(Minghui.org) China is experiencing an unusual summer – both drought and heat waves are the worst in the past 60 years, according to nearly all news outlets. With 1.1 million square kilometers (or 11% of China's land area) hit with temperatures above 40oC (or 104oF), many farmlands in the country have dried up. The temperatures in over 220 regions have broken records. Among them, the Beibei district in Chongqing has reached 45oC (or 113oC), according to BBC’s article on August 23 titled “What China's worst drought on record looks like.”
Although such phenomena are often attributed to climate change or meteorological patterns, I believe there are alternative explanations.
“The country is suffering a drought. Could it be because of officials abusing powers and abandoning virtue?” Confucius once wrote. Dong Zhongshu in the Han Dynasty further clarified the interactions between heaven and mankind. He believed that disasters would strike when a country failed to cherish virtue. If the mistake were not corrected in time, bigger catastrophes would occur.
Such an understanding continued throughout Chinese history. Among 470 or so droughts recorded in history, the emperors and officials always examined themselves to see if they had done anything inappropriately. They also reviewed criminal cases to prevent innocent people from being wronged.
An example happened to Emperor He. Once a major drought broke out and many salvaging measures also failed. Senior official Zhang Fen proposed to the emperor how to handle this. They went to prisons, reviewed the cases, and corrected a large number of wrongful convictions. Chen Xin, the magistrate of Luoyang who caused the wrongful convictions, was also punished appropriately.
It then began to rain for three days and the drought was resolved. This story was recorded in Hou Han Shu (Book of the Later Han), an official history book of that time. This shows ancient people in general, from officials to ordinary citizens, knew how our behaviors could lead to various consequences.
Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to suppress Falun Gong in July 1999, tens of millions of practitioners have been persecuted for their belief in Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. A large number of them were arrested, detained, and tortured.
As of March 2019, Minghui has collected cases of 109,579 practitioners being tortured for their faith. The torture methods included beating, corporal punishment, handcuffing, electrocuting, destructive force-feeding, hanging, freezing, drugging, tying up, burning, sexual abuse, crushing, suffocation, insects biting, beasts attacking, and more. Each category can be further divided into different torture devices and applied to different parts of the body. There were over 100 types of torture methods in total.
A senior CCP official said the cost of campaigning against Falun Gong exceeded that of a war. Other sources estimated that the CCP spent about one-quarter of the country’s GDP on the persecution in the beginning of the campaign. Both the scale and the severity of the persecution are beyond imagination.
Ms. Wang Fafeng, a practitioner in Shandong Province, was sent to a brainwashing center in Linyi City on June 14, 2012. To force her to give up the belief in Falun Gong, guards put her in an isolation room with all doors and windows closed. During those five days of solitary confinement, she was given little food. On two of the days she was also forced to stand still against a wall. She felt suffocated in such hot weather with no air conditioning.
Ms. Liu Guifu was sent to the Beijing Women’s Labor Camp in 2005. “It was summer with a temperature as high as 38oC (or 100oF). The guards closed all the doors, windows, and curtains. They also forced me to put on the winter coat I was wearing when being arrested months earlier,” she recalled, “Even some of the inmates assigned to watch me suffered heat stroke. But guards told them to continue smoldering me like that...”
Ms. Wang Yujie was a Falun Gong practitioner from Xiantao City, Hubei Province. Officers from the Manchun Police Station arrested her on March 31, 2010, and took her to the Erdaopeng Brainwashing Center in Jianghan District. In an attempt to force her to renounce her belief, guards kept her in a baking room in the burning summer from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. one day. She sweated profusely and complained that her head almost exploded. In the end, she died miserably at 24 on September 3, 2011.
By March 2019, Minghui had collected 1,342 cases of practitioners being subjected to burning torture methods that saw them being burnt with devices such as lighters, cigarette butts, candles, soldering irons, red-burning bricks (fire bricks), hot charcoal, boiling water, light bulbs, hot oil, hot liquid food, and so on. The torture targeted different parts of the body, from head to toe, from inside to outside.
A regular lighter has a temperature as high as 2,000oC (or 3,600oF). Even candles have temperatures of hundreds of degrees. In contrast, the human skin can tolerate only up to 60-70oC (140-158oF). However, guards at various detention facilities across China were cruel enough to subject Falun Gong practitioners to the above-mentioned heat-inducing tortures (smoldering, baking, or burning).
When higher officials turned a blind eye to such torture and when ordinary citizens chose to ignore such brutality, they may not have foreseen the possible consequences such as the drought and heat wave China is experiencing this summer.
If the harmony between heaven and mankind is real, the divine would not tolerate such inhumane persecution to continue forever. By persecuting Falun Gong practitioners for their belief in Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, the CCP is undermining the moral foundation of society and humanity. When many people chose to ignore this, they may face a gloomy future.
We sincerely wish everyone a healthy, safe, and happy life. But in the meantime, people are also choosing their path with their words and actions.