Tian Xiaoping, a 51-year-old Falun Gong practitioner, was sent to prison for 14 years this May. Police caught her in November last year after she and a number of others visited the family home of another practitioner who had been killed. Her sentence is one of the harshest in the 13-year-long campaign against the practice, and was part of a ratcheting up of the campaign against Falun Gong this year as the Communist Party planned for its 18th Congress.
The anti-Falun Gong mobilization includes a focus on intensive surveillance in some areas. A Public Security document from Gangshang Township, a tiny place of around 60,000 people in Jiangsu Province, contains explicit instructions on what to find out.
The document, addressed to “every work unit” in the town, says that public security units must “use a dragnet approach” to find all Falun Gong practitioners. Information that is supposed to be discovered includes “their transmission channels, activity schedules, the number of people, the times they gather, their family environments, their economic situations, their education and cultural levels, their life experiences, their individual temperaments, their motivation for practicing Falun Gong,” and so on.
“Not a single household” was to be left out in that intelligence gathering exercise, according to the document.
Convert Your Friends
Tianxin District in Changsha City, Hunan Province, held a series of large-scale events in a sporting stadium meant to prepare for “welcoming the Party’s 18th Congress” and calling for recruits in the battle against peaceful Falun Gong meditators.
The first order of business was to root out paper currency that had anti-Party slogans, or slogans in support of Falun Gong, written on it. Volunteers were supposed to make a sweep of their apartment buildings and tear down any Falun Gong-related signs. Anti-Falun Gong related displays were to be dusted and cleaned of graffiti, too. Volunteers were also supposed to try to “convert” any friends they may have who practice Falun Gong—all in the service on the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress.
In Huairou District of Beijing, the Party Committee was slightly more lenient. They merely called for any personnel who have Falun Gong or “religious behaviors” to be accounted for, appointed to a “responsible person,” and heavily supervised to “prevent any problems.”
Ideological Battle
A similar mobilization effort was announced in Baoding City, Hebei Province, where “harmony and stability” and creating a “favorable atmosphere” for the 18th Party Congress were linked to attacking Falun Gong. Small teams were to be set up to scour “every street, every corner, every pole. Don’t leave any gap.”
Like in Maoist China, cadres were also charged with carrying out “ideological work” on Falun Gong practitioners. “Lead them to thoroughly break from the Falun Gong organization,” the order said. “Make them remove their spirits from mystical beliefs and deliver them to the care of the Party,” it continued, adding that cadres should “avoid being enticed” by Falun Gong’s beliefs, whose emphasis on traditional morality had in the 1990s attracted up to 100 million adherents in China.
Torture and Death
