(Clearwisdom.net) Since 1999, the Chinese Communist Party has utilized every means at its disposal to carry out the persecution of Falun Gong. One of those resources is China's scientific community. On the afternoon of May 5, 2009, Dr. Sun Yanjun, a former professor of psychology at Capital Normal University in Beijing, held a press conference at the National Press Club to discuss how the CCP has used "research into religion to control and suppress Falun Gong and other religious groups."
Dr. Sun disclosed that the CCP has invested heavily into psychological research on domestic religious groups, so as to use the findings to undermine the adherents' faith and ultimately wipe them out. He stated that since 1999, more than 2,000 research grants were given in his specialty alone. He stated that the recipients of these grants, including visiting scholars sent overseas (such as himself), were pressured and obligated to serve the CCP's political needs with their research results.
Dr. Sun pointed out that a psychology-based approach to suppression has the potential to be more cruel and inflict longer-lasting damage than physical torture. Many forced labor camps have a unit dedicated to "ideological transformation" of practitioners, which specifically targets the practitioners mentally. They are trained to confuse, mislead, and ultimately exploit practitioners' weaknesses in their belief.
One such unit found that a particular practitioner had a phobia of mice, so whenever that practitioner refused to write a "transformation letter" to renounce Falun Gong, the guards stuffed mice into her shirt. This form of abuse created no physical damage or evidence of crime to be exposed, but certainly was traumatizing and barbaric.
Another and more direct use of the psychological science is the imprisonment of Falun Gong practitioners in mental institutions. Grants were given out and studies were conducted, where the researchers were encouraged to conclude that practicing Falun Gong amounted to "psychologically abnormal behavior." This paved the way to the practice of detaining large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners that appealed in Beijing in mental hospitals. Once these practitioners were "scientifically" condemned as having mental problems, this opened the floodgates to have them forcibly injected with harmful psychotropic drugs and other barbaric forms of torture.
Dr. Sun pointed out that if a researcher is given an expected outcome, it is easy to create studies and skew numbers that lead to the desired outcome. In China, where such practices are expected in return for funding, using such research to smear Falun Gong was all too easy. In the Western scientific community, because most research is funded without political affiliation or obligation, such blatant scientific fraud is rarely committed or even easily understood. However, that does not change the fact that the scientific community has been reduced to another tool wielded by the CCP to suppress its own people.
Category: Perspective
