25 years on: China’s criminalization of Falun Gong in numbers
To mark the 25th anniversary of China’s brutal crackdown against the spiritual movement Falun Gong, Safeguard Defenders is releasing detention and sentencing data on the group’s followers between 2008 and 2020.
The data show:
- China continues to arrest and give lengthy sentences to Falun Gong practitioners, more than two decades after followers were first criminalized under Article 300 anti-cult legislation
- The average jail sentence for someone convicted under Article 300 over that period was just over five years
- This is more than double the average 2.3 years for the “crime” of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, the most common charge used to persecute human rights defenders in China
On 22 July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) banned Falun Gong as “a threat to social and political stability” after 10,000 members staged a protest in Beijing urging for legal recognition. The number of followers – estimated to be in the tens of millions inside China back then – and their ability to stage large protests spooked the Party, prompting the ban.
The CCP used Article 300 of the Criminal Code to target them, which criminalizes “organizing or exploiting mystic sects or cult organizations, or using superstition to undermine the implementation of the nation's laws and administrative provisions.” A maximum of seven years is set for those found guilty, while there is no cap for “serious” cases.
There is also evidence that many practitioners died in custody – some harvested for their organs – while many others were persecuted from outside the judicial system and sent to horrific terms in labour camps or psychiatric detention.
In June 1999, before the ban, a Party organization, the 610 Office, was secretly set up to oversee the eradication of Falun Gong in China. The 610 Office was likely responsible for deciding on sentence lengths for those accused of Article 300 crimes. It appears to have been disbanded in 2018.
Earlier this year we collected data on human rights cases in China between 2008 and 2020. We used three sources, our own small database, and those maintained by the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) and NGO Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). We collected approximately 1,400 cases out of the more than 10,000 cases from those three sources, noting down the names, gender, location, crimes accused and sentence length. The date range of 2008 to 2020 was defined by the day the person was first detained, which means that some cases include trial data from 2021 and 2022 during Xi Jinping’s third term and the COVID-19 pandemic.
While there are caveats to this data – some entries are missing information, the sampling is not truly random, the number of cases per year we could collect is relatively small due to manpower limitations – it does give a general overview of the continuing persecution of Falun Gong and allows a comparison with data from other human rights-related cases.
We split the data up into three political eras (varying between three and four years) according to the CCP leader at the time:
2008 to 2012: Hu Jintao 1;
2013 to 2016: Xi Jinping 1;
and, 2017 to 2020: Xi Jinping 2.
More than half of the cases in our database were for Article 300, and that held for every year except for three in our sample, showing how determined the CCP has been in punishing followers.
Press the play button below to see how the share of anti-cult cases changes in our sample by year.
From observation during data collection, the vast majority of Article 300 cases we recorded were Falun Gong practitioners. Article 300 is also used to criminalize dozens of other banned sects, such as Church of the Almighty God. Falun Gong practitioners are occasionally persecuted using other charges, such as economic crimes and operating illegal businesses.
We collected cases across the country, although a few regions or provinces had no data. This does not mean there were no cases, but probably indicates there were less cases to start with so that it was easier to miss them. Most cases were in China’s northeast, with Heilongjiang having the most. The northeast is where the movement started in the early 1990s. Sichuan recorded the second highest number of cases.
We also looked at the gender split for people convicted under Article 300.
For those entries which recorded gender, 50% more women than men were convicted of Article 300 crimes between 2008 and 2020 from our sample.
It’s interesting to compare Article 300 cases with those of the two most common “crimes” applied to human rights defenders: Article 293 and Article 105.
Article 293, commonly known as picking quarrels and provoking trouble, has long been used to put activists and petitioners behind bars. The Criminal Code gives a maximum sentence of five years (10 for repeat offenders) for those found guilty of Article 293 offences.
It is aimed at punishing those who undermine public order but has been increasingly used to go after anyone that posts something the CCP does not like online. Even China’s top court said the charge was “being excessively used” last year.
Article 105, a more serious charge, has been used to punish human rights activists and covers state subversion and incitement to subvert the state. Serious cases of subversion carry terms of between 10 years and a life sentence, with five years set as a minimum for serious cases of incitement.
Here is the split for the whole period of 2008 to 2020 for cases we collected. Note the number of cases is just for our sample not the real number of cases.
We also took a look at the average sentence length for Article 300 convictions between 2008 and 2022, using the year of sentencing this time to define the era. It hovered around five years for the whole period (average 5.2 years). Because of the small number of cases – around 200 each for Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping 2 era, and then only 60 cases in 2021 and 2022, the small drop of a few months is likely not statistically significant.
The Criminal Code sets a range of three to seven years for Article 300 convictions (apart from lighter or more serious cases).
Comparing sentence length to the other two human-rights “crimes” shows that anti-cult penalties are on average more than double the length of Article 293 prisoners’ terms and about 10 months less than those given to Article 105 prisoners.
The average sentence length for the Article 293 cases in our sample (missing out those who were also accused of additional crimes) was 2.3 years.
The average sentence length for the Article 105 cases in our sample (missing out those who were also accused of additional crimes) was 6 years.
