Persecution of Falun Gong Laid Groundwork for China’s Digital Totalitarianism

Security guards patrol below surveillance cameras on a corner of Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Sept. 6, 2019. Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

News Analysis

Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin recently passed away, leaving behind a legacy that includes ushering China into a modern surveillance state.

“Jiang took critical steps in the early days of the internet in China to build the system today known as the Great Firewall, cutting off Chinese users from the rest of the world,” Sarah Cook, research director for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan at Freedom House, wrote on Twitter after China’s state-run media announced Jiang’s death on Nov. 30.

China gained access to the internet in 1994, at the time when Jiang was the communist regime’s top leader as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Jiang would eventually hold the position until November 2002.

According to Cook, the first stages of the Great Firewall—China’s vast internet censorship and surveillance apparatus—were built as early as 1996.

One of the first steps China took to censor the internet occurred on Feb. 1, 1996, when the communist regime’s cabinet-like State Council issued a regulation order on networking. One of the rules in the regulation states that “no units or individuals shall establish or use other channels for international networking on their own accord.” The order also specifies that a license is needed for anyone wanting to provide internet access to users.

In 1997, China’s Ministry of Public Security issued a regulation, stating that it is responsible for the “security, protection, and management of computer information networks, and the internet.” Additionally, the regulation prohibits the use of the internet to “create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit” anything inciting to resist or violate the constitution, laws, or administrative regulations.

Former Chinese dictator Jiang Zemin at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China on Nov. 8, 2012. Feng Li/Getty Images

Soon after Jiang took internet censorship to a new level after launching an elimination campaign targeting Falun Gong practitioners in July 1999.

“[Jiang] expanded the targets of repression with a 1998 crackdown on the China Democracy Party, the first prosecutions of cyber dissidents, and most significantly, the 1999 launch of a campaign to wipe out Falun Gong, then practiced by tens of millions of Chinese,” Cook wrote.

She added, “The development of online censorship was subsequently accelerated to contain news of abuses committed during these crackdowns and to restrict use of the internet for political organization.”

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that incorporates slow meditative exercises, and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

The practice surged in popularity after it was introduced to the public in 1992, with 70 million to 100 million adherents in China by the end of the decade, according to estimates at the time. Jiang perceived the enormous following as a threat to his rule, thus launching the persecution.

Since then, Falun Gong practitioners in China have been severely persecuted by the Chinese regime. According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, millions of practitioners have been thrown into prisons, labor camps, and brainwashing centers, where many have also been abused, tortured, and killed for their organs.

China’s Great Firewall now blocks Chinese citizens from accessing online content deemed unacceptable to the communist regime, including Twitter, Facebook, and Minghui.org—a website set up by a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reporting on the persecution of Falun Gong in China. The Epoch Times is also blocked in China.

U.S.-based China affairs analyst Tang Jingyuan said that the Great Firewall was more than just a tool for Jiang to prevent the persecution from getting publicized—it was also a tool to allow him to brainwash the Chinese people.

“To this day, the Internet Firewall has become the most important infrastructure of the CCP’s digital totalitarianism,” Tang told The Epoch Times. “It has since been extended to include other functions such as monitoring and tracking people.”

Golden Shield

The Great Firewall would become a part of the Golden Shield Project, which was launched by China’s Ministry of Public Security sometime between 1998 and 2000. The Golden Shield Project is a nationwide surveillance network with tracking capabilities driven by information databases.

Heng He, a U.S.-based China affairs commentator, told The Epoch Times that the Golden Shield Project, much like the Great Firewall, was created with the intention of using it against Falun Gong practitioners. And some of the early databases included those containing information on people practicing Falun Gong, he added.

While it is widely known that Fang Binxing, a prominent cyber expert, was the architect of the Great Firewall, it is less known that Jiang’s eldest son, Jiang Mianheng, was the one who provided oversight to the development of the Great Firewall and Golden Shield Project.

The young Jiang was once the vice president of the Shanghai branch of the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country’s top research institute. He resigned from the post in 2015.

Like his father, Jiang Mianheng saw the internet as something that the communist regime must have tight control of.

“China must build a national network that is independent of the internet,” the younger Jiang said during a conference in 2000, and China should break the West’s “monopoly on information resources and related industries.”

Jiang Mianheng, former president of the Shanghai branch of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, speaks at a conference in July 16, 2005. Chinese Academy of Sciences

China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the 610 Office, and the Political and Legal Affairs Commission are among several different CCP agencies that have been relying on both the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield Project in their efforts to persecute Falun Gong practitioners, according to Heng.

Jiang established the 610 Office—a Gestapo-like agency that operated outside the law—for the sole purpose of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners. Internal documents obtained by The Epoch Times show that the office was disbanded between 2018 and 2019, and its functions were merged into other CCP organs, including the PLAC and MSS.

Heng added that the Golden Shield Project has since evolved into the “Skynet Project,” a massive surveillance system involving millions of cameras, many with facial-recognition capability, throughout China.

China’s effort to censor Falun Gong online has previously been disguised in the form of innocent-sounding computer software. In 2009, China’s IT officials demanded that all personal computers sold in the country must have the internet software named “Green Dam Youth Escort” pre-installed. The regime claimed the software was designed mainly to block pornography and filter illicit content.

The software turned out to be a censoring system targeting words related to Falun Gong. A team at the University of Michigan found a file named “FalunWord.lib” with 37,468 Chinese characters, of which over 90 percent are Falun Gong-related. The word “610,” a reference to the 610 Office, appeared 63 times in the file.

Now, a search on China’s biggest search engine Baidu—using the words “Falun Gong” in either English or Chinese—shows nothing but hate propaganda, slander, and disinformation about the spiritual practice as search results.

Social Credit System

Currently, the Chinese regime enforces a social credit system, which assigns each citizen a score of “social trustworthiness.”

People can have points taken away from their social credit score by committing behaviors deemed undesirable by the CCP such as jaywalking. Those with low social credit scores are deemed “untrustworthy,” and thus deprived access to services and opportunities. They could be barred from traveling by plane or attending schools, among other things. Critics have slammed the system as a violation of human rights.

It was Jiang who provided one of the first indications that the communist regime would develop the system decades ago.

During a Party congress in November 2002, Jiang said there was a need to “establish a social credit system compatible with a modern market economy.”

The idea became a concrete plan in 2014, when the State Council issued a “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020).” The document states that the system is “an important component part of the Socialist market economy system and the social governance system.”

In September 2019, the National Reform and Development Commission, the communist regime’s top economic planning body, announced it had completed the first round of a corporate social credit system covering about 33 million firms. The announcement did not say how many of these firms were foreign or private companies.

Then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer appears before the Senate Finance Committee in Washington on June 17, 2020. Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images

Four months later, a group of 25 senators wrote a letter to then-U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, expressing concerns about how China’s corporate social credit system could threaten U.S. companies and workers.

Bitter Winter magazine, an online publication focusing on religious persecution in China, suspects that information about people’s religious faith has been added to the social credit system. Several medical workers in China told the magazine in 2019 that Chinese authorities had imposed a requirement saying that they had to ask about their patients’ religious status, but none of them “could understand the real intentions for this.”

“Some patients didn’t know why such questions were asked, but they still gave a truthful account of their religious faith. It isn’t a good thing. It may seem innocuous at the moment, but the government can exploit this information if it needs to,” an unnamed medical worker from central China’s Henan Province told the magazine.

A director of a hospital in eastern China’s Shandong Province said the information collected from patients, including their religious status, was uploaded to a government-run database.

“Not only the Public Security Bureau reviews these records, but employers can also access them. As soon as someone has a ‘blemish,’ they will be restricted to purchase tickets for travel. Employers won’t hire them either,” the director said, according to the magazine.

Falun Gong

“As the CCP improves its ability to monitor online activity, basic communication has become increasingly dangerous for Falun Gong adherents in China,” the Falun Dafa Information Center wrote in a report published in May.

The report added, “The CCP’s surveillance machinery reaches beyond state-owned mobile phone companies or internet gateways into message groups and social media platforms run by ostensibly private companies.”

The report pointed to the example of Song Xiaomei, a 51-year-old woman from northern China’s Liaoning Province, who was arrested and beaten by police in October 2021 after returning home from a trip to Japan. She was arrested because she shared information about the persecution on Twitter during her overseas trip.

Song was charged with “undermining law enforcement” for her tweets. In January, she was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison.

Falun Gong practitioners march down Constitution Avenue to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's persecution of the spiritual practice in China, in Washington on July 21, 2022. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Another example involved Gao Xiaoqi, a Falun Gong practitioner who was arrested in July 2020.

“She had been identified as a practitioner with Skynet’s facial recognition technology because she had previously met with other Falun Gong practitioners in the area, and was sentenced to nine years in prison,” the report stated.

In China, Falun Gong practitioners often distribute flyers to the public, to convince people not to believe in hate propaganda and disinformation about the practice being promoted by China’s state-run media. However, many of them have been arrested and persecuted, as their acts are caught on surveillance cameras.

One recent example is Ke Fanghua, a 78-year-old female practitioner from Henan Province, who was detained in May after local police saw her passing out flyers on camera, according to Minghui. Prior to her detention, she had already spent more than eight years in prison, during which she was subjected to forced labor, beatings, and brainwashing activities.

Current China

While Jiang may have started some of the technologies and systems, the Chinese regime under current leader Xi Jinping has further developed and perfected them to form China’s current hi-tech dictatorship.

Chris Meserole, research director of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, during a congressional hearing in September said that China “began building out an unprecedented apparatus for online censorship and surveillance” after the Internet became available in China.

“When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he moved quickly to consolidate that apparatus under his control, while also investing heavily in the equipment infrastructure and training to build out real-world surveillance programs like Skynet, smart cities, Sharp Eyes, and early pilots of the social credit system,” Meserole said.

He added, “Since these systems often lack due process and public oversight, the Xi regime has effectively built out the world’s most comprehensive digital architecture for repression.”

Chinese Leader Xi Jinping raises his hand as he votes during the closing session of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party at The Great Hall of People in Beijing, on Oct. 22, 2022. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The expert gave examples of how this system is used for control.

“GPS sensors, and smartphones, and cars, plus facial recognition that can track citizens across the city, make it difficult for private and covert religious communities to form and operate undetected,” he said, “while smart televisions and cell phones make it possible to remotely watch and hear private prayers within a home.”

“Put in Orwellian terms—Big Brother now has clear authority to extend its watchful eye over people of faith,” he added.

Luo Ya and Ning Haizhong contributed to this report.