Peter Westmore, former president of the National Civic Council (NCC) in Australia, wrote a book review in the August 8, 2020 issue of News Weekly. He reviewed The 20-Year Persecution of Falun Gong in China from the Minghui Publishing Centre and highly recommended it to libraries as well as government officials.
Falun Gong is a spiritual system that focuses on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. It has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since July 1999.
The practice “encourages practitioners to engage in prescribed gentle meditational exercises, often in public, to develop these virtues.” wrote Westmore in his review with the title of “The CCP’s War on the Chinese People.”
Massive Suppression
“For those concerned about the misuse of Chinese power around the world, this book is an essential source of information. It offers over 430 pages of the most exhaustive documentation of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China, and should be in every library and parliamentary office in Australia,” recommended Westmore.
There are about 100 million practitioners in more than 100 countries. Former CCP leader Jiang Zemin ordered the persecution of Falun Gong in July 1999 and the suppression of innocent practitioners has been going on since then.
The Minghui Group was established by Falun Gong practitioners to document the persecution.
Persecution and Discrimination
There have been numerous reports from various human rights organisations on the persecution, “but this book brings together this documentation, and also explains the beliefs of Falun Gong practitioners in a simple, well-organised way.”
The book also explained the cause of the persecution. “The demonisation of Falun Gong by the CCP is, in part, the result of the envy that Jiang Zemin and his successors have for an entirely voluntary association that commanded greater respect than the Communist Party, and therefore had to be eliminated,” Westmore wrote.
The book documents how the CCP mobilises the state apparatus to suppress Falun Gong. This includes “detention facilities, ranging from prisons, brainwashing centres, forced labor camps and mental hospitals indicating the participation of the police, judicial system, the penal system, and China’s hospitals in the persecution.”
The suffering goes beyond practitioners, as their family members were also mistreated in various ways. “Practitioners and their families are discriminated against in the education system, in employment, in housing and in denial of pension entitlements. Children are turned against their parents, and parents are turned against their children,” wrote the review.
More horrifying stories took place in the detentions and prisons. Torture methods included beatings, force-feeding, isolation, electric shocks, solitary confinement, waterboarding, suffocation and sexual assault. The damage included permanent physical and mental injuries, as well as deaths.
If these were not enough, forced organ harvesting is another crime against practitioners. Transplants with extremely short wait times “could obviously be done only by killing people for their hearts, livers, kidneys, corneas and other organs.”
With the persecution happening both inside and outside of China, this book serves as a record “holding the regime to account for its crimes.” Therefore, the book “deserves to be found in libraries around the world, and in offices of parliamentarians, so that the truth may be told.”
