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tim333

It seems clear Cisco knew their systems were going to be used against Falun Gong. Leaked Cisco presentation:

The Golden Shield Project:

Public Network Information Security Monitor System

• Stop the network-related crimes

• Guarantee the security and services of public network

• Combat “Falun Gong” evil religion and other hostiles

[Note: Statement of Government goals from speech government offical Li Runsen]"

Then again it's going to be hard to show legally they were doing much more than helping China enforce it's laws. Still at least the embarrassment factor may put companies off from getting involved in this stuff.

I hope the EFF case makes them release documents related to it.

View on HN

I didn't know a lot about Falun Gong, and did some research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

The fact that there is even a Wikipedia article with this title is horrifying.

>Falun Gong practitioners in Changchun intercepted eight cable television networks in Jilin Province, and for nearly an hour, televised a program titled "Self-Immolation or a Staged Act?". All six of the Falun Gong practitioners involved were captured over the next few months. Two were killed immediately, while the other four were all dead by 2010 as a result of injuries sustained while imprisoned.

Falun Gong is a peaceful semi-religion. They've never committed violent acts (as far as I can tell), nor have they even tried to subvert China's government. Why in the world is China torturing and killing them? It seems like they're doing it merely out of fear they could maybe one day become a force that would stand against the government. This is very Stalin-esque persecution and paranoia.

I talked with a Chinese person who told me why. His explanation:

Falun Gong exercises (Tai-Chi like) improved the health of their practicioners. The communist party supported Falun Gong practice because it lowered their healthcare costs.

Until there were more members of Falun Gong than Communist party officials. So the latter began hunting the former.

Some Chinese fled China, and that's how the West know about Falun Gong.

Very sad state of affairs.

http://en.falundafa.org/

Falun was banned by mainland China simply because it's a Taiwan backed cult organization to gather intel & support coup in government seniors and military. The rest is media propaganda.

Yeah right. Until 1999 it received wide support from Chinese officials, but then decided it was too big and started a silly propaganda campaign feeding the gullible with lies like you just told at the same time when they started a violent persecution.

At least they had learned something from the bloody Tienanmen massacre, and this time instead sending military to murder piles of unarmed civilians carried out the murders a bit more covertly.

Quick quiz for you: exactly how many people died on that square you mentioned? If not, where are the killing happened? Which side draw first blood?

You don't know?

The estimates for the civilians killed in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 range from hundreds to thousands - no exact count is available.

In terms of "which side drew first blood", you could say the "side" of the student protesters, though there's no evidence of "blood" in their actions (as they had no weapons).

The morning of June 3, protesters clashed with unarmed soldiers trying to force them out of the square, momentarily forcing the army to retreat. By 10pm that night, the army began firing live ammunition at the protesters and the fatalities commenced.

est probably means that while we "know" that people were killed on Tiananmen Square, they were actually killed in the streets around the square, not on the square itself.

(Other sources say that there were indeed deaths on the square, but less than five or so, not the main massacre)

But it doesn't really matter where exactly the deaths happened.

Only insofar as it reminds us of the fallibility of the human mind (cf. witnesses in court): many people actually believe they have seen in TV how people were slaughtered on the square, which is demonstrably incorrect.

Are you implying that the Tiananmen Square massacre did not happen?

Not speaking for the previous poster, but it is worth noting that talking about "Tiananmen Square massacre" may be misleading, because AFAIK the majority of fatalities, both of protesters and soldiers, happened outside the square, in the streets.

Just for fun, let's compare search engine results for the term "tiananmen square":

Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=tiananmen+square&safe=off&cl...

Baidu: http://image.baidu.com/search/index?tn=baiduimage&ps=1&ct=20...

Most estimates I see put the number of casualties in the 1000's, caused by the side that happened to have, y'know, tanks.

Getting your information from Baidu?

Don't forget that it wasn't just on the square. Soldiers fired in the surrounding area as well. so those deaths should be part of the total. Your tone gives the impression that you're either part of the PRC's internet army, or one of the tin-foil hat crowd. Which is it?

does it matter if it was 1 or 1000? They were killed because they wanted democracy and the state wanted to retain their power and ability to enrich themselves at the cost of the general population.

> Until 1999 it received wide support from Chinese officials

Even some famed academy of science fellow believed in "special human body functions". 90s was just a really weird time in China. Chinese government is far from perfect, but I honestly don't know anyone from China who doesn't support the banning of FLG.

Does this remind anyone else of Order 66?

Jedis aren't defenseless. Falun aren't trained fighters with powers. So no.

Order 66 is Hitler shutting down the SA for the SS.

I just had to "correct" you. Also I do enjoy finding similarities with the empire and Jedis.

I dunno. People still do business with IBM, and they worked with the German government on the census system that tracked victims of the holocaust during WWII.

IBM's existant history didn't put Cisco off of doing business with China.

IBM kind of claims that their subsidiary was more or less nationalized during the Nazi period. [1] However squishy and self-serving that claim is, Cisco doesn't even have that defense. War and human rights were going through a discovery period from WWI through the 1970's. In the 2000's there's not really an excuse for not scrutinizing what your products will be used for around the world.

1. https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss

(too late to edit original comment, just realized I missed the link)

IBM did that work before the 1980 Filartiga v. Pena-Irala case, which is what enables the remedy being sought in this case. In the former case, those injuries are a part of history, whereas in the latter case they are on-going so it's also a question of standing.

> • Combat “Falun Gong” evil religion and other hostiles

"Evil religion", wow. I wouldn't have thought a disbelief in moral relativism could make a government official sound so much like a third grader. I feel sorry for the millions of civilians whose lives are negatively affected by this Li buffoon.

You must think Orwellian - what is the only real evil thing in 1984 - the dissent unsanctioned by the government.

My wild guess is that the original was something along the lines of disorder/troublemakers and got lost in translation.

Falun Gong is an evil litigious cult created in 1992 as a way to raise money for the founders and cult leaders.

They're unscrupulous, including promising terminally ill cancer patients the possibility of healing if they just redirect their remaining wealth toward the cult.

They're the Chinese equivalent to Scientology, but even worse. Their teachings are racing, homophobic, sexist and misogynistic. They preached that UFOs had arrived on earth; aliens had taken over human bodies, and were trying to annihilate humanity through the control of TV and radio.

See: http://www.cultnews.com/2010/10/falun-gong-is-good/

Does that make it right to persecute and torture them?

Only if you subscribe to the "evil deeds done against bigots are not really evil" doctrine.

Wikipedia doesn't make them sound so bad - "three central tenets of the belief are Truthfulness (真, Zhēn), Compassion (善, Shàn), and Forbearance"

The troubles seem to stem from "April 1999, when over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered peacefully near the central government compound in Beijing to request legal recognition and freedom from state interference."

I guess peaceful demonstrations against the state are going to get you tiananmen squared over there.

I would not rely on wikipedia for politically controversial information.

And I would not rely on the Chinese state to be a neutral source of information on anything at all.

Ah, yes, but cultnews.com is the bastion of truth

> Their teachings are racing, homophobic, sexist and misogynistic

I could think of several large sects of the big three montothiestic religions that preach most of the above. Apart from racing. Racism perhaps, but not racing.

Your source makes the supports the claims you make, but it itself does not source (some of it more grievous) claims.

I'm willing to accept that the claims of them suing various people. But I wouldn't call these cases frivolous per se: They could very well believe that they were denied participation in a parade on a discriminatory basis. I wouldn't necessarily say I think it is the right approach to take but the examples they give are not that absurd in today's world. (And could also be the work of but a small subsection of the group).

regardless we are not in the business of killing scientologists just for being scientologists. From your description of them I would assume that the communist party in China dislikes them because they want to be the only party in town when it comes to enriching the leaders at the cost of everyone else.

What's interesting to me about the Falun Gong is the relation I draw between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (THK) movement and the Falun Gong. In the 1800s, the THK lead the Taiping Rebellion, a massive civil war in which the THK took over Nanjing and large amounts of Chinese Territory. I believe that the Communist Party of China's arguably overly-egressive response against the Falun Gong, which yes is rightfully an unscrupulous cult, is indicative of their own insecurities about how they maintain power. There are many people in China that commit all manner of scams, being that it is a country with a wide variety of income classes - America, for one, is the same in that regard. There are many racist, homophobic, sexist and misogynistic, wild cults in other societies - but that is what comes with pluralistic societies, which China is not being that they are one-party ruled. The key question is - why does the Communist Party of China attack the Falun Gong so disproportionately aggressively over how it does to other organizations and forces within its own country who perpetrate similar ills? One is tempted to think that the answer lies within the size, strength and power of what the Falun Gong had attained in the 1990s, coupled with the historical allegory of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. I believe that more than anything, the Communist Party is trying to protect its rule of the country, as well as the general order and progression of society, as is their philosophy as a vanguard socialist movement, rather than a pluralistic movement.

They may be cult-ish, but they don't seem nearly as bad as Scientology. If anything, they're a little more like Catholicism. They preach against homosexuality and deny evolution, but they aren't violent at all, or have beliefs that anyone would consider crazier than what fundamentalist Christians or Muslims believe.

They may not be the paragons of virtue they claim to be, but they definitely have done nothing to deserve mass torture and murder. Real cults like Scientology and Aum Shinrikyo have killed their own members, and non-members. Falun Gong hasn't.

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