Introduction

For more than fifty years, the Chinese communist regime has had its way in destroying people.s wills and crushing non-conforming groups through terror and deceit; it had never failed at any previous persecution. The continuing appeals by Falun Gong practitioners in Tiananmen Square, and the insistence on the right to practice by millions upon millions around the nation, made it clear that Falun Gong practitioners will not yield to the persecution. Embarrassed and enraged, Jiang, the formal China.s president, instructed through the "610 Office" system that "No measure is too excessive against Falun Gong," ordering the use of extreme torture. As the persecution continued to meet practitioners. peaceful resistance, Jiang.s personal crusade became a personal vendetta.

Since July 20, 1999, from information that has leaked through the tight control of the Chinese government, we know that millions of people have suffered arbitrary incarceration, almost all under inhumane conditions; hundreds of thousands, including pregnant women, the elderly, and young children, have been put into labor camps; thousands have been detained and severely tortured with nerve-damaging drugs in mental hospitals. Thousands have died in custody, while countless others are still unaccounted for. The scope and severity of the atrocities are difficult to fathom.

The worst atrocities are usually those of genocide. Genocidal killings are done to physically eliminate a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, and so they generally result in a large number of deaths.

The persecution of Falun Gong by Jiang Zemin and his "610 Office" system uses a different kind, arguably a worse kind, of killing: the killing of people.s minds. Its goal is not to physically kill a large number of people, although the death toll is of no concern to the murderers. The purpose is to force a victim to choose between a physical death and a mental demise - the giving up of his will, his fundamental values, and his conscience.

Torturing to the brink of death, therefore, is a necessary ingredient of this kind of killing. The Chinese police have openly told Falun Gong practitioners: "We will make you beg for life while dying, and beg for death while living!" The only way out? To lie and say that Falun Gong has done harm to them and to society, to say Truth-Benevolence-Forbearance is evil, and to thank and applaud the government for saving them from Falun Gong. Tell lies to live, or tell the truth and die.

Due to the Chinese government.s blockage of information, we do not know how many practitioners have been tortured to death in police custody. From the reports describing over 1,300 deaths of practitioners in the hands of the police, we see an almost unimaginable picture of tragedy: some died from their bodies being ripped apart by slowly pulling the limbs; some died after being locked in "water cages" and immersed in filthy water for months; some died from prolonged electric baton shocks on or in their genitals; some were frozen to death; some were burned alive. In extreme cases, an eight-month-old infant was killed with his mother, a 75-year-old grandmother was murdered, and a disabled man with a hunched back was killed when police forcefully "flattened out" his torso.

In addition to external injuries, the police also inflict internal pain through horrific force-feeding. These torturous force-feedings are not at all meant to nourish, but to cause excruciating internal pain. Policemen, guards, or convicts who are ordered to do so will jam a firm plastic tube into the victim.s nose and force it down to the stomach; sometimes it enters the lungs instead. The tube is often pulled out and re-inserted several times, causing internal bleeding. Boiling water, urine, feces, hot pepper oil, concentrated vinegar, mustard paste, and other irritating liquids are then poured through the tube. Of the known cases of killings of Falun Gong practitioners, this is by far the number one cause of death.

The mass killings of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese authorities have been reported by many journalists and human rights organizations. For example, in a Wall Street Journal report on December 26, 2000, Mr. Ian Johnson (who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his series of reports on the persecution of Falun Gong) wrote:

"WEIFANG, China - Rising out of the North China Plain... this is an unremarkable Chinese city in every respect but one: local police regularly torture residents to death. Since the beginning of the year, when police killed a 58-year-old retiree, at least 10 more Weifang residents have died in police custody. Weifang, which has less than 1% of the national population, accounts for 15% of those deaths."

Since Mr. Johnson.s report, at least twenty-one additional Falun Gong practitioners have died at the hands of the Weifang police.

It is important to note that the killings carried out in PRC.s persecution against Falun Gong aim only to demolish the minds and consciences of the victims, but they also result in the moral destruction of the torturers. Deceived by the hate propaganda, driven by government instruction, encouraged by promises of impunity, and enticed by financial rewards, police carry on torture and killing completely devoid of humanity, as some openly yelled at Falun Gong practitioners, "We are reincarnated little devils from hell, and we.ll beat you into hell as well."

It is a killing of conscience, indeed.