The Dog Meows: Zhou Yongkang Swears Human Rights Protection in His Law Enforcement

Zhou Yongkang, one of the members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)— particularly known as one of the masterminds behind the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong—has committed enormous crimes against humanity in the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. Due to the notorious role he has played he has been become quite infamous. He recently stirred quite a public satire when he talked about respecting human rights in law enforcement under his supervision. In a seminar toasting the enforcement of the China's lately amended criminal law, Zhou showed up and addressed the issue of human rights, emphasizing that all levels of the Politics and Law Committee in China should respect human rights while dealing with criminals. Well known for his thuggery and gross human rights violations, Zhou's utterances about respecting human rights were naturally ridiculed by the public.

Being the commander of the CCP's Politics and Law Committee, which controls all of China's police, courts and procuratorates, Zhou is ranked as the worst human rights violator of high position who is currently in power. No doubt, he is the number one person to be held accountable for the ever worsening corruption of China's judiciary system. Much of the deterioration of China's society can be traced back to the deterioration of China's judiciary, which is under Zhou's command. He is the authentic big brother of the gangsters which he claims to strike.

In his position, Zhou never spared any efforts in subverting the human rights of the Chinese people. According to a news report on Minghui.org on May 29, 2012, in early April 2011 he travelled to Wuhan City, Hebei Province. Fifteen days later, dozens of Falun Gong practitioners from Wuhan City were arrested, seven of whom were accused of organizing Falun Gong activities. These cases were so intentionally fabricated, they even failed to convince the CCP's prosecutors from Wuhan City, and were rejected many times because of “insufficient evidence.”

On December 19, 2011, the 610 Office of Wuhan City, harbouring a malicious intention to incriminate the practitioners, forced the procuratorate of Wuchang District to merge the cases of the seven Falun Gong practitioners into a single one and prosecute them altogether as a major case. However, due to the fabricated nature and illegitimacy of the evidence, the trial was postponed indefinitely. In April 2012, Zhou again came to Hubei Province. On May 19, enlisting the case as a major one, the court put the practitioners on trial without any legal basis. On the day of the trial all people who passed by the court were stopped and asked if they were Falun Gong practitioners. Even those who answered “no” had their bags opened and searched and were forced to verbally abuse Falun Dafa and its founder to show that they were truly not Falun Gong practitioners. According to the latest information, eight practitioners were arrested.

Zhou's visits to any cities in China are followed by an intensification of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. In the People's Congress, held in Beijing in March 2012, he showed no reservation in his support of Bo Xilai, another CCP high official whose hands are soaked with the blood of Falun Gong practitioners. In his position as the mayor of the Dalian City, Liaoning Province, Bo gave the local police specific commands: “Show no mercy in your striking Falun Gong and making them suffer.” It is widely believed that it is precisely Bo's cruelty in persecuting Falun Gong that convinced Zhou of his plan to choose Bo as his successor as the general secretary of Central Politics and Law Committee (CPLC) next year.

In his position as the general secretary of the CPLC, Zhou became the highest CCP official to break the law in his law enforcement. Mr. Gao Zhisheng, a well known human rights lawyer, has been held prisoner for years without any legitimate reason merely because he had written three times to the CCP's top authorities about the Falun Gong issue. The CPLC even organized an expert panel which specialized in persecuting Mr. Gao. Mr. Lü Jiaping, a researcher on the history of the Second World War, was sentenced to 10 years in prison without trial because of his work that revealed Jiang Zemin's infamous personal history as a spy for Japan and Russia during the Japanese occupation of China in the Second World War. Another well known case is that of Mr. Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer who defended victims of China's one-child policy, and in doing so ran afoul of the CPLC. The CPLC paid more than 60 million yuan each year for Mr. Chen's home arrest.

For Zhou's cruelty in persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, complaints against him were lodged on numerous occasions by overseas Falun Gong practitioners when he went abroad for visits. The exposure of the CCP's organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners further put him under a spotlight on a world wide stage as the mastermind of this unprecedented atrocity.

It is truly ironic that a man who specialized in trampling human rights swears he has been upholding human rights. One explanation for such an anomaly might be that he had found it absolutely necessary to do so, because he knew his human rights violations had finally become widely known.

Another reason for his doing so might be his realization that a final judgement is to be made against him. Due to Bo Xilai's fall, which signalled the collapse of the Jiang faction's struggle for supreme power, Zhou might have thought that by endorsing human rights he might save himself from his desperate end.

Zhou's address on human rights conforms to the ways of the CCP, whose deeds always defy its stated goals. Under its mask of respecting human rights, the CCP harbours the malicious intention of even more severe human rights violations. Like Jiang Zemin did to Falun Gong: While signalling his exact order “to beat Falun Gong practitioners to death” and “those who are beaten to death will be counted as suicide,” he claimed to the world “China is in a time when human rights are respected with a sincerity unprecedented in Chinese history.”

Zhou's promises to protect human rights is the exact opposite of his actions—especially with respect to Falun Gong practitioners.