been happening to Falun Gong and spiritual 

movements who are banned in China is really part of a much 

broader, elaborate machinery of repression that systematically tries 

to control and deny independent thought and expression in a range 

of areas throughout Chinese society. In many ways, Freedom 

House’s reports in recent years have found that this repression has 

been getting worse in certain areas. 

As Professor Tong had mentioned, the dynamic in China right 

now is very different from what it was like during the Cultural 

Revolution. But some of the underlying principles and institutional 

dynamics remain the same in the sense that the decision of what 

is approved or forbidden can be made arbitrarily by Party leaders 

based on their own perceptions of the threats to their monopoly on 

power or legitimacy, whether these threats are real or imagined. 

As someone who follows Chinese media very closely, I see this 

dynamic played out on a day-to-day basis with the kinds of propaganda directives that the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department issues to media outlets throughout China, where there will 

be certain items that one day will be permitted and the next day 

will not be permitted. 

So whatever the specific timeline of events that happened in the 

mid- to late 1990s surrounding Falun Gong or some of the other 

Christian groups that Mr. Shan mentioned, overall, one way of 

thinking about the situation is that Party leaders were able to ban 

these groups because: (A) they could, and there was no institutional mechanism like an independent judiciary to stop them from 

being able to do that; and (B) because the Communist Party genVerDate Mar 15 2010 16:36 Feb 14, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00018 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\57902.TXT DEIDRE
17 

erally is very reluctant to tolerate groups or individuals who place 

any authority, spiritual or otherwise, above their allegiance to the 

Party. 

Sometimes people use the term ‘‘political’’ to differentiate between incidents that trip the Party’s wire or not. But I personally 

find this idea of whether one is giving allegiance to the Party first 

or is willing to make changes based on the Party’s demands to be 

more helpful in terms of thinking about what really touches the 

nerves of the Communist Party. 

So for Tibetans, it is the authority of the Dalai Lama. For persecuted human rights lawyers like Gao Zhisheng, it’s the authority 

of the law and the idea of placing the authority of the law above 

the authority of the Party. For Falun Gong practitioners, it is a 

dedication to teachings centered on truthfulness, compassion, and 

tolerance, and the idea that these are the primary principles that 

one should follow in day-to-day life, rather than perhaps something 

that the Communist Party may or may not tell one to do. 

To me, one of the crucial elements that helps to understand this 

dynamic is this idea of ‘‘transformation’’ that Ethan Gutmann mentioned. Whether it is Falun Gong practitioners, or in some cases 

people like Gao Zhisheng and others, this very real focus on transformation and on reeducation, which means that people are not 

necessarily being arrested because they’re organizing politically or 

organizing into some kind of group. Rather, certainly in the more 

spiritual cases, the efforts by the authorities are to get these people 

to change how they think. 

It is very Orwellian, when you talk to practitioners and others 

who have been persecuted in this way. It is very much like the 

Party is torturing you to get you to say 2+2=5. If you keep saying 

2+2=4, even if you know 2+2=4, then that in itself can create a conflict and is one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party 

finds threatening. 

I just thought that might be another angle that could be helpful 

for thinking about these kinds of questions. In terms of some of the 

findings that Freedom House reports have indicated over the past 

10 years, I went through many of the reports and I am just going 

to talk about a few of the aspects, and then I’ll turn a little bit 

more in detail to Gao Zhisheng’s story. 

First, is this issue of large-scale detentions and widespread surveillance. According to our findings, perhaps after a lull because 

there was such an intense level of detentions and surveillance in 

the early years of the persecution, in the last couple of years, with 

the run-up to the Olympics and with a series of politically sensitive 

anniversaries, and as part of a much broader crackdown and intensification of the Communist Party’s efforts to control Chinese society, 

we saw an intensification of the pressure on Falun Gong practitioners. There is a range of abuses, though. Some are arrested and 

some are not. Some are put under surveillance. But we certainly 

saw an intensification of those efforts targeting that group. 

Second, is ongoing torture and deaths in custody. At Freedom 

House, we do not have the resources to maintain a comprehensive 

record of these deaths, but every year there are several well-documented cases of Falun Gong practitioners who are picked up and 

then killed in custody. There was one Beijing musician, in early 

18 

2008, who was stopped by police with his wife and the officers 

found Falun Gong literature in their car and the two were detained. He died in custody 11 days later. He was in his early forties. His wife was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison. 

So there are cases like that, and as Ethan had mentioned, there 

are overseas Falun Gong groups who have collected pretty detailed 

accounts, even though it has not been fully independently verified, 

of over 3,000 cases similar to this young man’s. 

The third thing that we’ve observed is the sentencing of practitioners to long prison terms following unfair trials or to reeducation 

through labor camps by bureaucratic fiat. I would tend to agree 

with Ethan’s efforts to try to understand what the real number is 

of people who are detained in these camps. 

There was a fascinating study by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group, if anyone would like to look it up, from February 

2009, where they went and spoke to petitioners who had recently 

been released from labor camps and interviewed them. Many of 

these people said that, in addition to the petty thieves and drug addicts who make up many of the people in the reeducation through 

labor camps, Falun Gong practitioners constituted a significant 

percentage of the people in those camps and there were quite a 

large number of Christians in some of those facilities as well. 

Some of the conversations I have personally had with people who 

came out of these camps included their talking about 140 religious 

prisoners, mostly Falun Gong practitioners, sometimes several hundred within an individual camp. So when you look at the nationwide labor camp population and you start to do the math, thinking 

about how many hundreds of camps there are in China, the number gets up very high, into the tens of thousands, quite quickly. 

The last thing, as I mentioned earlier, is that I do quite a bit of 

research on Chinese media and the Internet. Clearly, Falun Gong 

is one of the permanent taboo topics and really one of the most systematically censored on the Chinese Internet. But what you also 

see happening is that people who try to spread information anyway 

end up getting imprisoned and they could be Falun Gong practitioners or non-Falun Gong practitioners. There was a recent case 

of a Chinese democracy activist who was sentenced to three years 

in prison because he had been caught with DVDs that had information related to Falun Gong on them. 

So it is in the context of this kind of large-scale persecution of 

religious minorities that Gao Zhisheng and some of the other lawyers who have sought to represent Falun Gong practitioners come 

into the picture. Just a little bit of brief background on Gao: He 

was born in rural Shaanxi Province, where there are these cave 

dwellings, and that’s where he grew up. 

In the late 1980s, he was selling vegetables on the streets of 

Xinjiang Province and saw an advertisement that China wanted to 

train more lawyers. So, with just a middle-school education, he 

taught himself law, and in 1995, he passed the bar exam. Almost 

immediately he started taking pro bono cases for the full gamut of 

vulnerable groups, from coal miners, to workers. He very quickly 

became known nationwide and was actually named by the Ministry 

of Justice itself as one of the Top 10 Lawyers in China in 2001. 

19 

So it was in this context that, in 2004, Falun Gong practitioners 

started approaching him to see if this lawyer could help them, and 

he was hired by an adherent who had been sentenced to a labor 

camp. He tried to file for judicial review, to have that person’s case 

reviewed, because the man had done nothing wrong, other than 

being known as a Falun Gong practitioner. 

He went to the judges and the judges would not even look at the 

case. They would say, ‘‘Don’t you know we don’t take Falun Gong 

cases? ’’ So what he decided to do as recourse was to write a letter 

to the National People’s Congress. But the incident also sparked 

his interest in doing a more systematic investigation into what was 

happening to this group. It was as a result of those investigations 

that, in October and December 2005, he wrote the two open letters 

to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao that Doug mentioned earlier. 

As Doug mentioned, in response, he and his family have been put 

under increasing pressure and abuse themselves. I will not go 

through all of the details of the last few years since Doug had spoken about it, but he disappeared several times and was held in incommunicado detention. It was really only in early February 2009, 

in an incredible feat of courage, that we learned the full details of 

the torture he had suffered during one of his previous detentions. 

He issued a letter that was published overseas after he managed 

to sneak it out. In it, he chronicles being stripped naked and 

shocked with electric batons on his genitals, among other acts of 

torture. The guards, at least the way he describes it, told him that 

the conclusions of his investigations into what had happened to 

Falun Gong practitioners were indeed accurate, and in fact, the 

very torture methods they were using on him were ones that had 

been ‘‘perfected’’ on Falun Gong practitioners previously. 

Similar to this point of ‘‘transformation’’ that I was talking 

about, they continuously tried to pressure him that if he would 

simply write some kind of article attacking Falun Gong, denouncing the previous letters he had written and praising the Party, 

then the torture would cease. 

Eventually he was released, but almost immediately with the release and publication of this letter he was abducted again. His family fled to Thailand from China and is now in New York, but he 

has remained disappeared throughout most of 2009. Many of his 

friends, colleagues, and lawyers thought he had actually been 

killed in prison. He resurfaced in March 2010, and then disappeared again in April 2010. 

Ironically, Gao actually never got a chance to represent a Falun 

Gong practitioner in court, but there are over 20 lawyers who have 

followed his lead—and he really broke open this taboo—and have 

done so. 

In response, they have also faced temporary or permanent disbarment or being beaten. In at least one case, a lawyer, Wang 

Yonghang, was imprisoned for seven years under the same legal 

provision—that is, this vague legal provision—used to justify the 

imprisonment of his Falun Gong clients. 

The treatment of these lawyers raises two broader points related 

to the future of religious freedom, but also the future of the rule 

of law. First, what you see very clearly is that the tactics that are 

used and developed to suppress one group can be quickly applied 

20 

to others. From the vague legal provisions, to ‘‘black jails,’’ to torture and transformation methods, we have seen these spreading. 

In fact, when you speak to the lawyers and you ask them why 

they are taking on these super-sensitive cases that are clearly putting them and their families at tremendous risk, it is because, at 

least the way they explain it, that they feel very strongly that if 

this can happen to a group like Falun Gong practitioners then it 

can happen to anyone. Especially, since many of them are Christians, they feel that it could also happen to Christians and that the 

only way to protect believers is to create the kind of independent 

institutions and rule of law that will protect citizens from the Party’s arbitrary actions. 

Second, I think the more depressing side of it is that the Communist Party’s very intransigent and harsh response to these lawyers really points to the limitations for progress toward the rule of 

law under the current Communist Party leadership. According to 

experts like Jerome Cohen, even reforms that had taken place in 

previous years have been backsliding. 

The point I want to conclude with is actually optimistic, believe 

it or not, because parallel to this increased repression that we’ve 

seen is also a growing rights consciousness among ordinary citizens. In fact, you could argue that the increasing insecurity of the 

regime and its increased repression is in response to this growing 

and more assertive Chinese citizenry. Along with workers, 

bloggers, and journalists, Falun Gong practitioners are also those, 

as Ethan mentioned, who have used incredible ingenuity and creativity to challenge the repression against them. 

So I am just going to end with one last quotation from Gao, 

where he reflects, in terms of his own observations, on the effects 

that some of these actions, whether it is through the Internet or 

other types of grassroots efforts to talk to the Chinese people and 

try to convince them to change how they think about Falun Gong. 

More and more people around me, including professional 

scholars, government staff members, and ordinary Chinese citizens have begun to question the rationale behind the campaign 

against these believers. This has been a palpable change. 

These people have come to realize how unjust, inhumane, and 

lawless the government’s violent persecution of the Falun Gong 

people is. This rapid, widespread change in attitude stands in 

stark contrast to the government’s static, outdated practices. 

Now, if you talk to a lot of Chinese people, largely because of the 

media censorship and fears of repercussion, you can get all kinds 

of answers related to what they think about Falun Gong. But it’s 

still quite interesting to hear from somebody like Gao Zhisheng, 

who is tapped into the grassroots level of society that at least with 

some of the people in the circles that he was interacting with, there 

had been a change in how they were thinking about this group. 

So, I just wanted to say thank you, and to end on the last 

thought that I really do hope that at some point Gao Zhisheng will 

be able to be here himself to share with you what he has to say. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Cook appears in the appendix.] 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much, Sarah. 

Thank you to all four of our panelists for some outstanding presentations. 

21 

I would like to open the floor up, for the time remaining, for 

questions. 

Ms. FORD. I submitted written testimony for the record and it’s 

outside. But going to this basic question raised by the panel, of how 

do we understand the causes of the suppression in China and what 

are some of the prospects for reconciliation between Falun Gong 

and the Communist Party. In order to understand those questions, 

it’s valuable to look back at 1999 and really try to understand what 

the social dynamics were that led to the ban on Falun Gong. 

Mr. GROB. Would you stand, please, and turn around? 

Ms. FORD. You’ve heard a few different explanations for why 

Falun Gong was initially targeted, and those include peaceful demonstration at Zhongnanhai in April 1999, which as Ethan has alluded to, may have been something of a bait and switch. We also 

heard about sort of institutional reasons; Falun Gong is a large, 

independent civil society organization, and in China you simply 

don’t have large, independent civil society organizations—let alone 

spiritual or religious groups. There’s also the size of Falun Gong, 

a few million on the very low end, up to, by some estimates, 70 to 

100 million at the high end. This represents an enormous number 

of people who are operating outside of official sanction. 

I could go on. Scholars have posited a number of other explanations in the broader historical context. But in my view, I think 

you need to look at the nature of the Party itself. The Party is essentially a theocracy. It’s a theocracy, except that it’s purely a secular one. But it’s essentially a religion. The fact that people don’t 

believe in the Marxist religion doesn’t make that any less so, it just 

means that the appeal of the theology is more tenuous. And so the 

Falun Gong, not deliberately but just by its mere existence and its 

spiritual orientation, poses a challenge to that. Falun Gong is associated with the Buddhist school of thought, so it implicitly challenges the atheism of the party. 

Falun Gong, for instance, holds a belief in divine authority, 

where Marxism believes in human agency. Falun Gong teaches 

that morality, compassion, and virtue are measures of progress and 

value, where the Communist Party believes in material progress. 

When Falun Gong was first banned in 1999, the official editorials 

from the state-run press actually posited that this was the cause 

of the ban; they put forth a dichotomy between theism and atheism, and suggested that Falun Gong’s spirituality and emphasis on 

virtue and the divine was incompatible with the official ideology. 

I think probably the most candid statement came from an editorial 

in Xinhua on July 27, 1999, which said simply that the truth, compassion, and tolerance principles preached by the Falun Gong have 

nothing in common with the Socialist ethic and cultural progress 

we are trying to achieve. There are more of these kinds of remarks 

in my written testimony. But I think this underlies the fact that 

Falun Gong is not a legitimate threat, it’s not political, and it’s certainly never sought to be a political threat to the ruling party. 

What the Communist Party fears is people who derive moral authority from something other than itself. 

So I think this sort of understanding is just useful in evaluating, 

what are the prospects of reconciliation, what are the prospects for 

22 

ending the persecution. I’ll stop there because I know that we’re 

somewhat over time. So, thanks for the opportunity to share that. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much for those remarks. 

Yes, please. Mr. Geheran? 

Mr. GEHERAN. Hi. I’m Jim Geheran with Intiatives for China. 

Thank you. This is a most wonderful panel here. What I’m hearing 

is that it’s the very nature of the Chinese Government that they 

see anything that poses principles or an organization that is hedging on their power is a threat and is fair game to be stamped out. 

So the conclusion that I’m hearing is that the Government of 

China, despite its claims of harmony and stability, has succeeded 

in alienating just about every segment of Chinese society, whether 

it’s religious, labor, or whatever. 

My question to you, if anyone cares to comment on it, is: Where 

is all this alienation going? Where is this frustration being parked 

if so much of the Chinese population is being alienated, and what 

are the consequences for stability that the apparent policy of the 

American Government is just to look the other way? Are we setting 

ourselves up for another revolution? 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much. 

Professor Tong, would you like to comment? 

Mr. TONG. I think this is an important political agenda among 

the Party leadership. I don’t think anyone knows the answer. They 

don’t have any solution to it. The way they try to handle the problem is to manage the problem and not to eradicate it. They try to 

localize it so that either labor movements or discharged PLA soldiers or persons would not form cross-county, cross-city, or crossprovince coalitions. That is, I think, the best that they can do. So, 

I will leave it at that. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much. 

Other questions? Yes, sir? 

AUDIENCE PARTICIPANT. [Inaudible]—from Human Rights—I 

have a question about the——[inaudible]. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you for those remarks. 

Any other questions, comments from the audience? 

AUDIENCE PARTICIPANT. A question for Mr. Gutmann. [Inaudible.] 

Mr. GUTMANN. I certainly take James Tong’s point that there is, 

over time, less official Chinese recognition of Falun Gong as a problem. I think that has some basis. I mean, if I were saying that 

there were a million in detention in 2004, it might well be half a 

million now. 

But last I checked—and I was still doing interviews on this in 

2008, interviewing people who were fresh out of labor camp, fresh 

out of the laogai —they were not reporting any kind of decrease in 

the prison population, the laogai system population overall. Now, 

you might say, well, these are refugees, and so on. Maybe, but I 

wasn’t pushing them for that answer. 

I’m asking them the same questions. I’m going round the question a different way, but I’m coming back to the same point: How 

many of your people were in your cell block? How many other 

kinds of people were in your cell block? It might take a day before 

I’d even approach that question, just to get to the point where they 

were relaxed enough to just answer it casually, which is what I’m 

23 

after. And from those responses, I do not sense a major decrease 

in Falun Gong populations. 

I think your point is well taken. Falun Gong has pointed to the 

Beijing roundups, the Shanghai roundups before the Olympics and 

other events—events that get a lot of press. But frankly, most of 

the prisoners are coming out of the provinces. They’re not coming 

out of Shanghai and Beijing. That’s where the big numbers are, 

and those numbers are fairly unchanging. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much. 

Other questions? Yes, in the back. 

AUDIENCE PARTICIPANT. [Inaudible.] 

Mr. GROB. Professor Tong, then Mr. Shan. 

Mr. TONG. Indeed, that is happening. So Mr. Grob earlier made 

reference to the rule of law. You cannot have rule of law that would 

promulgate specific and arbitrary legislation, for manufacturers 

and consumers, or for individual entrepreneurs and for foreign investors, but denying it to the religious communities—you cannot 

protect the economic interests and assets of the accountholders of 

the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges, but denying it to religious groups, and not protecting their economic interests. 

Now religious personnel can collect fees for performing religious 

functions. Religious organizations can collect donations from both 

individuals and corporations both domestically and also internationally. One of the reasons is that if they allow non-government 

organizations like those in Legal Aid, women’s groups, the disabled, 

and environmental protection, to receive gifts, both from individuals and corporations, both domestically as well as from international organizations, they cannot deny religious communities 

from receiving it. 

This is also what is happening. The rule of law cannot discriminate. This is what is happening to the religious communities as 

well. This is why I say that the religious policy is the collateral 

beneficiary of market reforms. So today, in the past 10 years, every 

year, there were over 100 Protestant and Roman Catholic priests, 

nuns, and seminarians that are in the United States. Right now 

there are 300 Roman Catholic priests and seminarians in the Philippines alone. There are Roman Catholic priests that serve as 

chaplains in top universities in China. There are Roman Catholic 

priests teaching philosophy in top universities in China. There is 

a Roman Catholic priest, a foreigner, who serves as the director of 

a leprosy sanitarium in China. In these areas, China has relaxed 

its religious policy. 

Even for the five official religions—the State Administration of 

Religious Affairs has established a sixth division. It used to be just 

the five divisions each for an official religion. They have established a sixth division for the other unofficial religions. In some 

provinces the Eastern Orthodox religion is now an official religion. 

In some provinces, some folk religions are also officially recognized. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you, Professor Tong. 

Mr. Shan, would you like to add? 

Mr. SHAN. Yes. I think the Chinese Government is open to economics. They have developed a strong national capitalist system 

which is different from Western capitalism. As that lady mentioned, when we talk about, is it possible that the Chinese can give 

24 

much more room to religion as economics; first we need to consider 

the feature of the government, the Communist system. 

So, I mean, the Chinese Government, the open market for economics; it’s basically something that’s not new. Before the Communist Party took over China, in all of China’s history, China has 

been a free market country, or nation. But yet, every Chinese Government is sensitive to any religions or spiritual movements who 

touch politics. ‘‘Touch politics’’ means trying to use spiritual or religious ideas to justify or to deny the rulings of the government. 

So though they even allow some freedom through a series of religious systems and policies, they are still very careful with those religions, especially toward religion called monotheist religions: 

Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism. These monotheist religions 

are really powerful. They have played important roles in the whole 

world’s history, so the Chinese Government knows that, even without the lessons from Eastern Europe. The Chinese Government and 

the Communist Party will continue to suppress or restrict those religions. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you. 

Ms. Cook? 

Ms. COOK. The term that Professor Tong used about managing 

is really very relevant, because what you see the Communist Party 

doing, is that there is this divide-and-conquer strategy, this fragmentation of issues, and this idea that in order to maintain overall 

control you don’t necessarily have to control everything. So what 

you can see is that maybe certain groups will be allowed to be in 

this legal gray zone, while other groups will be subjected to horrific 

and systematic campaigns. 

I think my underlying point was that you have a dynamic that 

is arbitrary, and that can change at any time. In my personal opinion, looking at some of the dynamics related to the house church 

movement now, there are some worrying signs—I obviously very 

much hope it does not go in the direction of what has happened to 

Falun Gong practitioners—but there are a lot of similarities to 

what the dynamics were surrounding Falun Gong in the late 1990s, 

even just in terms of the sheer number of believers. 

Also, it is interesting, this question of whether people view themselves as political, because whether you talk to Falun Gong practitioners or you talk to petitioners who are trying to protest some 

kind of injustice, they often, at least initially, wouldn’t necessarily 

see their actions as being political. 

They see their appeals as being an effort to address some kind 

of grievance that they’ve encountered personally. In the case of 

Falun Gong practitioners, there was the appeal on April 25—and 

Ethan can talk about this, if we have a moment for him to talk 

about his version of events. Or, if you have a chance to read his 

article, it really is fascinating in terms of the description of his account of what happened on April 25. 

Falun Gong practitioners weren’t necessarily there to ask for an 

overthrow of the Chinese Government. They were there because 

they wanted to try to register as a group, because they previously 

tried to register repeatedly and weren’t allowed; they were there to 

ask for the release of people who had been arrested, as Ethan described, in Tianjin; and they were there to ask that the books of 

25 

their spiritual teachings that had been banned be allowed to be 

published again. That’s very similar to the requests you see petitioners coming to Beijing over—because they’ve been evicted from 

their home, or their child died in the earthquake in Sichuan Province and they want some kind of compensation. 

So it’s interesting because you see this process that a lot of individuals are going through, where it starts like that, where they just 

have a grievance that relates to something in their personal life 

that they don’t at all think of as political, but as they start to encounter the system and encounter the intolerance of the system visa-vis their efforts to find justice for this grievance, that’s when you 

see people starting to question the authority of the Party. 

If you talk to Falun Gong practitioners now, they’ll still say, ‘‘Oh, 

no, we’re not political.’’ They’ll explain it in the sense that ‘‘We 

don’t want any political power, we don’t want to replace the Communist Party.’’ But there is a sense that so long as the Communist 

Party is in power it’s going to be very difficult for Falun Gong practitioners to have full freedom of religion. There are real difficulties 

there in terms of what you might do upon coming to that conclusion. 

I think the only other quick point I wanted to make is that there 

is also an economic dimension to the persecution. That relates to 

the incentive systems, where you see, even at very low levels, notices on official Web sites offering rewards to members of the public 

who will turn in a Falun Gong practitioner who they notice putting 

up a posting. 

This defector Ethan mentioned who had come from the 6–10 Office and whose media interviews I’ve read talks about rewards for 

people who transform Falun Gong practitioners. Other evidence 

points to quotas for the number of transformed Falun Gong practitioners and promotions being determined based on that. 

So one of the things that you see is that these incentive systems 

almost take on a life of their own. That’s clearly an element in 

some of these issues related to organ transplants, in terms of the 

creation of a market and the incentives that that creates. 

That economic dimension is something to think about. It’s something you see in other areas of Chinese society in terms of the way 

the Communist Party manages its control. You see that with censorship, as a certain commercialization of censorship where the 

risk that newspapers face, that Internet companies face if they 

transgress political directives that are handed down by the Party 

are not just political punishments. It is not just that you’re going 

to be fired, it’s that your business could be shut down and that 

there are very real economic implications to that. 

So one ends up with these economic incentives that actually 

drive some of the political repression that we’re seeing, and that’s 

part of the sophistication and the difference, perhaps, between the 

China that we see today and the Soviet Union during the Cold 

War. So, I’ll just end there. I know that was a bit of a long comment, but I hope that’s helpful. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much, Sarah. 

Ethan, did you want to jump in? 

Mr. GUTMANN. Just very briefly. Minister X—I can’t give his 

name—was a financial minister at the provincial level and he deVerDate Mar 15 2010 16:36 Feb 14, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00027 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\57902.TXT DEIDRE
26 

scribed Party meetings in 1998 and early 1999. The explanation 

given for eliminating Falun Gong was really simple. It was just 

that Jiang Zemin had a problem. Tiananmen Square would not go 

away. It interfered with his legitimacy. They had to have a new 

target. It was that simple. 

I’m not saying that’s the ultimate explanation and I’m not saying 

it’s a perfect explanation, but inside the Party, that was the explanation. One of the tensions you feel on this panel about the overall 

subject is this: Is the Falun Gong crackdown indicative of how 

China is handling religious affairs? It’s not clear. There are some 

ambiguities there. The Falun Gong crackdown, in some ways, can 

be seen as a stand-alone. 

Yet I hate to use Chinese proverbs here, but you kill the chicken 

to scare the monkey, or if you like, a Western proverb from the 

New York Review of Books—the anaconda in the chandelier. The 

proverbs mean much the same thing, which is that they are setting 

an example. They are making it very clear that there are parameters. And you don’t know when the anaconda is going to come 

down, and you don’t know when the chicken is going to be slaughtered. That condition applies to religious believers and it applies to 

just about every other group in China as well. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much. We are over time. That was 

somewhat discretionary on my part. The problem with having four 

eloquent and knowledgeable panelists together with a collection of 

eloquent and knowledgeable members of the audience, is it makes 

my job as time-keeping taskmaster much more difficult. 

So I’d like to wrap it up and just ask one last time if any of our 

panelists have a 15-second final thought that they would like to 

add. 

Ms. COOK. I do. 

Mr. GROB. Please. 

Ms. COOK. I thought somebody in the audience might ask the 

question, well, what do we do about this? So I was trying to think 

about what might be some of the recommendations I could offer. I 

think there are a few things that might be worth keeping in mind, 

though these maybe touch a little bit more on the micro level than 

the macro level. 

One recommendation relates to international attention to individual cases and the difference that it makes. Really, Gao Zhisheng 

would not be alive, and there are many other former prisoners of 

conscience that I have spoken to who would not be alive today, if 

it had not been for the international attention to their cases. As 

badly as Gao was treated, I think they would have treated him 

even worse if they knew that they could just make him disappear 

and no one would ask any questions. 

Of course, that is the problem for some of the anonymous Falun 

Gong practitioners who may have had their organs harvested. So, 

I think that’s one thing to just keep in mind, that the advocacy for 

individual cases really makes a difference. 

Another thing in terms of perhaps U.S. Government policy is 

that one of the real difficulties when dealing with an issue like 

this—and it’s amazing to be able to get a panel like this to take 

place—but this really is a topic that, because of the sensitivity of 

the Communist Party, there’s very little good research on it. It’s 

27 

something we encounter in doing our research. So, my recommendation would be to try to find a way to fund really detailed 

assessments of individual cases. So how do you verify individual 

cases? 

In some ways, the lawyers can be a channel for that because you 

can find ways in which the lawyers can maybe anonymously be 

able to talk about what happened to their clients—who has actually been imprisoned, for how many years in a way that might be 

possible to verify or cross-reference with some of the reports coming 

from ChinaAid on Christians or from the Falun Dafa Information 

Center on Falun Gong. 

The last thing I would say is just that the things also happen 

outside of China. I could talk a whole lot—I’m sure Ethan could, 

too, and others here as well—about the lengths the Communist 

Party goes to outside of China to try to censor conversations like 

the one we’re having here, whether it’s about this topic or it’s about 

the Uyghurs, or it’s about Tibetans, or it’s about any other topic 

that the Communist Party finds sensitive. It’s amazing how many 

incidents there are of events that have been planned and at the 

last minute get called off. So from that perspective, I really do commend the CECC for holding this panel. 

So, for anybody who engages in these kinds of issues or comes 

across this, one of the experiences I have seen is that you can call 

the Communist Party’s bluff. So when that call comes from the 

Chinese official saying, ‘‘Oh, you know, don’t hold this event,’’ then 

you can call their bluff. There also have been cases where such incidents went to court, and courts in Israel and Taiwan ruled that 

Falun Gong practitioners should be able to exercise their right to 

free expression. 

So I’ll just end on that note. Maybe other people on the panel 

have thoughts, but I felt this would perhaps be a slightly more optimistic way of ending the discussion. That way, we’re not just 

thinking in terms of ‘‘Oh, my gosh, look at these terrible things 

that are happening in China,’’ but also in terms of what we can do 

about it sitting over here. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much. 

Any others? 

Mr. GUTMANN. Since Copenhagen, the Obama Administration has 

done pretty close to a 180-degree turn on China. The State Department is seriously considering giving the Global Internet Freedom 

Consortium money. We don’t know if the press reports are totally 

accurate, but this is very significant, a big change. Frankly, I believe that for all these causes, but particularly for religious 

causes—and I’m not just talking about Falun Gong here—a free 

Internet is essential. 

If my small voice can make any difference in encouraging this 

development, hopefully it’ll move through. We really are seeing a 

concerted effort to overcome the Big Brother Internet—not just 

temporarily, not just in China, but as a template for the world. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much, Ethan. 

Professor Tong? 

Mr. TONG. This year is the 500th anniversary of the death of 

Mateo Ricci, one of the first Roman Catholic missionaries who entered China. I think the lesson from all of this is this: for spiritual 

28 

religious movements that want to spread and grow inside China, 

one should think about strategy. Then, in the Catholic church, the 

question they were faced with was whether they would insist on 

doctrinal purity, that is, outside the church no salvation, and also 

ancestral worship in China as well, because the Roman Catholic 

church forbade it. 

But for Ricci and fellow missionaries, this was less of an issue 

as finding the right strategy. There are certain things that need to 

be emphasized, there are certain things that need not. It could also 

be the case that you are wrong, your doctrine could be wrong. So 

for Ricci, who waited 16 years just to find an audience with the 

Chinese Emperor, he waited. He did not insist on these doctrines. 

Finally, many colleagues of his Jesuit order found employment in 

the court. So the question is, one needs to find common ground and 

what is possible and what is not possible under the existing circumstances in China. That is, I think, worth considering. 

Mr. GROB. Thank you very much, Professor Tong. 

Mr. Shan, would you like to have the last word? 

Mr. SHAN. Yes. Thank you. I think, related to Sarah’s comment, 

what should we do to improve the situation of religious freedom in 

China, I think of course we should be optimistic in our wish and 

desires, but I would think that we should have a practical method 

or agenda to do that. We will say, okay, once China becomes a 

democratic country, it will solve the problems. That is true. But actually, from a sociology perspective, we know in Western countries, 

especially in Europe, how democracies came out. It was based on 

the citizen country built first, which means that citizenship should 

be first founded and established in a country according to law, then 

the next step would be democracy. 

So China is still not a real citizen society. But if you become a 

citizen society first, even without democracy, religious freedom, except political freedom, will be improved, like Taiwan, before their 

democracy, and Singapore was a dictatorship country, but they all 

allow religious freedom because they are a citizen society. A citizen 

society feature would be fourfold: you have civil rights, social 

rights, political rights, and religious rights. So I think that’s something we should put effort in for the first step. 

Mr. GROB. Well, thank you very much. 

This month marks the 47th anniversary of the famous civil 

rights address by President Kennedy in which he quite notably 

said that, ‘‘The rights of every man are diminished when the rights 

of one man are threatened.’’ It is in that spirit that we address this 

issue. 

The entire transcript of this proceeding, including statements 

submitted by our panelists for the record, and the discussion here 

today will be published and available online through our Web site 

and in hard copy. We look forward to the continuation of this discussion on this important topic. 

With that, thank you to our panelists. Thank you in the audience. This roundtable is adjourned. [Applause.] 

[Whereupon, at 3:58 p.m. the roundtable was adjourned.] 

(29) 

A P P E N D I X 

30 

PREPARED STATEMENTS

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JAMES TONG

JUNE 18, 2010

Thanks you for inviting me to participate in this roundtable. My remarks will 

focus on three issues. The first is how the Chinese Government views the level of 

political and security threat the Falun Gong presents in recent years. The second 

is what type of Falun Gong practitioners and their activities the Chinese Government considered illegal and unacceptable, and ground for legal sanction. The third 

are the implications for the Chinese Government positions on religious freedom at 

large. 

I. THE DIMINISHED SECURITY THREAT OF THE FALUN GONG IN CHINA

Last July was the 10th anniversary of the banning of the Falun Gong in China. 

In the past decade, the Chinese state has been effective in suppressing the public 

forms of the organized activities of the Falun Gong. Before the imposition of the ban 

on July 22, 1999, there were between 2.3 to 80 million practitioners of the Falun 

Gong. They were organized into 39 main stations, 1,900 guidance stations, and 

28,000 practice sites. Every morning, these assemblies of Falun Gong practitioners 

conducted breathing exercises in city parks and town squares. They also gathered 

in special convocations in sports arenas and auditoriums on special anniversaries. 

There were also training sessions lasting 3–4 days where practitioners learnt more 

advanced breathing exercise, meditation techniques and Falun Gong doctrine. Since 

July 22, 1999, these three forms of organized activities (morning assemblies, large 

convocations, training seminars) can no longer be seen in public. All known Falun 

Gong organizations (main stations, guidance stations, practice sites) are duly registered and the assemblies disbanded. Their leaders were arrested, went into hiding 

or self-exile. The rank and file practitioners were registered, and required to write 

severance papers where they declared their official withdrawal from the Falun 

Gong. Its publications met a similar fate. Before the official ban, the Falun Gong 

published 11 titles. Total distribution of these publications by the Beijing head office 

(Falun Dafa Research Society) was over 11 million copies. As part of the ban, all 

copies of these Falun Gong publications were seized, their existing stock confiscated. 

On the 7th day of the ban (July 29), mass rallies were held in 17 major cities where 

these publications were set ablaze or turned into paper pulp. In sum, these organized activities of the Falun Gong, as well as their publications enterprise, did not 

outlive the official ban on the Falun Gong imposed on July 22, 1999. 

There are still periodic reports in official media on arrests of Falun Gong practitioners for staging protests in provincial and national capitals, sabotaging media 

broadcasts, displaying Falungong banners in public places, but these acts of overt 

defiance have become rare in recent years. These can be seen in three developments. 

The first is the annual report of the Chief Procurator (the equivalent of the Attorney-General), which enumerates the major law-enforcement problems in China in 

the given year. From 1999–2003, the Falun Gong was listed as a major law-enforcement problem nation-wide. But from 2004 on, it was dropped from the list. Below 

the national level, each of the 31 provinces also issues its annual procuracy report, 

and these largely mirror the national trend. From 1999 to 2001, a great majority 

of the 31 provinces (29 in 1999, 28 in 2000, 21 in 2001) list the Falun Gong as a 

major law-enforcement problem in their province. But from 2004 to 2008, there was 

a monotonic decline from 7 in 2004 to 2 in 2008. 

The second related development is the absence of followup campaigns to consolidate the gains of the crackdown and to mop up Falun Gong remnants and resurgent 

elements. After the initial nationwide blitzkrieg in late July, 1999, a four-month nation-wide Strike at the Falun Gong campaign was launched in summer, 2001, to ferret out fugitive Falun Gong leaders, underground Falun Gong hide-outs, inventories 

of Falun Gong publications they had missed in the first security-round-up. For some 

Falun Gong strongholds, local law-enforcement agencies conducted single-day campaigns every quarter, or on Falun Gong special occasions. Other localities organized 

sustained 100-day campaigns to systematically check all printing shops, 

photocopying vendors, Internet cafes and rental properties for suspicious Falun 

Gong activities. From 2003–2008, no such followup campaign aimed at crushing the 

Falun Gong has been reported. 

The third related development was the re-reorganization of the special law-enforcement agency that deals with the Falun Gong. To prepare for the crackdown, 

31 

a special agency called the ‘‘June 10’’ Office was established at both the central, provincial, and municipal levels, and even within universities and large state-owned 

enterprises, with the exclusive mission to organize, manage and coordinate the business of arresting, registering, detaining, interrogating Falun Gong practitioners, and 

dissolving Falun Gong organizations. As the name suggests, most were established 

on June 10, or 40 days before the crackdown on July 22, 1999. Their full office titles 

were ‘‘the Office dealing with the Falun Gong’’ or the ‘‘Office dealing with the problem of Cults.’’ After April 2002, close to three years after the crackdown, most of 

these offices were renamed ‘‘Offices to maintain social stability.’’ Their mission was 

broadened to encompass other serious sources of social stability in the locality, including the protests of laid-off workers, those who have lost their pensions, peasants 

evicted from their land by real-estate developers, tenants with disputes against 

landlords in housing projects. In combination, such absence of followup campaigns, 

the lack of reference to the Falun Gong as a local serious security problem in national and provincial procuracy reports, the reorganization of the June Offices to 

deal with other local security issues, suggest that the Falun Gong has ceased to be 

a serious political threat and security problem for the regime since 2003 or 2004 

to 2008, both at the national and provincial levels. 

II. DIFFERENTIATION OF OFFENCES BY AND SANCTIONS OF FALUN GONG PRACTITIONERS

Next, I want to address the question of what type of Falun Gong practitioners and 

what type of offences warranted regime sanction. Let me begin with the simple fact 

that there was wide-ranging estimates of the number of Falun Gong practitioners 

in July 1999 before the official crackdown. The estimate varies because there is no 

clear definition of what is a Falun Gong practitioner. Unlike Christians, there is no 

rite of formal induction into the religious community. Falun Gong organizations also 

did not keep a roster of its practitioners. Even at the conservative low-end estimate 

of 2.3 million, mass detention and incarceration of Falun Gong practitioners was out 

of the question. 2.3 million is 4 times the total population of Washington DC. Even 

for an authoritarian state, the Chinese judicial system lacked the capacity to process 

2.3 million cases. There were not enough judges and prosecutors to prosecute, indict, 

convict and sentence 2.3 million cases, public security agents to enforce coercive detention, and the prison and labor reform systems to house them. In 1998, the year 

before the crackdown, the total number of criminal cases prosecuted in Chinese 

courts was 400,000, and total number of defendants was under 600,000. These include all cases—homicide, assault, robbery, fraud. At that rate, it would take the 

Chinese courts at least 4 years to process the 2.3 million cases. If we use the smaller number of only cases pertaining to endangering state security, endangering social 

order, obstructing social order (the usual alleged crimes that Falun Gong practitioners were charged), the Chinese court system in 1998 processed under 74,000 

cases of such offences. At that rate, it would take them 31 years to clear the 2.3 

million cases. Clearly, lacking the capacity to process all these cases, they need to 

differentiate among Falun Gong practitioners. 

On the same official notice announcing the ban issued on July 22, 1999, Falun 

Gong practitioners were divided into four types. For the great majority, rank and 

file members, there would be no disciplinary action taken, provided they would sign 

a document renouncing the Falun Gong and withdrawing from the congregation, 

after which their names would be entered into a registry. Disciplinary action refers 

to dismissal or demotion from positions held in government agencies or enterprises, 

denial or reduction of staff benefits, expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party, 

and prosecution in case of alleged criminal offences. The triage applies to three 

types of core leaders. The first group were those who had participated in illegal activities—participating in protest rallies and distributing Falun Gong publications on 

the official black list. If they would also renounce and withdraw from the Falun 

Gong, and provide an account of these activities, then no disciplinary action would 

be taken. The second type of core leaders were those who had committed serious 

errors, not only participating in, but facilitating protest rallies, not only distributing, 

but printing Falun Gong publications. If they would also renounce, withdraw from 

the Falun Gong, account for their activities, and in addition, provide a conscientious 

confession and self-examination, and accrue merit (persuading other practitioners to 

confess, informing authorities where the hide-outs were, finger-pointing other core 

leaders), then no disciplinary action would be taken. The third type is where the 

sanctions and disciplinary actions would be imposed. These were the core leaders 

who planned and organized ‘‘political turmoil,’’ viz, protest rallies in front of party 

and government headquarters and other public places without permission, and who 

remained unrepentant (refusing to renounce or withdraw from the Falun Gong, not 

providing information about the Falun Gong activities and leaders), then they would 

32 

be dismissed from the Party, or government post, sent to labor reform institutions, 

or prosecuted in trial if criminal laws were violated. 

III. IMPLICATIONS FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN CHINA

The foregoing analysis suggests several implications for the larger issue of religious freedom in China. The first is religion is still a managed religion in China. 

The state claims the right to manage religion. It claims the authority to define what 

is religion and what is a cult, what is official religion and what is not official religion, what is normal religious activities and what are not. There are religious affairs 

bureau at the national, provincial, municipal, and at county levels in China. The 

state requires the mandatory registration of all religious organizations and religious 

venues, and approval of the publishing and distribution of the Christian Bible. 

Second, the capacity of the party-state to manage religion has been eroded by 

market economy. On the supply side, the market economy has created political 

space where heterodox spiritual movements can survive outside the control of the 

party-state. In the Maoist planned economy, where virtually the entire working population were employed in government owned enterprises, lived in public housing, 

relied on government issued ration-coupons to get their daily necessities, religious 

believers who defied state rule could find no job, no housing, no food, no clothing. 

With the establishment of private and foreign owned enterprises, the end of rationing and the creation of the housing market, religious believers do not have to choose 

between practicing their faith and their maintaining their livelihood. 

On the demand side, 30 years of the market economy has fostered other social 

issues that pose threats to the social order and that compete for administrative attention and action. The annual procuracy report lists a rising crime wave, manifested in organized crime, murder, robbery, kidnapping, drug trafficking as serious 

law-enforcement problems. Aside from rising crime, the regime has to contend with 

another source of social instability. Market reform has created sources of social conflict that did not exist in the Maoist era—unemployed workers, those who lost their 

pensions because their companies went bankrupt, discharged soldiers who could not 

live on their meager severance pay, peasants evicted from their farms because the 

township secretary colluded with real-estate developer. In 1994, there were 10,000 

of these collective protests with 50 or more participants. The number was increased 

to 74,000 in 2004, or more than 200 incidents per day. In May 2004 alone, there 

were 2,180 collective protests each with 500 or more participants. With demonstrators in the street or outside their offices, these are much more urgent problems that 

the regime had to take care of. In comparison to organized and violent crime, or 

collective protests, religious congregations are much more tame, and it is not in the 

interest of the regime to drive them to the street to join other demonstrators. 

Third, a more benign religious policy is also the collateral beneficiary of market 

reforms. Before China launched its market reforms, there was convergence between 

its religious policy with the larger political, economic and social policies. China was 

a Communist state, subscribing to Communist ideology. Its 1973 Party Constitution 

states that the CCP is committed to the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement 

by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its economic system was a centrally-planned, 

socialist economy, with no private ownership of means of production. There was no 

labor market and no capital market. In its social system, there was no civil society, 

no independent NGOs. Internationally, there was no foreign direct investments, nor 

foreign economic presence in China, and were few other links with the global community. There was a thus a close fit of its religious policy with other policies of a 

Leninist state—where the state had virtual total control over the economy and society, including religion. But with 30 years of market reform, there is increasing divergence between its religious policy with its political, economic and social policies. 

Politically, China has ceased to be a Communist state. Major Communist anniversaries, like the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, 

the 100th death anniversary of Karl Marx, the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik 

Revolution, were not commemorated with a People’s Daily editorial in post-reform 

China. In Orwellian fashion, the current version of the Party Constitution was 

changed to remove references to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment 

of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its economy is arguably a market economy, almost fully integrated with the global economy, with thriving labor and capital markets. There are now 150 million investment account holders in the Shanghai and 

Shenzhen Stock exchange, while there are only 72 million CCP members. One can 

say that there are twice as many capitalists as communists in China today. Socially, 

there is an emerging civil society, with over 200,000 registered social organizations, 

many are independent NGOs, some with international connections. There are thriving 

gay and lesbian communities in major cities, where open gay marriages are celeVerDate Mar 15 2010 16:36 Feb 14, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00034 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 U:\DOCS\57902.TXT DEIDRE
33 

brated in downtown Beijing. Thus there is a increasing divergence between its political, economic and social policies with its religious policy, which is anachronistic, 

belonging the antiquated bygone Leninist era. Especially for a centralized, hierarchical system where first principles matter, China needs to reconcile its religious 

policy that is divergent with the more forward looking and progressive political, economic and social policies. 

And in some important ways, it has. At least since the promulgation of the New 

Regulations on Religious Affairs of March 2005 if not earlier, the Chinese regime 

has granted increasing institutional autonomy to religious organizations and circumscribed the authority of the state to manage religion. Religious organizations 

are no longer required to accept the leadership of the CCP, to pledge support of socialism and patriotism, as some earlier religious regulations stipulated. The onerous 

requirement for mandatory, annual re-certification of religious venues was dropped. 

House fellowship Christians is allowed by a majority of provinces. The authority to 

certify religious personnel, to examine and admit candidates for religious schools, 

to determine the curriculum of seminaries, to appoint and dismiss prelates of religious venues, to set the number of religious personnel in religious venues and the 

number of religious venues in each locality, now rests with religious organizations 

and not with the local religious affairs bureaus. The economic interests of religious 

communities are protected. Religious personnel can collect fees for performing 

religious functions. Religious organizations can now receive donations from both individuals and corporations, and from both domestic and foreign individuals and institutions. They can also invest in income-generating property and collect rents. 

When religious property has to be relocated or demolished in eminent domain cases 

like highway constructions, they need to be compensated by fair market value that 

is independently appraised. In addition, religious organizations are not only permitted, but encouraged to engage in philanthropy and social welfare programs. Both 

the Protestant and Catholic churches now operate nursing homes, hundreds of clinics, plus mobile dental and ophthalmology units. The Catholic church has two leprosy sanatoriums. There are thriving YMCAs in major cities, offering athletic programs, vocation training courses, foreign language classes. 

Just as significant, Chinese Christian churches have developed vital links with 

the global church. Many foreign religious leaders, including American evangelicals, 

superiors of Roman Catholic male religious orders have visited China multiple 

times, celebrated mass, gave retreats, and held conferences. Beyond visits, many 

faculty from Protestant and Catholic divinity schools in Europe, Canada and the 

United States have also taught in Protestant and Catholic seminaries in China. 

Outside seminaries, there are foreign Catholic priests who serve as a director of a 

leprosy sanatorium, chaplains in Chinese universities for American and European 

exchange students, professors with long-term contracts teaching philosophy and foreign languages in top Chinese universities. Conversely, hundreds of protestant and 

Catholic priests, nuns and seminaries have enrolled in degree programs in European, Canadian and U.S. divinity schools, after applying for and were granted exit 

visas and Chinese passports as religious personnel. One U.S. Catholic male religious 

order has sponsored over a hundred Chinese Catholic priests, nuns and seminarians 

to study in U.S. theologates. Upon completion of their European and North American divinity studies, some Chinese Christians now hold important positions in the 

church hierarchy. The present dean of the national Union Theological Protestant 

Seminary in Nanjing has a doctorate degree in divinity in Stockholm. The Seminary 

will have a new campus on 33 acres granted by the government, with a construction 

cost of 140 million yuan, some of it as grant or loan by the government. 

To conclude, there is still no religious freedom in China of the kind as in the 

United States. The state still manages, monitors, and often intervenes in affairs of 

religious organizations. Outside the five official religions, the fate is worse. Unregistered temples and churches have been demolished, their property and publications 

confiscated, their prelates jailed. But compared to that of the Maoist era, or even 

of the past two decades, there has been conspicuous and substantial progress. 

Whether one views the degree of institutional autonomy of religious organizations, 

the protection of their economic interests, their ability to operate social welfare programs, and their freedom to foster links with their universal community, there are 

positive developments in all these fronts, some unprecedented in the history of the 

People’s Republic. There are increasing signs that religious policy is converging with 

the political, economic, and social policies of the market reform era in China. 

Thank you. 

34 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF ETHAN GUTMANN

JUNE 18, 2010

I want to thank the CECC, but my remarks need to go beyond the pro-forma on 

this point. 

The Chinese Communist Party portrays Falun Gong as an evil cult and a terrorist 

entity. The Chinese State’s diplomatic arm has made it clear that the Falun Gong 

issue is non-negotiable. It is relevant that this appears to be the first U.S. Government hearing or roundtable directly focusing on Falun Gong in a decade. 

As a former Beijing business consultant, I do not rely on Chinese official statistics. For example, if you attempt to generate a population figure for the laogai 

system—labor camps, prisons, black jails, detention centers, and psychiatric hospitals—you get a figure well below a million. Yet if one counts every detention node 

and make common-sense estimates, as the Laogai Foundation researchers do every 

year, you get a more credible figure of 3 to 5 million. 

According to the UN rapporteur on torture, Falun Gong comprises half of those 

prisoners, but this figure might be high. Much of my research is based on interviews 

with refugees and defectors. I don’t ask them for estimates of the laogai system, but 

no matter how traumatized they are, I do expect them to remember how many 

Falun Gong were in their cell-block. After interviewing over 120 individuals, including defectors from inside Chinese security and well over 50 laogai refugees, I estimate that Falun Gong comprises between 15 to 20 percent of the laogai system. 

That’s about half a million to a million Falun Gong in detention on average, representing the largest Chinese Security action since the Maoist period. 

We often perceive Chinese human rights problems as an entrenched structure. 

But the Party’s campaign against Falun Gong more closely resembles a blitzkrieg, 

in an increasingly global war, marked by physical assaults in the United States, 

Chinese operatives posing as refugees, and coordinated hacking of Chinese dissident 

networks and U.S. Government entities. 

We should understand how the war began, the casualty rates, and the stakes of 

our neutrality. So I thank the CECC—and especially Toy Reid—for making this 

roundtable a reality. 

I was in Beijing on July 20, 1999, when the official crackdown began and soundtrucks flooded the streets. Western reporters flooded the zone, but with little 

cooperation from either the Party or Falun Gong, journalists had trouble simply 

penciling in the first question of any news report: What is Falun Gong? 

Falun Gong, simply put, is a Buddhist revival movement: moral passion, occasional talk of miracles, are-you-running-with-me-Master-Li individualism, and a reflexive mistrust of establishments and outsider agendas. 

The Buddhist aspect may be unfamiliar and exotic, but, as Arthur Waldron puts 

it: ‘‘. . . anyone who knows Asian religion will instantly see that Falun Gong fits 

into a tradition that extends back before the beginning of recorded history.’’ What 

made Falun Gong stand out from other qigong exercises and meditation practices 

was a moral system—compassion, truthfulness, and forbearance—unmistakably 

Buddhist in origin. 

The revivalist aspect helps explain why Falun Gong insist on being called ‘‘practitioners,’’ rather than ‘‘followers.’’ Actually, they don’t follow well. Ask 10 Falun Gong 

practitioners for a definition of Falun Gong, and you will get 10 different answers 

and 10 days of heated discussions. Yet it was that same do-it-yourself mentality 

that allowed Falun Gong to attract 70 million practitioners and skip over the barriers of Chinese society: class, education, rural/urban, civilian/military, and Party 

membership. 

Go back to 1995, and follow a diminutive old woman around Yuyuantan Park in 

West Beijing. Ding Jing was a Falun Gong coordinator, meaning she taught the exercises, and kept practice sites clean. Among the sites were three locations: One catered to employees from China Central Television; two, the Xinhua News Agency; 

the third—very well-attended—attracted Party officials, their wives, and employees 

of the Public Security Bureau. From a Marxist perspective, which venerates the seizure of power using the same template, Ding’s tidy practice sites represented something terrifying. In 1996, Zhuan Falun, in essence, the Falun Gong bible, was taken 

out of print. 

Given the amorphous floating world in which they traveled—a world without 

membership lists, central authority or hierarchy—practitioners didn’t panic. But 

Luo Gan, the head of the Public Security Bureau, began to use Falun Gong’s perceived infiltration of his own department to gather, report, and study. Where no hierarchy existed, the Party, seizing on small clues such as Jing’s phone calls to other 

35 

practitioners, would map one. Where no political objectives existed, the Party would 

create them. 

Until 1997, the Chinese media stayed neutral. Local Party leaders would show up 

at Falun Dafa day rallies, and chuck little children on the chin while the cameras 

rolled. Now critical language began to appear in the Party-controlled media—flares 

in the night sky indicating that the Party was trying something out. 

Falun Gong had a method to handle this. Show up en masse. Stay silent. Then 

stand around until someone talks to you. The technique smoothly reversed various 

negative reports—articles in 1997, a Beijing TV segment in 1998. 

In Tianjin 1999, it failed. I’ve made my article ‘‘An Occurrence on Fuyou Street’’ 

available. Employing interviews from both sides, it tracks the events from Tianjin 

on April 22 to Beijing on April 25. Essentially, the demonstration was a set-up. 

From the portable surveillance cameras on Fuyou Street, to the armed military unit 

at the Forbidden City, it was a Party bait-and-switch to create momentum for a 

State-level crackdown. 

A former district-level official, ‘‘Minister X,’’ recalls that the Party’s decision to 

eliminate Falun Gong circulated internally long before any public ban, and he was 

told to stop granting business licenses to practitioners. A Falun Gong source saw 

a similar communique ́ at Qinghua University in 1998. A former official of the 6– 

10 Office, the secret agency created to eliminate Falun Gong, noting the level of detail in practitioner files, believes that operations must have begun by 1998. 

Without understanding the initial integration of Falun Gong into the Party, and 

the Party’s initiative in starting the war—essentially creating the dilemma that 

threatens them today—one cannot understand the ineffectiveness of the Falun Gong 

response. Practitioners wanted to believe that it was a misunderstanding. So appearances at the petition office and signed letters were followed by mass detentions 

and the first deaths in custody. 

Beginning in 2000, based on the safe house occupancy in Beijing, I estimate that 

well over 150,000 practitioners made their way to Tiananmen Square to protest over 

a year’s time. Collectively, a remarkable number, but they trickled in at 500 to 

1,000 per day, and they stood up and unfurled their banners according to the dictates of their soul rather than any preconceived strategy. Would a mass strategy 

have even been possible? I have provided another article, ‘‘Hacker Nation,’’ on 6– 

10 surveillance: 

Before 1999, Falun Gong practitioners hadn’t systematically used the Internet 

as an organizing tool. But now that they were isolated, fragmented and searching for a way to organize and change government policy, they jumped online, 

employing code-words, avoiding specifics, communicating in short bursts. But 

like a cat listening to mice squeak in a pitch black house, the ‘‘Internet Spying’’ 

Section of the 6–10 Office could find their exact location, having developed the 

ability to search and spy as a result of . . . a joint venture between the 

Shandong province public security bureau and Cisco Systems. 

Following capture and initial interrogation under the 6–10 Office, the laogai system then operated to break the will and ‘‘transform’’ the practitioner, culminating 

with a public renunciation of Falun Gong. But it was within the laogai itself that 

the first effective resistance began. 

Wang Yuzhi was a tough, successful Beijing businesswoman. When the crackdown 

started she transformed her office into a secret Falun Gong printing press. It was 

broken up, her assets were seized, Wang ran, and was eventually caught. 

The low-ball casualty figure of over 3,000 practitioners who have died by torture 

is reasonably well-documented. Some practitioners simply refused to renounce their 

belief; others hoped that overcrowded prisons might contribute to the end of the persecution. Others wanted to set an example to fellow inmates. 

But Wang made it personal—so personal that some of the guards force-feeding 

her began wearing paper bag masks so she couldn’t identify them. It became a chess 

game between the practitioner and the torturers. Both sides knew that Wang’s 

screams of rage were legendary throughout the laogai , with rumors seeping out to 

practitioners scattered throughout the world. Both sides knew that checkmate—actually killing Wang—would leave a pyrrhic victory for the state. 

The underlying ambiguity of the laogai position was expressed in the following 

local maneuver: Rather than writing up a report of transformation failure, or the 

euphemism ‘‘death by suicide,’’ many labor camps and psychiatric centers would 

wait until the torture reached lethal levels, and then suddenly free the dying practitioner—especially after the so-called Tiananmen ‘‘self-immolation’’ and the 

Changchun television hijacking (and I welcome questions on those incidents). 

But Wang Yuzhi lived. Considered terminal on release, she fled China, and went 

on to purchase printing presses for the Epoch Times. Today she will smile at you 

36 

with her one good eye. This is the face of insurgency, and to such a face, the Party 

turned to a more permanent solution. 

The final article that I have made available, ‘‘China’s Gruesome Organ Harvest,’’ 

documents a pattern of retail-organs-only physical examinations carried out 

throughout the laogai system. I can find no rational medical explanation for the procedures, and I conclude that the commercial harvesting of Falun Gong is real. That 

finding has been confirmed by a Taiwanese surgeon who arranges transplants in 

China. 

One addition: While the Bush Administration’s consistent focus on House Christians may have had a Schindler’s List effect, inhibiting widespread harvesting of 

Christians, members of one sect, Eastern Lightning, were examined for harvesting. 

According to interviews by my colleague Jaya Gibson, so were some Tibetan prisoners. Yet harvesting of political and religious prisoners probably began in Xinjiang. 

A Uyghur policeman witnessed preparation for a procedure in 1994, and I recently 

interviewed a Uyghur surgeon who, in 1995, was ordered to take his medical team 

into the outskirts of Urumqi and remove a prisoner’s organs while the heart was 

still beating. 

Perhaps harvesting began as a purely black-market operation. But ultimately 

prisoners who would not transform—the Wang Yuzhi types—became too dangerous 

to release. But the Party had an outlet, the organ tourists of Japan, Europe, and 

the United States. 

Now the fact that China is the one currently pulling the reins up on Western 

organ tourism highlights Falun Gong’s stunning lack of success in making its case 

in the United States. For many in the Bush administration, it took one outburst 

from Wang Wenyi on the White House Lawn to establish that Falun Gong could 

not be reliable allies. For many Democrats, it took one Chinese-planted Wikipedia 

reference alleging Falun Gong was anti-gay to ward off sympathy (Falun Gong 

teachings on this point are essentially indistinguishable from traditional Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism). 

Practitioners in the West simultaneously watch two screens, a Western one and 

a Chinese one. But for them, China is always the default—and fear of the Party’s 

manipulative abilities runs deep. Hence we see the definitional problems, the alienating public torture displays and Daoist demarcations of good and evil—again, 

aimed at the mainland. 

But Falun Gong’s tunnel vision created one unprecedented success. Along with 

the construction of the greatest dissident media apparatus in modern Chinese history, a small group of Falun Gong engineers based out of a North Carolina suburb 

devised an Internet-lifeline to transmit information in and out of China. Along the 

way, they facilitated the only unblocked Internet transmissions out of Iran during 

the aborted Green Revolution. 

If the press is correct, the State Department is considering awarding these engineers (now known as the Global Internet Freedom Consortium), significant funding 

to do more. If my Falun Gong sources are correct, the Consortium is concerned 

about taking a sum too small to make a difference, in exchange for the inevitable 

Party propaganda point that they are U.S. agents. 

Yet the Party is pushing the two sides together. The State Department must end 

Chinese hacking by threatening China’s Big Brother Internet. Falun Gong has perhaps a million in captivity. As much as 1 out of 10 may have already been lost to 

the surgical knife. 

The answer to this dilemma will not be found in parsing Wikipedia. The question 

is no longer—What is Falun Gong? How do they define themselves? But rather— 

What are Falun Gong’s actions? What has Falun Gong achieved? Against what sort 

of odds? And here, I believe the evidence of a decade—from the laogai to the North 

Carolina suburbs—speaks for itself. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF MARK CHUANHANG SHAN

JUNE 18, 2010

The roundtable host, the CECC, asks that ‘‘what factors influence the Chinese 

Government’s policies toward spiritual movements and drive its treatment of members of spiritual groups. The Chinese Government has allowed space for some spiritual movements to operate in China, but has banned other groups, such as Falun 

Gong. Why does the Chinese Government consider some spiritual movements a 

threat? ’’ 

The above questions touch the root of Chinese political-religious culture. Through 

an analysis on the origin of the traditional political concept of the Mandate of HeavVerDate Mar 15 2010 16:36 Feb 14, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00038 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 U:\DOCS\57902.TXT DEIDRE
37 

en and its modern applications, and the case of severe persecution of the Christian 

lawyer Gao Zhisheng because of his defending the religious freedom of Falun Gong 

movement, we may gain more understanding of the rational of the current Chinese 

political-religious culture. 

I. ‘‘THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN’’ IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

When the Zhou king’s advisors persuaded him to attack the Shang dynasty (1766– 

1045 B.C.) he refused saying, ‘‘you do not know the Mandate of Heaven yet,’’ but 

he launched the invasion after he heard Shang king did horrible things to his people 

as a tyrant because that showed the disapproval of Heaven of the Shang king, and 

Heaven began to support the Zhou king to replace the former.1

After the conquest, the Zhou dynasty (1045–256 B.C.) issued a number of proclamations, preserved in the Classic of Documents, persuading the Shang people to 

submit to their conquerors in the name of Mandate of Heaven. Zhou rulers argued 

that: 

Heaven, charged certain good men with rulership over the lineages of the 

world, and the heirs of these men might continue to exercise the Heaven-sanctioned power for as long as they carried out their religious and administrative 

duties with piety, rightness, and wisdom. But if the worth of the ruling family 

declined, if the rulers turned their backs upon the spirits and abandoned the 

virtuous ways that had originally marked them as worthy of the mandate to 

rule, then Heaven might discard them to elect a new family or lineage to be 

the destined rulers of the world.2

The later historians such as Sima Qian and thinkers such as Confucius and Mozi 

interpreted the Mandate of Heaven as a justification to overthrow evil rulers and 

start a new dynasty.3 Therefore, the concept proved to have lasting influence and 

fit neatly into the later scheme of the Chinese dynastic cycles, ‘‘because it justified 

all successful overthrows just as it justified all dynasties that clung to power.’’ 4 In 

this theoretical frame, many historical events are judged as the outcome of Divine 

favor or disfavor including natural signs and disasters.5

In Chinese history, the emperors may hold different religious faiths personally, 

such as Buddhism, Daoism or even Nestorian/Catholic Christianity, but the Mandate of Heaven stayed as an unchangeable law in political ideology to justify their 

governance. 

In modern Chinese history, the great revolt against Qing Dynasty by the Christian sect ‘‘The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace Movement’’ (1850–1864) was led by Hong 

Xiuquan who viewed himself as ‘‘the second son of God’’ and ‘‘the younger brother 

of Jesus Christ’’ sent by God to eradicate demons and demon worship and ‘‘the overthrow of the Manchu would help bring in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.’’ 6 Sun 

Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen 1866–1925) was a Christian and the first president of the 

Republic of China (1912–1949). He was a founder of the Guoming Party and in his 

process of overthrowing the Qiang dynasty referenced the book of Exodus in the 

Bible and spoke of Jesus as a liberator who motivated him as he said ‘‘Moses did 

that, I can too,’’ and ‘‘Jesus is a revolutionary, so am I,’’ etc.7 He also claimed that 

‘‘God sent him to struggle with evil for the Chinese . . . and liberating Chinese from 

bondage.’’ 8 He also said ‘‘I am a Christian having fought demons more than forty 

years . . .’’ 9 The concept the Mandate of Heaven has even survived into the Communist China. For example, during the 1989 student movement which led to the 

Tian-an-men Square massacre, ‘‘many commentators remarked that the Communist 

Party has lost the Mandate of Heaven.’’ 10

Because of this spiritual feature of the political concept, spiritual or religious 

movements in Chinese history make it easy to challenge ruling of dynasties through 

spiritual moral approaches, thus Chinese Governments are sensitive to the politicalspiritual touch and are not tolerant of any spiritual movements shaking their ruling 

authority before the Chinese people. In addition, Chinese Governments have tended 

to keep state and religion separated through promoting non-religious Confucianism 

throughout much of their history, and that is an efficient way to keep religious or 

spiritual movements out of politics. 

II. AN ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT DEGREES OF FREEDOM AND SUPPRESSION OF CURRENT

SPIRITUAL-RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN CHINA, AND THE PERSECUTION CASE OF CHRIS- TIAN LAWYER GAO ZHISHENG11 (REFER TO CECC SUBMISSION 1, 2: STORY OF GAO

ZHISHENG)

‘‘The legal existence of the religious complexities totally relies on the co-operation 

and the acceptance of the leadership with the government, and the government 

grasps the very final right to choose the partnership.’’ (Ding, August 1995. Volume 

15, No. 88)12

38 

Though the Chinese Communist government is strongly atheist without believing 

in any spiritual things they are still sensitive to any spiritual movements that touch 

on politics being seen as a way of challenging their authority. On the other hand, 

the government tries hard to leave more room for those spiritual religions that respect their authority and abide by the religious policies, mostly in a way of promoting patriotic nationalism today. For instance, the Protestant Christian House 

Churches and Catholic Christian Underground Churches are persecuted, but the 

Protestant and Catholic Churches in the official Three-self Patriotic System (or 

TSPM) enjoy more freedom. Tibetan Buddhism is under suppression because of its 

feature of religion-politics combination, but Buddhism and Daoism in other parts of 

China enjoy comparatively much more freedom because they touch no politics. Islam 

among Uyghurs is under suppression because of the Xinjiang political problem, but 

Islam among Hui enjoys more freedom. This is true, not only inside same spiritual 

traditions, but also if we compare government treatments among different spiritual 

movements or religions in China. 

Similarly, the Qi-gong Movement has many branches. Some were suppressed but 

others are allowed more freedom. A Qi-gong branch, the Zhong-gong, was also suppressed and its leader Zhang Hongbao before his death in 2006 established a shadow 

government of China in the United States. Falun Gong, another branch of Qi-gong 

Movement, in its siege of the Party headquarters in Beijing on April 25, 1999, by 

more than 20,000 Falun Gong practitioners, was the main factor for the Chinese 

Government to crackdown against the Falun Gong.13 The large number of public 

protest challenges to the government touched on politics seriously. One of Falun 

Gong’s protest slogans after they went abroad is ‘‘Heaven Eliminates Chinese Community Party’’ which is an interpretation of the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. 

Among human rights Christian lawyers in China Gao Zhisheng received the most 

serious inhuman persecution because he was an attorney defending the religious 

freedom and human rights of some Falun Gong practitioners. The Falun Gong 

movement was suppressed more than other spiritual movements in China as CECC 

has pointed out. Therefore, when Gao Zhisheng did not gave up representing the 

Falun Gong members in China, the government attack of revenge on him has become severe. 

At this roundtable, CECC also asks: ‘‘what does the Chinese Government’s treatment of spiritual movements mean for the future of religious freedom in China? ’’ 

The sociologist Yang Fenggang proposes a Triple-color Market Model to analyze 

the religious situation in contemporary China: ‘‘a red market (officially permitted religions), a black market (officially banned religions), and a gray market (religions 

with an ambiguous legal/illegal status). The gray market concept accentuates noninstitutionalized religiosity (2006, Purdue University).’’ His three propositions are: 

‘‘to the extent that religious organizations are restricted in number and in operation, 

a black market will emerge in spite of high costs to individuals; to the extent that 

a red market is restricted and a black market is suppressed, a gray market will 

emerge; the more restrictive and suppressive the regulation, the larger the gray 

market.’’ 14

This model can be applied to conditions in China today by stating that a red market means that religions or spiritual movements which do not touch on politics have 

the most freedom (e.g. non-Tibetan Buddhism and Daoism); a black market means 

that banned ones (such as Falun Gong) which do touch on politics in a way of challenging the Communist government authority suffer the most suppression. A gray 

market ambiguous in their political interest, such as non-institutionalized Protestant House Church Christianity (Catholic Underground Church is closer to the black 

market because of its political feature extended from the Vatican), will continue to 

grow larger as others are encouraged or suppressed. 

III. CONCLUSION WITH A SPECULATIVE ANALYSIS ON THE ROLE OF CHRISTIANITY FOR

FUTURE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN CHINA

Chinese Governments through the history have not tolerated spiritual or religious 

movements which ‘‘touch on politics’’ because the moral claims they hold make it 

easy to powerfully challenge the authority of the government through the concept 

of the Mandate of Heaven when a government does not benefit all the people or is 

seen as corrupt. 

Interesting to note, Christians in China see in the Bible the mandate to pray for 

the government to prosper so that they may prosper also.15 While the Protestant 

Christian House Churches maintain spiritual and moral standards of behavior and 

its church setting teachings emphasize ‘‘we do not touch politics,’’ 16 ‘‘blessed are 

those who are persecuted for righteousness’’ or even ‘‘love your enemies and pray 

for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:10,44)’’ as the followers of Jesus Christ, 

39 

they are not a direct political threat to government and seem to have a bright future 

in China even under attempts of the government to restrict or suppress them. One 

important reason for the tighter restriction and suppression is the lesson learned 

by Chinese Government from Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes which collapsed 

with Christianity playing an indirect role. 

The founder and president of ChinaAid Association with the mission of help the 

persecuted churches and promote religious freedom in China, Bob Fu, a pastor and 

theologian, pointed out that ‘‘House churches which are committed to the sole 

headship of Christ in the church and to evangelism must operate as illegal groups 

conducting so-called ‘illegal religious activities,’ and consequently must suffer the 

administrative penalties inflicted by the state.’’ 17

Together Christianity in the gray market House Church and the red market 

TSPM Church is transforming the condition of religious freedom in China through 

the ‘‘new non-institutionalized religious citizen community’’ 18 established in the 

whole nation. 

(Refer to CECC Submission 3: 2009 Annual Report of ChinaAid Association.) 

————————————— 

1 Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire, a history of China to 1600, (New York-London: W. W. 

Norton & Company, 2000), 40–41. 2 Compiled by WM. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, Source of Chinese Tradition, Volume 

I, from earliest times to 1600, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 27. 3 Valerie Hansen., 41. 

4 Ibid. 

5 Ibid. 

6 Richard Hooker, Ch’ing China: The Taiping Rebellion, http://www.wsu.edu/dee/CHING/ 

TAIPING.HTM 7Wang Zhongxin, Sun Zhongshan and Christianity, Christianity and China, Volume IV, (The 

Blessings Foundation, Inc. CA, USA), 15. 8 Ibid. 

9 Ibid., 15–16. 

10 Valerie Hansen., 41. 11More information on www.freealim.com 12 cf. Bob Fu, God and Caesar: Church and State Relations in Communist China, Professor 

in Religion and Philosophy at Oklahoma Wesleyan University for the 2003–2005 academic 

years. 13 James W. Tong, Revenge of the Forbidden City: The Suppression of the Falungong in China, 

1999–2005. 14Fenggang Yang, The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion In China, The Sociological 

Quarterly 47 (2006) 93–122 © 2006 Μιδςεστ Σοψιολογιψαλ Σοψιετυ. 15 Jeremiah 29:7 ‘‘Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you 

into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it proper, you too will prosper.’’ See also, Romans 

13:5–6 ‘‘Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience . . . for the authorities are God’s servants . . .’’ 16When Bob Fu was arrested and interrogated in Beijing 1996 because his leadership of a 

house church, he answered the police after he was put in the jail: ‘‘I didn’t preach anything 

about politics in our church, because I believe the separation of the church and state.’’ The police 

answered: ‘‘I want you to know that you must talk politics everywhere.’’ That meant the government wants the house church to support the communist politics everywhere. 17 Bob Fu, God and Caesar: Church and State Relations in Communist China. 18 ChinaAid Association, 2009 Annual Report of Persecution by the Government on Christian 

House Churches within Mainland China, Part V 1. Church as a Corner Stone of Chinese Citizen 

Society. 

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD #1

Excerpt from www.FreeGao.com 

‘‘Christian human rights Attorney Gao Zhisheng was seized by a dozen police officers and last seen in public on February 4, 2009. Gao has been repeatedly kidnapped, arrested, imprisoned and tortured by Chinese authorities for defending the 

persecuted. He has been an unyielding and iconic advocate for justice in the Chinese 

courts and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008. 

On January 21, 2010, the Chinese Government publicly acknowledged Gao 

Zhisheng to be in their custody, for the first time since his abduction more than 365 

days ago. In response to a reporter’s inquiry, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu said: ‘‘The relevant judicial authorities have decided this case, 

and we should say this person, according to Chinese law, is where he should be.’’ 

Mr. Ma then added, ‘‘As far as what exactly he’s doing, I don’t know. You can ask 

the relevant authorities.’’ 

40 

The Ministry’s comments brought a glimmer of hope to Gao supporters around the 

world. Since December 2009, rumors of Gao’s death from torture in prison have 

spread uncertainty. Just one week before Mr. Ma spoke to the media, Gao’s older 

brother, Gao Zhiyi, was informed by a police officer that Gao Zhisheng had gotten 

‘‘lost and went missing while out on a walk’’ in September, 2009. The news of his 

death, then alleged disappearance, devastated Gao’s wife and children. 

Finally, on January 20, 2010, an Australian newspaper reported from an inside 

source that ‘‘Gao is still alive at present . . . he’s not missing.’’ 

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD #2

Excerpt from ChinaAid’s newsletter, distributed by ChinaAid on May 10, 2010, via 

email 

‘‘ChinaAid thanks you for your continued support of Gao Zhisheng. We have 

learned that Gao was last seen on April 15–16 visiting his in-laws in Xinjiang. He 

did not return to his Beijing apartment the following week, as he was scheduled to 

according to the family. He has not been seen or heard from him since. 

‘‘ChinaAid is actively searching for Gao and news of his condition and whereabouts. With no news in over three weeks, we fear Gao Zhisheng has been forced 

to disappear again. We will continue to press for information, and keep all Gao supporters updated with the latest confirmed news. We thank you for your continued 

prayers and support for Gao Zhisheng, and will not relent until Gao has been released, and is able to reunite with his family in the United States. 

‘‘As we continue to press for Gao Zhisheng, ChinaAid remains committed to defending other persecuted faithfuls in China. Hundreds of thousands suffer persecution for their faith, and in extreme cases, like that of Uyghur Christian Alimujiang 

Yimiti, it takes a global effort to call for justice.’’ 

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD #3

Excerpt from the 2009 ChinaAid ‘‘Annual Report of Persecution by the Government 

on Christian House Churches within Mainland China,’’ Part V, Section 1. Church 

as a Corner Stone of Chinese Citizen Society 

‘‘In his classical book ‘‘Citizenship and Social Class’’ (1964), T. H. Marshall defined 

modern citizenship as ‘‘a personal status consisting of a body of universal rights, i.e., 

legal claims on the state, and the duties held equally by all legal members of a nation-state (Marshall; Brubaker 1992).’’ He also defined three basic rights of modern 

citizenship: civil rights, political rights and social rights. 

Many scholars agree that the legal requirements for an emergent capitalist society were chiefly responsible for the birth of modern citizenship rights and that ‘‘the 

struggle to extend citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was carried 

on primarily by English working class through such important democratic movements as Chartism, the Factory Movement, and trade unionism,’’ yet Margaret R. 

Somers argues that the ‘‘social and political movements of those tumultuous industrializing epochs were built primarily on the efforts, political identities, and social 

activities of rural industrial working peoples in the pastoral regions (Somers 1993, 

Michigan University).’’ For Somers, ‘‘varying patterns of institutional relationships 

among law, communities and political culture were central factors in shaping modern citizenship rights,’’ and she argues that citizenship as an instituted process 

rather than a status.’’ 

To apply the above theories to China, we should admit that Chinese society is just 

starting to evolve into a citizenship society. Based on the 2009 report of persecution 

on House Church Movement in China, we also need to add religious rights, which 

were not such a concern for 19th and 20th century Christian Europe, to the three 

citizenship rights listed above. Then, to apply these four central rights theory we 

can see three major elements in the institutional process contributing to the construction of a Chinese citizenship society based on the emerging national capitalism 

since 1979. In the last 20 years these have been: the Western Law infrastructure 

borrowed by China, a Church Movement Community, as well as traditional symbolic 

political culture originating in Communist ideology, Confucianism and other ideas, 

which have stimulated needs for citizenship (Shan Chuanhang, 2008, Boston University, with an acknowledgment to Dr. Nancy Ammerman). The community used 

to be in the three major elements formula was an intellectual one but it faded away 

41 

from the instituted process after 1989’s brutal suppression and replaced by church 

movement community. 

The Christian communities (mostly House Church Movement and Three-Self 

Church) in China grew fast in an invisible model because of persecution, yet it 

emerges as a new social and spiritual block in society, through not giving up meeting together. Beijing Shouwang, Shanghai Wanbang, Chengdu Qiuyu zhifu and 

Guangdong Liangren house churches were all typical examples in 2009 of churches 

that did not give up meeting together under severe pressure from the government. 

Christian communities, similarly to the pastoral regions of Europe in 19th and 20th 

centuries, can also shape powerfully a Chinese citizenship society with a possible 

future ‘‘plausibility structure’’ (Peter L. Berger, 1966, Boston University). 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SARAH COOK

JUNE 18, 2010

Good afternoon. 

One of the topics I’ve been asked to speak about is the story of Gao Zhisheng, 

a leading Chinese human rights lawyer and vocal advocate for religious freedom, 

particularly for Falun Gong practitioners. Several years ago I had the honor of coediting the English translation of Gao Zhisheng’s memoir A China More Just. So, 

as I was considering how to begin today, I tried to think of what Gao would say 

if he were here today himself. There are two points that he would probably emphasize. 

First, he would give a heartfelt thank you. Thank you to the Commission for organizing this panel. Thank you to the United States government for taking an active 

interest in the human rights abuses taking place in China. Thank you to those in 

the audience who care for the Chinese people. 

Second, he would likely seek to convey the urgency of the current situation and 

the brutality of the treatment suffered by large numbers of Chinese people generally, but also of Falun Gong practitioners in particular. It is clear from his 

writings that the account after account of severe torture he heard from the Falun 

Gong victims he had interviewed left a profound impression on him and served as 

a key catalyst in his advocacy on their behalf. 

With a trembling heart and a trembling pen, I record the tragic experiences 

of those [Falun Gong practitioners] who have been persecuted in the last six 

years. Of all the true accounts of incredible violence that I have heard, of all 

the records of the government’s inhuman torture of its own people, what has 

shaken me most is the routine practice of assaulting women’s genitals. Almost 

all who have been persecuted, be they male or female, were stripped naked 

before being tortured. No words can describe our government’s vulgarity and 

immorality.1

While not spoken in quite such colorful language, Freedom House’s findings generally reflect what Gao had discovered. 

But before moving onto some specific details, I’d like to take a step back to address the question of why this is happening and to point out that the repression 

of Falun Gong and spiritual movements in China cannot be viewed in a vacuum. 

Rather, it is part of an elaborate machinery of suppression that arbitrarily and systemically denies independent thought and expression in a range of areas in Chinese 

society. Moreover, Freedom House’s findings indicate that this repression is, in some 

respects, getting worse. 

In the past few decades, the Communist Party’s tactics for suppressing free 

thought have become more sophisticated. But the underlying principle and institutional dynamic remains the same: the decision of what is approved or forbidden is 

made arbitrarily by Party leaders and that decision is generally based on their perception of threats to their monopoly on political power or legitimacy, whether these 

threats are real or imagined. This dynamic is reflected in every set of media censorship directives issued by the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department that gets 

leaked and posted online, but it applies equally to spiritual movements. 

Thus, whatever the specific timeline of events in the mid to late 1990s, one angle 

for explaining the banning of Falun Gong and other smaller spiritual groups is that 

Party leaders did so: a. because they could and there was no institutional mechanism like an independent judiciary to stop them; and b. because the Communist 

Party generally has a low tolerance for groups or individuals who place any authority, spiritual or otherwise, above their allegiance to the Party. 

For persecuted Tibetans, this authority is the Dalai Lama; for persecuted human 

rights lawyers—whom I’ll get to in a moment—it is the law; for persecuted Falun 

42 

Gong adherents, it is the dedication to spiritual teachings centered on the values 

of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. The Party’s emphasis on ‘‘transforming’’ 

Falun Gong practitioners—similar to its ‘‘patriotic education’’ campaigns in Tibet— 

is one indication of this pursuit of suppressing independent thought. 

Since 1999, Freedom House’s annual and other publications have recorded the ongoing rights abuses suffered by those who practice Falun Gong in China. Several 

aspects of the persecution stand out from a review of those findings. I’ll mention 

them briefly here and am happy to followup on in more detail during the Q and 

A. 

• First, large scale detentions and widespread surveillance. These appeared to 

intensify in 2008 and 2009 even from the already high levels experienced over 

the past decade. Falun Gong practitioners were a key target in what amounted 

to a broader crackdown surrounding the Olympics and a series of politically sensitive anniversaries. In addition to detention and monitoring, this phenomenon 

included regular citation in official statements on ‘‘strike hard’’ campaigns and 

in offers of monetary rewards to members of the public for turning in individuals distributing information related to Falun Gong. 

• Second, ongoing torture and deaths in custody. While Freedom House does not 

have the resources to maintain a comprehensive record of such deaths, well-documented individual cases come to light each year, while overseas Falun Gong 

groups have gathered detailed accounts of over 3,000 people killed in the last 

decade. In one high-profile case from 2008, Beijing musician Yu Zhou died in 

custody 11 days after being detained for possessing Falun Gong literature in 

late January; his wife, Xu Na, was sentenced in November to three years in 

prison.2 In January 2009, Chongqing resident Jiang Xiqing died while held at 

a ‘‘reeducation through labor’’ camp for practicing Falun Gong; lawyers seeking 

to investigate his death were detained and beaten.3

• Third, the sentencing of practitioners to long prison terms following unfair 

trials or to ‘‘reeducation through labor’’ camps by bureaucratic fiat. Based on 

interviews with recently released detainees, a February 2009 study by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group reported that in addition to petty thieves 

and drug addicts, Falun Gong practitioners constituted a significant percentage 

of those incarcerated in the camps, as did Christians in some facilities.4 Given 

a nationwide labor camp population numbering in the hundreds of thousands, 

if not more, and former prisoners’ accounts of hundreds of religious prisoners 

in individual camps, this translates into potentially tens of thousands of detainees. 

• Fourth, Falun Gong is a permanent taboo for Chinese media outlets and one 

of the most systematically censored topics on the Internet. In addition to the wellknown use of technical filtering to block access to Falun Gong-related websites, 

tests conducted as part of a recent Freedom House study of Internet freedom 

in China found that entries containing the keyword ‘‘Falun Gong’’ (as well as 

‘‘June 4’’ or the ‘‘Dalai Lama’’) could not be displayed on Chinese blog hosting 

services, including the simplified Chinese version of Microsoft’s MSN Space Live 

service and Skype’s Chinese version, Tom.5

Those who seek to spread information despite these restrictions risk detention 

and imprisonment. Several well-documented cases have emerged in recent years 

of Chinese citizens imprisoned simply for downloading, printing, or possessing 

Falun Gong-related materials, either for their personal use or for sharing with 

others. These included victims who were not Falun Gong practitioners. For example: 

Æ In November 2008, Liu Jin, a former university librarian, was sentenced 

to three years in prison in Shanghai after she downloaded information 

about Falun Gong from the Internet and passed it to others, which her lawyer argued was a common occurrence.6

Æ In March 2009, Zhang Xingwu, a retired professor and Falun Gong practitioner from Shandong province, was sentenced to seven years in prison 

after security forces broke into his home and confiscated VCDs and religious texts related to Falun Gong.7

Æ Last month, grassroots democracy activist Ren Ming from Shenzhen was 

reportedly sentenced to three years in prison for distributing CDs bearing 

a Falun Gong symbol.8

It is in this context of a persecuted religious minority facing large scale, brutal 

treatment from the authorities on the one hand, and silence, if not cooperation, from 

most of society on the other, that Gao Zhisheng and other lawyers’ efforts to represent Falun Gong practitioners become relevant. 

43 

As brief background on Gao, he was born in rural Shaanxi province and grew up 

in his mother’s cave dwelling. In the late 1980s, he was selling vegetables on the 

streets of Xinjiang province when he came across and advertisement that the government was seeking to train lawyers. So, with just a middle school education, he 

decided to teach himself and in 1995, he passed the bar exam. In addition to his 

regular cases, he immediately started taking pro bono ones for the gamut of China’s 

vulnerable groups. He soon became known nationwide and in 2001, was named one 

of China’s top 10 lawyers after a legal debate competition sponsored by the Ministry 

of Justice. 

It was in this context that in 2004, Gao was one of the first lawyers to break the 

Falun Gong taboo. He was hired by an adherent who had been sent to a labor camp 

and was stunned that judges repeatedly rejected his efforts to file for judicial review. He writes about visiting multiple courts in one day and being told by three 

judges: ‘‘Don’t you know we don’t take Falun Gong cases?’’ With legal avenues 

closed, Gao decided to write an open letter to the National People’s Congress and 

a few months later, he conducted the first of two in depth investigations into the 

persecution of Falun Gong. In October and December 2005, he wrote two open letters 

to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, detailing the torture he had uncovered and urging 

them to end the atrocities. 

In response, as many here probably know, he and his family were put under escalating pressure and abuse themselves: from 24-hour surveillance to having his law 

firm shut down and license revoked, to an attempt on his life and repeated incommunicado detentions. In December 2006, Gao was sentenced in a one day trial to 

three years in prison. But this was suspended and the Chinese authorities have instead used ‘‘disappearance’’ rather than imprisonment as their preferred tactic 

against him. 

It was only in February 2009, that, in an incredible feat of courage, we learned 

the full details of the torture he had suffered during his previous detention. In a 

letter he managed to send abroad, Gao chronicled being stripped naked and shocked 

with electric batons on his genitals, among other acts torture. Guards reportedly 

told him that the conclusions of his investigations were accurate and that these 

were indeed the torture methods ‘‘perfected’’ on Falun Gong practitioners, all the 

while pressuring him that if he simply said a few negative comments about Falun 

Gong and/or praise to the Party, the torture would cease.9 Almost immediately with 

the release of the letter, Gao was abducted again. His family managed to flee China 

to Thailand, but Gao remained ‘‘disappeared’’ throughout much of 2009. As the 

months went on, his family, friends, and fellow lawyers grew increasingly fearful 

that he had been killed in custody. In March 2010, the authorities allowed him to 

resurface following an intense international campaign on his behalf. But after the 

international limelight faded, he disappeared again in April. He hasn’t been heard 

from since. 

Ironically perhaps, Gao never actually had the opportunity to argue in defense of 

a Falun Gong client in court. But, at least 20 lawyers have followed in his footsteps 

and done so. In response, they too have been temporarily or permanently disbarred, 

beaten, abducted, shocked with electric batons, held in a cage at a police station, 

and in at least one case, imprisoned for seven years under the same arbitrary and 

vague legal provision used to justify imprisonment of his Falun Gong clients. 

The authorities’ mistreatment of these lawyers reflects two broader implications 

of the campaign against certain spiritual groups for the future development of religious freedom and rule of law in China. 

First, the tactics and strategies developed to suppress one group can be quickly and 

easily applied to others. From vague legal provisions, to ‘‘black jails,’’ to certain torture and ‘‘transformation’’ methods, the lawyers and others have remarked on how 

elements first used against Falun Gong practitioners are then applied to other victim groups, including the lawyers themselves. It is evident from the writings and 

comments of Gao and other lawyers that the reason they take such a risk defending 

Falun Gong and other persecuted religious believers is because they feel very 

strongly that if the current system is not able to protect these innocent people from 

such severe abuses, others are at risk at well. 

Second, the Communist Party’s intransigent and harsh response to these lawyers 

highlights its general reluctance to institute genuine rule of law. Indeed, as Jerome 

Cohen has repeatedly noted in his writings, in the past two years there appears to 

have been a backsliding on even previous, limited reforms, while Party control over 

the judicial system has tightened. 

This reality raises complex questions of what actions the United States government and other members of the international community might be able to take to 

improve the situation for individuals like Gao or Falun Gong practitioners. While 

44 

not comprehensive, I hope that the following three recommendations may prove 

helpful as a starting point for such a discussion: 

1. Continue to lobby for the release of individual prisoners of conscience: As 

harshly as Gao Zhisheng has been treated by Chinese security forces, there is 

little doubt that his situation would be even more dire without the intense 

international pressure that has been applied to the Chinese regime on his behalf. Other former prisoners whom I have interviewed and who were the subject 

of international appeal campaigns—including Falun Gong practitioners—have 

repeatedly testified to the noticeably less harsh treatment they received compared to their fellow, more internationally anonymous, detainees. 

2. Support initiatives to independently research and verify more individual 

cases: Central to the ability to advocate on behalf of individuals and to gauge 

the full scale of abuses targeting spiritual movements is the capacity to verify 

individual cases of religious prisoners. Despite the sensitivity of the issue and 

difficulty in obtaining information about Falun Gong or Christian prisoners, 

there are avenues for doing so. Increased support, including funding, for groups 

taking the initiative to compile credible prisoner lists could translate into real 

protection for members of these persecuted minorities. 

3. Remain vigilant in the face of Chinese official pressure to self-censor outside of China: Although this is not the focus of today’s discussion, pressure to 

self-censor beyond China’s borders is a daily reality for Falun Gong practitioners—similar to Tibetans, Uighurs, and others—who seek to organize events 

that might expose abuses in China or challenge the Communist Party’s dominant narrative about the country’s current reality. It is critical that outside 

China, hosts of cultural, academic, or other events be vigilant in protecting the 

right to free expression for all, including those whose voices are systematically 

silenced within China. 

There is one last point I’d like to make before I conclude—on a more optimistic 

note. Parallel to the increased repression we’ve seen in China in the past few years 

has been a growing rights consciousness on the part of ordinary citizens. Indeed, 

one might argue, the insecurity of the regime in the face of a more assertive citizenry is one reason for the expanded repressive apparatus. As with workers, 

bloggers, and journalists, Falun Gong practitioners have also been among those 

using incredible ingenuity, creativity, and courage to challenge the repression 

against them, primarily by trying to convince fellow citizens of the justice of their 

cause. 

Having begun with quoting Gao, I’d like to conclude with a few his words on the 

potential affect of their efforts. 

More and more people around me, including professionals, scholars, government staff members, and ordinary Chinese citizens have begun to question the 

rationale behind the campaign against these believers. This has been a palpable 

change. . . . These people have come to realize how unjust, inhumane, and lawless the government’s violent persecution of the Falun Gong people is. This 

rapid, widespread change in attitude stands in stark contrast to the government’s static, outdated practice. It is really quite thought-provoking.’’ 10

I hope that at some point in the future, Gao will be able to be here himself to 

speak these words. Thank you. 

———————— 

1Gao Zhisheng, A China More Just, Broad Press USA (2007); pg. 137 

2Freedom House, ‘‘China,’’ Freedom in the World 2009: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=363&year=2009&country=7586 3Freedom House, ‘‘China,’’ Freedom in the World 2010: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=22&year=2010&country=7801 4 Chinese Human Rights Defenders, ‘‘Re-education through Labor Abuses Continue Unabated: 

Overhaul Long Overdue,’’ February 2009: http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dclarke/public/CHRD— 

RTL—Report.pdf 5Freedom House, ‘‘China’’ Freedom on the Net 2009: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=384&key=197&parent=19&report=79 6 Ibid. 

7Freedom House, ‘‘China,’’ Freedom of the Press 2010 (forthcoming) 

8 Chinese Human Rights Defenders, ‘‘China Human Rights Briefing Weekly: May 18–24, 

2010,’’ May 26, 2010; available at http://blogs.amnesty.org.uk/blogs—entry.asp?eid=6592 9Gao Zhisheng, ‘‘A Letter from the Twenty-first Century Dungeon—Over Fifty Days of Endless Inhumane Tortures in the Hands of the Chinese Government,’’ published by China Aid on 

February 9, 2009; http://chinaaid.org/pdf/ 

Human%20Rights%20Lawyer%20Recounts%20Torture.pdf 10Gao Zhisheng, A China More Just, Broad Press USA (2007); pg. 86 

45 

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD

PREPARED STATEMENT OF CAYLAN FORD, FALUN GONG PRACTITIONER AND

VOLUNTEER ANALYST AND EDITOR, FALUN DAFA INFORMATION CENTER

JUNE 18, 2010

I would first like to thank you for the opportunity to submit this statement, and 

more importantly, for your efforts to shed light on this topic. My name is Caylan 

Ford, I am a practitioner of Falun Gong, and also a volunteer analyst and editor 

with the Falun Dafa Information Center. Today I would like to speak to the question of how Falun Gong perceives the persecution in China today, both in terms of 

its origins and its meanings, as well as the forces that will contribute to its eventual 

end. I should add the caveat that all Falun Gong practitioners have their own interpretations and understandings of these questions, but I will do my best to illuminate broad collective understandings. 

I’ll first address the causes of the suppression in China. This is an issue that defies easy comprehension. Journalists, scholars, and other observers have offered a 

number of compelling explanations to help account for why the Chinese Communist 

Party viewed the peaceful and apolitical Falun Gong as such a threat. The size of 

the practice is the first thing that comes to mind. By 1999, widely cited government 

estimated put the number of Falun Gong practitioners in China in excess of 70 million people. That’s larger than the membership of the Communist Party at the time, 

and it’s likely the largest independent civil society group in the history of the PRC. 

Second, Falun Gong existed outside of official sanction; in March of 1996, because 

Falun Gong refused to charge money for the practice and wished to exercise autonomy over its activities, it withdrew from the state-run Qigong Research Association. 

Subsequent attempts to register with the government in another form were 

rebuffed, and so Falun Gong was, for three years, a vast popular religion with no 

oversight by the state. Third, some of the personalities involved—namely Luo Gan 

and then-Party chief Jiang Zemin—were uniquely suspicious or jealous of Falun 

Gong’s popularity, and as Willy Lam suggested in 2001, Jiang may have intended 

the suppression to be a means of consolidating personal power. 

There are other explanations as well that place the crackdown against Falun 

Gong in the context of broader cycles of ‘‘fang and shou’’ (relaxation and tightening) 

in Chinese politics. That is, after a remarkable period of tolerance toward qigong 

practices in the 1990s, the Communist Party again sought to reign in the influence 

and autonomy of these groups. 

All of these explanations likely contain some truth. Yet even taken together, they 

cannot account for the ferocity with which the suppression of Falun Gong has been 

pursued. For that, one must look to the very foundations of the Communist Party’s 

rule, and understand how Falun Gong’s spiritual message, however benign, undermined the sources of the Communist Party’s legitimacy. 

The PRC, in a sense, a kind of theocracy, only its religion is a secular one. The 

Party’s mandate to rule derives from its claim to possess exclusive knowledge of certain Truths. The Marxist/Leninist ideology, including its vision of history and definitions of progress, serve as the ideological basis for Communist Party rule. That no 

one really believes in Marxism in contemporary China does not make this less so; 

it only means that the Party’s ideological standing is more tenuous than in past decades, and its eagerness to suppress others may be more acute. 

Falun Gong, and other independent religious groups, challenges the Party’s ability 

to command faith and allegiance. The Communist Party believes in the primacy of 

human agency. Falun Gong believes that human agency is subordinate to divine authority. Where Mao Zedong spoke of struggling against the heavens, Falun Gong reconnects with a traditional Chinese aspiration to live in harmony with the Dao. 

Where Communism explains human behavior as a function of material determinism, 

Falun Gong’s beliefs hold that human beings are innately good, that they are driven 

by conscience and compassion. And where the Party has sought to enhance its legitimacy over the last two decades by fostering economic growth, Falun Gong stresses 

that virtue is the source of true value. 

For approximately one week immediately following the ban on Falun Gong, carefully crafted editorials in Xinhua and the People’s Daily which explained the ban 

focused on Falun Gong’s moral philosophy. An editorial appearing in Xinhua on July 

27, 1999, proclaimed that ‘‘ ‘truth, kindness and tolerance’ principle preached by Li 

Hongzhi has nothing in common with the socialist ethical and cultural progress we 

are striving to achieve.’’ 

46 

Another wrote that ‘‘Marxist dialectic materialism and historical materialism represent the world outlook and methodology of the proletariat, and . . . the scientific 

theories of Marxism established on the basis of this world view should serve as the 

spiritual pillar of communists. Falun Dafa as created by Li Hongzhi preaches idealism and theism . . . and thus is absolutely contradictory to the fundamental theories and principles of Marxism.’’ And so on. 

These editorials lasted little more than a week before eventually giving way to 

more incendiary attacks. But while they lasted, they provided a candid glimpse at 

why the Party viewed why Falun Gong with such trepidation. It is not because 

Falun Gong practitioners sought political power (they didn’t), nor was it merely because of their size or independence from the state. Rather, Falun Gong offered a 

compelling moral philosophy, rooted in China’s spiritual traditions, that was seen 

by Jiang Zemin as undermining the already faltering appeal of the party’s ideology, 

and that cast the Party’s moral deficiencies in stark relief. 

And so, because China’s rulers believed themselves to be at odds with the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance and with the theistic spiritual orientation 

of Falun Gong, they have pursued its adherents with incredible resolve. 

Understanding this dynamic can help answer another important question: why 

have so many Chinese Falun Gong adherents—tens of millions, by some estimates— 

persisted in exercising their faith when confronted with the full force of China’s persecutory apparatus bearing down on them? Why don’t they simply denounce Falun 

Gong? The objective of the imprisonment and the violence, after all, is forced religious conversion; if adherents recant, they are freed from detention. If they don’t, 

they are held extrajudicially and subjected to painful punishment. And yet the 

choice for millions of Falun Gong adherents has been to persist in spite of the 

threats; to continue practicing Falun Gong, and in many cases to risk their lives 

in order to tell their compatriots about the persecution and the practice. 

To be clear, Falun Gong practitioners don’t invite martyrdom. They seek not to 

be tortured; they want out of labor camps. But given the choice between recanting 

their faith or being tortured, most still choose the latter. What motivates them? 

The answer has already been alluded to. Falun Gong is suppressed because the 

Party fears that if people believe in divine authority, if they seek moral and personal inspiration from a religious belief system, then the Party loses control. The 

Communist Party dictates that a person’s life belongs to the cause of Communism; 

a person possessed of a spiritual faith, by contrast, believes that life originates with 

and is connected to something which transcends this physical existence. They are 

thus far more impervious to control or coercion with threats, violence, with material 

incentives; they are their own people, their hearts and minds not the property or 

subject of the state. 

Falun Gong’s capacity to resist elimination in China lies precisely in its belief, one 

shared by all religions, that life goes on in the hereafter, and that the state in which 

you exist in the next life is connected to how you choose to live in this one. Falun 

Gong’s faith holds that the virtues of Truth, Compassion, and Tolerance describe the 

intrinsic nature of the universe itself; that they are eternal and undying. And if a 

person seeks to live in line with these principles, they are connecting to something 

far greater than themselves. If a person lives a life of honesty, of courage, of compassion and justice, then in that act alone they forge something that is everlasting; 

they achieve a kind of immortality. 

To observers who do not believe in an afterlife, who are pure pragmatists, Falun 

Gong’s response to persecution as folly. But even if you don’t believe in a life hereafter, there is still something to be said for living a life devoted to principles, or 

to believing that maybe virtue is its own reward. Posterity seldom remembers pragmatists. The great figures of history are men possessed of principles who made immense personal sacrifices in defense of justice. Were they pragmatists, people who 

put their own immediate interests ahead of principles, we would not know their 

names, nor would we be able to enjoy their legacy. 

This explains why Falun Gong adherents have resisted suppression in China, and 

why they have not folded in labor camps and under threat of violence. The same 

rationale also explains how Falun Gong has responded to the persecution. 

At some point in the last decade, you have likely encountered some manifestation 

of Falun Gong’s response to persecution: the silent vigils of meditation kept outside 

Chinese embassies or consulates, the appeals of a young woman whose sister is held 

in a labor camp in China, or the rallies and marches meant to raise awareness of 

persecution in China. You have likely heard about the media outlets that some 

Falun Gong adherents started to provide an alternative to Chinese state-run television and newspaper, or about how software developed by American Falun Gong 

practitioners is now used to circumvent government censorship of the Internet from 

China to Iran, Syria to Burma. 

47 

Some of these activities—and especially Falun Gong practitioners’ efforts to encourage people to denounce their affiliations to the Communist Party—bear distinctly political overtones. This has given rise to the belief in some circles that the 

Falun Gong community has become a political force in China, or even that it seeks 

power for itself. 

But look more closely at Falun Gong’s resistance and you find that it lacks the 

qualities of a true political movement. While most Falun Gong adherents believe 

that good government should be one that respects freedom of speech, of press, rule 

of law and that institutionalizes a separation of church and state, few of us would 

be likely to describe the solution to our suppression in China as lying in institutional or political change. Falun Gong has never sought to prescribe what China’s 

government (or any other government) should look like. Its adherents do not covet 

political power or influence, and they do not participate in debates on other social 

or political issues. To put it plainly, Falun Gong adherents ascribe relatively little 

importance to political institutions in general. 

When the persecution began, Falun Gong initially responded somewhat incredulously, believing that the authorities had simply made a mistake. These were people who based their self-identity on being law-abiding, peaceful people, and they 

believed that if they simply explained themselves, the suppression on Falun Gong 

would be lifted. 

Adherents’ response was characteristic of what political scientist Kevin O’Brien 

describes as China’s ‘‘rightful resisters’’: people who did not want to challenge the 

government, but instead wanted it to uphold its own laws and protect existing social 

contracts. These are people who, rather than going underground to engage in subversion, sought the government’s attention and made appeals to its institutions and 

leaders in good faith. To that end, Falun Gong practitioners from across the country 

traveled to local petitioning offices where they hoped to explain why Falun Gong 

was no threat to the government and request that their rights be restored. It did 

not turn out well. The local appeal offices became gateways to labor camps and prisons. Practitioners soon began looking beyond their local government offices and toward 

Beijing, calling for dialogue, reconciliation, and understanding. Yet the results were 

no better. On any given day from late 1999 to early 2001, hundreds of Falun Gong 

adherents from around the country would turn up on Tiananmen Square to stage 

silent protests, to meditate, or to unfurl banners proclaiming Falun Dafa’s goodness 

and innocence. They referred to these demonstrations never as protests, but as ‘‘appeals,’’ implying that they still held out hope that the leadership would change its 

mind. Nonetheless, they were met with brutal reprisals, and the violence and the 

scale of the suppression only escalated. 

In late 2001, and continuing to this day, Falun Gong adherents shifted focus. The 

Communist Party was committed to its course, but perhaps the people of China 

could be persuaded. If the people refused to be complicit, there would be no police 

willing to arrest practitioners, no teachers willing to turn in their students (or vice 

versa), no judges willing to be compromised. Denied any voice in the official media, 

the daily protests on Tiananmen Square gave way to autonomous underground 

printing houses in nearly every county and district in the country—China’s equivalent of the Soviet Samizdat, one could say. From their living rooms, adherents would 

establish secure Internet connections, access websites outside China using proxy 

servers, download usually censored literature on the persecution of Falun Gong, and 

use it to produce homemade leaflets which they would distribute by nightfall. Falun 

Gong adherents living outside China worked to give scale to these efforts, creating 

censorship-circumvention software, launching Chinese-language radio and satellite 

television, and so on. The belief guiding these efforts is that all people are inherently good; that if they can merely know the truth, their consciences will steer them 

toward justice. 

But persuading Chinese citizens to not be complicit in the persecution is a difficult task. Decades of political campaigns have the Chinese citizenry that the best 

course of action is to lay low, to keep one’s head down, to follow orders, lest they 

also be targeted. Falun Gong’s challenge is to convince people to put justice, and 

for the possibility of a better future ahead of their short-term interests. The best 

way we know to do that, from our own experiences in labor camps and detention 

centers, is to appeal to people’s connection to eternal truths and virtues; to things 

which are lasting, and greater than any one of us. 

And so, while the efforts to encourage renunciation from the Communist Party 

may appear politically driven, look closer and you will find that the message is not 

that Falun Gong should be in power, or that democratic revolution should be fomented. The message is that virtue and integrity—the cornerstones of China’s Confucian and Buddhist traditions—must return to China. The message is that China’s 

48 

greatness, and the value of the Chinese people, lies precisely in the value that its 

culture places on moral courage, on compassion, and on justice. 

I began by addressing how we understand the origins of the persecution against 

Falun Gong in China, and I will conclude by sharing how we hope it might end. 

If you ask a Falun Gong practitioner in China what they would do if freedom of 

belief were afforded to them, they will probably tell you that they’d like to go back 

to practicing meditation in the parks in the morning. They don’t want political 

power, even after all that has transpired. And the way we hope to bring this about 

is by convincing the people of China that their greatness as a country and as a people is not based on their money, or their power projection. Their value comes from 

the fact that they are a people of justice and compassion. They are a people who 

will not stand by passively as their neighbors are imprisoned and tortured, and are 

a people who can sacrifice short-term interests in defense of what is right. In our 

best-case scenario, the persecution will end when the Chinese people decide that 

they are better than this. 

Æ