Reports/Analysis

Behind the Olympic Spectacle: A Journalist's Walking Guide to the Persecution of Falun Gong in Beijing

Among the thousands of reporters, athletes, and spectators arriving this week for the Beijing Olympics, most have likely heard of Falun Gong and the Communist Party’s often brutal campaign to crush it. But what few realize is the extent to which the violence meted out against these peaceful religious believers has in some cases taken place within walking distance of Olympic venues, hotels, and prominent landmarks.

Our Sources

Much of our information begins on the ground, with eye-witness sources in China or victims themselves of rights abuses. This is a network tens of millions large, involving the full body of adherents as well as family, friends, and those close to them. Volumes of emails, faxes, and phone calls from this contingency reach us or our affiliates every day...

China’s People Power

Chinese people are getting fed up, and stating so publicly. Generations of Chinese have had to live in fear and under persecution. First it was the landowners. Then it was the artists, musicians, intellectuals, and the Buddhists. Eventually it was the Falun Gong’s turn. It seems that every few years a different whim has driven China’s Communist Party to deem another group “counter-revolutionary” or a “threat to social stability,” and imprison and kill them. Now, the regime that claims to belong to “the people” has been abandoned by 37 million of those very people.

Arthur Waldron: The Falun Gong Factor

The excessive caution many people show with respect to Falun Gong has the same source as the non-appearance of politicians when the Dalai Lama visits. That source is fear of what the Chinese authorities may do to them. For an American like myself, probably the worst possible is a harassing phone call from the Chinese embassy or denial of a visa. Since my research is about China, I value the opportunity to go there. But I do not believe that a free person in a free country should act differently than they would be inclined to, out of fear of a foreign autocracy. But many do.

Transcending the Mundane

It is an idea with staying power. A belief as old as Chinese civilization itself, having resonated with a stunning range of dynasties, provinces, and personalities. To generations has it spoken. In the very substrate of China’s culture is it firmly embedded.

An Analysis of the 610 Office

Chinese officials deny it exists. Western media and scholars barely mention it in passing. And Chinese lawyers compare it to the Gestapo. It is called the 610 Office, and it is the extra-legal police task force responsible for carrying out the mission of eliminating Falun Gong.

A Chinese “Court” is Not a Court

Westerm citizens with little or no knowledge of how China differs from countries governed by the “Rule of Law” typically react naïvely and inappropriately to reports about the Beijing regime’s suppression of Falun Gong. Some suggest that Falun Gong practitioners have contravened Chinese laws and therefore have only themselves to blame for their problems; others ask why practitioners do not hire Chinese human rights lawyers to defend them or even to bring lawsuits on their behalf against officials who have illegally seized their property or inflicted torture upon them.

Un-Peaceful Rise on Campus

WHAT was meant to be a look at an egregious human rights violation turned into a stunning show of incivility—a breakdown of all values and practices that New York’s most prestigious university holds dear. For two hours last Friday, the Columbia University community was given a chilling glimpse at one Chinese export America can decidedly do without: hatred.

Out of the Media Spotlight

Righteous Resistance

It used to be you could hardly turn a corner in China without a taste of Falun Gong. Practitioners filled the nation’s parks at the break of dawn for their Tai-chi-like exercises. Its texts, regularly bestsellers, lined the shelves of Wangfujing’s bookstores. And in the summer of 1999, countless adherents filled the streets of China’s capital in protest of an unlawful ban that would soon to morph into what leading human rights attorneys have called “genocide.”