EndCCPWorld.com

In the 1990s China caught "qigong fever." In 1992 Li Hongzhi founded Falun Gong, preaching "truthfulness, compassion, forbearance," quickly gaining huge followings — officially once estimated at 70 million (disputed, unverified), exceeding CCP membership, alarming the leadership.

On April 25, 1999, over 10,000 practitioners petitioned near Zhongnanhai for the release of detained Tianjin practitioners and the right to practice. Zhu Rongji met representatives; it ended peacefully. But Jiang Zemin deemed it a grave political incident and resolved to crush it.

Jiang Zemin (then General Secretary) was the supreme decision-maker. Key decisions:

• April 25, 1999: 10,000+ practitioners peacefully petitioned at the State Council appeals office ("4.25 appeal") — released Tianjin detainees, lifted the publication ban, legal practice. Premier Zhu Rongji met representatives the same day and agreed; practitioners dispersed peacefully. That night Jiang wrote to the Politburo Standing Committee: "Communists must defeat Falun Gong." (Letter content via Falun Gong sources — unverified.)
• June 7, 1999: Jiang convened a special Politburo meeting, calling Falun Gong "an unprecedented serious threat to the party in 50 years," ordering a dedicated leading group.
• June 10, 1999: the Central Leading Group on Handling the Falun Gong Issue and its standing Central 610 Office were established — with no legislative basis; the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China called it an "extrajudicial security apparatus."
• July 20, 1999 (dawn): nationwide arrests of identified leaders; July 22 the Ministry of Civil Affairs banned the organization and the Ministry of Public Security issued the "six prohibitions" — the full crackdown began; 1.5 million books and tapes seized and destroyed within days.
• October 30, 1999: the NPC Standing Committee passed the anti-cult decision; the Supreme Court and Procuratorate issued judicial interpretations.

June 10, 1999: The "610 Office" (named for its date) was created to crush Falun Gong, above the law.

July 20, 1999: Nationwide roundups began. On July 22 the Ministry of Civil Affairs outlawed Falun Gong.

October 30, 1999: The NPC Standing Committee passed the anti-"evil cult" decision.

2000–2001: Mass petitions in Beijing met labor camp and prison. After the January 23, 2001 "Tiananmen self-immolation," the crackdown intensified.

March 5, 2002: Changchun practitioners hijacked TV signals to air their message; heavy sentences followed (Liu Chengjun et al., 10–20 years).

2006: Lawyer Gao Zhisheng and Canadians David Matas released organ-harvesting investigation reports.

2013: Labor camps abolished, but "transformation classes" and imprisonment continued.

2018: The 610 Office merged into the Political-Legal Committee.

2024: The US Congress advanced the Falun Gong Protection Act.

Execution chain: Jiang Zemin → the Central Leading Group/610 Office → 610 offices at all levels → public security, state security, labor camps, prisons, courts, propaganda.

• The 610 Office: set up at every level under party political-legal committees — an "extrajudicial security apparatus" (US CECC). Its central functions were absorbed into the Political-Legal Commission and Ministry of Public Security in March 2018.
• Propaganda war: after July 22, CCTV's nightly news was "demonizing from start to finish," scholars said.
• The "transformation" system: forced renunciation of belief — in labor camps, prisons and "legal education centers." Methods: tiger benches, electric batons on sensitive areas, "dead-person beds," hanging, small cells, sleep deprivation, force-feeding, forced injections. (Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; individual cases mostly via Falun Gong sources — source nature noted.)
• Scale of torture: the UN Special Rapporteur on torture found torture widespread in China, with 66% of victims Falun Gong practitioners.
• Labor-camp share: the US State Department's 2008 human rights report cited foreign observers estimating at least half of the officially recorded 250,000 labor-camp detainees were practitioners.

September 3, 2025 hot-mic incident (verified public record): during Beijing's military parade, a CCTV livestream hot mic caught Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin discussing organ transplantation and longevity. Putin's translator: "Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality." Xi (off camera): "Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old." Putin later confirmed it. CCTV pressured Reuters to withdraw the video. DAFOH issued an alarmed statement September 10, 2025. (Sources: Reuters; DAFOH.) Presented as public record.

1. In-party dissenters:

• Qiao Shi (retired NPC chairman): led a months-long independent investigation before the crackdown, concluding "Falun Gong has a hundred benefits and not a single harm for the nation and people" — submitted to the Politburo.
• Zhu Rongji (premier): met the April 25 representatives and granted their requests; Jiang later accused him of being "too soft."
• The State Sports Commission: declared Falun Gong's effects "outstanding" and its contribution to social stability "extraordinary."
• Beijing lawyers Li Heping, Teng Biao and four colleagues (2007): the famous "Constitution Supreme, Belief Innocent" not-guilty defense.

2. Practitioners' peaceful resistance: the April 25 appeal itself — 10,000+ quiet, orderly, no slogans, cleaning up litter before leaving; continued petitions and Tiananmen appeals after the ban; "truth-clarification" worldwide.

3. International opposition: US House resolutions (2004, 2010, 2016), Secretary Blinken's 2021 sanctions on Chengdu's ex-610 chief, the Senate's September 28, 2026 Falun Gong Protection Act; European Parliament resolutions (2013, 2016, 2024); the UN Committee Against Torture (2015) and 12 independent experts' joint statement (June 14, 2021); Spanish and Argentine courts' genocide indictments (2009).

The 610 Office's "state within a state." Above police, prosecutors and courts, it pioneered the "special-case" stability-maintenance model later used on rights lawyers and dissidents.

International human-rights issue. The crackdown became a core Western criticism of China; the US Falun Gong Protection Act, EU resolutions keep up pressure.

Media and truth. Practitioners founded Epoch Times and NTDTV, major overseas Chinese anti-CCP outlets (their stance and methods also disputed).

The immediate trigger: Tianjin. In April 1999 He Zuoxiu, a prominent physicist, published an article in a Tianjin youth magazine attacking Falun Gong by name. From April 19 to 23 thousands of practitioners went to the magazine's offices to seek a correction. On April 23 Tianjin riot police cleared the crowds and made arrests — 45 people by Falun Gong's account; Tianjin authorities published no figure. Practitioners later said officials told them the matter "could only be resolved in Beijing." From the evening of April 24, practitioners converged on the capital. By dawn on April 25 more than ten thousand stood quietly along Fuyou Street, outside the State Council appeals office next to Zhongnanhai — no banners, no slogans. Premier Zhu Rongji came out at dawn, spoke with practitioners and received their representatives; that evening Tianjin released its detainees and the crowd dispersed peacefully, famously taking its litter with it. To practitioners this was a lawful appeal. To Jiang Zemin it was something else: that night he wrote to the Politburo that Falun Gong must be "defeated," and the decision to suppress was set in motion.

The ban in operation. In the early hours of July 20, 1999, police across China simultaneously arrested local Falun Gong coordinators and leading practitioners. On July 22 the Ministry of Civil Affairs formally banned the movement and the public security authorities issued a list of prohibitions. In the months that followed, Falun Gong books and recordings were confiscated and publicly destroyed in many cities; state television ran wall-to-wall denunciation programming; work units held criticism sessions; and practitioners were pressed one by one to sign statements renouncing their belief. On July 29 the police issued a wanted notice for Li Hongzhi, by then living in the United States. In the first years, practitioners who travelled to Beijing to appeal were intercepted, sent home and commonly given re-education through labour — up to three years, extendable, imposed by police decision without any court trial — which made the camps the workhorse of the suppression.

How "transformation" worked. The campaign's central metric was "transformation": practitioners were required to sign renunciation, guarantee, repentance and denunciation statements. Human-rights organizations and researchers have documented that local 610 offices were assessed on transformation rates tied to officials' performance reviews. To meet quotas, localities ran "legal education study classes" — brainwashing centres in all but name — where practitioners sent by their work units or neighbourhood committees were held indefinitely, without any judicial process, until they signed. Refusal meant labour camp, prison, dismissal from employment and pressure on family members. Among named cases: Gao Rongrong of Shenyang, whose face was disfigured by electric batons at Longshan labour camp in 2004 — photographs of her injuries reached the outside world and drew international attention; rearrested in 2005, she died in custody that June, aged 37. Zhao Xin, a Beijing university lecturer, died in 2000 after police beatings fractured her neck vertebrae. In 2012 a woman in Oregon found an English-language SOS letter hidden in a box of Halloween decorations, traced to Shenyang's Masanjia camp; its author, Sun Yi, became the best-known witness of the camp system before dying in exile in Indonesia in 2017.

The death toll: two different kinds of number. No figure on this page is more contested, so the sourcing must be exact. Falun Gong's Minghui website has for years recorded named cases one by one — name, home town, place of detention, circumstances of death — and its cumulative total has passed five thousand. Independent investigators cannot enter China to verify these case by case, so international media and rights groups cite them as "according to Falun Gong websites." The Chinese government says practitioners who died did so by refusing medical treatment and accuses Falun Gong of fabricating figures. Independent material offers only partial corroboration: UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak reported after his 2005 visit that practitioners accounted for roughly two-thirds of the torture allegations registered with his mandate. This site's position: the named cases are allegations that demand investigation, but the total must always carry its source and method, and is not stated as proven fact until archives open and independent verification becomes possible.

Organ harvesting: completing the timeline. Three further points belong beside the dispute section above. In 2016 Kilgour, Matas and journalist Ethan Gutmann published an update arguing, from Chinese hospitals' own published transplant volumes, bed numbers and surgical staffing, that actual transplant activity far exceeded official figures — a method critics have questioned and Beijing calls fabricated. In 2019 the China Tribunal, an independent people's tribunal in London chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, heard witnesses and medical experts and concluded that forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience "has been practised for a substantial period of time in substantial numbers" in China, with Falun Gong practitioners "probably" a main source. In June 2021 a group of UN human-rights experts issued a joint statement saying they were "extremely alarmed" by the allegations and calling for independent international monitoring. Beijing rejects every element of this and dismisses the tribunal as a Falun Gong-funded farce. Both positions stand on this page: the allegations carry the backing of an independent tribunal and UN experts, but no party has ever been able to verify conditions on the ground inside China — which is precisely what the "unverified" label means here.

Litigation, legislation and the present day. Practitioners and supporters sued abroad: in 2009 Spain's National Court opened an investigation of Jiang Zemin and others for torture and crimes against humanity, later shelved after Spain narrowed its universal-jurisdiction law; the same year an Argentine federal judge ordered the arrest of Jiang and Luo Gan, an order never executed. In the United States, the Falun Gong Protection Act passed the House in 2024 and the Senate in September 2026, centred on visa and asset sanctions against those involved in forced organ harvesting. Inside China, the 610 Office was nominally folded into the party's Political and Legal Affairs Commission and the public security ministry in 2018, but its functions did not disappear; Minghui continues to report several hundred practitioners sentenced each year. A suppression begun in 1999 has now run for more than a quarter of a century — the longest, and the only still-ongoing, event in this archive.

The Changchun television interception (2002). On the evening of March 5, 2002, signals on several channels of the Changchun cable television network were cut into and replaced for some forty to fifty minutes with Falun Gong programming — a film of the movement's spread worldwide and a rebuttal of the official account of the Tiananmen self-immolation — reaching tens of thousands of households. It was the boldest single act of "truth-clarification" of the entire campaign. A citywide sweep followed; Falun Gong sources say several thousand practitioners in the Changchun area were detained in the weeks afterwards. The principal participants, including Liang Zhenxing and Liu Chengjun, received sentences of more than ten years. Liu died in a Jilin prison in December 2003, aged thirty-two: Falun Gong sources say he had been severely tortured and could no longer walk; officials attributed his death to illness. Both accounts are recorded here; this page draws no conclusion on the cause of death.

Gao Zhisheng: from defence lawyer to disappeared man. The suppression also consumed the lawyer who defended its victims. Between 2004 and 2005 the Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng wrote three open letters to China's leaders; the third, titled "We Must Immediately Stop the Barbarian Onslaught That Is Extinguishing Our Nation's Conscience and Morality," documented torture cases from his own investigations and demanded an end to the persecution. His firm was closed, and in 2006 he was sentenced to three years for inciting subversion, suspended for five — during which he was repeatedly seized and held incommunicado; a memoir that later reached the outside world describes torture in harrowing detail (his own account, not independently verifiable, and labelled as such here). Released in 2014 to house arrest in his home village in Shaanxi, Gao briefly escaped surveillance with supporters' help in August 2017, was recaptured, and has not been seen since — more than eight years on the missing lists of the United Nations and several governments. That the lawyer who defended Falun Gong should himself end as a disappeared person is the single starkest footnote to a campaign now in its third decade.

The everyday face of persecution. Beyond prisons and camps, the suppression's most common form was the withdrawal of ordinary life. Human-rights reporting documents a repeating pattern for practitioners who refused to sign: dismissal from public employment, cancellation of pensions, loss or demolition of housing; children disadvantaged in schooling, military enlistment and civil-service vetting because of a parent's file; spouses pressed by their work units to divorce; elderly parents visited in rotation by neighbourhood committees. Almost none of this passed through any legal document, which makes it the hardest layer to count or prove — and for millions of practitioners and their families it was the substance of the persecution. Measured by prison numbers alone, the campaign's scale is badly understated: the 610 system's real method was to turn every work unit and every street committee into an enforcement organ. This layer is recorded here on the basis of human-rights reports and personal testimony; case-by-case verification awaits the opening of the archives.