If violence and torture have been routine in communist China as the regime strives to silence dissident voices, Beijing’s bid to do so globally appears to be taking on a more cunning form.
While during the decade-long Cultural Revolution in the 1970s intellectuals and other so-called class enemies got a dunce cap on their heads and were paraded down the streets for public humiliation, today’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “using mechanisms of [Western] democracy to do their bidding,” Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, told The Epoch Times.
“I think we’ve never faced a dilemma quite like this.”
“This is an authoritarian regime trying to snuff people out. It’s just they’re not using labor camps,” Browde said. “Because, by and large, in the U.S. those mechanisms don’t exist.”
To Browde, the directive from Xi has helped to explain a pattern that he has observed and documented, especially over the past year. As the world observes Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, he said, he hopes his organization can help people in the West connect the dots.
“It’s much more deceiving now,” he said. According to him, the media, judiciary, and government agencies “are the things that people believe in the West,” and the CCP is now leveraging them to “destroy a different voice.”
“The CCP’s latest efforts to persecute Falun Gong practitioners will not go unnoticed in the 119th Congress,” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) told The Epoch Times.
According to Ogles, the CCP, like most rogue regimes, only understands strength.
“If the CCP insists on marginalizing or harming the Falun Gong group here in the United States, Congress must be prepared to respond forcefully,” he said.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), a member of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said that International Human Rights Day is a reminder that “we all need to recommit ourselves to upholding a high standard of human rights for every person on this planet.”
“The Chinese government, sadly, has had a horrific human rights record, and they have attacked numerous groups in China, and some of these attacks have come in the most vicious forms,” McGovern told The Epoch Times.
“It’s important for everybody, not just U.S. legislators ... to stand up and denounce that,” he said, adding that the United States needs to hold the CCP to account for its transnational suppression activities so that people who gained freedom in America won’t need to once again live in fear.
The new pivot in the attack campaign is “deeply concerning,” but not surprising, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) told The Epoch Times. Following the exposure of a secret Chinese police station in New York City, Tiffany proposed a bill calling for the United States to shutter the Chinese consulate in the city and expel its Chinese diplomats to push back against Chinese communist influence operations. In January, he said, he hopes Congress can “get back to cracking down on the CCP’s transnational intimidation campaign by kicking out spies who are masquerading as diplomats and closing down their offices.”
Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), a member of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said the leaked directive from Xi was “disturbing.”
“We must continue to investigate the ways the Chinese Communist Party seeks to exert influence in the United States,” Carson told The Epoch Times.
Recently, dozens of social media accounts have emerged that target Falun Gong and Shen Yun Performing Arts, a New York state-based performing arts group founded by Falun Gong practitioners that showcases China prior to the communist takeover in 1949, as well as modern scenes of the CCP’s persecution of the spiritual group.
Over the summer, two whistleblowers leaked internal meeting notes showing Chinese officials being instructed to feed disparaging materials to a particular social media influencer, who has taken credit for making inroads in attacking Shen Yun.
Targeting Falun Gong at this particular time suits the regime’s political goals, according to Wang Zhiyuan, who heads the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, a human rights group that has been probing reports of forced organ harvesting in Chinese hospitals.
He pointed to the economic and political turmoil that the regime has faced in the past two years. Suppressing Falun Gong, which has been a top target for the regime for more than two decades, is a way for Beijing’s leaders to draw attention away from domestic problems.
This has always been the regime’s modus operandi, Wang told The Epoch Times.
“They target a small group of people for persecution so as to scare off the rest,” Wang said. “It’s an act of survival.”
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said that since the CCP is an adversary, the United States “should have increased scrutiny on all their activities and with the mindset that they would do these things purposefully.”
“We can’t have our adversaries using our systems, our administrative systems ... to violate people’s basic civil and human rights,” Perry said.
Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) voiced a similar view.
“The United States needs to use diplomatic and economic policy to help promote civil liberties and protect minorities in China,” Soto told The Epoch Times.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said that there are real consequences if the United States allows the operations to go unchecked.
“Giving them the opportunity to have immunity to attack people in American soil or international soil legitimizes what they’re doing,” she told The Epoch Times.
“That’s the most dangerous part.”
