EndCCPWorld.com

Jiang Zemin (1926–2022)

Handpicked by Deng Xiaoping as successor after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Jiang served as the CCP's supreme leader from 1989 to 2002. His defining crime was the all-out crackdown on Falun Gong launched in 1999 — creating the extralegal "610 Office," leading to mass arbitrary detention, labor camps, torture, and the widely disputed allegations of forced organ harvesting. This page documents the causes, course, and consequences of his repression.

Lifespan

August 17, 1926 (Yangzhou, Jiangsu) – November 30, 2022 (Shanghai)

In power

June 1989 – November 2002 (13 years); continued to wield power as CMC chairman until 2004

Positions

General Secretary of the CCP, President of China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission

Key crimes

Crackdown on Falun Gong (1999–, created the 610 Office); continued post-Tiananmen high-pressure rule; suppression of dissidents and independent unions

1. Accidental rise: from Shanghai to Zhongnanhai

Jiang Zemin was born in 1926 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, joined the CCP in 1946, and spent his career in industry. He became mayor of Shanghai in 1985 and Party secretary in 1987. During the 1989 Tiananmen crisis, he won Deng Xiaoping's favor by decisively handling the World Economic Herald incident in Shanghai (rectifying the paper and removing its editor-in-chief Qin Benli).

On June 24, 1989, at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 13th Central Committee, Jiang was elected General Secretary. He was 63, with shallow Party seniority — his elevation was purely because he was "obedient." Deng needed someone who would not reverse the Tiananmen verdict and would crush dissent without hesitation. Jiang understood perfectly: his first act in office was to declare "stability overrides everything."

Unlike Mao and Deng, Jiang had neither revolutionary credentials nor a military base. His power derived entirely from Deng's designation and the "core" status conferred on him in the 1990s (official propaganda began calling him the "core of the third-generation leadership"). This congenital weakness made him hypersensitive to any force that might threaten his position — which set the stage for the 1999 Falun Gong crackdown.

Sources: Robert Lawrence Kuhn, The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin; Wu Guoguang on Chinese politics in the Jiang era; Selected Works of Jiang Zemin.

2. Post-Tiananmen control: high pressure continued

After taking office, Jiang continued the high-pressure policies of the post-Tiananmen crackdown. In the early 1990s, large numbers of dissidents were sentenced: Wang Dan (arrested 1989, sentenced to 4 years), Liu Xiaobo (arrested 1989, later imprisoned repeatedly), Wei Jingsheng (re-arrested 1993, sentenced to 14 years). Independent unions, underground churches, and house churches were all suppressed.

After Deng's 1992 Southern Tour, economic reform restarted, but there was zero political loosening. Jiang proposed the "Three Represents" (2000), trying to find new legitimacy for CCP rule — but it was old wine in new bottles: the Party still monopolized all power, and any organized opposition was treated as "subversion."

In the late 1990s, China saw mass protests by laid-off workers (tens of millions laid off during the 1997–2000 SOE reforms). The Jiang government's response: "re-employment projects" as soothing rhetoric, combined with ruthless suppression of organized worker protests. Demonstrations in Liaoning, Heilongjiang and elsewhere were dispersed by armed police; organizers were sentenced.

Sources: Wu Guoguang on Jiang-era politics; Zhang Boshu on 30 years of Chinese reform; China Labour Bulletin reports.

3. Crushing Falun Gong (1999–): the 610 Office

Causes: Falun Gong, a qigong movement founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992, had a huge following by the late 1990s (official estimates once put practitioners at 70 million; Falun Gong sources claimed over 100 million). On April 25, 1999, more than 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered near Zhongnanhai in Beijing to petition — demanding the release of practitioners detained by Tianjin police and a legal environment for practice. The "April 25 appeal" was peaceful and orderly, but its scale shocked Zhongnanhai.

Jiang was furious. According to the Selected Works of Jiang Zemin and multiple recollections, on the night of April 25 he wrote to the Politburo calling Falun Gong an "organized political force with a program" that "must be firmly opposed." At the time, Standing Committee members including Zhu Rongji and Li Ruihuan favored a "cooling" approach — but Jiang insisted on crushing it.

The decision: On June 10, 1999, the CCP Central Committee established the "Leading Group for Handling the Falun Gong Issue," with an office underneath — known as the "610 Office" after its founding date. This was a completely extralegal body, unconstrained by any law, reporting directly to Jiang. On July 20, mass arrests began nationwide; Falun Gong was labeled an "evil cult" (the NPC Standing Committee passed the Decision on Banning Cult Organizations in October 1999).

Methods: Under 610 Office command, the crackdown included: mass arrests (according to Minghui.org, hundreds of thousands of practitioners were sent to labor camps between 1999 and 2005), forced "transformation" (brainwashing classes), torture (electric batons, tiger benches, force-feeding), and psychiatric detention. Labor camps in Beijing, Tianjin, Liaoning, Shandong and elsewhere overflowed.

Scale of persecution (competing estimates):

Sources: Human Rights Watch reports on the Falun Gong crackdown; Amnesty International annual reports; Minghui.org case database; U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports on China (2000–2005).

4. Labor camps, torture, and organ-harvesting allegations

Jiang-era repression relied heavily on the "re-education through labor" (laojiao) system. Laojiao required no court trial — public security organs could directly send people to labor camps for 1–3 years. Before laojiao was abolished in 2013, the system held up to 300,000 detainees at its peak, with Falun Gong practitioners making up a large share from 1999 onward.

On torture, large numbers of escaped practitioners testified to electric shocks, the "dead person's bed," prolonged standing, and sleep deprivation in labor camps and brainwashing classes. These accounts have been cross-verified by human rights organizations.

Most controversial are the forced organ harvesting allegations. In 2006, Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas and former Asia-Pacific director David Kilgour published a report alleging that China was harvesting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners. In 2019, the London-based "China Tribunal" ruled that forced organ harvesting had taken place "on a massive scale" in China. Beijing flatly denies this, saying organs came from executed prisoners (and since 2015, claims it stopped using prisoner organs).

Sources: Matas & Kilgour, Bloody Harvest (2006, revised 2007); China Tribunal judgment (June 2019); Human Rights Watch and Amnesty reports; Chinese government responses.

5. How it worked: the power of the "core"

Jiang's power base differed from both Mao's and Deng's. With neither revolutionary credentials nor a military foundation, he relied entirely on his "core" status and Deng's dying instructions. This congenital weakness gave his rule two hallmarks:

First, "stability above all." Because his power came illegitimately (rising after Tiananmen), he feared "instability" more than anyone. The 1999 Falun Gong crackdown was largely driven by this fear — a peaceful appeal by ten thousand people looked, to him, like a political threat.

Second, "get rich quietly." The Jiang era was China's high-growth period — and the period when corruption fully exploded. His son Jiang Mianheng, dubbed "China's No. 1 princeling," controlled telecoms, aviation, and other key sectors. This fusion of power and capital laid the foundation for the crony capitalism that followed.

In 2002, Jiang handed over the General Secretary and Presidency posts as required — but clung to the CMC chairmanship until 2004, "ruling from behind" for two more years. This foot-dragging set a terrible precedent (later imitated by Xi Jinping and taken to extremes).

Sources: Wu Guoguang on Jiang-era politics; David Shambaugh, China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation; Selected Works of Jiang Zemin.

6. Controversies

The official line ("core of the third generation"): The CCP credits Jiang with "holding high the great banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory" and "ensuring China's stability and development." When he died in 2022, he received a high-profile state funeral as an "outstanding leader." The official line says nothing about the Falun Gong crackdown; the 610 Office still exists (folded into the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission after 2018).

Liberal critics: They call Jiang a "mediocre dictator" — with neither Mao's theory nor Deng's nerve, whose only "achievement" was repression. Liu Xiaobo once quipped: "Jiang's greatest talent was turning China into an oversized Singapore — a bit of economic vitality, a political dead sea."

Falun Gong lawsuits: Falun Gong groups have sued Jiang in multiple countries for "genocide" and "torture." The cases never reached substantive trial (sovereign immunity and other barriers), but the lawsuits themselves form part of the historical record.

7. Historical impact

Jiang died on November 30, 2022, at 96. His greatest legacy is the perfection of the "stability maintenance" (weiwen) apparatus: the 610 Office, the state-security police, internet censorship (the "Great Firewall" began construction in 1998, under Jiang), and the suppression of NGOs — all inherited and expanded by Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.

The Falun Gong persecution has never ended. While mass laojiao declined after the system's abolition in 2013, "transformation" and criminal sentencing continue. Minghui.org still updates new persecution cases daily.

And the "get rich quietly" culture of the Jiang era — officials colluding with businessmen, power-seeking rents — became the breeding ground of Chinese corruption. When Xi Jinping launched his "anti-corruption" campaign, many of those felled were interest groups cultivated in the Jiang years. But that was power struggle dressed up as anti-corruption.

8. April 25 to July 22, 1999: Jiang's personal decision chain, day by day

Section 3 described the crackdown's machinery; this section completes the chain of personal decisions behind it. During the day on April 25, 1999, Premier Zhu Rongji met practitioner representatives at Zhongnanhai, and the Tianjin detainees were released — a negotiated exit existed. That evening Jiang Zemin, writing as General Secretary to the Politburo Standing Committee and other senior officials, framed Falun Gong as a question of the Party's hold on power and demanded the leadership's full attention. The letter was circulated as a Central Committee General Office document for study, and it set the internal line. Its contents are known through Jiang's later published writings, internal-document quotations, and compilations such as testimony before the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC); this page paraphrases them rather than quoting at length. On June 7, Jiang addressed a Politburo meeting, called the Falun Gong question the gravest development since the Party took power fifty years earlier, and ordered a Central Leading Group for Dealing with Falun Gong — Li Lanqing in charge, Luo Gan running it day to day — instructed to prepare the work of disintegrating the movement. The Jamestown Foundation's study of the 610 Office and the work of scholar James Tong both cite the internal text of that speech. On June 10 the leading group's office opened: the 610 Office. No law created it; no published charter defined its powers; it answered to the leading group and to Jiang.

The public launch was equally precise. On July 19 a Central Committee circular barred Party members from practicing Falun Gong. In the early hours of July 20, police across the country arrested local Falun Gong coordinators in a coordinated sweep; tens of thousands of practitioners who traveled to petition were held in stadiums, including Beijing's Fengtai and Shijingshan stadiums. On the afternoon of July 22, CCTV interrupted regular programming: the Ministry of Civil Affairs declared the Falun Dafa Research Society an unregistered, illegal organization and banned it, while the Ministry of Public Security issued six prohibitions covering Falun Gong symbols, books, group practice, and petitioning. From July 26, publications were confiscated and destroyed nationwide; period reporting put the toll at roughly two million books and recordings destroyed within a week. In October, visiting France, Jiang gave Falun Gong the "cult" label in an interview with Le Figaro; on October 30 the NPC Standing Committee adopted its decision on banning cult organizations, supplying a legal shell for the mass sentencing that followed. One famous phrase requires a caution label: the claim that Jiang demanded Falun Gong be eliminated "within three months" circulates in Falun Gong publications and some overseas reporting as an internal instruction, but this page found no publicly available official document containing it, so it is recorded here as a reported attribution (not independently verified). The intensity of the first three months — arrests, "transformation" classes, total media mobilization — is consistent with such a timetable, but consistency is not documentary proof.

Sources: Jamestown Foundation, "The 610 Office: Policing the Chinese Spirit"; CECC hearing testimony (Yiyang Xia, December 2012), compiling the circulation of the April 25 letter and June 7 speech; English Wikipedia, "History of Falun Gong" and "610 Office"; U.S. House Resolution 605 (2010), timeline recitals.

9. Shutting the World Economic Herald: the step onto the national stage

Section 1 noted that Deng chose Jiang after his handling of the World Economic Herald; the details matter, because they are the first documented repression in Jiang's own file. After Hu Yaobang's death in April 1989, the Shanghai weekly prepared a memorial issue carrying a roundtable assessment of Hu that praised him and touched on political reform. The Shanghai Party Committee, under Jiang and Zeng Qinghong, ruled the issue a serious breach of discipline. In late April the paper was ordered into rectification, a work team moved into its offices, editor-in-chief Qin Benli was suspended and then removed, and copies of the issue were recalled and destroyed. After months of struggle the Herald ceased publication in the summer of 1989 — the first nationally influential newspaper shut down in the 1989 crisis. Jiang's handling of Shanghai's streets supplied the other half of his audition: firm but without gunfire, including a personal appearance before students at Jiaotong University — the Gettysburg Address recitation retold in Robert Lawrence Kuhn's biography. Order returned to Shanghai relatively early, and no troops fired there. In Deng's calculus, the combination was decisive: hard enough on the press, controlled enough on the streets. On June 23–24, 1989, the Fourth Plenum of the 13th Central Committee removed Zhao Ziyang and elected Jiang General Secretary. The editorial-office rectification decision of April 1989 is thus the first checkable repression document in his record, predating every national decision that followed.

Sources: Kuhn, The Man Who Changed China; English Wikipedia, "World Economic Herald"; Wu Guoguang on Jiang-era politics.

10. Overseas litigation, in full: Spain, Argentina, and how the cases ended

Section 6 mentioned the lawsuits; this section records their procedure and their endings, keeping three legally distinct things separate: an allegation, an indictment, and an arrest warrant are not a conviction. By 2006, according to a count in the Journal of Political Risk, Falun Gong plaintiffs had filed at least 54 criminal and civil actions in 33 countries against Jiang and other senior officials, alleging torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Most stopped at jurisdiction or head-of-state immunity. Two jurisdictions produced judicial documents.

Spain (the Falun Gong case): suit was filed at the National Court in 2003 under Spain's universal-jurisdiction law. In November 2009, after a two-year investigation, Judge Ismael Moreno accepted genocide and torture charges against Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Bo Xilai, Jia Qinglin, and Wu Guanzheng and sent them rogatory letters — formal judicial questionnaires — with a deadline to respond. The practical consequence was narrow but real: had any of the five entered a country with an extradition arrangement with Spain, he risked detention for questioning. Beijing never replied, and the case never reached trial. Argentina went further on paper: on December 17, 2009, after roughly four years of investigation, Federal Judge Octavio de Lamadrid ordered the arrest of Jiang and Luo Gan on genocide and torture charges and asked Interpol to act. Reuters reported at the time that a lawyer for the plaintiffs acknowledged the order was largely symbolic; China's Foreign Ministry demanded that Argentina "handle it properly." The warrants were never executed.

Spain's second, separate case — the Tibet case, not to be confused with the Falun Gong case — produced arrest warrants on February 10, 2014, against Jiang, Li Peng, and three others over Tibet. Within weeks, Spain's parliament narrowed universal jurisdiction by statute, and pending universal-jurisdiction cases, the Tibet case and the Falun Gong case among them, were closed. Scholars and the plaintiffs' lawyers widely connected the reform to Chinese diplomatic and economic pressure; the reform itself was a Spanish domestic legislative act. This page records the procedural facts: the filings happened, indictments and warrants were genuinely issued, and the cases ended not with a ruling on the evidence but with the removal of the jurisdictional door they had entered through.

Sources: Reuters, December 23, 2009 (Argentina arrest order); Journal of Political Risk, count of Falun Gong litigation (at least 54 cases in 33 countries by 2006); AFP, February 10, 2014 (Spain Tibet-case warrants); Chinese Human Rights Defenders, analysis of Spain's 2014 universal-jurisdiction reform and the case closures.

Contact: endccpworld@proton.me