Chinazism: State Terrorism

'Think of your family': China threatens European citizens over East Turkestan protests
Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France have complained of intimidation by Beijing
By Benjamin Haas in Munich

Demonstrators holding Uighur flags in Berlin before a meeting between German chancellor Angela Merkel and Li Keqiang. 

Two days after Abdujelil Emet sat in the public gallery of Germany’s parliament during a hearing on human rights, he received a phone call from his sister for the first time in three years. 

But the call from East Turkestan, in western China, was anything but a joyous family chat. 

It was made at the direction of Chinese security officers, part of a campaign by Beijing to silence criticism of policies that have seen more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities detained in concentration camps.
Emet’s sister began by praising the Communist party and making claims of a much improved life under its guidance before delivering a shock: his brother had died a year earlier. 

But Emet, 54, was suspicious from the start; he had never given his family his phone number. 

Amid the heartbreaking news and sloganeering, he could hear a flurry of whispers in the background, and he demanded to speak to the unknown voice. 

Moments later the phone was handed to a Chinese official who refused to identify himself.
By the end of the conversation, the façade constructed by the Chinese security agent was broken and Emet’s sister wept as she begged him to stop his activism. 

Then the Chinese official took the phone again with a final warning.
“You’re living overseas, but you need to think of your family while you’re running around doing your activism work in Germany,” he said. 

“You need to think of their safety.”
In interviews with more than two dozen Uighurs living across Europe and the United States, tales of threats across the world are the rule, not the exception. 

Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France all complained of similar threats against family members back in East Turkestan, and some were asked to spy for China.
More than a million Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic ethnic group, and other minorities are being held in concentration camps, according to the UN, with some estimates saying the number is “closer to 3 million”.
Emet, originally from Aksu in East Turkestan, has lived in Germany for over two decades and is a naturalised citizen. 

He does volunteer work for the World Uyghur Congress and is a part-time imam in his community. He has never told his family about his activism, hoping the omission would protect them.
“I will not keep my silence and the Chinese government should not use my family to threaten me,” Emet said. 

“I was clear with them on the phone: if they harm my family, I will speak out louder and become a bigger problem for the government.”

‘China threatening people in Germany should never become normalised’
Most Uighurs remain silent, and have found little help from European authorities. 

But Margarete Bause, a member of the German parliament representing Munich, said Chinese interference was unacceptable and urged Uighurs to contact their MPs.
“We need to protect visitors to the Bundestag. Observing parliament is a fundamental right in any democracy,” she said. 

“It’s also important for the German public to know how China is trying to exert influence here. The Chinese government threatening people in Germany should never become normalised.”
Bause has been interested in Uighur issues for over a decade, after she was admonished by Chinese diplomats in 2006 for attending an event hosted by the World Uyghur Congress. 

In August she was denied a visa as part of a parliamentary visit to China and the trip was eventually cancelled in response.
Beyond discouraging activism, Chinese officials have also tried to recruit Uighurs living abroad to spy on others in their community, asking for photos of private gatherings, names, phone numbers, addresses and licence plate numbers. 

Some are recruited when they go to Chinese diplomatic missions in Europe to request documents, and others are contacted by security agents over WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. 

Emet’s number is likely to have been leaked to Chinese security agents this way, he said, with his number well known in the Uighur community in Munich.
Chinese agents offer cash, the promise of visas to visit East Turkestan or better treatment for family members as a reward, but also dangle the threat of harsh consequences for those same family members if their offers are refused. 

Uighurs described having crucial documents withheld from Chinese embassies and consulates unless they agreed.
One Uighur living in Germany who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said a Chinese agent asked for photos of Eid and other celebrations, and specifically asked for information on Uighurs who had recently arrived in Europe.

A group of people stage a protest against China’s human rights violations against members of the Turkic Uighur minority.

The recent surge in activism among Uighurs overseas is mostly a direct response to the increasingly repressive policies in East Turkestan, and as more people speak out China has doubled efforts to silence them and control the narrative over what it calls “re-education camps”.
There are some signs China’s campaign to silence Uighurs in Europe is working. 

Gulhumar Haitiwaji became an outspoken critic of policies after her mother disappeared into one of the camps in East Turkestan, appearing on French television and starting a petition addressed to French president Emmanuel Macron that garnered nearly half a million signatures. 

But after threats from Chinese officials targeting her mother, Haitiwaji cancelled a planned appearance in March at a human rights summit in Geneva, according to two sources familiar with her plans. 

Haitiwaji and the organisers of the meeting did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who focuses on East Turkestan, said European governments needed to do more to protect their citizens from Chinese intimidation.
“The biggest mistake European Union countries make is that once they allow China to get away with something, that emboldens Beijing,” he said. 

“China has systematic strategies in place and the threats to Uighurs in exile show that. Europe needs its own unified strategy to stand up to China and respond to these threats.”
The Chinese embassy in Berlin did not respond to requests for comment.

China's state terrorism

Sweden condemns China's brutal detention of bookseller Gui Minhai
Swedish citizen was picked up by plainclothes agents on 20 January as he travelled on a train to Beijing with two Swedish diplomats
By Tom Phillips

Sweden’s foreign minister has condemned China’s “brutal” detention of a Hong Kong bookseller who irked Beijing with his tabloid-style stories about the Communist party elite.
Gui Minhai, a China-born Swedish citizen, was picked up by plainclothes agents on 20 January as he travelled on a train to Beijing with two Swedish diplomats. 

Supporters said he had been traveling to the Chinese capital for a medical examination.
Gui had spent much of the previous two years in custody in east China after his kidnapping from his holiday home in Thailand. 

Until his second disappearance, hopes had been rising among supporters for his release.
In a statement Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, said: “The continued detention of the Swedish citizen Gui Minhai in China is a very serious matter.”
Wallstrom labelled the action against Gui and the two diplomats as a “brutal intervention”: “China’s actions were in contravention of basic international rules on consular support.
“We demand that our citizen be given the opportunity to meet Swedish diplomatic and medical staff, and that he be released so that he can be reunited with his daughter and family.”
The statement signals a marked escalation from Sweden which has been publicly cautious over the case ever since Gui first went missing in October 2015.
On Sunday the publisher’s daughter, Angela Gui, told the Guardian that her father’s whereabouts remained a mystery.

State Terrorism

Daughter's fears grow over bookseller missing in China

AFP

It is the second time Gui Minhai has been snatched in murky circumstanced following his 2015 disappearance from Thailand. 

HONG KONG -- The daughter of missing Swedish publisher Gui Minhai who was snatched in China last month says she fears she may never see him again and has urged the international community to take action.
Gui was arrested on a train to Beijing just over two weeks ago while accompanied by two Swedish diplomats -- the second time he has disappeared in murky circumstances into Chinese custody.
His daughter Angela Gui, 23, told AFP she had heard nothing from him since and had received no information about where he might be.

Angela Gui as a child with and her father Gui Minhai. 
"There are all sorts of awful scenarios that could be unfolding," she said, speaking from England, where she is a student.
The United States and European Union have called for Gui's immediate release and his disappearance has sparked a diplomatic row between Stockholm and Beijing.
But Chinese authorities have so far publicly parried requests for information, suggesting only that Swedish diplomats had somehow violated Chinese law.
Civil society has come under increasing pressure since Xi Jinping took office in 2012, with authorities rounding up hundreds of lawyers and activists.
"I just hope that Sweden and other governments will be as vocal as possible," Angela said.
"I want them to demonstrate actual consequences, instead of just repeating how unacceptable it is."
It is the second time 53-year-old Gui, who was born in China but went on to become a Swedish citizen, has been snatched.
He first disappeared in 2015, one of five Hong Kong-based booksellers known for publishing gossipy titles about Chinese political leaders who went missing and resurfaced in the mainland.
Gui vanished while on holiday in Thailand and eventually surfaced at an undisclosed location in China, confessing to involvement in a fatal traffic accident and smuggling illegal books.
Chinese authorities declared they had released him in October but his daughter said he was under "loose house arrest" in the eastern mainland city of Ningbo, where some of his relatives still live.
Angela told AFP she had spoken to her father on Skype multiple times a week in the past three months and that he was able to move around the city, but was followed by police.
He had been allowed to go to the Swedish consulate in Shanghai three times to apply for documentation, including a new passport, and Angela said she did not believe he had been told explicitly to stay in Ningbo.
Angela graduated from England's Warwick University with a master's degree the day before her father disappeared again and had spoken to him ahead of the ceremony.

Angela Gui, who is studying in the UK, says she fears for her father's safety after he was snatched by Chinese security forces. 

"He said: 'I'm very sorry that I can't be there'. I told him it was alright because I'm doing my doctorate now, so there was another one for him to come to," she said.
"I was hoping that there would be an end to this soon and that he might be able to come home."

MEDICAL HELP
On Jan 20, Gui was grabbed by plainclothes police while on a train between Ningbo and Beijing, where he was due to have a medical appointment.
Chinese officials have given no public reason for his detention. 

Angela fears he may now be put on trial and receive a longer sentence, jeopardising his health.
Doctors in Ningbo said her father may have the neurological disease ALS -- he had been on his way to Beijing to see a Swedish specialist.
The muscles in his hands had begun to atrophy and he had lost some sensation in the soles of his feet, Angela said.
"If he does have ALS, perhaps he might not have that much time left," she told AFP.
China was widely criticised after veteran rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo died from liver cancer while on medical parole in July last year.
Rights groups had pushed for him to be allowed to seek medical treatment abroad. 

It was the first time a Nobel laureate had died in custody since Nazi Germany.

Factfile on Hong Kong bookseller snatched by Beijing. 

Angela said the international community must snap out of its "paralysis" over the case, describing her frustration that more had not been done to get her father out of China sooner.
"He shouldn't have been abducted again in the first place -- there should have been a way of getting him home before that," she said.
"Or there should have been a way of making sure he was safe when he was travelling."
A spokesman for the Swedish government told AFP that "intense efforts" were underway, but would not say if they had received any information as to Gui's whereabouts.
A Western diplomat in Beijing said he feared Gui would not be released "any time soon".
"The circumstances of his abduction are unprecedented," he told AFP.

China's State Hooliganism

Sweden summons Chinese ambassador over kidnapping of Gui Minhai

The situation has worsened since the bookseller was taken by police while travelling on a train to Beijing
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Sweden has summoned China’s ambassador to Stockholm to explain the dramatic snatching of a Swedish bookseller as he travelled to Beijing with two European diplomats.
Gui Minhai, 53, was taken on Saturday by about 10 plainclothes officers as his train stopped at a station outside the Chinese capital.

His current whereabouts is unknown.
It is the second time in just over two years that Gui, a Hong Kong publisher who had specialised in melodramatic tomes about China’s political elite, has been seized by Chinese agents. 

In October 2015 Gui vanished from his Thai holiday home, later resurfacing in detention in China where he made what supporters denounced as a forced televised confession. 

Gui had seemed on the verge of release last autumn but this week’s dramatic development has shattered those hopes.

Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai snatched by Chinese agents from train.

Margot Wallström, Sweden’s foreign minister, told reporters her government had “detailed knowledge” of Saturday’s events and was “working round the clock” on the issue. 

“The situation has now worsened since Saturday morning,” she admitted.
Criticism of China’s actions -- and Stockholm’s so far timid public response to Gui’s ordeal -- intensified after reports of his latest detention. 

“This was precisely what wasn’t supposed to happen,” the bookseller’s daughter, Angela Gui, told the Guardian.
“I think it is quite clear that he has been abducted again and that he’s being held somewhere at a secret location,” she added in an interview with Radio Sweden.
In an editorial entitled ‘Is there anything China won’t get away with?’ Sweden’s Borås Tidning newspaper said it was time to stand up to a bullying Beijing: “The scariest part of the news about the Swedish publisher isn’t so much that Chinese authorities have caught him again but the arrogance the manner of his arrest demonstrates to the rest of the world.”
It warned: “This is a new China that we see; a China which, with its ever-growing tentacles, wants to build a huge port in Lysekil … which builds nuclear power plants in the UK, which wants to build an Arctic highway from Norway to Moscow … a China that is not afraid of the diplomatic repercussions that may arise from grabbing a Swedish book publisher in front of the employees of Margot Wallström.”
Diplomats and observers say that under Xi Jinping, who was recently crowned China’s most dominant ruler since Mao Zedong, Beijing has become increasingly deaf to foreign criticism and inclined to throw its weight around, wagering cash-hungry governments will not challenge its actions.
“There is really a new, harsher tone in their approach. It wasn’t like this a few years ago,” said one western diplomat who declined to be named because of the political sensitivities involved.
“I think they’ve become over confident and are overplaying their hand,” the diplomat added. 

“And there is an increasing push-back from all over the world.”
Jojje Olsson, a Swedish writer who has written a book about Gui’s saga, said Saturday’s “kidnapping” underlined how Beijing cared more about silencing dissent than its international image: “It shows the Chinese government cares less and less about criticism from the outside -- they would rather set an example that you cannot get away when you criticise the government, than listen to foreign governments or foreign media.”
Olsson contrasted Stockholm’s handling of Gui’s case with its efforts to free two Swedish journalists who were imprisoned in Ethiopia in 2011. 

“Back then, the Swedish government was very quick to get involved ... the foreign minister travelled to Ethiopia twice ... [But] in the case of Gui Minhai obviously it has been very muted.” 

Sweden’s foreign minister had not once spoken to Angela Gui, Olsson claimed.
“They say they are working ... "behind the scenes" but they are being very careful in putting official pressure on China. That is, of course, how China would like it.”

State Terrorism

Chinese-American journalist's wife kidnapped by China

AP

Paramilitary police officer guards entrance to U.S. embassy in Beijing on April 30, 2012.

BEIJING -- A Chinese-American journalist who extensively interviewed an exiled businessman says his wife has been kidnapped and held for months by Chinese security forces, adding a subplot to the high-stakes drama that has transfixed followers of Chinese politics.

Chen Xiaoping, a New York-based editor at Chinese-language Mirror Media Group, told The Associated Press that a new video that surfaced this week of his wife denouncing his work was filmed under duress and proves that she is being held by the government in an effort to pressure him.
Over the past year, Chen has been at the centre of a political firestorm surrounding Guo Wengui, a fugitive real estate billionaire who repeatedly appeared on his live-streamed broadcast to air allegations of corruption within the upper echelons of China's ruling Communist Party.

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Xi Jinping, front right, meets representatives attending the award ceremony on ethical role models and pioneers in Beijing, China on Nov. 17, 2017.

In September, shortly before one of Chen's broadcasts, his wife Li Huaiping, who remained in China, sent him a terse message saying she was "in trouble," Chen said.
Li was not heard from until Sunday, when an anonymous YouTube account believed to be linked to Chinese security agencies uploaded a video in which she explained she had cut all contact with Chen due to "emotional issues" -- as well as his "overseas work." 

The video is the first sign of Li since she disappeared from her home in Guangdong province, and it was uploaded a day after Chen published an open letter on Twitter to Xi Jinping pleading for his wife's freedom.
"I didn't think a video would be released so quickly after I wrote my letter," Chen said from Long Island, New York. 

"It's clear that my wife's kidnapping and my work have been totally related."
Li, who appears to be reading from a prepared text in the video, also asked Chen to stop searching for her and speaking out publicly on her behalf.
"They forced her to make this video," Chen said.
Chen has spoken to State Department and congressional officials about the disappearance of his wife, who is a U.S. permanent resident, he said. 

Chen became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2012 and married Li that same year.
Spokesmen for the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing referred inquiries to police headquarters in the southern province of Guangdong, where calls rang unanswered Wednesday.
Li's disappearance carries echoes of 2015, when several Hong Kong publishers who sold politically sensitive books vanished in quick succession -- believed to be abducted by Chinese agents -- in cases that sent chills through Chinese-language political media around the world.
But until the recent disappearance of Chen's wife, Mirror Media Group, under the direction of its publisher Ho Pin, managed to avoid the pitfalls of the business while cultivating its reputation as one of the top clearinghouses for Chinese political gossip.
The outlet's following and profile skyrocketed in 2017 when Chen conducted half-dozen interviews with Guo, who is seeking asylum in the U.S. 

Chinese authorities have accused Guo, who lives in Manhattan, of a long litany of "crimes", including bribery, extortion, kidnapping, genocide and rape.

State Terrorism

Political murder: anger after terminally ill Chinese Nobel laureate released from prison
By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

An undated handout image of Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel peace prize winner. 

China’s dissident community has expressed anger, shock and sadness that the country’s best-known political prisoner – the democracy activist and Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo – has been transferred to hospital after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.
Liu, 61, had been serving an 11-year prison sentence for inciting subversion of state power. 

His lawyer, Mo Shaoping, who has been in contact with Liu’s family, said he was now in the late stages of disease. 

Another of Liu’s lawyers, Shang Baojun, said he had been diagnosed on 23 May.

Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo released from Chinese prison with late-stage cancer

“This type of late-stage cancer is very difficult to treat. It would have been easier if it was discovered sooner,” Shang said. 

“It’s extremely serious.”
News of Liu’s diagnosis was met with an outpouring of anger from activists in China and abroad.
“This is simply a political murder, this is how the Communist party deals with its enemies, a prisoner of conscience dying just outside a jail cell,” said Hu Jia, a fellow activist who has known Liu for more than a decade and previously collaborated with him. 

“I’ve been to prison in China. The medical care is terrible and I’m sure China’s leaders were hoping for this outcome.”
In a rare statement, the Norwegian Nobel committee, which awarded Liu the prize in 2010, said: “Liu Xiaobo has fought a relentless struggle in favour of democracy and human rights in China and has already paid a heavy price. Chinese authorities carry a heavy responsibility if Liu Xiaobo, because of his imprisonment, has been denied necessary medical treatment.”

Liu is being treated by a team of eight doctors at the First Hospital of China Medical University in the north-eastern city of Shenyang, according to the provincial prison bureau, which also confirmed his medical parole.
Friends and family worry he may not receive the best care. 

He has asked to return to his home of Beijing to undergo medical treatment, but the authorities refused permission to do so.
“It adds injury to insult that Liu Xiaobo, who should never have been put in prison in the first place, has been diagnosed with a grave illness,” said Patrick Poon, a China researcher at Amnesty International. 

“The Chinese authorities should immediately ensure that Liu Xiaobo receives adequate medical care, effective access to his family and that he and all others imprisoned solely for exercising their human rights are immediately and unconditionally released.”
Liu was arrested in 2008 after writing a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08, in which he called for an end to one-party rule and improvements in human rights. 

Following a year in detention and a two-hour trial, he was sentenced to 11 years in December 2009.
Little has been heard from him since, and he was represented by an empty chair during the 2010 the Nobel peace prize award ceremony. 

In his absence, Liu’s final statement to the court entitled “I have no enemies” was read in place of his speech.
“Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation’s progress toward freedom and democracy,” one section read. 

“That is why I hope to be able to transcend my personal experiences as I look upon our nation’s development and social change, to counter the regime’s hostility with utmost goodwill, and to dispel hatred with love.”
Zhang Xuezhong, a legal scholar and human rights activist, said Liu had been a symbol of hope for many years.
“It’s known that Liu Xiaobo and his family have made a tremendous sacrifice for the cause of freedom and democracy for China,” said Zhang. 

“This is unfortunate news for him and his family, and it’s a blow to China’s democracy movement, as so many people have placed hope in him, and rightfully so.”

Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The Chinese government’s culpability for wrongfully imprisoning Liu Xiaobo is deepened by the fact that they released him only when he became gravely ill.”
A foreign ministry spokesman was “not aware of the situation” when asked about Liu’s case at a daily press briefing.
A literary critic and scholar, Liu was previously jailed for two years in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests and subsequent massacre.
His wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest since her husband won his Nobel prize and has reportedly suffered from depression and insomnia because of her isolation. 

She has not been formally charged with a crime despite spending the past seven years confined to her apartment.
Any meetings between the couple, usually one a month, are watched over by prison guards who interrupt any conversation they deem unsavoury. 

They are not allowed to touch.
More than 1,400 political dissidents are detained in China, according to a US congressional database, but the number is probably higher because information about topics deemed sensitive by the ruling Communist party is heavily censored.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on civil society, including the arrest of feminist activists, human rights lawyers and book publishers.
Liu’s 2010 Nobel prize infuriated the Chinese government and relations with Norway quickly deteriorated. 

Normal relations were only restored in December 2016, when the country said it “attaches high importance to China’s core interests and major concerns, will not support actions that undermine them, and will do its best to avoid any future damage to the bilateral relations”.

State terrorism

China has a worrying habit of making business leaders disappear
by Sherisse Pham

The mystery of disappearing Chinese tycoons

A TOP EXECUTIVE SUDDENLY DROPPING OFF THE RADAR WOULD BE ALARMING FOR ANY COMPANY. BUT IN CHINA, IT'S BECOME A DISTURBINGLY FAMILIAR SITUATION.
The latest example is Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of a major insurance company that owns the Waldorf Astoria in New York and recently held talks with the Kushner family over a Manhattan office tower.
He is reported to have been detained by authorities on Friday as part of a government investigation. His company, Anbang Insurance Group, said in a short statement that Wu "cannot perform his duties due to personal reasons."
His abrupt absence follows a string of cases in recent years in which business leaders were unceremoniously yanked from their duties by authorities, leaving employees and shareholders in the dark.
In 2015, senior executives from dozens of Chinese companies disappeared. 

Some returned to their posts, others did not.
The driving forces appeared to be Xi Jinping's crackdown on corruption as well as government investigations into China's stunning stock market crash in the summer of 2015.
Last year was relatively quiet, but a new push now seems to be unfolding ahead of an important meeting of China's political elite in the fall. 

Earlier this year, the head of the country's stock market watchdog reportedly vowed to capture more tycoons engaged in market manipulation.
Here are three of the most high-profile cases from the past 18 months:

Nabbed from the Four Seasons
Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua was seized from his apartment at the Four Seasons hotel in Hong Kong and taken to mainland China in late January, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Xiao controls the Tomorrow Group, a massive holding company with stakes in banks, insurers and property developers.

Xiao Jianhua

Days after he went missing, a front page ad published in a Hong Kong newspaper muddied the waters by appearing to deny he had been seized.
The statement, which had Xiao's name printed at the bottom, said that he was "recuperating overseas" and hoped to meet with media once he had recovered.
Nearly five months later, it's unclear what's happened to him.

China's Warren Buffett
Chinese conglomerate Fosun Group's investments include Club Med, Cirque de Soleil and Thomas Cook. 

Its chairman, Guo Guangchang, has been dubbed the Warren Buffett of China.
But Guo's fame and fortune did not save him from going missing for several days at the end of 2015. Fosun suspended trading of its shares after his sudden disappearance.

Guo Guangchang

When Guo finally resurfaced, the company said in a statement that he had been assisting officials with investigations.
His brief absence didn't derail Fosun's business. 

The company pulled in $11 billion in revenue last year.

Clothing tycoon
Zhou Chengjian, the billionaire founder of one of China's leading clothing companies, went missing in January last year.
After reports that Zhou had been detained by authorities, his company, Metersbonwe suspended trading of its shares.

Zhou Chengjian

The textile tycoon suddenly returned to work 10 days later.
The company gave no details about his disappearance.

State Terrorism: Inside the People’s Republic of Death

The range of victims—from hardened spies to infants barely out of the womb—is stunning and should be taken into account by Washington whenever it deals with Beijing.
By Gordon G. Chang

A Chinese informant for the Central Intelligence Agency was shot in front of colleagues in the courtyard of a government building, reports The New York Times. 

China’s government, according to former American officials, executed at least a dozen supposed CIA sources from the end of 2010 through 2012.
Beijing’s Global Times, a semi-official tabloid, calls the reporting of the courtyard killing “a purely fabricated story, most likely a piece of American-style imagination based on ideology,” but the publication, controlled by the authoritative People’s Daily, did not deny the New York paper’s report of the other executions.
The People’s Republic of China has very little compunction about killing its citizens. 

There is no question about that. 

The range of victims—from supposedly hardened spies to infants barely out of the womb—is stunning and should be taken into account by Washington whenever it deals with Beijing.
We start with babies born without permits issued by population control officials.
Mao Hengfeng heard the “piercing cries of her baby” after a forced abortion. 

“Yet instead of being able to hold her newborn child,” veteran journalist Verna Yu reports, “she watched helplessly while her baby was drowned in a bucket.”
“The baby was alive, I could hear the baby cry,” Mao said. 

“They killed my baby.” 

Mao was also forced by family planning officials to undergo a hysterectomy. 

She had been seven-and-a-half months pregnant at the time.
Her baby was killed a quarter century ago, but the practice continues today. 

“In today’s China, under the Communist rule,” says blind activist Chen Guangcheng, “the government can put their hand into your body, grab your baby out of your womb, and kill your baby in your face.” 

Chen talks of a “war zone” created by family planning officials.
Forced abortions occur as late as the ninth month, according to Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, in 2009 testimony before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress (PDF). 

Chinese “methods of infanticide” include “puncturing the skulls and injecting alcohol into the brains of full-term fetuses to kill them during labor,” she testified.
Littlejohn appended a translation of a Chinese document labeled “Best Practices, Infanticide,” issued to handle the question, “What if the infant is still alive after induced labor?”
“This is the hallmark of communistic governments: the peacetime mass killings of their own citizens,” Littlejohn told The Daily Beast.
China, since the beginning of 2016, has generally permitted couples to have two children, a relaxation of the notorious One-Child Policy, in place since 1979. 

Yet the requirement that couples obtain birth permits and the other coercive rules remain in place.
And that, unfortunately, means “gendercide.” 

As Susan Yoshihara, senior vice president for research at the Center for Family and Human Rights, pointed out in comments to me, “brutal Chinese family planning policy has led to the direct and indirect killing of tens of millions of innocent Chinese baby girls just because they are girls.”
Almost as grisly is organ harvesting. Dr. Jacob Lavee, president of the Israel Society of Transplantation, told PBS NewsHour that in 2005 one of his patients was promised a heart transplant in China “two weeks ahead of time.”
“If a patient was promised to undergo a heart transplant on a specific date,” Lavee said, “this could only mean that the—those who promised that they knew ahead of time when his potential donor would be dead.”
China said in 2014 that, beginning the following year, it would no longer take organs from executed prisoners. 

But forced donations are continuing according to Ethan Gutmann, author of The Slaughter.
Gutmann, along with David Kilgour and David Matas, is co-author of an exhaustive June 2016 report. 

They maintain there are somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants a year, a number far in excess of donations available from voluntary sources.
Prisoners corroborate conclusions of the report. 

Wang Chunying and Yin Liping, Falun Gong practitioners, told PBS they were forced to take tests needed for matching organs with recipients. 

Gutmann says he has heard similar accounts from other prisoners.
“China is not the only country with organ-transplant abuse,” David Matas, a Canadian human rights lawyer, told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. 

“What’s different about China is it’s institutionalized, it’s state-run, it’s party-directed. It’s not a few criminals in back alleys trying to make a fast buck.” 

Kilgour, a former Canadian MP and now a human rights activist, implored the Chinese government to stop what he labeled “an industrial-scale crime against humanity.”
In China, you can get livers, kidneys, hearts, spleens, hands, breasts, arms, corneas, intestines, pancreases, thyroids, stem cells, hair, and bone marrow, and it looks like they come from more than just common criminals. 

China has used Falun Gong practitioners, Uighurs, Tibetans, and Christians as forced donors, the three authors charge.
Beijing called the charges “groundless accusations” after the U.S. House of Representatives last year passed a resolution on the practice.
Despite noticeable improvement in Chinese donor practices, the Chinese state looks like it is searching for a new source of organs. 

“Forced organ harvesting of political dissidents began in the ’90s, in Xinjiang,” Gutmann told The Daily Beast. 

“With the recent revelation from Human Rights Watch—that the Chinese authorities are comprehensively mapping Uighur DNA—it is difficult to suppress the thought that Beijing has entered a new stage: not simply the murder of individual political dissidents but a slow-motion version of racial genocide.”
But, in fact, China is still murdering political dissidents, even if the killings often are out of sight. 

In 2009, police said a 24-year-old prisoner, Li Qiaoming, died while “playing hide-and-seek.” 

Li, however, had been beaten to death, and this term suddenly became a common euphemism for official brutality.
Last year, Lei Yang, 29 years old and an environmental activist, died an hour after being taken into custody in the Chinese capital. 

Police blamed a heart attack. 

An autopsy revealed Lei choked on his own vomit.
These days, activists also “disappear.” 

Take 2015’s “709” crackdown, so named because it began on July 9. 

Some 300 rights lawyers, legal assistants, and dissidents were swept up. 

A few of them—Zhao Wei and Wang Quanzhang—are still missing. 

The 709 campaign, primarily directed at the legal profession, has been called the “war on law” and “is widely seen as a sign of a growing intolerance of dissent under Xi Jinping.
“In China, there are countless allegations of police torture, abuse, and suspicious deaths,” widely followed freelance journalist Paul Mooney tells The Daily Beast. 

The police are killing citizens “with impunity.” 

And as he points out, “police power is growing and we can expect the situation to get worse and worse.”
Many people call the country “China.” 

But we would understand it better if we thought of it as the People’s Republic of Death.

China’s Hidden Massacres: An Interview with Tan Hecheng

The mass murder of nine thousand Chinese by explicit order of regional Communist Party officials during the height of the Cultural Revolution. 

By Ian Johnson

Tan Hecheng, author of The Killing Wind, on China’s Cultural Revolution, at Widow’s Bridge where many were murdered in the fall of 1967, November 2016

Tan Hecheng might seem an unlikely person to expose one of the most shocking crimes of the Chinese Communist Party. 

A congenial sixty-seven-year-old who spent most of his life in southern Hunan province away from the seats of power, Tan is no dissident. 

In fact, he has spent his career working for official state media and trying to believe in Communism.
But in a meticulously detailed five-hundred-page book released in English this week, he lays out in devastating detail one of the darkest, and least known, episodes in Communist Chinese history: the mass murder of nine thousand Chinese citizens by explicit order of regional Party officials during the height of the Cultural Revolution. 

Tan’s subject is specific to one county, but documents suggest that similar such massacres in the countryside were widespread, leading to as many as 1.5 million deaths.
In fact, it was the government itself that introduced Tan to these crimes. 

In 1986 while covering factory life for state media in Hunan province, a reform-minded magazine gave him an unusual assignment: to go to Dao County in a rural part of the province to write about a government investigation of killings that had taken place there during the Cultural Revolution. 

It was a time of reform and growing openness in China, and as an official journalist he was given full access to its tens of thousands of pages of documents. 

The idea was that Tan would write a positive piece about the Party’s efforts to deal with the past and punish the perpetrators.
But by the end of 1986 the political climate in China had shifted, and Tan’s article was never published. 

Still, Tan couldn’t let go of the explosive information he had found about the mass killings, and twenty-five years later he published his findings in Hong Kong. 

Now his book is coming out in English as The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness During the Cultural Revolution. 

Our conversation took place this fall, when I traveled with Tan to Dao County, where the massacres he writes about took place.

Ian Johnson: Let’s start with some specifics about the book. Why were you allowed to do your investigation in the 1980s?
Tan Hecheng: This was a time when [the reformist Communist Party leader] Hu Yaobang was in charge. 

He sent 1,300 officials to Dao County to investigate what had happened in the Cultural Revolution. 

I was working for Kaituo, which back then was the most courageous magazine in China. 

So I got to write it and in a big way do the interviews.
But then things didn’t go as planned.
When the first round of interviews was over, the political atmosphere was already turning. 

Forces in the Party opposed what was called “bourgeois liberalization.” 

So my article couldn’t be published. 

And the more time went on, the more impossible it became. It got tighter and tighter.

But why didn’t you give it up?
That’s simple. 

To speak frankly, in the past I didn’t really understand the Communist Party and its peasant revolution. 

It was like a blockage in my thinking. 

But suddenly in a short period of time my thinking became clear.

What triggered this understanding?
I’d kept asking one question: Had any one of the 9,000 people killed in the region been planning a counterrevolutionary event or said something unlawful? 

In the end the answer was: No.

Not one?
Not one. 

There wasn’t one who was counter-revolutionary in thoughts or deeds. 

Not one said anything against the revolution. 

They found a lot of cases of “counterrevolutionaries” and they killed them all, but they were all fake. 

When I understood this, I was heartbroken. 

I began to realize that the Party had a history of violence. 

Already in 1928 it organized violent peasant revolts that killed masses of people. 

And land reform [shortly after the Party took power in 1949] was incredibly violent. 

It was one mass killing after another. 

All of a sudden it became clear. 

There was no justification for what happened. It was just terror.
So I felt that situation really needed me. 

I had to write it. 

All those people [survivors, family members, and reform-minded government officials] who gave me information, I had pledged to them that I wasn’t taking this for personal gain, but for our children and grandchildren’s descendants—so that a massacre wouldn’t happen again.

In your book, you describe how the killings radiated out of the cities and towns into the countryside. You described it as a “pestilence.”
I mean it spread at foot speed. 

It spread like an old-fashioned plague, with carriers bringing it from one place to the next. 

At that time, transportation, information wasn’t developed. 

The massacre’s spread relied on individuals walking and delivering the message. 

When someone arrived with the orders, the killing started.

The killers were all young. You wrote that most were in their twenties. Were they brainwashed by the Maoist propaganda?
Yes. 

The young people kept talking about exploitation by the landlord class. 

But for all this talk, all the exploitation was by the same four landlords: Huang Shiren, Zhou Baopi, Liu Encai, Yang Bapian. [Four landlords whose alleged crimes were constantly repeated by Communist Party propaganda across the nation in movies, posters, and textbooks.] 

And it turned out that their crimes were all fake. 

But this is all they knew and they thought that anyone who owned any land in China was a horrible landlord who deserved to die. 

In fact, the people who owned land were mostly just the country’s middle class. 

Especially in Hunan, big landlords were very rare. 

But they were all classified as landlords. 

They were declared to be subhuman, and when the orders came down, people found it easy to kill them. 

They had been conditioned to think of them as not human.

Dao County, China, 2016

But this is all half a century ago. Things have changed.
No. 

It is rooted in this soil. 

Around the time of the [1989] Tiananmen Square massacre I raved about this at a meeting and put it like this: I said that according to my research the Communists were triumphant not because the Nationalists [their opponents in the civil war] were backward; it was because the Communists were even more backward. 

Their brutality and backwardness allowed them to succeed. 

The Nationalists still had a few enlightened ideas so they lost.

What about today? Can these ideas be published today?
It’s even stricter than before. 

In the past you could play an edge ball [a term from ping pong referring to hitting a ball right on the edge of the table—a risky strategy but one that allows a talented player to score points]. 

Now they don’t let you play that. 

Now they’ve drawn the demarcation line even tighter.

Why?
Some leaders aren’t very educated. 

They have just a middle school level. 

And then you add in the autocratic system that China has and you have policies that are moving against rather than toward greater openness.

What’s the reaction of local leaders in Dao County?
Their greatest desire is to avoid trouble. 

The county is not run by the same people as before. 

Several decades have passed. 

The people who wielded power then are now in their 80s. The new people in power don’t want trouble or unrest. 

Even in the 2000s it was risky to go there to do research because those in power were the children. But even they have retired.

When I traveled with you to Dao County you were quite cautious to avoid attracting attention.
Why were we so prudent? 

It’s because of higher-ups—of the new emperor [Xi Jinping]. 

His ways of doing things isn’t the same. 

Hu [Jintao, the party secretary from 2002 to 2012] is gone, so is Jiang [Zemin, party secretary from 1989 to 2002]. 

Hu and Jiang were more flexible. Xi is hard. 

The lower-downs don’t dare do otherwise, so they are hard too.

Do you think that people are still traumatized by memories of the killings?
Most people who witnessed it have died off, but the scar hasn’t healed. 

Because those who were killed and who suffered were the weakest members of society, the most marginal. 

They couldn’t get justice.

But some killers were brought to trial and compensation was paid.
According to the commission, 15,050 people were directly implicated in the killings, including one half of the Party’s cadres and members in the county. 

But only fifty-four people were sentenced for their crimes and another 948 Party members were disciplined. 

In addition, families only received 150 yuan for each person killed. 

This was equivalent to about 5,000 or 6,000 yuan [about $1,000] in today’s currency.

Couldn’t they fight or protest?
You can only have a conflict if the two sides have equal power. 

If one side is overwhelmingly more powerful, then there is no conflict. 

These poor farmers are so pitiable. 

If you give them 300 yuan [about $50], or 500 kuai, or find them a temporary job somewhere, then they won’t speak up. 

Poverty chills ambitions.

The current leadership seems trying to move back to the 1950s, when officials were thought to be clean and the Party had broad support.
Exactly. They think that that era was good. 

But that era led to the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t a good time. 

It was just because Mao had not laid bare his plans. 

I don’t mean the Cultural Revolution will repeat itself exactly. 

The methods won’t be the same but all socialist systems end up like that. 

It’s like inheriting a wife from your dead brother, or a father passing on knowledge to his son. 

The leaders just appoint their successors. It’s just a small circle. 

The soil—it’s so deep.

That makes change hard.
Look at it like this: the Qing [dynasty from 1644 to 1911] deteriorated into a complete mess [in the mid-nineteenth century] but still muddled through for fifty years. 

Now, look at the assets the current government has in its hands. 

You want to change it? 

It’s laughable.

The very last chapter of your book is a single, very striking line. You write, “The Buddha said: Lay down your butcher’s knife and become a buddha”—fangxia tudao; lidi chengfo. This is a well-known expression about repenting one’s sins. Why did you use it here?
I had three intentions. 

One is as the Buddha says, that people should put down their killing swords. Only then can they be absolved of their sins. 

The others is that I wish the Communist Party would really put down its killing sword—to reform. And the third, well it’s not about the knife in your hand. It’s the knife in your heart. 

Wang Yangming [the neo-Confucian philosopher who lived from 1472 to 1529] said it is easy to defeat the bandits in the mountains but hard to defeat the bandits of the heart. 

This applies to the entire population. 

It’s not aimed at the Communist Party but all of us: we have to lay down the knives in our hearts. Only then can we move toward a democratic path. 

So in the future if we have troubles, we won’t have to solve it through massacres and murders or clashing of fists, or whoever is stronger wins.

Why hasn’t the Party put down its sword?
It can’t. 

The benefits enjoyed by this privileged class are too great. 

If you put down your butcher’s knife you have to lay down your privileges. 

Because this whole state power is based on power coming from the barrel of a gun. 

Right now the Communist Party can’t really cheat anyone anymore because they are [ideologically] bankrupt. 

In the past they relied on deception and violence. Right now it’s entirely on violence. 

Think of all the arrests and detentions. This is the only way it rules. 

Lay down your knife and repent!

Tan Hecheng’s The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution has just been published by Oxford University Press.