Excerpts from
An open Letter to the United States Congress
By Gao Zhisheng
A Persecuted and tortured Human
Rights lawyer
September 12, 2007
Dear ladies and
gentlemen from the Senate and the Congress of the
United States,
Most respectful greetings from Gao Zhisheng! Allow
me to express my sincere gratitude for your kind
consideration and support in the past year to me and
the values I am pursuing.
In the past two months, I have twice read the
Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 by James
Madison, and admired the freedom and democratic
constitution which China has not been able to enjoy.
There is a saying in China, “a bite when hungry is
better appreciated than a feast when full.”
Likewise, your persistence is especially precious
given the almost total silence, or even
subservience, of the mainstream international world
in the past few years in front of the tyranny of
Chinese communist regime, a parvenu government
that stops at no evil. Your persistence is a symbol
of the light of humanity. The persistence you and
many others show in refusing to collaborate with
this fascist government is a strong wall that
the overbearing communist regime can not stride
over. This persistence is a buoy that keeps the
oppressed from being completely drowned by darkness,
and it is the hope and source of strength for the
downtrodden Chinese people who are struggling for
human rights. It will keep us going with our
peaceful protest. You and other people of conscience
are an important force that makes it possible for
Chinese people to peacefully abandon the tyranny and
to establish a free, democratic and civilized new
China.
I am not a politician. I promise that you won’t see
any rhetoric, distortion, or pretence in this
letter. Experience teaches us that though the world
can be very critical, people often favor
counterfeited virtues. This rule is brought to
extremes in my country by those who vilify the
good and glorify evil. In the past two
years, the Chinese communist regime has demonstrated
every vile act one can and cannot imagine during
their efforts to silence me.
As if to prove their
determination to destroy human feelings and
conscience at all cost, the regime ordered at least
four secret police to maintain continuous intimate
man-to-man surveillance on my 3-year-old son.
My 12-year-old daughter was “privileged” to an
even higher level of treatment with six to ten male
and female secret police at her heels day and night,
month after month, even when she was in the
classroom. ... During this period, my wife and
children suffered repeated brutal assaults. The
regime is determined to stop at nothing to persecute
me, only because I stick to my conscience and
responsibility as a human being. Behavior that is
commonly considered to be too degrading for human
beings is enforced in my country as political
tasks....
A recent incident in Beijing reflects the regime’s
fear for the people. An old man persevered in
petitioning against forced eviction that robbed him
his home till his last breath. At his funeral,
Beijing police sent hundreds of policemen and
unidentified personnel in 59 police vehicles (mostly
buses) to surround the old man’s residence to
prevent people from attending the unyielding old
man’s funeral that was held there.... A Heilongjiang
farmer, Yang Chunlin, was robbed of his land. He was
arrested for “inspiring ” after he cried out, “We
want human rights, not the Olympic Games.” In recent
years, the illegal arrests of innocent people have
gone out of limits....
The Chinese Communist Party is a criminal group
that operates under the protection of national
political powers. It is essential to realize its
criminal nature so that we can make the right
decisions. I know clearly that due to the greed for
profit not many people would publicly acknowledge
this observation while too many people will just
pretend they don’t believe it. It is widely agreed
that for any legal government, it is a nature and a
basic moral standard to carry out the constitutional
law. But in China, this rule is publicly abandoned,
and the government that has been tirelessly
violating the constitutional law has become the
obstacle to people’s basic rights....
I. The
ongoing bloody religious persecution
The virtues taught by true beliefs means only
disaster to the evil. Though the freedom of belief
is regulated by China’s constitutional law, the
communist regime has never stopped fighting
people’s right in choosing their own beliefs, a
right that is justified by human nature. On the
other hand, without a court that can enforce the
constitutional law, the law has no effective
bonding. Even so, the communist regime takes pains
to make sure the constitutional law is completely
suffocated with numerous orders and regulations (for
example the Regulation on Religious Affairs
issued by State Council of China).
The bloody
persecution of Falun Gong starting from 1999 has
surpassed all evils ever done. In the past eight
years, over 3000 Falun Gong practitioners have been
confirmed to be killed, and countless injured.
Hundreds of thousands of practitioners have been
sent to labor camps. Millions were illegally
detained in the countless brainwashing camps
established in every corner in China by the
notorious 610 Office, an agency founded to lead
the persecution of Falun Gong. Such brainwashing
camps require even simpler entrance procedures while
the methods used to “educate” the practitioners
are shockingly cruel. Tens of millions have been
persecuted in various forms. A large number of
children have been expelled from school only because
their parents practice Falun Gong. Some of the
children were left unattended or even homeless after
their parents were arrested. (Since last August my
daughter has met many such children who lingered at
the gate of her school. The children, though
homeless, came up to my daughter to express their
condolence and support. Our hearts ached for these
children.)
The eight year long suppression of Falun Gong is so
far the most long-lasting and the most serious
humanity disaster in China and in the world. This is
why I am emphasizing it early in this letter. As for
proof of this persecution, I’d like to recommend the
investigative report I composed after doing
investigation myself. To report recorded the legally
acceptable evidences that I collected as an
attorney. One of the cases in the report involves
28-year-old Liu Boyang, a medical degree holder, and
his mother, who were both Falun Gong practitioners.
The mother and son were tortured to death
within less than ten days in the same building. The
last nights before their deaths, the two could hear
each other’s painful cries during the torture.
Before the cries died with them, the police never
stopped torturing them....
So today I’d take the liberty to ask you, and ask
the entire mankind, the following questions.
- Are the eight
year long persecution of Falun Gong and the
crimes against humanity committed by the Chinese
Communist Party only a problem for the victims?
Or are they problems for the mankind?
- Are the CCP’s
genocide and crimes against humanity a threat
only to the victims, or to the moral values of
the entire human society?
- Is mankind
capable of dealing with such state-run crimes
against humanity? ... Does today’s society have
the courage and conscience to stand up against
the genocide? If yes, do we have the capability
to stop it?
Judging by the definition of crimes of humanity
and genocide given in the international laws, a
large number of CCP officials meet all
Over 100 thousand
survivors who can testify over the tortures they
suffered, such as electric shock, torture by
particularly made tools. ...
The issue all of us
has to face is whether to pursue punishment [of the
criminals]. Is China an exception when it comes to
Public International Law for its crimes
against humanity and genocide? We should not ignore
difficulties to start this process due to the power
of the CCP, but it is feasible, possible, and
necessary from the perspective of International Law
to pursue criminal procedural punishment [against
the criminals]....
The CCP’s continuous
suppression of Christian family churches is
comparable to the shocking persecution of Falun
Gong. Except for large cities such as Beijing and
Shanghai, where people strongly oppose the
persecution and force the dictator to lower the
level of persecution, the persecution in townships
and villages toward family church members are no
different from the disaster suffered by Falun Gong
practitioners. In my hometown, a small county,
the number of arrested, detained, and robbed family
church members each year is far beyond persecuted
Falun Gong practitioners, and this illegal
persecution has been going on for a long time. Based
on my research on the persecution toward family
church members in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region,
the CCP has trained a group of police to focus on
harassing, persecuting, and suppressing family
church members. Just recently Mr. Zhou Tong and
others in Xinjiang were illegally detained. The
CCP’s persecution of Christians is an open
secret....
II.
Brutal Persecution of People’s Freedom and Rights
...In China, freedom is not only a luxury item, but
it also regarded as a dangerous item by the
dictators. The suppression of people’s longing for
freedom is against human nature and against heavenly
principles.
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press
are basic indicators of a civilized society, are the
main factors in modern world freedoms, and they are
also the basic part of social freedom. For a country
without rule by law, freedom of speech and freedom
of the press are the only ways to ensure people’s
rights and safety. Without this freedom, one can
imagine how unabashed the dictators are and how
helpless the suppressed groups are. The CCP has
always taken the control of media as a key
political task. It focuses on using technology to
control the media....
Recently, the CCP’s Ministry of Public Security
issued an urgent notice to order LDC to shut down
all forums, blogs, and other online information
exchange platforms before the 17th National
Congress. If one center is found to have more than
seven sites of online platforms, it will be shut
down and heavily fined. This is another evil
campaign to illegally suppress the media.
Freedom of association is regarded as a threat
by dictators. In a country without freedom of
association, people have no way to defend themselves
from the brutal dictatorship. How can a group of
people without any connection, as a result of lack
of freedom of association, challenge a regime
fortified with wealth and weapons? The feeling of
fragility and frustration of Chinese people is
beyond imagination for those in a democratic
country. In China, the whole nation is subdued by a
small group of criminals focusing on attacking and
persecuting people, one group after another....
III.
Furious Suppression of the Rights Defense Movement
In recent years, the CCP has furiously suppressed
the Chinese peoples’ rights defense movement to the
edge of lunacy. A typical example is the case of
Chen Guangcheng. When Chen Guangcheng, a blind man
and a human rights defender, learned of family
planning abuses in Linyi City, Shandong Province
through his own investigation, he made public the
CCP’s practice of forced abortions and
sterilizations. Chen voiced that a human being
should be allowed to come out, to the country and
the world. However, his single voice caused the
whole Chinese communist regime to panic. Their
reaction was not to stop the continuation of these
crime committed throughout the entire country, but
to exert brutal persecution against the upright
and brave hero Chen Guangcheng, along with his
innocent wife, young son, and elderly mother in her
seventies.
The CCP’s birth control policy is the largest
genocide in the history of mankind. Millions of
unborn each year have lost of their lives simply
because a few dictators made such a policy. (The
Chinese regime officially released figures that the
birth control policy has helped prevent 400 million
births in the last 20 years). Common people who have
not obeyed the policy have received extremely harsh
punishment. The startling evidence of these
excessive crimes by the CCP that blind Chen
Guangcheng happened to “witness” and expose to the
public-- these are just a small fraction of the long
list of the CCP’s countless crimes.....
Here I want to remind the ladies and gentlemen of
the open letter to Hu Jintao, written by the
prominent human rights defender Guo Feixiong’s wife,
which contains a detailed account of Guo’s
horrifying experience in a year-round prison. Guo is
a human rights defender of complete integrity in
both personality and conduct. His firm determination
and persistence in his human rights work threw the
communist regime into panic. In two years, Guo was
detained three times....
During his detention, he was subjected to physical
abuse and was handcuffed and shackled to his bed for
42 days. Guo experienced the worst treatment after
being transferred to a detention center in Shenyang
City, Liaoning Province. There interrogators heavily
beat him, shackled his hands behind his back, and
sat him on a tiger bench or stool. As a result,
overpressure from the torture damaged his shoulder
joints. Even more brutally, the police, headed by
Tao Zhongge and Yang Naixin, applied a high-voltage
electric baton to his genitals. On August 7, Guo
told his attorney that this brutality of viciously
and continuously striking his genitalia damaged his
health and lead to incurable injury on his body.
All of these to us are just like nightmares that we
cannot get away from. In the past two or three
years, the precipitous, cruel reality around us has
become the main theme of our lives. How can the
world become so absurd, and where on earth will it
drive people to? If we hadn’t personally experience
the suffering and pain, we could not believe such
incomprehensible things happen around us....
To the wrath and indignity of all, on February 12,
2007, they extorted a confession from Guo after they
used electric batons to beat his genitals, but they
were not quite satisfied. On the night of March 19,
police officers dragged him into the secret place
where he was interrogated the last time and
reportedly beat him....
I’m not able to see
your facial expressions after you hear these stories
of how Hu’s regime treats people of conscience. Few
people in China would be surprised about hearing
such things. Indeed, this is because our government
has conducted this savage behavior too much and for
too long.... Since the beginning of this year, there
have been large-scale forced abductions of
appellants in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities.
The bloody violence occurring in broad daylight is
shocking.
IV.
Evil Conduct of Stealing People’s Private Property
...Recently, 215 courageous Shanghai citizens,
including the renowned human rights lawyer Enchong
Zheng, wrote an open letter to CCP’s chairman Hu
Jintao, enumerating the crimes committed by the
political clique in Shanghai that had harmed
people’s personal rights and property rights to the
extremes. They wrote in their open letter: “By hook
or by crook, they drove 2.8 million Shanghai
citizens from the center of the city to the suburban
area, and forcibly confiscated the farm land and
tore down the residences originally belonging to one
million farmers in the suburb. For more than a
decade, Shanghai has been the origin and center of
forceful land appropriation and coercive
residence tear-downs to force people to move.
In the past two
years alone, the city government of Shanghai
organized 4,000 cadres from the appeals office to
serve as a large-scale 'blocking' force to prevent
victims from appealing; the government also
organized a 'roughneck team' to commit violence
against civilians in order to implement the city’s
plan to appropriate land. Civilians’ bodies were
brutalized; sometimes their lives were taken away;
all channels to appeal were completed blocked.
Since 2006, citizens
beaten to death include Huimin Duan, Ronglin Du,
Rong Dai, Xiaoming Chen, and others. Some were
detained in mental hospitals where they suffered
severe mental torture.... So far in 2007, three
people have been beaten to death. They were Huimin
Duan, Xiaoming Chen, and Dahua Zhou....
VI.
Farmers
The economic development did not widely benefit the
farmers. Most countrysides are still poor and are
unimaginably underdeveloped. Even though there is no
more farming tax, this tax was merely one of the
reasons for the poverty. It's cancellation did not
help reduce the degree of poorness. Chinese Law says
that the farming fields all belong to the State
or the Group, while the group is totally
controlled by the State power. The logic is:
“The State owns the fields, the CCP rules the State,
and the CCP is run by the bureaucrats.” Therefore,
the CCP bureaucrats are the biggest landlord....
Currently in China,
there are 120 million city laborers who are
countryside residents. They are the biggest slave
group in human history. They are not treated
with dignity. They have to do hard labor in very
severe conditions and are only paid $1.50 or less
per day. Even with such low salaries, payment is
often delayed by employers. Although there are more
than 100 million farmers laboring in the cities,
they are deprived of the right to form unions and
can only face the corrupted government powers
individually....
After the June 4th massacre happened in 1989,
corruption accelerated. The economic reform, lead by
corrupted officials, followed a phenomenon of
ignoring lower level people's benefits everywhere.
The majority of Chinese are farmers, farmer city
laborers, early retired workers, and other groups
that are weak and helpless. During the “Medicare
Reform,” seventy percent of Chinese were excluded
from the system. Expensive medical costs deprived
them of the possibility of visiting a doctor. ...
Elderly people would commit suicide to solve their
illnesses problems....
Even though there was
supposed to be nine years of “free” education, there
was a lack of State financial support in many
regions. High tuition caused middle and higher
education to become a nightmare to lower level
people. ... At the same time, in order to pay
children's tuition, the lower level parents are
squeezed out every last penny and down to their last
drop of energy, many suicides happened to parents as
soon as their children were admitted into a college.
The government
statistics showed that the bureaucrat group used 400
billion yuan of State funds each year on banquets,
another 400 billion yuan on touring, and another 400
billion yuan on public owned vehicles.
VII.
Extremely Unjust Legal System
Today, the unjust, extremely illegal behavior of the
corrupted legal agencies and officials are seen....
The agencies are not allowed to accept cases
regarding the forceful destruction of personal
housing, not allowed to accept cases of farmers
losing their fields...There is no bottom line to
safeguard legal matters. Typical examples are
happening in Hebei Province and Inner-Mongolia
Autonomous Region such as as Mr. Nie Shubin's
murder. In order to cover the crime, the legal
system refused to chase the true killer. The legal
personnel's humanity and morals are lower than the
murderer's.
VIII.
Daily Disasters Are Common
People suffer disasters on a daily basis. For
instance reported on August 30, 2007, on Nanfang
Zhoumo (Southern Weekends): On July 29, flooding in
the Sanmenxia Coal mine in Henan Province, trapped
69 miners underground. On August 14, 2007,the
Fenghunag Bridge in Hunan Province, which was still
under construction, collapsed and killed 64. On
August 17, flooding in the Huayuan Coal mine in
Xintai City, Shandong Province, trapped 172 miners
underground and they have still not been rescued
today, more than 30 days later. They are given no
chance to survive. ...
On August 30, 2007, a
small coal mine in Fangshan District, Beijing City
had a collapse, and the local government decided to
stop all rescue efforts in less than 48 hours.
Shockingly, the local government officials even
ordered local people to stop their own rescue
efforts. Mr. Liu Guojun and others, were locked
up, to prevent them from conducting their own
rescue, until two trapped workers walked out alive.
These two survived after 132 hours by drinking each
other's urine. Many people were sarcastic about the
incident. It was good thing that these two workers
did not know that the government decided not allow
anyone to rescue them, otherwise, their escape under
the “scientifically correct” decision to stop the
rescue is illegal.
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, the CCP government has
deprived my right to speak or write for more than
one year using the lowest possible means. I am
filled with emotion now that I am finally holding my
pen. I have a faith: The above crimes truly exist,
and have violated the justice and freedom of the
whole human race, including yours. I truly believe
you all have the same faith, and believe whoever
does nothing in front of such truth, has given up
human sensibility and responsibility. I truly
believe that you all know, like we do, that the
western politics and economy are all sacrificing
values in exchange for surface benefits. I truly
believe, you are all like me, longing to work on
lifting up human principles, change the tyranny,
stop the evil, and end human's embarrassment....
In today's China, these inhuman tragedies have
become a common situation that is happening all over
the country, many people have become used to it,
and are indifferent. The reason the CCP can
sustain its power, is by purposely attacking our
conscience with violence, and numbing our
conscience with lies. It is eroding our virtue
on a daily bases, to expand passive support from
people's helpless minds. ...
When we witness those crimes against humanity
happening all over the country, and those evil deeds
challenging people's basic senses happening in the
legal system... we have no choice but to admit to
our selves that our social protection mechanism is
completely destroyed. The force destroying the
mechanism and keeping it from rebuilding is the
Chinese Communist Party....
....officials work together to rob common people's
fortune, bribery is from bottom to the top,
and the higher levels are protecting the lower
level's crimes. ... No matter what beautiful wishes
Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have, they do not have the
strength to change as individuals....
Dear ladies and
gentlemen, changing China seems very hard, because
the CCP is carrying an unbearable debt of 80
million lives killed. It is more unforgivable
than the Nazis....
Jesus said, “Love others as well as you love
yourself. ” Those struggling in the CCP prisons,
those crying under the CCP's tortures, those roaming
around to avoid mistreatment need your help. When
you light a candle, when you dress up, holding your
cocktail or drink, I wish you will think of those
suffering people. May God bless America, may God
give each person justice, responsibility, and firm
determination, may the light of freedom shine upon
China proper, let evil have no place to hide, and
may the mistreated no longer be in pain.
Sincerely,
Wishing ladies and gentlemen peace and health!
Gao Zhisheng
September 12, 2007
See the whole letter
here: www.david-kilgour.com/2007/Sep_23_2007_03.htm
"...we have this
treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may
be of God and not of us. We are hard pressed on every side, yet
not crushed... perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not
forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed — always
carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the
life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body."
2 Corinthians 4:7-10