South Korea since 2009 has deported 10 Falun Gong practitioners back to China after courts here refused to grant them refugee status and asylum. Some of them haven’t been heard from since their return to China, according to other Chinese asylum-seekers in South Korea and human rights organizations.
South Korea has denied asylum to more than 40 other Chinese Falun Gong practitioners. It’s unclear whether South Korea has granted refugee status to anyone associated with Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that began in China about 20 years but that alarmed Chinese authorities in the 1990s because of its size and independence from the government. The Chinese leadership officially banned it in 1999 and began to imprison practitioners.
On Sept. 6, Seoul police and South Korean immigration authorities arrested Jin Jingzhe, 26 years old, and his wife Ma Yue. The couple arrived in South Korea from China in 2008. Mr. Jin, who practices Falun Gong, sought asylum but was denied. He’s now being held in a detention center in Suwon and could be deported any day. His wife was freed.
Representatives at the Immigration Department and Justice Ministry said they couldn’t discuss Mr. Jin’s case.
Supporters of Mr. Jin have marshaled letters from human rights groups, 23 members of the U.S. Congress and the vice president of the European Parliament to President Lee Myung-bak urging him to intercede in Mr. Jin’s case. In one such letter, Terri Marsh of the Human Rights Law Foundation in Washington wrote, “It is a certainty that Mr. Jin will be subject to torture if he is returned to China.”
Reached by phone at the Hwaseong Fortress Foreigners’ Detention Center, Mr. Jin said he was fine but declined to discuss the situation. He referred questions to his legal advisor, Oh Se-yeol, who also a spokesman for the Korea Falun Dafa Association, which is the local chapter of the organization.
Mr. Oh said he may ask Justice Minister Kwon Jae-jin to grant a humanitarian stay of the immigration court’s rejection of asylum status.
“At this stage, filing an objection is the only option,” Mr. Oh said. “If it is rejected again, Jin might be repatriated. The possibility would sharply rise.”
He added, “We hope the public will recognize the urgent situation of Falun Gong practitioners and the Korean government will make a humanitarian decision for Falun Gong refugees.”
Several human-rights groups staged a news conference late Monday about Falun Gong in South Korea. They said that, while the asylum hearings and deportations are in line with South Korean law, they may violate the nation’s responsibilities as a signer of United Nations treaties on the status and rights of refugees and the convention against torture.
It’s not just human rights campaigners and pro-Tibetan activists who are under constant attack, however. Among the most viciously persecuted are individuals associated with Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa. The spiritual and philosophical movement was banned by the Communist regime in 1999 after officialdom decided it might represent a threat to the Communist Party.
Labelling it an ‘evil cult,’ China then created an extra-legal apparatus known as the 6-10 Office to quash the discipline domestically—and around the world. An unprecedented campaign of terror and brainwashing has since been unleashed, including a vast network of ‘re-education’ camps, disappearances, torture, harvesting organs from practitioners, and more.
And the regime’s tentacles have truly spread worldwide in pursuit of its goal. ‘The war against Falun Gong is one of the main tasks of the Chinese mission overseas,’ Chen Yonglin, a senior official at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney told a US Congressional committee in 2005 after his defection.
A vast body of evidence, and even recent court cases, support the claim. In June, for example, a Chinese man in Germany was convicted of spying on members of the Falun Gong community for China. A few years earlier, a senior Chinese embassy official in Ottawa was expelled after being caught spying on practitioners there.
In the United States, officials also regularly highlight the problem. The House of Representatives has blasted the regime for similar illegal activities inside the United States on at least four occasions. A House resolution passed last year and a separate measure adopted in 2004, for instance, recognized the seriousness of the problem, called for the regime to stop, and urged US authorities to take action.
According to the resolutions, China’s diplomatic corps is actively ‘harassing and persecuting’ Chinese dissidents in the United States, breaking into the homes of prominent activists, pressuring US officials with threats, spreading lies, and more. In addition to the well-known persecution going on within China, ‘the Chinese Government has also attempted to silence the Falun Gong movement and Chinese pro-democracy groups inside the United States,’ the measures state.
More than a few US Representatives have been even more direct. Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), speaking in support of the resolution, said last year that ‘clear evidence’ shows Chinese diplomats were colluding with secret agents and ‘thugs’ to suppress the constitutionally protected rights of Americans. She called on the State Department to ‘get tough’ on the regime’s functionaries within US borders.
‘First is the issue of the penetration of agents of an alien Communist regime right here inside the United States to wage a campaign of repression against US citizens,’ Ros-Lehtinen said before the House, citing examples and noting that Chinese agents were ‘persecuting American Falun Gong practitioners in our own country.’ And the well-documented ‘bloody harvest’ and ‘coercive organ transplants’ from Falun Gong practitioners within China, she added, ‘is almost too ghoulish to imagine.’
One prominent analyst on the issue of Falun Gong persecution, David Kilgour, is a former Canadian member of parliament and served as Canada’s secretary of state for Asia-Pacific in 2002 and 2003. He recently co-authored a book entitled ‘Bloody Harvest—The killing of Falun Gong for their organs,’ which closely examines the brutality and takes a look at the regime’s illegal persecution of exiled practitioners.
‘The espionage and intimidation the party-state deploys against Falun Gong abroad is outrageous,’ Kilgour says, calling it an extension of the ‘very severe persecution’ in China. ‘It’s unconscionable for a repressive government to use the freedom of a democracy to project abroad its persecution of its chosen victims.’
Among the examples he cites is a 2003 case in which two Chinese diplomatic officials in Edmonton were caught handing out pamphlets inciting hatred against the Falun Gong—a crime in Canada. But there’s much more, he says.
Chinese defectors have told Kilgour that the effort spent monitoring and repressing dissidents overseas actually outweighs all other functions of Chinese diplomatic missions combined, he says. Apparently the regime doesn’t want the international community to realize what has been perpetrated in China.
One victim of that persecution, author and human rights activist Jennifer Zeng, fled China in 2001 after being tortured at one of the regime’s ‘Re-Education-Through-Labour’ camps. ‘The PRC espionage and intimidation against FG practitioners overseas is so common that many of us have become accustomed to it,’ she says.
But while Falun Gong practitioners may be at the top of the regime’s list of perceived enemies, they are far from the only victims of anti-dissident Chinese operations abroad.
More at The Diplomat
"Canada is a close ally of the U.S. and a member of NATO," explained J. Michael Cole, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) analyst and now deputy news chief at the Taipei Times.
"Intelligence agencies seeking to penetrate organizations like NATO will try to do so via the weakest link in the chain."
Cole said Canada's optics, satellite and robotics technologies, its participation in the F-35 stealth fighter consortium and its natural resources sector could also attract Beijing's attention.
"(China) could also seek to gain knowledge about Canadian projects abroad - in South America, for example," Cole said.
Chinese agents are also known to keep tabs on pro-democracy activists, Falun Gong practitioners and other groups the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) considers hostile.
Brock University Prof. Charles Burton, a former diplomat in Beijing, said he doesn't doubt Chinese espionage in Canada is significant.
"It's well known from CSIS insiders that almost half of CSIS's resources are devoted to Chinese counter-intelligence exclusively and I would say we need more because clearly we're not on top of the situation," Burton told Sun News Network.
Last year, CSIS director Richard Fadden stirred up controversy when he spoke about concerns regarding politicians at various levels being co-opted by foreign governments.
He didn't name China specifically, but it's widely believed that's one of the five countries of concern to Fadden.
There are tried and true methods Chinese agents use to gain influence over a potential source of information.
"Wine and dine, and gradually find ways to compromise the target so that he or she can be blackmailed," Cole said, such as offering sexual favours to a politician, businessman, or even a journalist and secretly taping the encounter.
QMI Agency was first to report allegations from Beijing critic and Conservative MP Rob Anders that such methods have been used against Canadian politicians.
"I know MPs who have taken up those offers," he said in July 2010, adding some ministerial staffers have been compromised too.
While he doesn't paint all post-secondary students from China with the same brush, Cole said some could be used by Beijing.
"There are lots of self-initiated nationalist Chinese students who hack computers," he said. "Other students, known as 'professional students,' are guided by the CCP and asked to perform certain tasks when abroad."
The Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada reports roughly 16,000 full-time students from China are enrolled in this country's universities.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada says upwards of 50,000 are enrolled in Canadian colleges.
The group, Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Law Foundation, filed an amended complaint (.pdf) Sept. 2 to a May 19 lawsuit seeking class action status filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Cisco.
Among the allegations in the amended complaint is that Cisco marketed to Chinese public security officials software with the claim that it was the "'only product capable of recognizing over 90 percent of Falun Gong pictorial information.'"
"To achieve such a high success rate, Defendants identified and analyzed Internet activity that is unique to Falun Gong practitioners and used this activity to create unique digital Falun Gong 'signatures,'" the suit alleges.
The Falun Gong religion developed in China in 1992; it has been illegal there since 1999 and its followers have since been subject to imprisonment and torture. The suit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for Falun Gong followers, as well as an injunction enjoining Cisco against "future unlawful activity."
Many of the features supplied by Cisco as part of the Golden Shield--also known as the Great Firewall of China--were first-of-their-kind, the suit states, adding that Cisco customized routers with blocking and surveillance features and created technology "to address the use of non-standard, 'dynamic' IP addresses by Falun Gong practitioners."
Cisco, in an Aug. 4 motion to dismiss (.pdf) says it did not engage in customization. "The products Cisco has sold in China have been the same products that are in Cisco's standard product catalogue and that Cisco sells in the United States and elsewhere," the company says, also stating that sales to China were made in compliance with U.S. export laws.
In an statement emailed Sept. 9 by a Cisco spokeswoman, Cisco said it is reviewing the amended complaint, adding that "Cisco does not operate networks in China or elsewhere, nor does Cisco customize our products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression."
