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Liu Jing (1944– )

Director of the Central 610 Office from September 2001 to October 2009, and a Vice Minister of Public Security. He took over as the crackdown entered its "routine" phase — and his eight-year tenure is when Masanjia's torture "experience" went nationwide and the Tiananmen self-immolation was used as the pretext to escalate the persecution. The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong accuses him of personally helping stage the January 23, 2001, self-immolation — an accusation no independent third party has adjudicated. This page presents the competing accounts side by side.

Born

1944 (Yu County, Shanxi); graduated in wireless systems from the Beijing Institute of Technology

Tenure

September 2001 – October 2009, director of the Central 610 Office; from January 2001, Vice Minister and deputy Party secretary of Public Security (minister-level)

Positions

June 2000 – September 2001, deputy director of the Central 610 Office; member of the 17th CCP Central Committee

Key crimes

Day-to-day command of the crackdown across eight years; building Masanjia's "transformation base"; the official defense after the self-immolation; accused of staging the self-immolation

1. A technical cadre rises through public security

Liu Jing was born in 1944 in Yu County, Shanxi, and graduated from the Beijing Institute of Technology in wireless systems — a technical cadre by training. He spent his career in the public security system, was named deputy director and deputy Party secretary of the Central 610 Office in June 2000, and in January 2001 concurrently became Vice Minister and deputy Party secretary of Public Security, with the rank of deputy chief superintendent. By rank he was minister-level — and the 610 directorship reached its peak of power in his hands.

At a 2011 hearing of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a witness testified that Liu Jing had simultaneously directed both the 610 Office and the Central Stability Maintenance Office — the two "extralegal offices" under one chief; only after his retirement were they separated again. One office for Falun Gong, one for every "destabilizing factor," both flowing through a single pair of hands.

Sources: "Liu Jing (politician)," English Wikipedia; U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing, "Falun Gong in China: Review and Update" (2011); Chinese Wikipedia, "610 Office."

2. The handover: September 2001

In September 2001, Wang Maolin stepped down and Liu Jing took over the Central 610 Office. The context of the handover is telling: after the January 23, 2001, Tiananmen self-immolation, the crackdown needed to escalate — and Liu Jing held the Vice Minister of Public Security portfolio, putting the police's blade directly in the 610 director's hand. The baton passed from Wang Maolin, a propaganda-system man, to Liu Jing, a public-security man: the campaign's center of gravity shifted from "propaganda blitz" to "violent stability maintenance."

He stayed eight years, until October 2009, when Li Dongsheng succeeded him. Those eight years (2001–2009) were the institutionalization of the Falun Gong persecution: brainwashing centers blooming everywhere, "transformation rates" as hard targets, torture as daily routine in labor camps and prisons. The machine was built; Liu Jing was the man in the driver's seat every day.

Sources: "610 Office," English Wikipedia; WOIPFG, "Report on the 610 Office."

3. Masanjia's "ideological education transformation base": a ten-million-yuan "transformation" project

Origins: Around 2001, the "transformation rate" became the hard metric for the crackdown's success. Masanjia labor camp, singled out for its "outstanding results" in "transforming" practitioners, was designated a national model and slated for expansion into an "ideological education transformation base" — a "school" in name, an upgraded torture factory in fact.

How it unfolded: Per the WOIPFG report, Masanjia spent some 10 million yuan building out the "base" — on high walls, electric fencing, interrogation rooms, and "transformation" workshops. Meanwhile, the Liaoning justice department handpicked Masanjia guards into "experience-sharing delegations" that toured labor camps, prisons, and brainwashing centers across the country, "teaching the experience."

Results: The Masanjia model's core methods — electric baton shocks, the "stretching bed," sexual abuse, prolonged solitary confinement — spread nationwide with the "experience sharing." The authorities awarded Masanjia the "First Class Hero Collective"; guards took bonuses, with No. 2 Female Section head Su Jing receiving 50,000 yuan from the Justice Ministry and the title "First Class Hero." And the deaths, maimings, and mental breakdowns kept coming (per WOIPFG's compilation of persecution cases). Ten million yuan did not build a school. It built a torture factory. Liu Jing's tenure (September 2001–October 2009) is exactly when this "base" was completed and its "experience" exported — and he and Luo Gan traveled to Masanjia together repeatedly to "inspect" the transformation work (per Minghui.org, October 2004).

Sources: WOIPFG, "Compilation of Falun Gong Persecution Cases" (200-en.doc); WOIPFG, "Report on the 610 Office"; Minghui.org, October 24, 2004.

4. The Tiananmen self-immolation: January 23, 2001

Origins: By early 2001, the crackdown was eighteen months old, practitioners kept appealing, and international pressure was building. The authorities needed something that would "turn public opinion in one stroke" — moving ordinary Chinese from sympathy for practitioners to hatred of Falun Gong.

How it unfolded: At 2:41 p.m. on January 23, 2001, a self-immolation occurred on Tiananmen Square. Xinhua and CCTV reported with uncharacteristic speed, identifying the five self-immolators and two would-be self-immolators as Falun Gong practitioners. CCTV replayed the footage relentlessly, claiming a mother had set herself on fire alongside her 12-year-old daughter. A CNN crew on the square was promptly detained by police.

Results: Chinese public opinion swung sharply; the crackdown gained its "popular mandate," and the persecution escalated dramatically. Falun Gong sources say hundreds, possibly thousands, of practitioners died in the escalated persecution that followed (Falun Gong's claim, unverified independently).

The dispute — four accounts, side by side:

The official account: the self-immolators were Falun Gong devotees; the incident proves Falun Gong "destroys lives," and the crackdown "protects the people."

The Falun Gong account: Falun Gong teachings explicitly prohibit killing, and suicide is a sin — the self-immolators could not have been genuine practitioners. The event was staged by the government; frame-by-frame analysis of the CCTV footage shows multiple anomalies; the self-immolators' sitting posture and slogans did not match Falun Gong practice.

The Washington Post investigation (Philip Pan, February 2001): on-the-ground reporting found that one of the self-immolators, Liu Chunling, had worked as a nightclub hostess and that neighbors had never seen her practice Falun Gong. Officials claimed police extinguished the flames "within a minute" with fire extinguishers — yet Tiananmen patrol police do not normally carry extinguishers, and the nearest building was a twenty-minute round trip away.

International Educational Development (IED), at the United Nations on August 14, 2001: announced it had obtained video proving the incident was staged by the government.

WOIPFG goes further, accusing Liu Jing of "personally helping plot and implement" the self-immolation and of manufacturing the hate-inciting propaganda around it. That accusation comes from WOIPFG; no independent judicial body has ruled on it. This page records it as stated, without adjudicating.

Sources: "2001 Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident," English Wikipedia; Bitter Winter, "Falun Gong' 'Self-Immolations': 25 Years Since a 'Deepfake' on Tiananmen Square" (2025); WOIPFG, "Report on the 610 Office"; IED statement at the UN, August 14, 2001 (cited in the WOIPFG report).

5. After the flames: the press-conference defense

After the self-immolation, Liu Jing — Vice Minister of Public Security and 610 chief — repeatedly fronted the official response. At press conferences and in public remarks, he branded the incident "ironclad proof" that Falun Gong "harms people," defended the escalating crackdown, and stoked public hatred of practitioners (per the WOIPFG report and Minghui.org).

This "verdict first, propaganda second" pattern was the 610 Office's standard move: manufacture or exploit an extreme incident, saturate it through CCTV and Xinhua, pin the acts of a few on the entire group, and then escalate with a clean conscience. After the self-immolation, "transformation" quotas hardened, brainwashing centers multiplied, and labor camps hit harder — the opinion groundwork done, what remained was the doing.

Sources: WOIPFG, "Report on the 610 Office"; Minghui.org, October 24, 2004.

6. Exporting the Masanjia "experience" nationwide

Under Liu Jing, the 610 Office's "transformation" work hardened into a unified national methodology. At the January 2001 national conference of judicial bureau chiefs, Justice Minister Zhang Fusen ordered local justice bureaus to take responsibility for "transforming" practitioners; that April, the CCP Central Committee's Organization Department circulated the "transformation" experience of three models — Masanjia labor camp, the Beijing Reeducation-Through-Labor Bureau, and the Qitaihe Party committee in Heilongjiang — as official documents (per Minghui.org's "Brainwashing: China's Hidden Industry," citing the directives).

"Legal education centers" — brainwashing centers — mushroomed nationwide. Public security personnel in Dalian proposed "legal education schools" for "closed management and transformation"; Beijing piloted the model and the center promoted it countrywide. A complete "transformation industry chain" took shape: arrest, brainwash, labor camp, prison — checkpoints at every stage. Brainwashing centers charged fees; labor camps generated revenue. The persecution itself became a business.

As the eight-year director, Liu Jing was this system's chief architect and chief foreman. Luo Gan steered; Liu Jing drove — one set the direction, the other worked the throttle.

Sources: Minghui.org, "Brainwashing: China's Hidden Industry" (October 2014); WOIPFG, "Report on the 610 Office."

7. Assessing responsibility

Liu Jing's eight years (2001–2009) were the institutionalization of the Falun Gong persecution. Wang Maolin built the frame, Luo Gan steered — and Liu Jing sat in the driver's seat every day.

Three entries in his ledger cannot be evaded. First, Masanjia's ten million: every yuan spent, every interrogation room built, happened on his watch. His system approved the money and raised the model. Second, after the self-immolation he personally fronted the defense, turning a deeply suspicious incident into a license to escalate — whether or not he helped stage it, the exploitation afterward is a matter of record. Third, across eight years, the 610 system's "transformation" quotas, brainwashing centers, and labor camps all answered to him as director. How many were arrested, "transformed," and sent to labor camps each day — the reports landed on his desk.

He stepped down in October 2009; Li Dongsheng succeeded him. But the 610 Office was not abolished, and the "transformation" system kept running. He helped build a machine that would not stop — and the ledger stays open. Retirement is no absolution; leaving office is no severance.

Sources: WOIPFG, "Report on the 610 Office"; "610 Office," English Wikipedia; Minghui.org, "Brainwashing: China's Hidden Industry."

8. Numbers and accounts

Sources: as cited in each table row; full citations under "Sources & further reading."

9. How "transformation rates" were passed down: from the central 610 to provincial study classes

Under Liu Jing, "transformation" work ran on a traceable chain of quotas. The central 610 Office set the direction and the wording; provincial 610 offices broke the task down to prefectures; prefectures pressed it onto counties, districts and individual work units; and labour camps, prisons and the various "legal education study classes" reported their transformation figures back up, person by person. Minghui's 2014 report Brainwashing: China's Hidden Industry, which compiled leaked internal documents and practitioner testimony from many localities, describes a recurring assessment method: the "transformation rate" was a hard target in the performance reviews of camp and brainwashing-centre directors; facilities that missed the target were criticised by name and their directors held to account; and a person counted as transformed who later openly reaffirmed their belief was recorded as a "relapse," to be taken back in hand by the original unit for "consolidation." The effect was to turn whether one individual renounced their faith into a number on a local cadre's promotion form.

Beneath the quotas came an expansion of facilities. After 2001, provinces steadily converted guesthouses, cadre schools and idle barracks into permanent "legal education centres" or "legal education training bases" — a centre at provincial level, study classes at municipal level — where the length of detention was set by no judicial process at all, but jointly by the 610 Office and the detainee's work unit, running from weeks to months or even years. By around 2004 these permanent bases had taken shape in many provinces: arrivals were isolated, then worked on in rotation by "assistance and education" staff, made to watch defamatory videos for long stretches and to write endless "thought reports," while anyone who refused to sign a guarantee statement faced the threat of transfer to a labour camp. The original quota documents of the central 610 Office have never been made public, so this chain is reconstructed from leaked local documents, testimony and research compilations; reported percentages vary by locality, and this page adopts no single nationwide "transformation rate."

Liu Jing's place in the chain was its top link. The director's signature set the tempo: which year would feature a "concentrated transformation offensive," which year a study-class model would be promoted nationwide. Every report form ended up at the office he chaired. Each grassroots "offensive," in document language an act of "education and rescue," meant for the person concerned a sealed room, relays of interrogators and thought reports without end.

Sources: Minghui.org, "Brainwashing: China's Hidden Industry" (October 2014); WOIPFG, "Report on the 610 Office"; CECC annual reports on transformation assessments.

10. Inspections and press conferences: Liu Jing in the public record

Liu Jing left few public activity records, but each type is telling. The first is the press conference: WOIPFG's investigation records that, speaking as head of the State Council's office for preventing and handling cult issues, he held press conferences attacking Falun Gong over the Tiananmen self-immolation and defending the crackdown's "principles and policies" — the 610 Office used one name internally and a State Council nameplate externally, and Liu was one of the few men to appear publicly under both. The second is directing local work: the same report records that he directed province-level "concentrated transformation" of practitioners and dealt with Falun Gong issues in Hong Kong. The third is inspecting detention sites: the report records repeated trips to Masanjia and other labour camps to press for completion of the roughly ten-million-yuan "Masanjia Ideological Education Transformation Base"; the October 2004 Minghui report cited in section 3 records him inspecting transformation progress at Masanjia together with Luo Gan.

Together these records form a complete commander's portrait: upward, he unified the message at press conferences; downward, he went to labour camps in person to check progress; outward, he handled Hong Kong matters. The 610 Office had no public office address and no separate listing among government organs, yet its director could speak at a press conference held in the State Council's name, walk into a labour camp to inspect its work, and issue requirements to a whole province. That "invisible yet omnipresent" condition was the institution's design. In Liu's eight years, official media never reported his itinerary in detail; his inspections were pieced together afterwards from testimony and overseas reporting, and Chinese state media have never published a systematic record of a 610 director's activities.

Sources: WOIPFG, investigation report on the central 610 Office (zhuichaguoji.org); Minghui.org, October 24, 2004.

11. The U.S. lawsuit: the 2002 Chicago case and the 610 Office as defendant

The American lawsuit directly connected to the institution he led was the 2002 Chicago case. In October 2002, during Jiang Zemin's visit to the United States, Falun Gong practitioners filed a class action in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Ye et al. v. Jiang Zemin), naming Jiang himself and the 610 Office as defendants. The complaint alleged genocide and torture, among other claims, under the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act, and further alleged that the defendants' side had intimidated practitioners inside the United States, violating their civil rights. Liu Jing was then director of the 610 Office, but he was not named as an individual defendant — the defendant on the caption was the office he headed.

The case ended on procedural grounds. After the U.S. State Department filed a suggestion of head-of-state immunity, Judge Matthew Kennelly ruled in September 2003 that Jiang enjoyed such immunity and dismissed the claims against him; the claims against the 610 Office were dismissed as well, for defective service and lack of personal jurisdiction. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit affirmed on September 8, 2004 (383 F.3d 620). No American court ever reached the merits of whether persecution had occurred: the case closed at the two procedural gates of immunity and jurisdiction. The distinction matters — dismissal was not a finding that the allegations were false, just as filing the suit was not proof that they were true.

Sources: Ye v. Zemin, 383 F.3d 620 (7th Cir. 2004); Washington Post and Washington Times reporting on the Chicago litigation, 2003.

12. After stepping down: the 2009 handover, removal in 2011, and a fading public record

In October 2009 Liu Jing handed the directorship to Li Dongsheng, then a vice minister of public security — a successor whose later trajectory in turn marks the office's character: Li was removed in December 2013 and transferred to the judiciary, and on January 12, 2016 was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for bribery. Liu himself kept his posts as vice minister and deputy party secretary of the Ministry of Public Security until March 2, 2011, when he was removed as vice minister; he held no further public office. He had been a member of the CCP's 16th and 17th Central Committees; after the 17th Central Committee's term ended in 2012, his name essentially disappeared from public reporting.

About Liu Jing's present circumstances, open sources verify only the disappearance itself: no systematic record of books, inscriptions or public appearances in retirement, no official obituary, and no judicial proceeding attached to his name. The eight years he spent running the 610 Office left no public archive of his work; not one of the documents he approved, the directives he issued or the report forms he signed has been declassified. That a man who directed a nationwide campaign for eight years should become nearly invisible in the public record after retirement is no accident — it is how the institution was designed to run from its first day: unpublished, unnamed, unarchived. What this page can do is assemble the fragments scattered through case law, hearing records, leaked documents and testimony, so that the name Liu Jing and the post he held from 2001 to 2009 at least correspond in the archive.

Sources: Chinese Wikipedia entries "610 Office" and "Liu Jing," citing the Chinese government portal's March 2, 2011 removal notice and China Economic Net appointment reports; reporting on Li Dongsheng's public sentencing, January 2016.

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