Falun Gong practitioners take part in a parade marking the 22nd anniversary of the start of the Chinese regime’s persecution of Falun Gong, in Washington on July 16, 2021. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
By
NEW YORK—The opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics contained all the pageantry that one might expect from an authoritarian regime eager to burnish its global image: hundreds of children holding dove-shaped props formed the shape of a heart as they danced on a star-lit stadium, as green and white fireworks spelled out the word “spring” overhead, a reference to the lunar new year celebration.
“One world, one family,” so reads the slogan displayed to spectators in the partially-filled “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium on Jan. 4, echoing a call for unity that the Chinese regime has often repeated on the world stage over the past few years.
With this glitzy show, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is trying to take the world’s attention away from the much grimmer realities, including detention, torture, and death taking place a mere miles away from the Olympic venues, activists said.
General View inside the stadium of the Olympic Cauldron as a firework display is seen above during the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics at the Beijing National Stadium in Beijing, China, on Feb. 04, 2022. (David Ramos/Getty Images)
One detainee was so emaciated that she was taken home on a stretcher, and slapped with a two-and-a-half-year sentence days later. Another spent his entire 30s in prison, only to receive another long sentence years later. A third lost her husband to persecution and is herself now behind the bars. All three became the regime’s target merely for persisting in practicing their faith.
Their stories and others were featured in an interactive map released on Friday, the same day as Beijing became the world’s first country to host both the Summer and Winter Games. The map, developed by Falun Dafa Information Center, spotlighted over a dozen “persecution hotspots” in and around Beijing, where adherents of the persecuted faith group Falun Gong are languishing for not giving up their beliefs.
A screenshot of the interactive map by Falun Dafa Information Center to showcase the detention facilities near Beijing Olympic venues. (Courtesy of Falun Dafa Information Center)
It’s the first comprehensive map of its kind to allow “a glimpse inside the places the Chinese Communist Party does not want you to see,” said the New York-based human rights group.
The “proximity of Olympic glory to terrible human suffering highlights the tragic and often deceptive rule of the Chinese Communist Party,” said the center’s spokesperson Erping Zhang.
“There is no other regime on earth that has the audacity, and international clout, to host the Games while simultaneously detaining such large numbers of prisoners of conscience in settings ripe with abuse and torture,” he said in a press release.
Two Chinese police wears a protective mask as they stands in front of the Olympic Tower ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics in Beijing, China, on Jan. 30, 2022. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
Olympic Venues Alongside Prison Camps
Adherents of the spiritual discipline have been subject to an over two-decade-long persecution by the communist regime, which deemed the group a threat after the practice exploded in popularity during the 1990s. Between 70 million to 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong by the end of the decade, according to estimates at the time.
Half a dozen torture facilities that hold Falun Gong detainees are around 10 to 20 miles away from Beijing’s major Olympic venues, from the National Stadium to the National Speed Skating Oval, where the speed skating competition commenced on Feb. 5.
“You could literally watch the speed skating Olympic event, walk out the door from the oval, and walk 14 miles due east and you are at a prison camp where people are being incarcerated—at least one case for nine years—for their faith in Falun Gong,” Levi Browde, executive director of Falun Dafa Information Center, told The Epoch Times.
Performers are seen during the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics at the Beijing National Stadium in Beijing, China, on Feb. 04, 2022. (David Ramos/Getty Images)
It took a month for the researchers to verify the details and complete the map. Many of the facilities have both a public and private name, and even two addresses, to avoid outside scrutiny. Some, serving concurrently as a labor camp, adopt a secondary name as a cover for their slave labor business, according to the researchers.
Despite his years of research into the persecution campaign, seeing the facilities visually was still striking, said Browde.
“That’s sort of like going to see the Yankee Stadium and walking down to somewhere in Central Park, where there’s a prison camp.”
Persecution
The detainee that Browde cited was 52-year-old Shi Shaoping, who holds a master’s degree from the photochemical institute at the country’s lead national scientific institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Shi Shaoping pictured with his masters’ degree certificate (R). (Courtesy of Minghui.org)
Shi was arrested from his home in November 2019, but his family did not hear any news about his whereabouts until last April, when police notified them of Shi’s nine-year sentence at Beijing No. 2 Prison, a venue for holding death-row inmates and those serving life sentences.
For his faith, Shi had already served a 10-year prison sentence prior to this arrest. At Qianjin Prison, which is also on the interactive map, Shi was made to sit on a small stool, motionless, for up to 20 hours daily, over a few years, according to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based clearinghouse for the persecution of Falun Gong in China. On the coldest winter days, guards would leave the window wide open, causing Shi’s whole body to shiver. He was once barred from using the restroom for an entire month.
Sixteen miles away from the same skating venue is Beijing Women’s Prison, where artist Xu Na was held until this January.
An undated photo of Xu Na. (Courtesy of Falun Dafa Information Center)
Months before the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, police arrested Xu and her husband Yu Zhou during an “Olympic check,” after discovering Falun Gong books in their car. Yu, a folk singer and musician, died in detention 11 days later, on the eve of Chinese New Year. Xu subsequently spent three years in jail.
About 22 miles northwest of the National Stadium, the Changping District Detention Center held Wang Chaoying for distributing informational materials about Falun Gong. The 68-year-old was hospitalized three times over six months between 2020 and 2021. She was sent home on a stretcher, having lost 40 pounds of weight. Ten days later, the court delivered her verdict: a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.
Slave Labor
Thirteen miles north of the skating oval is the Beijing Juvenile Correction Facility where Liu Jiying, who escaped to New York in 2016, first crossed paths with Xu, the Beijing painter, in 2001, Liu told The Epoch Times. The facility was actually an underground forced labor facility, where they became practically slave laborers. Both were later transferred to Beijing Women’s Prison, then still under construction. Liu was serving an eight-year jail term, while Xu was on a five-year sentence.
Each prison unit sourced its own “jobs.” Xu was levied some of the harshest labor, including sewing shoe soles, which often kept her up until 2 a.m. Liu had made sweaters and scarfs for export, stitched lacings on ski socks, and assembled stamp albums. More often, she would need to package about 10,000 disposable chopsticks each day. There would be no sleep until they finish their allotted quota. Talking wasn’t allowed, but once, Liu flashed a thumbs-up to Xu to cheer her up.
An undated photo of Xu Na (L) and Yu Zhou. (Courtesy of Falun Dafa Information Center)
The hygiene situation on the production floor was often deplorable, Liu, now 67, said. The chopsticks sometimes came with shoe prints on them; when placing the cotton swabs, another product she had to package, into plastic bags at Beijing Women’s Prison, where she was later transferred, small insects would crawl out. The swabs would be labeled as “disinfected,” she said.
It was at these facilities that Liu vowed never to use disposable chopsticks again. “When people take the chopsticks to eat, they’d assume those are clean, who would examine them that closely?” she said.
Detained Again
Three weeks ahead of Winter Olympics, on Jan. 14, the Beijing painter Xu was handed another eight-year jail term for her role in supplying photos to The Epoch Times that documented the early months of the pandemic.
Following Xu’s case from New York, Liu said the news gave her inexplicable sadness. “She already served eight years, now’s another eight,” she said. Liu knows of others who have fared even worse: one friend of hers, who did not cave in to authorities’ pressure to renounce her belief, served 12 years. Her son was 9 months old when she was jailed. When the woman was freed, the child didn’t recognize her as his mother.
Falun Gong practitioner Xu Na in China in this undated photo. Xu was sentenced to eight years in prison for her religious beliefs. (The Epoch Times)
“What did we do? I didn’t do anything illegal, what right do they have to imprison me for eight years?” said Liu. “It is they who are breaking the law.”
She had once posed the same questions at an arraignment hearing in 2016.
“You are committing a crime,” she told the authorities.
They, in turn, “said not a word,” she recalled.
Liu lost her mother shortly after her release in 2016. The woman had fallen unconscious following Liu’s arrest and a house raid.
“My mother didn’t have to die,” she said.
The tragedies traversing two Beijing Olympics should make plain to the international community that the regime has not at all changed, said Browde.
“Too often, they would look at the high rise buildings and all the Starbucks around Beijing, and they think, ‘oh, this is the new China,’” he said. “They just think it’s better and more civilized.”
“Seeing Olympic venues right alongside prison camps … where people are incarcerated and tortured because of their faith makes the deception and the hypocrisy of the CCP very clear.”
