Forget Not the Beijing Olympics’ Victims

Thanks to Jana and A True Renaissance for this post.

It is now clear that the Beijing Olympics Games did not help to improve human rights in China. On the contrary, unknown thousands of innocent people have fallen victim to the Beijing Olympics.

Knowing that it had the Olympics secured, the Chinese regime not only refused to honor the promise it made to improve human rights when it bid for the 2008 Olympic Games,1 but it used the Olympics’ security as a pretext to apprehend, torture, and murder people who had already suffered prolonged human rights violations in China.

One group of victims that the Chinese regime particularly targeted in the year leading up to the Beijing Olympics is Falun Gong practitioners.2 The Chinese regime has consistently denied persecution of other groups, but has publicly vowed to “eradicate” Falun Gong.

In April 2007, a secret document of the Public Security Department listed Falun Gong among 11 groups that were to be monitored and prohibited from attending the Olympics.3 In February 2008, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad issued an internal instruction to “strictly monitor and control Falun Gong.”

Following these instructions, Chinese authorities all over the country intensified the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. In the following pages, we document the names and details of the arrest of over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners in the name of the Beijing Olympics’ security. To fit within a reasonable space, we provide only a small number of the descriptions of how these victims have been violently and even fatally abused in custody. Because of the Chinese regime’s restrictions on the flow of information, the atrocities are feared to be much worse.

The report can be found at below site:
http://www.falunhr.org/reports/PDFs/BeijingOlympicsPersecution.pdf

These people have committed no offense. The majority of them were abducted when the police broke into their homes. Many were taken from their work. Some middle school and high school students were arrested in their dormitories and classrooms. They could not possibly threaten the Olympics from where they were arrested; many were hundreds or thousands of miles away from the venue.

The incarceration of Falun Gong practitioners was not at all to keep them away from the Olympics; it was to coerce them into renouncing Falun Gong. To that end, all of the arrested Falun Gong practitioners were severely tortured; some were beaten to death hours after their arrest.

When their family members asked for their release, the authorities replied, “After the Olympics.” However, large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners are still in custody, long past the Olympics.

1 Liu Jingmin, Vice President of the Beijing Olympic Bid, said in April 2001, “By allowing Beijing to host the Games you will help the development of human rights.”

2 United States Congressional-Executive Commission on China Annual Report 2008, Page 143
3 http://chinascope.org/main/content/view/339/148/
http://www.consciencefoundation.org

It should be clear from this report how the Beijing Olympics was used by the Chinese regime to intensify its persecution of Falun Gong. The same Olympics tragedies have happened to others, including Tibetans, Uyghur’s, Christians, and human rights lawyers and defenders.

In presenting this report, and the evidence that it contains to show the deterioration of human rights in China, we remind those who rationalized rewarding the Olympics to Beijing as an opportunity to help human rights in China that they have a responsibility to come to the rescue of those who suffered the consequences of their failed rationalization.

This failed Olympics rationalization is but the latest entry in the long list of similarly failed rationalizations of the U.S. and the West’s policy of economic engagement with Communist China.4

There have been numerous so-called opportunities over the past twenty years to help China to improve its human rights, yet with the passing of each opportunity, more victims have fallen to the Chinese regime’s human rights violations. Meanwhile, the makers of the engagement policy have simply walked away from the victims and moved on to the next “opportunity.”

Human rights improvement requires having a heart for the victims, a sense of responsibility, and the courage to stand up for what is right, rather than the excuse of so-called opportunities.

By repeating the same failure in China’s human rights and continuing to profit from these “opportunities” for financial gain, the economic engagement policy has become modern democracy’s worst example of hypocrisy. The complete lack of accountability also makes it modern democracy’s worst example of irresponsible politics.

It may therefore be fitting that beyond the Beijing Olympics there is no opportunity in sight to “help” improve the human rights situation in China. Instead the U.S. and the West are supplicating China to help them financially in the current deep financial crisis, as evidenced by the recent pleading of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for China to continue buying U.S. debt. Going further than President Clinton’s delinking of human rights from trade with China, Secretary Clinton has openly delinked human rights from all China policy, stating that “those issues” can't interfere with our more important goals, that “our economies are so intertwined,” and that, “We are truly going to rise or fall together. We are in the same boat and thankfully we are rowing in the same direction.”

Secretary Clinton is candid in openly admitting what human rights really means to the U.S.’s China policy, an inconvenient interference with other more important goals, yet it is sobering to see the top diplomat of the leader of the free world avow such a Faustian contract to rise or fall together with the most tyrannical regime of the world. Such a pledge is a betrayal not only to human rights, but to the very core of American values. Had America’s Founding Fathers cast aside “those issues” like unalienable rights, America would not have been conceived in liberty but remained intertwined with Great Britain.

Had President Lincoln refused to let “those issues” like equality interfere with other “more important” goals such as avoiding a war and preserving a much more intertwined economy, the Union could just “rise or fall together” with the South, and there would be no President Obama.

4 “Enticement and Engagement” from Falun Gong, Humanity’s Last Stand, Conscience Foundation, 2006, Page. 31.
http://www.consciencefoundation.org

However, more is at stake. Few may have noted how closely the collapses of Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, AIG and others followed on the heels of the Beijing Olympics to bring about the present financial crisis, and fewer may have considered that these scourges were not coincidental. Throughout history people with demonstrably higher moral standards have been more introspective in enlightening to the significance of tribulations. President Abraham Lincoln, in another mightier scourge, noted that the powerful interest of slavery was somehow the cause of the Civil War, and that both the North and the South at some point had contributed to the prolonging of that interest – “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”

Even when the Civil War came, most looked for “a result less fundamental and astounding.” Lincoln, however, saw that “The Almighty has His own purposes,” and that if God willed that the Civil War continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

The U.S. and the West’s economic engagement policy with China may be less overt than the old slavery but no less immoral, for behind the pretext of human rights improvement is the profit from outsourcing to China’s modern slavery.3 The Chinese regime not only entices the U.S. and the West to outsource to its modern slavery, but also bankrolls American consumers to buy China’s cheap slave-labor products by lending money to the U.S. through bond purchases.

If the profit extracted from America's old slavery had to be wiped out through the Civil War, could the financial gains extracted from China’s modern slavery at the expense of the Chinese people's worsening rights be treated differently and written off by selling more bonds to China?

If the current financial crisis is a warning of our moral decline in profiting from China’s modern slavery, what might be at stake in continuing down this wrong path? Needless to say, it is when a country is less inclined to believe in higher principles that its officials will consider to “rise or fall together” with a godless and criminal regime.

But will the higher principles be less true just because we believe in them less? Will God be less just merely because human beings become less spiritual and more material?

It may be expedient and even tempting to remain silent to the Chinese regime’s human rights abuses in exchange for some financial gains, but, wittingly or unwittingly, those who place lining their pockets over values are themselves victims of the Chinese regime’s crimes against conscience.5

Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, Uyghur’s, Christians, and human rights lawyers
and defenders have been victimized and lost their freedom because of their refusal to conform to the abusive regime, but those who choose to be in the same boat and rise and fall with such an abusive regime have lost their conscience.

In presenting this report and asking the free world not to forget these victims, we hope the free world may come to see its own falling victim to the Chinese regime’s crimes against conscience.

5 See also: http://www.falunhr.org/newsletter/AgainstConscience.pdf
www.consciencefoundation.org

This report is also a tribute to Falun Gong practitioners’ courageous defense of human conscience. The information contained in this report did not come easily. Many Falun Gong practitioners in China have risked all to expose the violations they or fellow practitioners have suffered. Their reports must not be taken lightly, lest the values of hope, courage and human beings’ most fundamental right to conscience be forsaken. It is our earnest hope that in helping them the free world will find its way back to the true spirit of humanity.