In 1979, the regime launched the “one-child policy,” which allowed married couples to have only one child, in a campaign ostensibly aimed at boosting the standard of living by curbing population growth. The policy caused widespread forced abortions, forced sterilizations, and infanticide. According to Chinese Ministry of Health data cited by Chinese state media, 336 million fetuses were aborted from 1971 to 2013.
Xia Runying, a villager from Jiangxi Province who experienced forced sterilization, wrote in a public letter in 2013 that her family requested to postpone the surgery because of her poor health. The local official, however, said that they would do the surgery even if she had to be tied up with ropes.
She began to urinate blood and have headaches and stomachaches after the surgery. Later, she was forced to stop working.
The regime discontinued the one-child policy in 2013, allowing two children. On May 31, it announced that families could have three children.
Epoch Times Photo
A girl wounded during the clash between the army and students on June 4, 1989, near Tiananmen Square is carried out on a cart. (MANUEL CENETA/AFP/Getty Images)
Tiananmen Square Massacre
What started as a student gathering to mourn the death of reform-minded former Chinese leader Hu Yaobang in April 1989 morphed into the largest protests the regime had ever seen. University students who congregated at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square asked the CCP to control severe inflation, curb officials’ corruption, take responsibility for past faults, and support a free press and democratic ideas.
By May, students from across China and Beijing residents from all walks of life had joined the protest. Similar demonstrations cropped up all over the country.
CCP leaders didn’t agree to the students’ requests.
Instead, the regime ordered the army to quash the protest. On the evening of June 3, tanks rolled into the city and surrounded the square. Scores of unarmed protesters were killed or maimed after being crushed by tanks or shot by soldiers firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Thousands are estimated to have died.
Lily Zhang, who was head nurse at a Beijing hospital a 15-minute walk from the square, recounted to The Epoch Times the bloodshed from that night. She woke up to the sound of gunfire and rushed to the hospital on the morning of June 4 after hearing of the massacre.
She was horrified when she arrived at her hospital to find a “warzone-like” scene. Another nurse, sobbing, told her the pool of blood from injured protesters was “forming a river at the hospital.”
At Zhang’s hospital, at least 18 had died by the time they were carried into the facility.
The soldiers used “dum-dum” bullets, which would expand inside the victim’s body and inflict further damage, Zhang said. Many sustained grave wounds and were bleeding so profusely that it was “impossible to revive them.”
At the hospital gate, a critically injured reporter with the state-owned China Sports Daily told the two health workers who carried him that he “didn’t imagine that the Chinese Communist Party would really open fire.”
“Shooting down unarmed students and commoners—what kind of ruling party is this?” were his final words, Zhang recalled.
Then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who ordered the bloody clampdown, was quoted in a British government cable as saying that “two hundred dead could bring 20 years of peace to China,” a month before the massacre in May 1989.
To this day, the regime has refused to disclose the number killed in the massacre or their names, and heavily suppresses information about the incident.
A decade later, the regime decided to carry out another bloody suppression.
On July 20, 1999, the authorities began a wide campaign targeting the estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that includes meditative exercises and moral teachings centered around the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, a website for Falun Gong-related information, millions of practitioners have been fired from their jobs, expelled from school, jailed, tortured, or killed simply because they refused to give up their belief.
In 2019, an independent people’s tribunal in London confirmed that the regime had carried out forced organ harvesting “on a significant scale” and that imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners were “probably the principal source.”
He Lifang, a 45-year-old Falun Gong practitioner from Qingdao, a city in Shandong Province, died after being detained for two months. His relatives said there were incisions on his chest and back. His face looked as if he was in pain, and there were wounds all over his body, according to Minghui.org, a website that serves as a clearinghouse for accounts of the persecution of Falun Gong.
Epoch Times Photo
A perimeter fence is constructed around what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in Dabancheng, Xinjiang Province, China, on Sept. 4, 2018. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)
Suppression of Religious and Ethnic Minorities
To maintain its rule, the CCP regime transferred a large number of Han ethnic people to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, where ethnic groups live with their own cultures and languages. The regime forced local schools to use mandarin Chinese as the official language.
In 2008, Tibetans protested to express their anger at the regime’s control. The regime, in response, deployed the police. Hundreds of Tibetans were killed.
Since 2009, more than 150 Tibetans have self-immolated, hoping their deaths might stop the regime’s tight control in Tibet.
In Xinjiang, the regime authorities have been accused of committing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, including detaining a million people in secretive “political reeducation” camps.
Last year, the regime in Beijing set a new policy that mandated Mandarin Chinese-only teaching in some Inner Mongolia schools. When parents and students protested, they were threatened with arrest, detention, and job loss.
The regime also uses a surveillance system to monitor ethnic groups. Surveillance cameras were set up in Tibetan monasteries, and biometric data are collected in Xinjiang.
One-Child Policy
In 1979, the regime launched the “one-child policy,” which allowed married couples to have only one child, in a campaign ostensibly aimed at boosting the standard of living by curbing population growth. The policy caused widespread forced abortions, forced sterilizations, and infanticide. According to Chinese Ministry of Health data cited by Chinese state media, 336 million fetuses were aborted from 1971 to 2013.
Xia Runying, a villager from Jiangxi Province who experienced forced sterilization, wrote in a public letter in 2013 that her family requested to postpone the surgery because of her poor health. The local official, however, said that they would do the surgery even if she had to be tied up with ropes.
She began to urinate blood and have headaches and stomachaches after the surgery. Later, she was forced to stop working.
The regime discontinued the one-child policy in 2013, allowing two children. On May 31, it announced that families could have three children. Epoch Times Photo A girl wounded during the clash between the army and students on June 4, 1989, near Tiananmen Square is carried out on a cart. (MANUEL CENETA/AFP/Getty Images) Tiananmen Square Massacre
What started as a student gathering to mourn the death of reform-minded former Chinese leader Hu Yaobang in April 1989 morphed into the largest protests the regime had ever seen. University students who congregated at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square asked the CCP to control severe inflation, curb officials’ corruption, take responsibility for past faults, and support a free press and democratic ideas.
By May, students from across China and Beijing residents from all walks of life had joined the protest. Similar demonstrations cropped up all over the country.
CCP leaders didn’t agree to the students’ requests.
Instead, the regime ordered the army to quash the protest. On the evening of June 3, tanks rolled into the city and surrounded the square. Scores of unarmed protesters were killed or maimed after being crushed by tanks or shot by soldiers firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Thousands are estimated to have died.
Lily Zhang, who was head nurse at a Beijing hospital a 15-minute walk from the square, recounted to The Epoch Times the bloodshed from that night. She woke up to the sound of gunfire and rushed to the hospital on the morning of June 4 after hearing of the massacre.
She was horrified when she arrived at her hospital to find a “warzone-like” scene. Another nurse, sobbing, told her the pool of blood from injured protesters was “forming a river at the hospital.”
At Zhang’s hospital, at least 18 had died by the time they were carried into the facility.
The soldiers used “dum-dum” bullets, which would expand inside the victim’s body and inflict further damage, Zhang said. Many sustained grave wounds and were bleeding so profusely that it was “impossible to revive them.”
At the hospital gate, a critically injured reporter with the state-owned China Sports Daily told the two health workers who carried him that he “didn’t imagine that the Chinese Communist Party would really open fire.”
“Shooting down unarmed students and commoners—what kind of ruling party is this?” were his final words, Zhang recalled.
Then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who ordered the bloody clampdown, was quoted in a British government cable as saying that “two hundred dead could bring 20 years of peace to China,” a month before the massacre in May 1989.
To this day, the regime has refused to disclose the number killed in the massacre or their names, and heavily suppresses information about the incident.
Persecution of Falun Gong
A decade later, the regime decided to carry out another bloody suppression.
On July 20, 1999, the authorities began a wide campaign targeting the estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that includes meditative exercises and moral teachings centered around the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, a website for Falun Gong-related information, millions of practitioners have been fired from their jobs, expelled from school, jailed, tortured, or killed simply because they refused to give up their belief.
In 2019, an independent people’s tribunal in London confirmed that the regime had carried out forced organ harvesting “on a significant scale” and that imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners were “probably the principal source.”
He Lifang, a 45-year-old Falun Gong practitioner from Qingdao, a city in Shandong Province, died after being detained for two months. His relatives said there were incisions on his chest and back. His face looked as if he was in pain, and there were wounds all over his body, according to Minghui.org, a website that serves as a clearinghouse for accounts of the persecution of Falun Gong. Epoch Times Photo A perimeter fence is constructed around what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in Dabancheng, Xinjiang Province, China, on Sept. 4, 2018. (Thomas Peter/Reuters) Suppression of Religious and Ethnic Minorities
To maintain its rule, the CCP regime transferred a large number of Han ethnic people to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, where ethnic groups live with their own cultures and languages. The regime forced local schools to use mandarin Chinese as the official language.
In 2008, Tibetans protested to express their anger at the regime’s control. The regime, in response, deployed the police. Hundreds of Tibetans were killed.
Since 2009, more than 150 Tibetans have self-immolated, hoping their deaths might stop the regime’s tight control in Tibet.
In Xinjiang, the regime authorities have been accused of committing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, including detaining a million people in secretive “political reeducation” camps.
Last year, the regime in Beijing set a new policy that mandated Mandarin Chinese-only teaching in some Inner Mongolia schools. When parents and students protested, they were threatened with arrest, detention, and job loss.
The regime also uses a surveillance system to monitor ethnic groups. Surveillance cameras were set up in Tibetan monasteries, and biometric data are collected in Xinjiang.