Highlight: Jiang's Repressive Legacy - Falun Gong Bulletin Ep 02

There's a lot in the media kind of painting rosy news stories about Zhang, especially in the West, but you shouldn't let those stories distract you from the fact that tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners' lives were torn apart as a part of Zhang Zemin's directive. To remember him of anything other than an evil despot would be doing a disservice to the millions of Falun Gong practitioners who suffered in his hands. To understand Zhang's legacy, we have to give a little bit of context to the rise of Falun Gong and the size and significance of it before going into his brutal and deadly reaction to it. Because much of the CCP's propaganda over the last decades has been to malign Falun Gong in the West, to control its coverage, and make people feel as though it's a small fringe issue. But in reality, Falun Gong is one of the largest defining stories in modern Chinese history. Falun Gong was introduced to China in 1992 by Mr. Li Hongzhi, and it was introduced through a series of lectures that were given from 1992 to 1994. And from 1992 to 1999, organically, Falun Gong grew from 0 to 100 million practitioners by Chinese government's own estimates of 70 to 100 million practitioners. That means that one out of every 13 Chinese people were practicing Falun Gong. And the amount of people practicing Falun Gong exceeded the amount of people in the Chinese Communist Party. And the amount of people practicing Falun Gong permeated through every level of Chinese society, from farmers to top CCP officials. And the resurgence of Chinese traditional values was obviously at odds with the atheism, violence, and struggle of the Marxism of the Chinese Communist Party. And Jiang Zemin, who was a person that came up through the ranks through squashing the Tiananmen Square protests, was someone that wanted to solidify his power through violence and an iron fist. And he wanted to solidify his power through placing people under him and throughout the Chinese Communist Party that would be loyal to him through corruption. Through his own decision making, in 1999, on July 20th, he started the illegal persecution of Falun Gong based on his own directive. And he didn't have the support of all the fellow CCP politoboros standing members. And to quote him, it really sums up what his goals were and his legacy. Just to quote him about Falun Gong, he said, to ruin their reputations, to bankrupt them financially, and to destroy them physically.