Internal Communist Party Documents Disclose New Campaign to Forcibly "Transform" Millions of Falun Gong Practitioners in China

New York—A series of internal Communist Party documents, some of them posted online, reveal the details of a new three-year, multi-billion dollar campaign targeting Falun Gong practitioners across China.

The campaign’s stated goal is to “transform” 75 percent of all known practitioners, who number in the tens of millions despite eleven years of brutal suppression. Specifically, the campaign calls upon security forces to go into “villages and households” to “educate and conquer” Falun Gong practitioners.

Transformation—a euphemism for forcing practitioners to renounce Falun Gong and pledge allegiance to the Communist Party—has been at the core of the anti-Falun Gong campaign since its inception. As part of the transformation process, individuals are typically subjected to physical and psychological torture.

“What these documents call for is a campaign of surveillance, extralegal abductions, physical torture, and psychological abuse on a massive scale,” says Falun Gong spokesman Erping Zhang. “The scenes playing out across China could be taken right out of Orwell’s 1984.”

“When Chinese authorities talk of ‘transforming’ Falun Gong practitioners, what they mean is torturing out of people the aspiration to be honest, kind, and tolerant. They torment healthy, rational people to the point where the victim either betrays his or her most deeply held beliefs and completely submits to the will of the Communist Party, dies from abuse, or is driven to the edge of sanity. They push practitioners to the point where life is a living hell.”

The Falun Dafa Information Center has obtained eight documents from various localities describing a campaign to intensify efforts to transform Falun Gong practitioners from 2010 to 2012. Seven of the documents are available online, while the eighth was obtained from an internal source whose identity and location cannot be revealed for fear of retribution.

Based on details in the documents, the campaign is a multi-billion dollar initiative. On one webpage from Xinglong township in Sichuan province, the instructions call for an increase in funding for transformation efforts. The document states that “to transform one Falun Gong person costs on average 45,000 yuan [$6,750] nationwide, 40,900 yuan in Sichuan provice, [and] in my township, 39,000 yuan.” Given that Falun Gong practitioners in China number from 20 to 40 million (demographics), the total cost reaches tens of billions of dollars.

Although all eight documents are from the level of county or below, there is little doubt that the instructions originated at the top echelons of the Communist Party. One document explicitly states that the campaign was initiated by the central 6-10 Office, an extralegal security force that has led the persecution of Falun Gong since 1999. In addition, identical wording is evident among the documents, as are references to campaign performance being a criteria for evaluation at the end of the year. Both are elements typical of high-level instructions implemented down the ranks of the Party apparatus.

“Beyond the revelations they provide on the latest danger facing Falun Gong practitioners in China, these internal documents dispel—in the Communist Party’s own words—the common misconception that Falun Gong has been crushed,” says Zhang.

“After all, if the Party had succeeded in eliminating the group, as it often claims publicly, why would it need to invest billions of dollars in a three-year campaign to strengthen the ‘battle’ against Falun Gong?”