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.

Chinese hypocrisy is a pleonasm

China jails its citizens as it touts global benefits of ‘new Silk Road’ 

By Nathan Vanderklippe

The curtains closed on China’s moment of international glory with leaders from 29 countries agreeing to a joint communiqué, an act of symbolic support for Beijing’s vision of building a more prosperous global future around a “new Silk Road.”

But as those leaders placed their signatures on a document pledging, among other things, “to be more responsive to all the needs of those in vulnerable situations,” hundreds of Chinese people were being kept inside a black jail on the outskirts of Beijing, many of them with long histories of complaining about mistreatment they had endured. 

They remained there for the duration of the Belt and Road Initiative forum that brought crowds of foreign dignitaries to China.
On Tuesday, after the Presidents had left, police transferred several dozen people out of the black jail, the unofficial Jiujingzhuang detention centre where people who petition the government are often held. 

They were loaded onto a single car on a slow train to Shanghai, with men in uniform barring anyone else from entering or leaving for the 19-hour trip.
The gap between their treatment and the ideals put forward in the communiqué is one indication of the contradictions that lie at the heart of China’s ambitious new desire to position itself as a new global leader, one at the forefront of a new era of common trade, security and peaceful relations.
The joint communiqué also pledges signatories, which include Russia and Turkey, to expand “peace, justice, social cohesion, inclusiveness, democracy, good governance, the rule of law, human rights, gender equality and women empowerment.”
But to those in China who complain that their rights have been violated, “they treat us like enemies. They believe that while their meeting is on, we should not appear. We should disappear,” said Mao Hengfeng, a long-time protester and human-rights defender who has been jailed multiple times since she was forced to have an abortion in the late 1980s.
Ms. Mao arrived in Beijing on Sunday, the first day of the Belt and Road forum. 

When she and a group of other petitioners reached a bus stop near the meeting site, police checked their identification and quickly took them away, depositing them first in what she described as an unused military warehouse, then taking them to a black jail, before evicting them from Beijing.
“It does call into question some of the high-sounding rhetoric in the joint communiqué,” said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International.
Elsewhere, too, there are inconsistencies between the rhetoric and practice of China’s bid to fill the leadership vacuum left by a more inward-focused United States.
China has said the world needs more connectivity, even though it is a leader in fencing off the Internet. 

China has called for removing obstacles to trade and investment, despite maintaining protectionist barriers at home and pursuing a national import substitution program to privilege its own manufactured goods. 

Xi Jinping has urged the creation of “a big family of harmonious co-existence,” while at home Chinese authorities urge the reporting of foreigners who might be spies.
“When they are dealing with globalization, they are not actually doing it in the way the term has previously been understood,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. 

Xi “instead is emphasizing the kind of globalization the Chinese government wants to promote.”
That may affect China’s ability to assume the global primacy it has sought since the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President.
“Leadership has two sides. You have to be willing and able to assert your leadership and you need other people willing to accept your leadership,” said Prof. Tsang. 

China’s willingness to expend vast funds in building new roads, rail lines and power plants on its One Belt, One Road initiative has won it supporters around the world, he said.
With Beijing “prepared to put an absolutely enormous amount of money behind it, you are not going to have a lot of people coming out openly to challenge you. And therefore you are going to be successful in the short-term, officially,” he said.
And it’s clear that globalization as it is currently constructed has run into problems, in Western countries and elsewhere. 

China is providing an alternative. 

Beijing says it is focused on trade and economic matters, and that it has no desire to meddle with the affairs or political systems of other countries.
What’s not clear is how much those who back Belt and Road are prepared to cede China a durable position of influence, such as the U.S. has managed to achieve.
With China, “all they are offering is the greatest-ever gravy train,” Prof. Tsang said.
“If the Chinese economy does not stay on the current trajectory, then the game is changed. And if that money isn’t there, then the gravy train becomes a train of sand, and you don’t get the same reception.”
Those aboard the slow train to Shanghai, meanwhile, questioned why China is spending so much time and money addressing issues outside its borders, when their own complaints remain unresolved.
Fei Aizhong has protested since her Shanghai home was demolished in 2002. 

To draw new attention to her case, she came to Beijing with others during the Belt and Road forum. Some of them slept under bridges because hotels barred them from staying during the event.
“For so many years, they robbed us of our house and property,” Ms. Fei said.
“One Belt, One Road is beneficial to people all over the world,” she said. 

“But they haven’t solved our problems. Instead, they treat us like class enemies.”