610: An Overview

The Establishment of the "610 Office"

On June 7, 1999, about a month before the suppression of Falun Gong began, Chinese President Jiang Zemin circulated a letter entitled "Comrade Jiang Zemin's Speech at a Meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee Regarding Handling and Resolving the 'Falun Gong' Issue Without Delay."

In this letter, Jiang initiated the suppression policy to be used against Falun Gong. He ordered the establishment of what he called "a leadership group that will specialize in handling the 'Falun Gong' issue," and appointed the three chiefs to the group including the head of the Political and Judiciary Committee, Luo Gan.

Under Jiang's direct order, on June 10, 1999, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee officially set up an office for the "leadership group" and named it "the Head Office for Handling the Falun Gong Issue," also called the "610 Office."

In his letter, Jiang further asked that "the Central Committee and government units in all ministries and commissions, and all provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the Central Government, need to act in close coordination" with the "610 Office." Consequently, the "610" became a well-organized and independent system spanning from the Central Government to the local governments, and has absolute power over each level of administration in the Party, as well as over the political and judiciary branches.

It is the highest authority deployed by Jiang Zemin and his accomplices to specifically persecute Falun Gong. According to Jiang in his letter, the establishment of "610 Office" is "to investigate and to come up with a unified approach in terms of specific steps, methods, and measures to resolve the 'Falun Gong' issue."

Just as chilling as it sounds, the "610 Office" has orchestrated the two-year-plus brutal persecution of Falun Gong and its practitioners which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of cases of defamation, arbitrary detention, false imprisonment, torture, sexual and psychiatric abuse, disappearance, and murder.

The Execution of the "610 Office"

Over the past two years, the "610 Office" headed by Luo Gan has been developed into an ultimate machine of Jiang's state terrorism policy against Falun Gong, which employs forceful indoctrination, violence and fear to terrorize and dominate the minds and hearts of Falun Gong practitioners as well as all other Chinese citizens.

Documentation from the testimonials of multiple, sometimes hundreds, of witnesses shows that for the past two years, Jiang Zemin's regime has constantly issued various secret orders against Falun Gong through the "610 Office," from the directive "Physically destroy Falun Gong practitioners" to "Falun Gong practitioners' being tortured to death is counted as suicide" and "Do not identify the body. Cremate it locally."

These secretive and deadly directives have given local police free rein to torture, sexually assault, even murder Falun Gong practitioners.

The brutality is beyond comprehension. In detention facilities, violence and torture have become a major tool against Falun Gong practitioners, regardless of age, gender, or physical condition.

Battering; force-feeding with hot pepper or high-density salt water; denial of food, sleep, and toilet use; exposure to extreme hot or cold weather; burning with cigarettes and heated metal; shocks with electric batons - these are just some of the recorded means of torture employed upon practitioners. Women practitioners have suffered all types of sexual assaults including rape and use of electric stun devices to shock sensitive body parts. Pregnant women have been subject to forced late-stage abortion in order to prolong their captors' ability to detain them rather than be released from jail to give birth to their child.

The rapid increase of death cases over the past year is a direct result of all these orders from "610 Office." Currently the verified death toll has come to 3137 cases, while the actual death toll is far greater in number. Insider sources from the Chinese Communist Party say that the death toll has come to at least one thousand.

In nature, "610 Office" is very similar to the Cultural Revolution Group of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, a product of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, which led the horrifying persecution and murder of numerous innocent citizens during the "Cultural Revolution."