The Neighbourhood Committee: the Chinese Communist Party's Organisational Tool Against Chinese Citizens

The most basic social organisational unit in Mainland China under the direct control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the Neighbourhood Committee, something which is set up in every street and small alley.

By reviewing the neighbourhood committee's history, one can discover that this odd and annoying organisation is closely attached to the CCP. The neighbourhood committees are always involved in each and every evil, Party-created national disaster. The committee wears the mask of "legitimacy" and "caring," when it is actually an evil agency. It spies on and monitors every resident's family and their personal life, trying to even get into their thoughts; it enforces and implements all anti-humanitarian and anti-human rights policies, down to society's smallest unit. It acts as the evil party's long-reaching hand, extending into people's lives.

After the CCP took over the government, in order to further control people's thoughts, it set up the so-called Neighbourhood Committee in the 1950s. Its members were one or two retired individuals whom the Party trusted--primarily women. They were given a one or two-room office. These trustees acted as mediators of domestic or neighbourhood conflicts, going from family to family, learning each household's situation and opinions. They would set up some families as monitoring targets and report the collected information to the Party's upper level administration department. They also arranged for a set of families to monitor another set of families, to build suspicion between these families, thus enabling them to collect more private information. During the "three-anti's," the "five-anti's," "the anti-right" and the "Great Leap Forward" political movements, the CCP Committee secretaries at various levels working for the Party personally directed the neighbourhood committee's work, issued the Party's instructions, placed certain families under even stricter monitoring, and frequently escalated harassment by going into these families' homes. Those residents who had originally thought the neighbourhood committee would truly help people, gradually realised the real face of it. They all said that the old women from the neighbourhood committee were there to get people in trouble.

In the 60s, with the Party's vigorous support, the neighbourhood committee became even more aggressive, publicly hanging up "So-and-so area Neighbourhood-Committee" signs and in the meantime strengthening the evil Party's control. They arranged for a retired worker or a retired soldier from the armed services as the appointed committee head. The number of members also expanded to three or four people who were assigned tasks according to thought, women's issues, mediation and other issues. They set up individual responsibilities and centralised leadership, strictly monitoring each family household and each individual.

During the "Big Starvation" of the 60s, the "Four Clean-ups," and the "Great Cultural Revolution" created by the CCP, as a means of more stringent control over the people, it declared that the neighbourhood committee was a grassroots-level leadership organisation with a certain administrative authority. This laid down further ground rules for regulations against human rights. From that time on, the CCP hooked up telephones for the committees, and sent them official documents and newspapers. Whenever these committee pawns discovered anything they believed "not safe," they could get an immediate phone line to the police, and in just a few moments agents from the police station would arrive.

In the 70s, the CCP summarised a set of torture methods from the chaotic "Cultural Revolution." It put these virulent methods in effect through the neighbourhood committee's administration, governed the neighbourhood by registering each resident in the registration book, synchronised with the one in the local police station. Whoever they thought belonged to an "alien element," a "dangerous element," or someone who did not follow their decrees, they would contact the local police, who would send such people for brainwashing. They even put people directly into forced labour camps through "the reform-through-labour" provisions. This is the Party's acclaimed, so-called intimate organisation -- the Neighbourhood Committee, which should actually be called The Committee of Evil.

The persecution of citizens during the students' movement at the end of the 80s caused thousands of families to lose family members, and the wound is still unable to heal. The CCP again developed a further utilisation of the neighbourhood committee. The neighbourhood committees oversaw the monitoring of those parents who lost their offspring in the movement. They are still doing this monitoring, even now. They know these families' circumstances and their thinking quite well. At the slightest sign of any "trouble," the neighbourhood committee directly reports it to the Party. This is no doubt heaping additional misfortune on these suffering families. The neighbourhood committee was given instructions and authority from the Party to question those college faculty members who had some involvement with the democracy movement of 1989. The committee acted in the evil role of harassing and harming the people.

In the 90s, the neighbourhood committee evolved into an accomplice organisation, linking the police station, the patrol security guard office and the city law enforcement office. The Party provided advanced communication equipment for the neighbourhood committee and provided three to five police cars of various kinds. By recruiting PhD, graduate students and undergraduate students to join the committee, the rulers are attempting to give dignity and status to this organisation. Their tactics for harming people became more covert and sophisticated. For example, one neighbourhood committee colluded with the city administration to collect so-called protection money from small merchants. When they meet with protests, the committee members have the support of an organised crime group. People may feel indignant but they dare not speak out. From another point of view, Chinese residents experienced most personally the Party's cruelty at the hands of the neighbourhood committee's corrupt conduct; thus they experienced the deepest ingrained evil nature of the Party.

In one incident in particular, the neighbourhood committee fully manifested its role as a low-life, evildoing organisation. That was on July 20th, 1999 when the Party made use of a fabricated story, defaming, slandering and discriminating against Falun Gong and launched the most brutal persecution. Falun Gong had merely introduced the principles of Truth-Compassion-Forbearance to people. But the neighbourhood committee began keeping books, recording all the practitioners in its area. They kept track of practitioners for a long time, tailed them closely, tapped their telephones, participated in the search of practitioners' homes, and even assisted with illegal arrests, sending people to forced labour camps, handing out unlawful criminal sentences, and other despicable acts. The neighbourhood committee spread the lies about Falun Dafa in the immediate area, misleading the residents into cooperating with their persecution.

Having experienced deeply grievous experiences for over fifty years, people are now gradually re-examining the Party's theory of deceit and also awakening to the functions of one of the Party's elements -- the neighbourhood committee. Dafa practitioners' truth clarification, in particular, has clearly exposed the Party's evil nature. Looking back on either one's own or another family's years of painful experiences at the hands of the CCP makes one thing explicitly clear -- the CCP has committed countless crimes during its numerous political movements, even going so far as to dare to go against Falun Dafa, the universal Law. The Party's extremely arrogant, egocentric and metamorphic evil spectre will be surely eliminated and all its accomplices will be heavily punished!