מדוע 100 מיליון סינים הוגדרו כאויב

Hi everyone, I'm Karen and this is The Run List. So many of you probably don't know about July 20th, 1999. About 14 years ago, China's Communist Party suddenly declared as many as 100 million Chinese people as the number one enemy of the state. Now you're probably thinking, that's quite a lot of people. Why haven't I heard about this? Well, there are several reasons. These new state enemies all had one thing in common. They practice a very traditional Chinese spiritual practice called Falun Gong or Falun Dafa. So Falun Gong involves simple meditative exercises and is based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance, so that practitioners strive to be good people in society. They also believe that deities like Buddha, stars and gods exist. Okay, now that doesn't sound so bad, but you have to understand that the Chinese Communist Party is atheist, it bans its members from adopting any religion and tightly controls any belief system. So now getting back to my point about why Falun Gong was targeted. Falun Gong is really a grassroots spiritual movement. Within just a few years, it spread around China by word of mouth, because people who learned the practice were impressed by how it improves health and teaches them to be better people. So after Falun Gong was introduced to the public in 1992 by this man, Mr. Li Hongzhi, by 1999, the Chinese government estimated that between 70 and 100 million people at every level of society had taken up the practice. To break that down, that's about one in every 15 people. You could see big groups of people doing the meditative exercises in parks all across the country. Now remember how I said the Communist Party kind of wants to control everything like what you study, how many kids you have, and what you can read? Well, the leader at the time, Jiang Zemin, wasn't happy that all of these people were doing this practice that fundamentally differed from what communism preaches. So after a couple of years of trying to secretly investigate Falun Gong in order to come up with reasons it could use to oppose the practice, the regime couldn't actually find anything. But you know, when the party controls every single media outlet in the country, it's pretty easy to start printing articles and reports to discredit anything it wanted. And that started happening. And when Falun Gong practitioners appealed to the government to say, hey, these reports are false, the regime said, aha, these people are against the government. And so on July 20, 1999, Jiang Zemin ordered an all-out ban of Falun Gong. So all of a sudden, police moved in, arrested practitioners in the parks, ransacked their homes, and detained them. Hundreds of thousands were sent to prisons or labor camps where they were severely tortured into giving up the practice. Many who held on to their beliefs were simply tortured to death. For the next couple of years, there was an intense media campaign to smear Falun Gong so the party could justify the crackdown. State-run CCTV even broadcast fake stunts like this one, saying these were Falun Gong practitioners burning themselves to death. Now, anyone who knew about Falun Gong knew that this could not be true because the practice bans killing. And after the CCTV footage was analyzed, experts concluded it was just staged by authorities and that the individuals who died were actually not practitioners. Still, the Communist Party has been carrying out this crackdown for 14 years, and the persecution continues to this day. In response, Falun Gong practitioners have used each July 20th as an opportunity to tell people around the world about all the atrocities that have happened. It's part of a peaceful approach they have used to try to bring awareness so the persecution would end. So you may see Falun Gong practitioners exercising in public places around the world this weekend and handing out informational brochures. Anyway, have you heard of Falun Gong and the Holocaust-like persecution they're subjected to before? What would you say to Chinese leaders if you had the chance? Please leave your comments below, share this video, or check out this award-winning documentary Free China, The Courage to Believe, to find out more.