610 Office
The 610 Office was a security agency in the People's Republic of China. Named for the date of its creation on June 10, 1999, it was established for the purpose of coordinating and implementing the persecution of Falun Gong. The 610 Office was the implementation arm of the Central Leading Group on Dealing with the Falun Gong, also known as the Central Leading Group on Dealing with Heretical Religions, a leading small group of the Chinese Communist Party. Because it was a CCP-led office with no formal legal mandate, it is sometimes described as an extralegal organisation.
The central 610 Office has traditionally been headed by a high-ranking member of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, and frequently directed other state and party organs in the anti-Falun Gong campaign. It was closely associated with the powerful Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission of the CCP. Local 610 Offices were also established at provincial, district, municipal and neighborhood levels, and were estimated to number approximately 1,000 across the country.
The main functions of the 610 Offices included coordinating anti-Falun Gong propaganda, surveillance and intelligence collection, and the punishment and "reeducation" of Falun Gong adherents. The office was reportedly involved in the extrajudicial sentencing, coercive reeducation, torture, and sometimes death of Falun Gong practitioners.
Since 2003, the 610 Office's mission has been expanded to include targeting other religious and qigong groups deemed heretical or harmful by the Communist Party, though Falun Gong remains its main priority. In March 2018, the office was reorganized and its functions transferred to the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission and the Ministry of Public Security.
Background
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a form of spiritual qigong practice that involves meditation, energy exercises, and a moral philosophy drawing on Buddhist tradition. The practice was introduced by Li Hongzhi in Northeast China in the spring of 1992, towards the end of China's "qigong boom."Falun Gong initially enjoyed considerable official support during the early years of its development, and amassed a following of millions. By the mid-1990s, however, Chinese authorities sought to rein in the influence of qigong practices, enacting more stringent requirements on the country's various qigong denominations. In 1996, possibly in response to the escalating pressure to formalize ties with the party-state, Falun Gong filed to withdraw from the state-run qigong association. Following this severance of ties to the state, the group came under increasing criticism and surveillance from the country's security apparatus and propaganda department. Falun Gong books were banned from further publication in July 1996, and state-run news outlets began criticizing the group as a form of "feudal superstition," whose "theistic" orientation was at odds with the official ideology and national agenda.
On April 25, 1999, over 10,000 Falun Gong adherents demonstrated quietly near the Zhongnanhai government compound to request official recognition and an end to the escalating harassment against them. Security czar and politburo member Luo Gan was the first to draw attention to the gathering crowd. Luo reportedly called Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin, and demanded a decisive solution to the Falun Gong problem.
A group of five Falun Gong representatives presented their demands to then-Premier Zhu Rongji and, apparently satisfied with his response, the group dispersed peacefully. Jiang Zemin was reported to have been deeply angered by the event, however, and expressed concern over the fact that a number of high-ranking bureaucrats, Communist Party officials, and members of the military establishment had taken up Falun Gong. That evening, Jiang disseminated a letter through Party ranks ordering that Falun Gong must be crushed.
Establishment
On 7 June 1999, Jiang Zemin convened a meeting of the Politburo to address the Falun Gong issue. In the meeting, Jiang described Falun Gong as a grave threat to Communist Party authority—"something unprecedented in the country since its founding 50 years ago"—and ordered the creation of a special leading group within the party's Central Committee to "get fully prepared for the work of disintegrating ."On 10 June, the 610 Office was formed to handle day-to-day coordination of the anti-Falun Gong campaign. Luo Gan was selected to helm of the office, whose mission at the time was described as studying, investigating, and developing a "unified approach...to resolve the Falun Gong problem." The office was not created with any legislation, and there are no provisions describing its precise mandate. Nonetheless, it was authorized "to deal with central and local, party and state agencies, which were called upon to act in close coordination with that office," according to UCLA professor James Tong.
On 17 June 1999, the 610 Office came under the newly created Central Leading Group for Dealing with Falun Gong, headed by Politburo Standing Committee member Li Lanqing. Four other deputy directors of the Central Leading Group also held high-level positions in the Communist Party, including minister of the propaganda department, Ding Guangen. The leaders of the 610 Office and CLGDF were "able to call on top government and party officials to work on the case and draw on their institutional resources," and had personal access to the Communist Party general secretary and the Premier.
Journalist Ian Johnson, whose coverage of the crackdown on Falun Gong earned him a Pulitzer Prize, wrote that the job of the 610 Office was "to mobilize the country's pliant social organizations. Under orders from the Public Security Bureau, churches, temples, mosques, newspapers, media, courts and police all quickly lined up behind the government's simple plan: to crush Falun Gong, no measures too excessive. Within days a wave of arrests swept China. By the end of 1999, Falun Gong adherents were dying in custody."
Structure
The 610 Office is managed by top echelon leaders of the CCP, and the CLGDF that oversees the 610 Office has, since its inception, been helmed by a senior member of the Politburo Standing Committee. The practice of appointing top-ranked Party authorities to run the CLGDF and 610 Office was intended to ensure that they outranked other departmental officials. According to James Tong, the 610 Office is situated "several administrative strata" above organizations such as the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television, and the News and Publications Bureau. The 610 Office plays the role of coordinating the anti-Falun Gong media coverage in the state-run press, as well influencing other party and state entities, including security agencies, in the anti-Falun Gong campaign.Cook and Lemish speculate that the 610 Office was created outside the traditional state-based security system for several reasons: first, a number of officials within the military and security agencies were practicing Falun Gong, leading Jiang and other CPC leaders to fear that these organizations had already been quietly compromised; second, there was a need for a nimble and powerful organization to coordinate the anti-Falun Gong campaign; third, the creation of a top-level party organization sent a message down the ranks that the anti-Falun Gong campaign was a priority; and finally, CPC leaders did not want the anti-Falun Gong campaign to be hindered by legal or bureaucratic restrictions, and thus established the 610 Office extrajudicially.
Soon after the creation of the central 610 Office, parallel 610 Offices were established at each administrative level wherever populations of Falun Gong practitioners were present, including the provincial, district, municipal, and sometime neighborhood levels. In some instances, 610 Offices have been established within large corporations and universities. Each office takes orders from the 610 Office one administrative level above, or from the Communist Party authorities at the same organizational level. In turn, the local 610 Offices influence the officers of other state and party bodies, such as media organizations, local public security bureaus, and courts.
The structure of the 610 Office overlaps with the CCP's Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. Both Luo Gan and Zhou Yongkang oversaw both the PLC and the 610 Office simultaneously. This overlap is also reflected at local levels, where the 610 Office is regularly aligned with the local PLAC, sometimes even sharing physical offices.
The individual 610 Offices at local levels show minor variations in organizational structure. One example of how local offices are organized comes from Leiyang city in Hunan province. There, the 610 Office consisted in 2008 of a "composite group" and an "education group." The education group was in charge of "propaganda work" and the "transformation through reeducation" of Falun Gong adherents. The composite group was in charge of administrative and logistics tasks, intelligence collection, and the protection of confidential information.
James Tong wrote that the Party's decision to run the anti-Falun Gong campaign through the CLGDF and the 610 Office reflected "a pattern of regime institutional choice" to use "ad hoc committees rather than permanent agencies, and invested power in the top party echelon rather than functional state bureaucracies."