In China, Millions Targeted for Brainwashing

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is rolling out a new campaign that seeks to forcibly “transform” [forcibly renounce Falun Gong] the minds of Falun Gong believers in China. It will go for three years, involve millions of people, and cost billions of dollars, according to Party documents available online and a recent analysis by a Falun Gong human rights group.

In July 1999 then-paramount leader Jiang Zemin promised to “eradicate” Falun Gong and this brainwashing campaign is the latest attempt by the CCP to make good on his threat. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a traditional Chinese spiritual discipline that consists of the practice of five meditative exercises and the study of moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.

Seventy-five per cent of the known practitioners of Falun Gong are being targeted in the new campaign, according to the CCP documents.

Estimating how many individuals are now at risk is not a simple matter. The CCP’s numbers aren’t credible and the persecution of Falun Gong obstructs any attempt to survey the practitioners active in China.

The Falun Dafa Information Centre, which broke the news of the campaign in English on October 25th, estimates that there are between 20 to 40 million practitioners active in China.

This estimate is based on the knowledge of the grassroots network that practitioners rely on to exchange information. The practitioners in China depend on what they call “material sites” to create literature that helps to explain to their fellow Chinese what Falun Gong is, how it is persecuted by the CCP, and why that persecution is illegal and wrong.

Each of these material sites, which are usually in a private home and may be little more than a computer, a printer, and a copier, typically serves between 100 and 200 practitioners. According to the Information Centre, there are 200,000 such sites in China, which leads to the estimate of between 20 and 40 million active practitioners.

The campaign targets 75 per cent of known practitioners, but how many of the active practitioners are known to the authorities is itself unknown. If the 75 per cent target is applied to the total population of practitioners, then tens of millions are at risk of being brainwashed over the next three years.

Penetrating Society

The campaign appears to come from the top of the Party and penetrate to the lowest rung of Chinese society. Of the eight documents that the Information Centre analyzed, all bar one were from small townships—including one from even a local water resource bureau. The eighth document came from inside the Party apparatus, the Information Centre said.

“Under the guidance of experts in re-education and transformation,” one of the documents reads, Party cadres are instructed to “go into different villages and households to educate and conquer those challenging individuals.”

The original circulars are full of blustery communist tropes, including the need to “educate, transform, and conquer key targets to solidify the overall battle,” “explore new methods in conducting the special political and thought work,” “educate scientifically” the captured practitioners, and “promote the transformed members in their return to normal life in the society, and consolidate and enlarge the war victory.”

The last slogan refers to state propaganda whereby “transformed” individuals are paraded on television or radio shows, denouncing Falun Gong.

Like a military battle plan, specific metrics are given for the various objectives: a transformation rate of 75 per cent, a “relapse” rate of no more than 6 per cent, and key tasks for each stage of the campaign, year on year.

In 2010 the CCP aims to “unify thoughts… devise plans… perfect facilities,” in 2011 it is to “further implement and strengthen the work of education, transformation, and conquer key targets,” and in 2012 to “deepen education and transformation work… reach a transformation rate of no lower than 10 per cent based on the 2009 figure.”

Communist Party administrators should “force them to attend the seminars, and strongly implement a combination of education and interrogation, and transform them so as to uproot them.”

At the end of the third year, bonuses will be doled out to the most zealous brainwashers.

Previous Campaigns

The campaign bears many similarities to previous thought-reform campaigns waged by the CCP, according to experts.

“The format and style of this notice are just like from the old days,” said Zhong Weiguang, a Chinese dissident and scholar of totalitarianism now living in Germany, in a telephone interview. “Just change ‘educate and transform’ to ‘thought reform,’ or take out the 2010-2012 part and the words ‘Falun Gong’, and no one would know what year it was from.”

Zhong also noted that the campaign is basically illegal under Chinese law. “When people break the law, courts should deal with it. What gives the government the right to capture people and forcibly change their thoughts? This is not what happens in a normal society, it’s distorted,” he said.

The document from Laodian Township in Henan Province speaks of the need to “Impart the socialist core value system into the entire process of re-education and transformation work.”

“When [the Party] makes breakthroughs in conquering the challenging groups,” it must “help the target to establish a new outlook while destroying his/her old philosophy.” In this manner, the document says, cadres will “avoid the problem that the person being transformed is left with a blank mind after transformation and needs another round of re-education.”

For Falun Gong spokesman Erping Zhang, quoted in the Information Centre’s press release, “the scenes playing out across China could be taken right out of Orwell’s ‘1984.’”

‘Blunter and Harsher’

But while the rhetoric may be similar to campaigns 60 years ago, the techniques have become blunter and harsher, according to Cheng Xiaonong, former advisor to ousted premier Zhao Ziyang and, later, chief editor of Modern China Studies.

“It’s a forced change of mind by violation and repression. They don’t use as much of the indoctrination or communist ideology that was used in the thought reform campaigns before,” he said. “In other words, thought reform or thought indoctrination took place outside prison, but this ‘transformation’ takes place inside prison. That’s the main difference.”

The Information Centre’s release notes cases in which practitioners have died from abuse within days of being detained in a brainwashing center. According to the Information Centre, tens of thousands of practitioners are feared to have been killed during the persecution overall.

Another notable aspect of the campaign is the sheer amount of money that is being poured into it. The document says that the cost of transforming one Falun Gong practitioner reaches up to US$6,750. The total costs of the campaign will run into the billions of dollars.

Professor Scott Lowe, Professor and Chair of the department of philosophy and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, notes that the Party spent a “freaking fortune” going after practitioners between 1999 and 2005, and that “it's hard to believe that they've got that much money to waste a second time.”

Drawing a parallel from an earlier era, he suggests “this might be more like the endless campaigns of the late '50s and early '60s, where the ‘class enemies’ coming under repeated attack were more or less the same people every time... the state might simply be rounding up the ‘usual suspects,’ for a second, third, fourth round of abuse,” he wrote in an email exchange.

Fundamental Challenge

The apparently massive investments of money and manpower are being mobilized because of the Party’s ideological weakness, according to Zhong and Cheng.

“People who have lived under Chinese communism know this: the influence of Falun Gong on Chinese society has been big, and that’s the only real reason they would do this, and go to so much effort to do this,” Zhong said.

Cheng Xiaonong suggests that the CCP must still be perturbed by the perceived threat that Falun Gong poses to the Party on a fundamental level. “The Falun Gong movement spread so quickly in China and it had once about 100 million believers. It took place during a period when real believers in communist ideology had dramatically decreased in China.”

He says that while the regime no longer focuses on complete ideological dominance of the population, Falun Gong’s influence was still problematic from the perspective of a quasi-totalitarian government.

“Actually, Zhen Shan Ren, the core idea of Falun Gong, is perceived by the Chinese regime as a challenge to its ideology, because the Communist Party does not tell the truth, is not kind, and is actually quite terrible,” Cheng said, referring to the Falun Gong tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. “Therefore, the more people talk about Zhen Shan Ren, the more the government believes it’s a challenge and criticism of Communist Party political rule.”

For Zhong, the mere existence of the campaign circulars indicates that the Party’s attempt to eradicate Falun Gong has fallen short of success. Hannah Arendt once wrote that a Communist Party always focuses its propaganda at its weakest points, Zhong said. “They do this because their persecution of Falun Gong has failed.”