Epoch Times UK Staff
Aug 26, 2005
Commentary
There was a time in China when you couldn't switch on the TV, radio, or pick up a paper without being hit by a deluge of anti-Falun Gong propaganda. But now--not a whisper. The subject of Falun Gong has been faded out over the last couple of years in one smooth slide of the media control panel.
So what happened? Did the Communist regime give up their attempts to eradicate the peaceful practice? Is the silence of the airwaves, once filled with hatred, matched by a quiet in the labor camps which has replaced the echoing screams of torture victims?
In a word, no.
The media silence on the persecution does not indicate a softening stance towards Falun Gong. On the contrary; it is a calculated step designed to continue the persecution unabated. According to the Falun Dafa Information Centre, the number of reported Falun Gong deaths has been continuing to rise at an increasing rate.
The recent deportation cases, in which asylum seekers have been sent back to China to face persecution, are case in point; a sharp example of the serious situation in China and the degree to which Western governments have been duped by the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) tactical shift.
In March, a family of Falun Gong practitioners were deported from Germany back to China. The authorities had confidently dismissed claims that they would face persecution, saying that the husband, Jiang Renzheng had not engaged in any activities which would put him at risk. Within one month, he was in a labor camp.
Two weeks ago in Canada, a Falun Gong practitioner was returned amidst similar assurances. She disappeared on return to China. When Falun Gong practitioners disappear, all too often they reappear months later in labor camps, or emerge years later as a name on a list of death cases.
Recent cases in the UK, as with other cases in other countries, have been taken so close to the wire, with last minute aborted deportations.
In the UK at present, Ms. Ling Na Rong is still in detention, her fate hanging in the balance, having narrowly avoided two scheduled deportations. The authorities have rejected her asylum claims because she is not a "Falun Gong leader". Yet Falun Gong practitioners in the UK are adamant that she faces a very real risk of torture.
The Home Office, like other authorities, says that each case is measured on its own merit. But when governments are consistently misjudging the risk to deportees, the problem lies not with their judgment of the individual case but with their overall perception of the situation. In other words, they have been deceived by the CCP about the situation in China.
Jiang Zemin originally declared his intention to eradicate Falun Gong within three months and launched an all out campaign of demonization. The expectation was that the wave of hatred-inducing propaganda and all-out repression, together with extensive torture and incarceration, would be too much for Falun Gong to bear and all traces of the practice would be washed away. The persecution was an all or nothing gamble; it was such a large scale deception--targeting 100f the population--that were the truth to emerge and Falun Gong to survive, Jiang knew it would spell disaster for the CCP.
So when a few years later Falun Gong was still going strong, and the persecution was beginning to lose support and face growing criticism in China, the CCP quietly pulled it underground. The all-out slander dropped from a daily barrage to a weekly trickle, then to nothing. But meanwhile, in the labor camps and detention centers, the torture and beatings continued.
The purpose was to allow the persecution to continue unchecked, to convince the Chinese people that the CCP had won out against the practice, and to convince the outside world that the persecution was no longer an issue for the CCP.
When the CCP was still shouting from the rooftops about Falun Gong, the voice of criticism had begun to grow louder in the west. The benign nature of the practice was increasingly recognized outside of China, so the voice of hatred from China was beginning to be seen more clearly for what it was; incitement to genocide. In dumbing down the hate campaign, they gave the impression that they had left Falun Gong alone.
And, if the recent spate of deportation attempts is anything to go by, the downplaying of the persecution by the CCP has in part been successful in convincing Western governments that the CCP has lost interest in Falun Gong.
However, the widespread miscalculation of the risk to deportees has several further reasons behind it.
One issue is espionage. Falun Gong practitioners have always claimed that they have been monitored by Chinese spies abroad, and that western governments have failed to grasp the degree of surveillance overseas. They emphasize that for a person to involve themselves in Falun Gong appeal activities even in a small way may place them in great danger on return to China.
They refer to a "blacklist" of Falun Gong practitioners, used by the CCP to bar people's entry into other countries on sensitive occasions, as evidence of overseas monitoring. When ex-president Jiang Zemin visited Iceland, dozens of Falun Gong practitioners from different countries were detained on arrival, and many were barred from boarding flights to the country. The Icelandic people protested in their thousands. Similar things have happened in other countries.
Falun Gong practitioners in the UK have long-claimed to have received menacing calls, had their emails tampered with, their telephones tapped, had conversations opposite the Chinese embassy monitored and have been filmed by people inside the Chinese Embassy.
Perhaps it is forgivable that the authorities doubted Falun Gong practitioners' concerns about espionage and needed further confirmation of the phenomenon. But when Jiang Renzheng was whisked off to a labor camp after deportation from Germany, the alarm bells should have begun to ring in the Immigration departments worldwide.
And when several defectors stepped forward in the last few months, describing and evidencing a network of thousands of spies dedicated to monitoring Falun Gong, governments should have sat up, taken notice and adjusted their perception of asylum-seeking issues accordingly.
But recent events suggest that they haven't.
It is a sad indictment of the failure to take these claims seriously that the latest deportation tragedy was in Canada, where defector Han Guangsheng has not only confirmed other reports of espionage rings monitoring Falun Gong, but also described in graphic detail how he had witnessed torture and beatings of over a hundred Falun Gong practitioners.
It seems that the voice of Falun Gong practitioners is the last one to be listened to. Media reports often imply that Falun Gong would have its own motives in providing false information or painting the persecution as more serious than it really is.
But looking back over the last six years, a clear pattern emerges; the claims of Falun Gong practitioners are slowly but surely, one by one, turning out to be true.
When the persecution first began, many of the lies about the practice were repeated in the west. These lies were challenged by Falun Gong practitioners, and eventually the peaceful nature of the practice came to be recognized as they claimed it to be.
When in 2001 a tragic case of self-immolation in Tiananmen Square caught the headlines, claimed by the CCP to be carried out by Falun Gong, it was vehemently denied by practitioners saying that a genuine Falun Gong practitioner would never do such a thing. Over the following months and years, evidence emerged which clearly points to the whole event being staged by the CCP.
Falun Gong practitioners long ago began to talk about the mysterious 610 Office; an instrument of government above the law which has absolute power in carrying out the persecution of Falun Gong. The existence of this Gestapo-like agency has recently been confirmed by defectors who worked for it.
There are many further examples.
Much of the reluctance to take the word of Falun Gong practitioners at face value stems from the remnants of the labels slapped on it by the CCP which filter through to the west unnoticed. Falun Gong has subconsciously been labeled as having ulterior motives.
There are two sides to any story, but that doesn't mean that the truth lies between. Hitler had his reasons for persecuting the Jews for sure. And the Jews had their reasons for resisting. Hitler was a Genocidal maniac. The Jews were fighting for their lives.
The CCP is trying to eradicate Falun Gong. Falun Gong practitioners are fighting for their right to practice and fighting for the lives of their fellow practitioners. This is not an unreasonable motive for their efforts to expose the persecution, nor a reason to work too hard to find reasons to doubt their word. Caution yes, but when you have to make a choice in which human lives hang in the balance, is it better to trust the word of a persecuted meditation practice or the word of a regime which has murdered 80 million of its own people?
The CCP has always made a mockery of diplomacy, deliberately manipulating the sensitivities of democratic processes to its own advantage. For example, it plays on the concept of "not losing face" Any self-respecting diplomat will be taught that "not losing face" is part of the Chinese cultural make-up and must be handled sensitively. So they play on this: "You can't talk about human rights out in the open, because we will loose face." The diplomats wring their hands in a great show of cultural sensitivity, and comply. Meanwhile the CCP is just laughing at them.
The deportation cases tragically reflect both the naivety and ignorance of the Western governments and the bitter reality of the persecution. The CCP cadres must be laughing, rubbing their hands in glee, as governments prepare these deportations and forward information on the person, their time of arrival and the nature of their application.
Even the CCP must be wondering how many times people will be able to disappear into labor camps on return to China before the Western governments begin to wise up. But one thing is for sure; they aren't going to miss a trick. Poison is just poison.
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