Gansu 610 Office Holds Brainwashing Session to Force Falun Gong Practitioners to Renounce Their Faith

(Minghui.org) On June 8, 2021, officials from the Political and Legal Affairs Committee and the 610 Office in Pingliang City, Jingchuan County, Gansu Province held a three-day brainwashing session in a hotel in Jingchuan County, attempting to force Falun Gong practitioners to renounce their faith.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditation practice that teaches Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been persecuting the practice since July 1999. 

Four practitioners were arrested at work and taken to the brainwashing session. They include: Ms. Lu Huiling, a 53-year-old engineer in the Bureau of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry; Mr. Kang Shangwen, 48, an anesthetist at Jingchuan County Chinese Medicine Hospital; Ms. Wen Xiaoning, 57, a middle school teacher; and Mr. Gao Wenke, 54, an elementary school teacher.

The practitioners were each held in a hotel room, which their respective employers were ordered to pay for. Each of the employers was also instructed to send in a few people, one of whom had to be a higher-level manager, to stay with their practitioner from 6 a.m. to 12 midnight every day. The practitioners were not allowed to leave the room; food was delivered to the room. 

During the brainwashing session, 610 Office agents took turns slandering Falun Gong and threatening the practitioners. The brainwashing content also included atheism as well as propaganda to promote communism and Party culture.

In addition to the brainwashing, the agents also used salary raises or job promotion to entice the practitioners to renounce their belief. When the practitioners didn’t respond, the agents began to threaten them with job termination, suspension of their pay or other sources of income, or with blocking their children from attending college or finding a job. They also threatened to dispatch police officers to monitor the practitioners, instead of people from their workplace. 

Ms. Lu was once sentenced to three years for upholding her belief, Mr. Kang was sentenced to one and a half years, and Mr. Gao was sentenced twice, for a total of four years. They have each suffered varying degrees of torture and abuse in detention—Ms. Lu lost all of her teeth and Mr. Gao was injured from beatings sustained in the forced labor camp.

Knowing about their past persecution, the 610 Office agents threatened to subject the practitioners to the same ordeals, including home ransackings and prison sentences, when they remained unmoved in the latest round of brainwashing and coercion.

When the practitioners pointed out the illegality of the persecution and the brainwashing, Zhu Yonggang, deputy director of the 610 Office in Pingliang City, cut them off by saying that “experts” would be talking to them about the law. However, when the practitioners talked to the so-called expert, the “expert” admitted that he was not an expert, but simply a rank-and-file employee from the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, an extra-judiciary agency tasked with overseeing the persecution.

During the brainwashing session, Mr. Kang pointed out the loopholes in the staged Tiananmen Square self-immolation hoax, asking why the hair of the “self-immolators” didn’t catch fire, or how the girl who supposedly underwent a tracheotomy could sing just a few days later. Mr. Kang added that Falun Gong’s teachings prohibited killing or committing suicide.

Another “expert” accused the practitioners of committing “treason” by persuading local residents to quit the Chinese Communist Party, and threatened that all of their family members would be implicated if they didn’t stop their efforts to raise awareness of the persecution.

At the end of the session, the practitioners were ordered to sign a guarantee statement. Most of the practitioners’ supervisors at work were reluctant to participate in the persecution, but were forced to do it.