My Personal Experience with a Media Farce

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began its persecution of Falun Gong on July 20th, 1999, and I went to the Beijing State Appeals Office two days later to appeal for justice. At their request, I provided the office clerk my personal information and finished filling out a form. The person handling my form told me the office staff were actually police agents, waiting to arrest Falun Gong practitioners. Whenever they got enough to fill up a bus, they would take them to a forced labour camp. That evening, a few policemen from the Yantai City Police Department in Shandong Province came to the Appeals Office. Sitting between two policemen in the rear of a car, I was escorted to the Yantai City Liaison Office in Beijing and then taken back to Yantai.

The Head of the Zhifu District Communist Party Committee in Yantai City at the time was Wei Xiutian. He urged Zhifu District Procuratorate officials to imprison me in a small meeting room on the second floor in their building. Former co-workers from my place of employment monitored my every single movement 24 hours a day. They would not even let me close the toilet door when I needed to use it.

The Procuratorate agents were violating the law by imprisoning me. The head of my work unit extorted money from my family. My family had to pay for my captors' food and expenses. Furthermore, the same person also asked my family members to renovate his house for him.

I had no freedom at all. Except when eating or in the toilet, I was barraged with TV programmes, and had to read lie-filled newspapers and books. Several people took turns to talk to me to keep me from sleeping.

Zang Guozhang from the Anti-Corruption Bureau had several of his people take turns to talk to me in the evenings. They threatened me and insinuated that unless I wrote statements denouncing Falun Gong, my job and family would be affected. A few days later, feeling dizzy and tired, I was unable to think clearly.

The state media's propaganda slandering Falun Gong was everywhere, all the time. It felt as if the Cultural Revolution had returned. Not daring to blame the CCP, my family members could do nothing but shed tears for me in private.

Deception is a tactic that the CCP is very practised at. CCP officials told Falun Gong practitioners to write false statements to denounce Falun Gong so that they could close the case. Once someone turns in a damaging statement, they will use it to deceive other practitioners, claiming, "Now that the others have been reformed, you are the only one left." They create false impressions, as if you were the only one in the world who still practised Falun Gong, and 1.3 billion Chinese were suppressing you.

The constant threats from the CCP regime and their brainwashing momentarily confused me, and I wrote a guarantee statement to give up Falun Gong. After that, I played with words and wrote a "statement of repentance" and "statement of exposure," hoping they would let me get away after I signed such statements.

After I signed the statements, however, I was still detained. Chief Procurator Zhang Xueen told me that I had affected his possible future promotion opportunities, and that I should talk to the media to restore my work unit's reputation. Thinking that I could explain the facts about Falun Gong to the journalists, I agreed.

Journalists from the following media came to interview me: Yantai Daily, Yantai Evening News, Modern Scientific Living, the Yantai TV Station, Dazhong Daily and the Yantai Radio Station. I told them truthfully that I became a good person because I practise Falun Gong; that Falun Gong is good, but the regime forbids people to practise Falun Gong. I also repeatedly told them that I hoped they would honestly report what I told them. None of them gave me copies of their reports afterwards.

Zhang Xueen told my family that they should make a banner for him to show their appreciation for him if they wanted me to be released early. My work place also sent journalists from Modern Scientific Living to take pictures when my family members were presenting Zhang Xueen with the banner. They lied to the public viewers and said that Zhang had "rescued" Falun Gong practitioners, and that was why practitioners' family members presented him with banners to show their appreciation.

Then journalists from the Dazhong Daily and The People's Daily came to interview me. The People's Daily journalist asked me questions as if he were interrogating a criminal.

He slandered Teacher Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong and ordered me repeatedly to agree. I would just say, "No! My Teacher is not that kind of person." He repeatedly used profanity and demanded that I give him the answers he wanted. Realizing that he did not want to listen to the facts about Falun Gong, I firmly refused and told him, "If you're here to interview me, then listen to me. However, if you simply intend to repeat government propaganda and then force me to agree with it, you are not interviewing me at all. This shows that you do not want to know the truth. Then why don't you go home and fabricate the interview without me? Why do you have to say so-and-so said this? Do you still have professional ethics? Does this fit with the mission of a government media representative?" When he heard this, he became extremely irritated. After pounding the table and yelling at me, he left.

Zhang Xueen reprimanded me afterwards. He had meant to have that journalist write an article for him and publish it in The People's Daily, and said that I had ruined his wish. From then on I refused to talk to any journalists.

One of my colleagues came to the office where I was detained and told me that I was in the newspaper. He showed me the article in Modern Scientific Living that said how the regime had reformed me, etc. It also said that I "attacked" Falun Gong. The truth was, when they interviewed me, I kept telling them that Falun Gong told us to follow Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, and that I was a beneficiary, not a victim. The article was a complete fabrication, and the truth was distorted. Other newspaper articles, including the one on Yantai Daily, were also fabricated. I was not surprised to learn that the Yantai TV Station and radio station programmes were no better.

Infuriated, I asked Zhang Xueen to correct the false local media reports. He said, "It is a political requirement. It's impossible to do that." I then realized I had been used.

I was released in August 1999, after 20 days of detention. At home I was told that the local officials and media had widely disseminated false information about me. Because of that I resigned from my job.

After that I repeatedly wrote to the local media, demanding that they correct the lies. In October 1999, I was once again detained for more than 10 days. In May 2000, I went to Beijing to appeal one more time.

In the years that followed, I have been detained a total five times.

Even though this happened several years ago, I feel guilty about what I did. This article intends to warn those who have helped fabricate lies: Everything we do has a consequence and is being recorded.

The persecution of Falun Gong has made a victim of every ordinary Chinese citizen, as the CCP is quite skilled at making people fight each other. I hope that those who are still confused can see the evil nature of the CCP and withdraw from it and its affiliated organizations.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2009/7/18/204693.html