Difference between revisions of "610 Office"

Revision as of 13:24, June 12, 2020

The 610 Office formally known as the Central Leading Group on Preventing and Dealing with Heretical Religions, is an extra-legal Party organization similar to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo, with various names as disguises in public. The 610 Office is the main organization created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to eliminate Falun Gong. It is nominally subordinate to the Political and Legal Affairs Committee (PLAC) of the CCP Central Committee. The Political and Legal Affairs Committee purview was expanded after the 610 Office was incorporated into it.

Functioning without approval from the Party’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, and the 25-member Politburo made up of Party elites, the 610 Office has never had a legal basis for its existence. No legislation was ever passed establishing the 610 Office nor provisions formally outlining its mandate.^[1]

The 610 Office has branches all over China, down to the tiniest village.

Extralegal powers

With a structure extending from top to bottom throughout the Party, government, and military, it has the power to command all police and judicial organs. This organization is akin to the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Cultural Revolution Group, and is dedicated to carrying out the systematic eradication of the practice of Falun Gong. It is an ad hoc agency at the highest levels endowed with extraordinary and extralegal power.

The 610 Office derives its name from the date of its founding, June 10th, 1999. After that date, almost every Party branch, from the province to the county to the district level, established its own 610 Office. The source of the 610 Office’s ability to operate extralegally and with impunity is not drawn from the State. Neither the People's Congress nor the State Council has authorized its actions. Rather, approval and support for its deeds comes from the CCP. Each 610 Office takes orders from the 610 Office one level above it, going up to the Central Committee 610 Office. The local 610 Offices also take orders from the leadership team of the CCP Committee at its same organizational level.^[2]

It later changed its name to the Central Leading Group on Dealing with Heretical Religions or Office of Maintaining Stability.

Official data of the annual reported expenditures from 13 local 610 Offices in various counties and districts across nine provinces in 2014 and 2015 are available online. The total expenditure for these branches, covering a population of some 14 million, was 8.9 million yuan ($1.37 million). If that per capita investment is applied to China’s total population of 1.37 billion, the estimated annual budget for all 610 Offices nationwide is 879 million yuan ($135 million). This represents only one part of the party-state apparatus involved in the suppression of Falun Gong.

The ultimate form of financial exploitation has been reported: the killing of Falun Gong detainees and the extraction of their organs to be sold at high prices to Chinese patients and foreign “transplant tourists” as part of a multibillion-dollar industry.^[3] Judicial systems sold organs to the transplant centres. Forensic hospitals actively conducted organ transplant. Special institutions under Public Security Bureaus carried out organ transplantation and human body experiments on a large scale.^[4]

Organ harvesting

See also: Forced organ harvesting

A vice president of a medical university in northeastern China in charge of logistics for its two affiliated hospitals which conducted 2,000 to 3,000 organ transplants every year told this story:

“The two affiliated hospitals of our university conducted 2,000 to 3,000 organ transplantation surgeries each year. Due to a pool of living organ sources, tissue matching took less than a month, sometimes as short as 48 hours…The 610 Office (the Communist Party bureaucracy charged with eradication of Falun Gong) transported organ sources to the hospitals in prisoner transport vehicles. Once the tissue matching was verified, the transplants were performed. After the surgeries, the bodies were cremated…We only get serial numbers [of the “organ sources”] and knew only that they were Falun Gong practitioners. Such cases accounted for 90% of transplants in the hospitals. The whole process was monitored by the members of 610 Office…We were strictly required to keep secret. All the serial numbers and data of organ transplants were reported to the supervising Chinese Communist Party Committee at the end of each year, and then were removed from our computers under the supervision of 610 Office personnel.”^[5] “Since 2000, the 610 Office started to supply us such kind of organs of Falun Gong practitioners. There were no names and addresses, just their gender, age, and a serial number. Whenever our hospitals sent medical teams to collect blood samples from the prisons, labour camps, and brainwashing centres, I had to prepare the tools, drugs, coolers and provide transportation. I have the complete records in hand…The military and police hospitals usually conduct more transplants than civilian hospitals.”

The vice president added, the actual death row prisoners, criminals who had been sentenced to death account for only a small number of the organs procured.^[6]}} Even in the ten biggest cities in China, no more than fifty prisoners were executed annually. Senior Chinese Communist Party officials and their relatives refuse to accept organs from executed prisoners. Those organs were usually reserved for foreigners who come to China for organ transplants. Prices for foreigners are not fixed—in some cases, those with money, desperate for an organ, have been charged up to $2 million for a transplantation and hospital stay.

See also

References