610 Office - Structure

Structure

The 610 Office is managed by top echelon leaders of the Communist Party of China, and the CLGDF that oversees the 610 Office has, since its inception, been helmed by a senior member of the Politburo Standing Committee, beginning with Li Lanqing (1999–2003), Luo Gan (2003–2007), and Zhou Yongkang (2007 – Present).

The practice of appointing top-ranked Party authorities to run the CLGDF and 610 Office was intended to ensure that they outranked other departmental officials. According to James Tong, the 610 Office is situated “several administrative strata” above organizations such as the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television, and the News and Publications Bureau. The 610 Office plays the role of coordinating the anti-Falun Gong media coverage in the state-run press, as well influencing other party and state entities, including security agencies, in the anti-Falun Gong campaign.

Cook and Lemish speculate that the 610 Office was created outside the traditional state-based security system for several reasons: first, a number of officials within the military and security agencies were practicing Falun Gong, leading Jiang and other CPC leaders to fear that these organizations had already been quietly compromised; second, there was a need for a nimble and powerful organization to coordinate the anti-Falun Gong campaign; third, the creation of a top-level party organization sent a message down the ranks that the anti-Falun Gong campaign was a priority; and finally, CPC leaders did not want the anti-Falun Gong campaign to be hindered by legal or bureaucratic restrictions, and thus established the 610 Office extrajudicially.

Soon after the creation of the central 610 Office, parallel 610 Offices were established at each administrative level wherever populations of Falun Gong practitioners were present, including the provincial, district, municipal, and sometime neighborhood levels. In some instances, 610 Offices have been established within large corporations and universities. Each office takes orders from the 610 Office one administrative level above, or from the Communist Party authorities at the same organizational level. In turn, the local 610 Offices influence the officers of other state and party bodies, such as media organizations, local public security bureaus, and courts.

The structure of the 610 Office overlaps frequently with the Communist Party’s Political and Legislative Affairs Committee (PLAC). Both Luo Gan and Zhou Yongkang oversaw both the PLC and the 610 Office simultaneously. This overlap is also reflected at local levels, where the 610 Office is regularly aligned with the local PLAC, sometimes even sharing physical offices.

The individual 610 Offices at local levels show minor variations in organizational structure. One example of how local offices are organized comes from Leiyang city in Hunan province. There, the 610 Office consisted in 2008 of a “composite group” and an “education group.” The education group was in charge of “propaganda work” and the “transformation through reeducation” of Falun Gong adherents. The composite group was in charge of administrative and logistics tasks, intelligence collection, and the protection confidential information.

James Tong wrote that the Party’s decision to run the anti-Falun Gong campaign through the CLGDF and the 610 Office reflected “a pattern of regime institutional choice” to use “ad hoc committees rather than permanent agencies, and invested power in the top party echelon rather than functional state bureaucracies.”