Falun Gong - Suppression

Suppression

On 20 July 1999, security forces abducted and detained thousands of Falun Gong adherents that they identified as leaders. Two days later on 22 July, the PRC Ministry of Civil Affairs outlawed the Falun Dafa Research Society as an illegal organization "engaged in illegal activities, advocating superstition and spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances, and jeopardizing social stability", and the Ministry of Public Security issued a circular forbidding citizens from practicing Falun Gong in groups, possessing Falun Gong's teachings, displaying Falun Gong banners or symbols, or protesting the ban.

The ensuing campaign aimed to "eradicate" the group through a combination of propaganda, imprisonment, and coercive thought reform of adherents, sometimes resulting in deaths. In October 1999, four months after the ban, legislation was created to outlaw "heterodox religions," and applied to sentence Falun Gong devotees to prison terms.

Hundreds of thousands are believed to have been imprisoned extrajudicially, and practitioners in detention are reportedly subjected to forced labor, psychiatric abuse, torture, and other coercive methods of thought reform at the hands of Chinese authorities. The U.S. Department of State and Congressional-Executive Commission on China cite estimates that as much as half of China's reeducation-through-labor camp population is made up of Falun Gong adherents. Researcher Ethan Gutmann estimates that Falun Gong represents an average of 15 to 20 percent of the total "laogai" population. Former detainees of the labor camp system have reported that Falun Gong practitioners are one of the largest groups of prisoners; in some labor camp and prison facilities, they comprise the majority of detainees, and are often said to receive the longest sentences and the worst treatment.

According to Johnson, the campaign against Falun Gong extends to many aspects of society, including the media apparatus, police force, military, education system, and workplaces. An extra-constitutional body, the "610 Office" was created to "oversee" the effort. Human Rights Watch (2002) noted that families and workplaces were urged to cooperate with the government.

In February 2001, in an attempt to show unity, the Communist Party held a Central Work Conference and discussed Falun Gong. Under Jiang's leadership, the crackdown on Falun Gong became part of the Chinese political ethos of "upholding stability" – much the same rhetoric employed by the party during Tiananmen in 1989. Jiang's message was echoed at the 2001 National People's Congress, where Premier Zhu Rongji made special mention of Falun Gong in his outline of the PRC Tenth Five-Year Plan, saying "we must continue our campaign against the Falun Gong cult", effectively tying Falun Gong's eradication to China's economic progress. Though less prominent on the national agenda, the suppression against Falun Gong has carried on during the tenure of Hu Jintao; successive, high-level "strike hard" campaigns against Falun Gong were initiated in both 2008 and 2009. In 2010, a three-year campaign was launched to renew attempts at the coercive "transformation" of Falun Gong adherents.