Persecution of Falun Gong Totally Explained

Everything about Persecution Of Falun Gong totally explained

On July 20, 1999, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) banned Falun Gong and began a nationwide crackdown, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. This followed seven years of widespread popularity and rapid growth of the practice within mainland China On April 25 1999, the 10,000-practitioner gathering at Zhongnanhai triggered the ban. Officially, the authorities banned Falun Gong for "jeopardising social stability" and "engag[ing] in illegal activities." In late 1999 legislation was created to outlaw "heterodox religions," and applied to Falun Gong retroactively. An extra-constitutional body, the 6-10 Office was created to "oversee the terror campaign," Families and workplaces were urged to actively assist in the campaign, and practitioners were subject to severe coercion to have them recant. illegal imprisonment, forced labour, and psychiatric abuses. Falun Gong practitioners comprise 66% of all reported torture cases in China, and at least half of the labour camp population. In July 2006, Canadian parliamentarians David Matas and David Kilgour presented their investigative report of systematic organ harvesting from living practitioners.
   Amnesty International asserted the persecution to be politically motivated and a restriction of fundamental freedoms. The nature of Communist Party rule is seen as a cause for the crackdown; Falun Gong's popularity, traditional roots, and ideological distinction from communism was seen as a challenge. Though support wasn't unanimous, Jiang Zemin is considered to be personally responsible for the final decision and ensuing "Mao-style political campaign." Suspected motives include personal jealousy towards Li Hongzhi, anger, and ideological struggle. Li later began offering free lectures. After refusing a request to raise his tuition due to complaints from other qigong masters, Li withdrew from the CQSRS, claiming that it only tried to make money off the qigong masters without doing any research on qigong. Falun Gong sources claim that some of the individuals from the CQSRS began spreading rumours about Li Hongzhi to the government, also urging the government to curtail its growth David Ownby contends that opposition to Falun Gong from within the Party began in around 1994, and increased over the following years. He notes that there's no conclusive evidence on the motivation of the Party's initial resistance. However, Johnson notes that the phenomenal growth of Falun Gong is part of a wider trend within China caused by the Government's refusal to address the social upheaval, and its refusal to ease the rigid policies on religion that were pitching Falun Gong against the Communist Party. Falun Gong claims this was the beginning of a "concerted media campaign." A protest was held outside the journal, and the government claimed that Falun Gong supporters surrounded its offices. Following the incident, China Press and Publication Administration, which controls content in China's media instituted a "three nots" policy on groups such as Falun Dafa as part of the agency's general policy of avoiding anything controversial - media "should not be for it, shouldn't be against it and shouldn't label it good or bad". This caused Falun Dafa to believe that demonstrations were acceptable.
   Six months later, police agencies launched a nationwide investigation into Falun Gong at the behest of certain highly-ranked Party officials--among them Luo Gan--with the purpose of finding fault with Falun Gong.
   Another official investigation under the same pretext was launched in 1998, and police surveillance of practitioners increased. Though it reported that Falun Gong "only benefits, and does no harm to the Politburo and the nation," a circular was distributed to police offices throughout the country which labelled Falun Gong as a "sect." and faced confiscation. denounced Falun Gong in an interview on Beijing Television. The program showed a video of one of the practice sites, and called Falun a "feudalistic superstition." The station received letters of protest from Falun Gong practitioners, and some 2000 conducted silent sit-ins in front of its offices. He was met with the "unpleasant experience" of having half a dozen adherents "showed up at his residence, sat in his living room for three hours, arguing with him..
   On April 11, 1999, He Zuoxiu published an article in an obscure, small circulation journal Noah Porter suggests that He's critiques may have been intentional provocation to Falun Gong practitioners. He complained of "endless phone calls" and harassment. According to Patsy Rahn, some 6,000 practitioners staged a sit-in at He's university on 19 April 2000; riot police were dispatched, scuffles broke out, Practitioners complained to local authorities, who told them that the imprisoned practitioners would only be released with central government approval. He Zuoxiu, brother-in-law of Luo Gan, one of the chief taskmasters of the persecution, is said to have "become a national hero" for opposing Falun Gong. He also later accused some Falun Gong practitioners of harassment because of the articles he wrote: Rahn quotes He saying that seven groups came to his home to debate with him, that his answering machine was flooded with calls, and that he received over 200 letters "of abuse." He Zuoxiu published a book entitled How Falun Gong Harassed Me and My Family, which described Falun Gong as a "heretical cult", a term which subsequently appeared in government pamphlets. He Zuoxiu later went on to found the China Anti-Cult Association, which spearheaded the campaign to vilify Falun Gong as an "evil cult."

Zhongnanhai demonstration and aftermath

Several days after the initial protests in Tianjin, on the morning of April 25, 1999, an estimated ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners and sympathisers surrounded the Zhongnanhai compound where top Chinese leaders both live and work. They stayed in silence for 12 hours, reading and meditating in the quest for legal recognition as a religion, redress against He Zuoxiu, the release of imprisoned practitioners, and protection of the practice. Premier Zhu Rongji, or perhaps only his secretary
The Asia Times speculated that Li Hongzhi arrived in Beijing on April 22 to finalize plans for the April demonstration.. Li maintains that he merely stopped off on transit to Australia and had no knowledge of the gathering. The authorities claimed that exercise points around Beijing had received notices for practitioners to go to Zhongnanhai for a large "group practice." A World Journal article contends that the Zhongnanhai demonstrations might have been organized in part by the government to "trump up charges against Falun Gong which it had observed and monitored for years through its infiltrators." Luo Gan had allegedly wanted the practice banned since 1996 but lacked the legal basis. Credited as the chief Communist organizer of the Zhongnanhai gathering, Luo is alleged to have had the police direct them there in order to create an incident that could later be held against Falun Gong. The practitioners are said by Schechter to have wanted to make a peaceful appeal at the citizens' appeal office, located at Fuyou street, near Zhongnanhai. However, pointing to high-ranking political figures which include PLA Generals and "many" members of China's National People's Congress amongst the influential tutors of Falun Gong network, the Wall Street Journal suggested this "powerful, highly disciplined network" organised the 10,000-strong demonstration. A 74-year-old retired general, Yu Changxin, was arrested for organising the gathering, and sentenced to 17 years in jail in January 2000.

Ban and crackdown

On July 22, 1999, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) issued a statement banning Falun Gong:
Julia Ching from the University of Toronto suggested that the Zhongnanhai incident led to "fear, animosity and suppression". Tony Saich agrees that the campaign was used by Jiang to serve as a loyalty test to his individual leadership. The size and reach of Jiang's anti-Falun Gong campaign surpassed that of many previous mass-movements. On June 10, 1999 the Party established the 6-10 Office, an extra-constitutional body charged with managing the persecution. Representatives are in every province, city, county, university, government department and state-owned business in China. which was “not going well,” with constant demonstrations and appeals in Tiananmen Square. Li Lanqing, then head of the 6-10 Office, is said to have verbally announced the Party's new policy on Falun Gong, "defaming their reputations, bankrupting them financially and destroying them physically".}}
On July 20 1999, the crackdown officially began. Under orders from the Public Security Bureau, churches, temples, mosques, newspapers, media, courts and police were all quickly mobilized to follow the Party line to crush Falun Gong, “no measures too excessive.” and by February 2000, 5,000 were detained across China.
   Practitioners from around the country, many of them middle-aged women, kept streaming into Beijing to appeal. They would "court detention" by unfurling banners or meditating on Tiananmen Square, and be quickly bundled into waiting vans by police, "kicking, punching, dragging them by their clothes or their hair... knocking them over if they didn't move quickly or if they tried to get away." Falun Gong attempted to ensure international media were on hand to record the juxtaposition of peaceful protest and violent response; they'd draw attention to arrests and suspicious deaths in custody, issue media alerts, and post information on the internet. This was a cascading responsibility system to push the responsibility for meeting central orders down onto those enforcing them: central authorities would hold local officials personally responsible for stemming the flow of protesters. A typical “study session” of police and government officials was held in Weifang; the central government's directive to limit protesters was read aloud, no questions were asked as to how it was to be achieved —“success was all that mattered.”
   Officials further began to extort money from Falun Gong practitioners when the central government upped the ante and began penalising lower-level officials: the provincial government would fine mayors for each Falun Gong practitioner from their district who made it to Beijing; the mayors would in turn fine the heads of the Political and Legal commissions, who would in turn fine village chiefs, who fined police officers who administered the punishment. The fines were illegal, as no law or regulation had officially been issued. Johnson writes that the order was only relayed orally at meetings, “because they didn't want it made public.” A chief feature in the testimony of Falun Gong torture victims was that they were “constantly being asked for money to compensate for the fines.”
   The Party used a variety of legal and extra-legal mechanisms to stamp out public practice and protest.

Media and education campaign

Since the nation-wide crackdown began, the state-controlled media repeatedly referred to Falun Gong as an "evil cult" spreading superstition. By July 30, Xinhua reported confiscations of over one million Falun Gong books and other materials, hundreds of thousands burned and destroyed.
Elizabeth J. Perry describes media reports inundating the evening news at the early stages of the crackdown: "For weeks... each night, pictures were broadcast of huge piles of Falun Gong materials that had been either voluntarily turned over by practitioners or confiscated in police raids on bookstores and publishing houses," including the People’s Liberation Army Press. "Some were disposed of in gigantic bonfires, others were recycled..." Media reports would focus on the testimonies of relatives of Falun Gong "victims", who would talk about the "terrible tragedies" that had befallen their loved ones; former practitioners would confess being "hoodwinked by Li Hongzhi and... expressing regret at their gullibility"; "happy pictures of those who had kicked the Falun Gong habit" and were now pursuing more benign pass-times were broadcast; physical education instructors suggested healthy alternatives to Falun Gong practice, including badminton, ballroom dancing, bowling. Perry writes that the basic pattern of the offensive was similar to "the anti-rightist campaign of the 1950s [and] the anti-spiritual pollution campaigns of the 1980s."
   Falun Gong was branded as part of an "anti-China international movement," according to CNN's Willy Lam. The Women's Federation stated the need to "arm our sisters with scientific knowledge and help improve their capability to recognize and resist feudal superstition"
   The campaign entered educational institutions, with anti-Falun Gong propaganda incorporated into high-school and primary school textbooks. WOIPFG claimed that students who practiced Falun Gong were barred from schools and universities and from sitting exams; a policy of "guilt by association" was adopted, such that direct family members of known practitioners were also denied entry; schoolchildren were taught anti-Falun Gong poems; anti-Falun Gong petitions were organised on a mass scale; viewing Falun Gong websites could result in arrest; examinations contained questions with anti-Falun Gong contents--incorrect answers would result in reportedly violent repercussions. Australia, Canada and England, and blocks access to internet resources about the topic.
   In July 2001, as part of House Concurrent Resolution 188, the U.S. House of Representatives denounced the "notorious" '6-10' offices which oversees the persecution through "organized brainwashing, torture and murder", and stated that propaganda from state-controlled media "inundated the public in an attempt to breed hatred and discrimination." The Resolution was passed by a 420:0 vote, calling on China to "cease its persecution and harassment of Falun Gong practitioners in the United States; to release from detention all Falun Gong practitioners and put an end to the practices of torture and other cruel, inhumane treatment against them and to abide by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights"

The 'cult' label

See further: Falun Gong and the anticult movement The authorities claimed that the practice exploited spiritual cultivation to engage in seditious politics. In exposés such as "Falun Gong is a Cult",[[Image:FalunDafaDestroyBook.jpg|thumb|right|150px|The words on the steamroller read “Smash Falun Gong’s printed materials to pieces.” Li was portrayed as a charlatan, while snapshots of accounting records were shown on television, "purporting to prove that [he] made huge amounts of money off his books and videos."
   Bryan Edelman and James T. Richardson stated that "Over the years, the CCP has also become more sensitive to international criticisms concerning China's human rights record. In this context, the anti-cult movement and its ideology have served as useful tools, helping efforts by the party to try to maintain a delicate balance and create the illusion that the rule-of-law has been upheld, even as actions in violation of international customary law are being taken against the Falun Gong. The social construction of the cultic threat posed to Chinese society and the rest of the world, the subsequent government's response to that threat, and its lax definition of the term 'cult" has armed the CCP with the weapons necessary to attack any religious, qigong, or sectarian movement its sees as a potential threat to its authority. By applying the label and embracing theories that posit passive followers under the mental control of a dangerous leader, the government can aggressively destroy the group, all the while claiming to be protecting religious freedom. In this respect, the Western Anti-Cult Movement has served, unwittingly or not, as a lackey in the party's efforts to maintain its political dominance."
The Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident
On the eve of Chinese New Year, January 23, 2001, seven people attempted to set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square. Footage was broadcast nationally in the People's Republic by China Central Television (CCTV). Western news organizations disseminated the story as given by Xinhua, without the possibility of verifying it independently, given the tight state censorship. According to Time, the Government's media war against Falun Gong gained significant traction following the act. The six-month campaign successfully portrayed Falun Gong as an "evil cult" which could unhinge its followers. Repeated broadcasts of images of a girl’s burning body, and of interviews with the other practitioners declaring self-immolation would lead them to paradise convinced many Chinese that Falun Gong was an evil cult. The campaign is thought to be the government's first effort to gain public support for the crackdown of Falun Gong, and is "reminiscent of communist political movements -- from the 1950-53 Korean War to the radical Cultural Revolution in the 1960s."
   Falun Gong disputes whether the protagonists were practitioners in reality. The state-owned broadcaster claimed the self-immolators as Falun Gong practitioners. A Time magazine article suggested that it was possible for misguided practitioners to have taken it upon themselves to demonstrate in this manner, handing a propaganda opportunity to the Chinese authorities. Falun Gong and some third-party commentators claim that the event was staged by the Chinese government in order to build public support for the "persecution" of the group Up to 99% of long term Falun Gong detainees are processed administratively through this system, and don't enter the formal criminal justice system. Outside access isn't given to the camps, and conditions are reported to be poor. Prisoners are forced to do heavy work in mines, brick factories, and agriculture. Beatings, interrogations, inadequate food rations, and other human rights abuses take place.
   There are estimates of up to 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners having been sentenced administratively to reeducation from the beginning of the crackdown, but commented that independent verification would be impossible. Falun Gong alleges numerous cases of extreme torture, accompanied by testimonies, sometimes resulting in impaired mental, sensory, physiological and speech faculties, mental trauma, paralysis, or death. Over 100 forms of torture are purported used, including shocks, stress positions, branding, force-feeding, sexual abuse, with multiple variations on each type. The main purpose of the torture is ostensibly to have Falun Gong practitioners renounce or denounce the practice and the founder, Li Hongzhi. Kilgour and Matas also accused China of torturing prisoners to obtain their consent to have their organs removed for transplant. The Special Rapporteur refers to the torture scenarios as "harrowing" and writes that "The cruelty and brutality of these alleged acts... defy description."
   Chinaview, an independent website focused on human rights abuses in China, reveals that the Gaoyang Forced Labour Camp was the first to begin force-feeding Falun Gong practitioners with human urine and excrement in the summer of 2003, and that “…the Chinese government awarded them for this innovation, and sent labour camp staff from around the country to learn this procedure.”
   Association for Asian Research reports that victims in the Dalian Labor Camp were tied up in a spread-eagle position as torturers repeatedly thrust foreign objects (toilet and shoe brushes, and long rods) into their vaginas.
Use of psychiatry and claims of abuse
Soon after the onset of the persecution, Falun Gong and human rights observers began reporting widespread psychiatric abuse of mentally-healthy practitioners. Falun Gong says that thousands have been forcefully detained in mental hospitals and subject to psychiatric abuses such as injection of sedatives or anti-psychotic drugs, torture by electrocution, force-feeding, beatings and starvation. The Chinese government states that there had already been a sharp increase of practitioner detentions in psychiatric facilities since 1992, and that all remedial actions have been taken in accordance with the law. The World Psychiatric Association disputes claims of systematic psychiatric abuses, but is prepared to believe some abuse is merely due to "lack of training and professional skills of some psychiatrists".
Political abuse of psychiatry
Robin J. Munro was the first clinician to draw worldwide attention to the abuses of forensic psychiatry in China in general, and of Falun Gong practitioners in particular. Munro says that large-scale psychiatric abuses are the most distinctive aspect of the government’s protracted campaign to "crush the Falun Gong."
   Sunny Y. Lu and Viviana B. Galli credit Jiang Zemin with reversing the declining trend of using mental hospitals as places of government-directed torture in China, as part of what they see as a comprehensive and brutal campaign to eradicate Falun Gong. They draw comparison with political abuse of psychiatry by the Soviet Union aimed at dissidents and nonconformists, but said that Falun Gong practitioners were "neither political nor nonconformists."
   Munro writes that detained practitioners are tortured and subject to electroconvulsive therapy, painful forms of electrical acupuncture treatment, prolonged deprivation of light, food and water, and restricted access to toilet facilities in order to force confessions or renunciations as a condition of release. Fines of several thousand yuan may follow. Lu and Galli write that dosages of medication up to five or six times the usual level are administered through nasogastric tubes as a form of torture or punishment, and that physical torture is common, including binding tightly with ropes in very painful positions. Effects of this treatment, including drug or chemical toxicity, are loss of memory, migraines, extreme weakness, protrusion of the tongue, rigidity, loss of consciousness, vomiting, nausea and seizures.
   Lu and Galli claimed that the Chinese government uses extreme measures to prevent investigation of the alleged abuses: threats, bribes, summary cremation of victims' bodies, arbitrary detention of potential whistleblowers, censorship of the internet, restricted access for western media and humanitarian organisations, and detention, harassment, deportation of journalist or revoking their licenses etc.
   The Washington Post repeated the reports of psychiatric abuses: "The old Soviet Union pioneered the misuse of psychiatry against political dissidents; China has followed suit..." The Post recounts the story of 32-year-old computer engineer Su Gang as "dramatic". Su had been repeatedly detained by the security department of his workplace for refusing to renounce Falun Gong. Following a protest trip to the capital, on May 23, 2000 his employer, a state-run petrochemical company, authorized the police to "drag him off to a mental hospital." According to his father, doctors injected Mr. Su twice a day with an unknown substance. "When Mr. Su emerged a week later, he couldn't eat or move his limbs normally. On June 10, the previously healthy young man died of heart failure."
Legitimate use of psychiatry and “Qigong Psychosis”
Ji Shi cites doctors at the Beijing University of Medical Science saying that "since 1992 the number of patients with psychiatric disorders caused by practicing Falun Gong accounted for 10.2 percent of all patients suffering from mental disorders caused by practicing various qigong exercises", and that the figure had risen to 42.1% by the first half of 1999.. In 2000, state-media reported that “The cult has led to more than 650 cases of psychological disorder, with 11 practitioners becoming homicides and 144 others physically disabled.” The government's claims of admitting individuals psychologically disturbed from Falun Gong practice is dismissed by certain human rights law and psychiatry experts.
   Munro says he's surprised by the "remarkable" rise in numbers of admissions of Falun Gong practitioners to psychiatric facilities (after Ji Shi) considering Falun Gong didn't even exist before 1992; the 1999 assertion of an official spokesman that Falun Gong represented 30% of all mental patients in China Munro calls "absurd." He brings attention to the coincidence between the reportedly very sizeable increase in Falun Gong admissions to mental hospitals, and the fact that it was during this same period when the government began preparing its nationwide public crackdown. He remarks that this was "deemed unworthy of mention" by Chinese authorities in their publications.
   Some third party commentators sympathise with the Chinese government's perspective and actions. Dr. Sing Lee from Harvard Medical School studied the practice of psychiatry in China in 1997, and cites one case of a 54-year-old housewife who had practiced Falun Gong for two years, and was apparently "[enthralledby]... the trance state and the spontaneous bodily movement that the practice brought" which she couldn't control
   Lee and Arthur Kleinman M.D., a professor of medical anthropology and psychiatry at Harvard University, wrote a series of articles challenging Munro for use of indirect and unconfirmed accounts, allegations and reports from human rights groups "with their own axes to grind," and from Falun Gong, which is "engaged in a nasty political struggle with the Chinese state." They state that regular prisons would be much cheaper to detain Falun Gong practitioners in, and disagree that the Chinese government would use mental hospitals for reasons of ‘self-justificatory vanity’ and ‘international prestige’. They also deny that the modern Chinese psychiatric profession has become implicated in the Communist Party’s political agenda. Lee and Kleinman accused Munro of “…creating a witch hunt that attributed to the profession as a whole the misuses and abuses of what may well turn out to be only a small number of practitioners.”
   In 2002, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) scheduled an investigation with the involvement of the Chinese Society of Psychiatrists' (CSP) to examine alleged abuses of Falun Gong practitioners who were sent to Chinese psychiatric hospitals and clinics as punishment. In April, several days before it was to start, the investigation was postponed indefinitely, at the Chinese government's insistence. Kleinman contends that Falun Gong's allegations were "exaggerated and distorted"; he maintains that many Falun Gong adherents had obvious symptoms of psychosis, "and were put in psychiatric hospitals for good reasons".
   Friends of Falun Gong (FoFG) board member Dr. Abraham Halpern criticised this view. "The allegations of psychiatric abuse in China involve mistreatment, torture, and fraudulent diagnoses in the case of large numbers of political dissidents and Falun Gong practitioners and shouldn't be dismissed as mere `failures in accurate diagnosis.'"
   Munro maintains that the four Falun Gong case he selected were typical of the “several hundred such accounts that have so far been compiled and published by the Falun Gong,” He responds to Lee and Kleinman's doubts by saying that they, in their own published work, relied on the very same documentation, drawn from facts, commentary, and decades of survey material written and compiled by Chinese psychiatrists and law-enforcement officers published in China’s officially authorized professional literature on psychiatry and the law. He opines that since they don't make any substantive rebuttal of his evidence, they must have no answer to it.
   Munro contends that decades-long political abuse of psychiatry by the Party, directly preceding the section on Falun Gong, transfers the burden of proof "squarely back onto the Chinese authorities."
Allegations of organ harvesting
In March 2006, allegations were made in the Epoch Times of organ harvesting on living Falun Gong practitioners at the China Traditional Medicine Thrombosis Treatment Center, a Chinese joint-venture company in Sujiatun, Shenyang co-owned by Country Heights Health Sanctuary of Malaysia, and subject to oversight in Liaoning province. According to two witnesses, internal organs of living Falun Gong practitioners have been harvested and sold, and the bodies have been cremated in the hospital's boiler room. The witnesses further allege that no prisoner has come out of the centre alive, and that six thousand practitioners have been held captive at the hospital since 2001, two-thirds of whom have died to date.
   Dissident Harry Wu, who immediately sent in investigators, said that the allegations were just heresay from two witnesses. On April 14, 2006, the United States Department of State reported the findings of its investigation, stating that: "U.S. representatives have found no evidence to support allegations that [Sujiatun] has been used as a concentration camp to jail Falun Gong practitioners and harvest their organs."
   The Chinese Government accused Falun Gong for fabricating the "Sujiatun concentration camp" issue, reiterating that as a WHO Member State, China resolutely abided by the WHO 1991 Guiding Principles on Human Organ Transplants and strictly forbids the sale of human organs. It added that Sujiatun District government carried out an investigation at the hospital and invited local and foreign media, including NHK and Phoenix Satellite Network; and two visits were paid by US consular personnel, who confirmed that the hospital was completely incapable of housing more than 6,000 persons; there was no basement for incarcerating practitioners, as alleged; there was simply no way to cremate corpses in secret, continuously, and in large volumes in the hospital's boiler/furnace room.
   In July 2006, David Kilgour and David Matas, human rights lawyers, concluded an investigation on behalf of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of the Falun Gong in China (CIPFG). Their report gave credence to the allegations of China's harvesting organs from live Falun Gong practitioners. The Christian Science Monitor states that the report's evidence is circumstantial, but persuasive. The conclusion of the report has been questioned, but according to David Matas has "not been refuted."
   A Congressional Research Service report says that the report "does not bring forth new or independently-obtained testimony and relies largely upon the making of logical inferences". The principal allegations "appear to be inconsistent with the findings of other investigations". the conclusions therein remain lacking in universal acceptance.
   On August 11, 2006, three UN Special Rapporteurs had sent an urgent appeal on organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. This was a joint action by the Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Asma Jahangir and the Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, Sigma Huda.

Response from Falun Gong
See further: Falun Gong outside the People's Republic of China Falun Gong groups outside of China responded to the crackdown by making films such as the anti-CCP "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party", and initiating a world-wide "Three Renunciations" Campaign, which was hosted by The Epoch Times. Since it began on Dec 3, 2004, over 22 million members of the Communist Party of China and its subordinate organizations (the Communist Youth League and the Young Pioneers of China) are alleged by Epoch Times to have resigned as at May 21, 2007. However, due to its anonymous nature of renunciations the figure can't be verified.
   The link between the Three Renunciations and Falun Gong is disputed, since the existence of Buddha and the Christian God isn't mentioned in Falun Gong teachings. However, Fei Liangyong, Chairman of the Democratic China Front and senior member of Chinese Free Culture Movement, explicitly mentioned that the Three Renunciations campaign was indeed initiated by Falun Gong via its associated media in his speeches and his various interviews with Falun Gong related media.
   Practitioners have been able to interfere with state televised broadcasts, but often with consequences: in March 2002, 15 Falun Gong practitioners hijacked a state-run cable TV station in Changchun and broadcast around 40 minutes of pro-Falun Gong material. Liu Chengjun, named as the instigator, was sentenced to 19 years in prison. He was allegedly tortured to death after 21 months in Jilin Prison, and his body cremated without autopsy..
   In June 2002, Falun Gong tapped into transmissions of China's central and provincial networks via Sinosat, interrupting the final of the Football World Cup; the head of the state radio and television administration was reportedly so alarmed that he slept in his office to prevent recurrence. In September, Sinosat was reportedly twice hijacked, and Falun Gong feeds were transmitted. It was further claimed the hacked signals originated from "Taiwan province", and that hackers used instructions posted on Minghui. The authorities alleged that the September 9 interception seriously damaged the rights of 20,000 students across the country receiving long-distance CETV [education] broadcasts; on September 21, a "hijacking marathon" interrupted Mid-Autumn Festival programming from 19:00. In November 2004, a Hong Kong satellite broadcasting into China was hacked into, and pro-Falun Gong material reached the feeds of two stations, but no-one claimed responsibility.
Legal action
Chinese officials alleged to have taken part in human rights abuses against practitioners have become targets of legal action when they step upon foreign soil. Targets have included Jiang Zemin, trade minister Bo Xilai,, Vice Premier Li Lanqing, Culture Minister Sun Jiazheng and Luo Gan. The PRC has complained about a conspiracy to sue Zhao Zhifei, head of the PSB in Hubei province, when he visited the US in mid-July 2001. Charges include genocide and torture. Since 2001, there have been in excess of 70 legal cases launched by Falun Gong practitioners or sympathisers against the Government of the People's Republic of China, its leaders, and other officers.
An Overview of Legal Cases Filed by Falun Gong Practitioners Around the World
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