(Minghui.org) The U. S. State Department announced on July 9, 2020 sanctions against the Public Security Bureau and four Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, including Xinjiang Party Chief Chen Quanguo.
The sanctions were based on Executive Order 13818, “Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption,” which builds upon and implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and was issued by President Trump on December 20, 2017.
This signified a new era of the U.S. leading the world in pursuing people, even living inside China, who have assisted the CCP in human rights abuses.
Chen Quanguo’s Crime against Falun Gong
The U.S. announced that Chen was responsible for “unjust detention or abuse of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other minority groups in Xinjiang.” The U.S. Department of Treasury effectively froze his and three other officials’ assets in the United States. The State Department also restricted him and two other sanctioned officials and their immediate family members from entering the U.S.
The Department of Treasury listed their crimes as establishing and managing detention camps, applying tortures, using digital surveillance, and carrying out “political reeducation.”
Before Chen went to Xinjiang to persecute the Uyghurs and other minority groups, he directly participated in the persecution of Falun Gong for many years. The crimes against Falun Gong are the most severe and largest human rights persecution campaign, which has also lasted the longest in the CCP’s history.
The Wall Street Journal reported that since the CCP started persecuting Falun Gong in 1999, Chen, as a senior official in Henan Province, participated in the suppression and was responsible for destroying Falun Gong books and VCDs in the province.
Chen continued overseeing the persecution of Falun Gong when he moved to Hebei Province and served as the governor from January 2010 to August 2011. Under his administration, several Falun Gong practitioners were persecuted to death, including Ms. Wu Zhijin, a kindergarten teacher in Sanhe city, and Ms. Hu Lianhua, an elementary school teacher at Yanshan County.
Chen became the CCP’s iron hand in Xinjiang after becoming the region’s Party chief in August 2016. He spent $9.1 billion on “stability maintenance” (a CCP term for suppressing social discord) in 2017, an increase of 92 percent from the previous year.
Over the years, Chen has set up a surveillance network, including a large number of cameras and face scanners, and turned Xinjiang into a gigantic prison for the Uyghurs and other minority groups.
Falun Gong practitioners in Xinjiang also faced unprecedented persecution after Chen took office. With the massive surveillance system, almost all practitioners there were imprisoned, restricted of personal freedoms, or forced to go into hiding. Some, even including elderly practitioners, were subjected to severe tortures.
For example, the authorities detained Ms. Yan Yixue, 90, at a brainwashing center in Shihezi city for a year. The CCP Party chief of the Shihezi Political and Legal Affairs Committee slapped her in the face publicly, and police officers beat her and locked her onto an iron chair for two weeks. The authorities arrested her again in May, prior to the CCP’s annual political meetings––the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference––that were postponed from March to May 22, 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Her family has been kept in the dark about her whereabouts ever since.
Ms. Li Yulan, 76, a former obstetrician and gynecologist in Wujiaqu City, was arrested three years ago and later sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Mr. Ma Chao, a senior engineer at the Environmental Monitoring Center, was detained at the “education and transformation base” (brainwashing center) in Urumqi city and later transferred to Anningqu Concentration Camp.
In addition to the above mentioned practitioners, some who were sent to the concentration camps since 2017 remain in custody. Due to the coronavirus epidemic, some practitioners’ families haven’t been allowed to visit them for more than six months.
Ms. Zhang Xiaoping, of Urumqi, who has been held at a brainwashing center for over two years and was reportedly to be released in early 2020, remains in custody at the time of writing, after the officials in her community refused to take her back, saying it would affect their annual bonus.
Accomplice to CCP’s Crimes Will Be Pursued
The Minghui.org website has reported first hand persecution accounts of Falun Gong every day for the past 21 years. So far, the website has collected information on over 100,000 perpetrators involved in the persecution.
Bruno Dey, a former Nazi Schutzstaffel guard at the Stutthof camp, was brought to court for contributing to the killings of 5,230 prisoners at the camp, at the age of 93 last year. He was only a guard and didn’t actively participate in the killing. But however tiny he was as a gear on the Nazi’s killing machine, he could not avoid the justice pursuing him, even after so many years had passed.
The law of retribution is a natural law that governs the human world. The CCP accomplice should not hope that they could avoid it.
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