meet a Chinese reeducation center victim
It was near the end of the day when Mingxia’s cell phone rang at the bus stop in Tianjin, China.
The slight, twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher had spent the day presenting Tang dynasty history to a group of fifth graders. It hadn’t gone well.
In an innocent attempt to make the eighth-century ruler more accessible, she’d had her students make paper hats that looked like the one in the emperor’s dour portrait. It had only taken twenty minutes for a boy to fold the long, stapled earflaps upward into Mickey ears. Five minutes after that, she was facing thirty Mouseketeers.
What a disaster, she’d thought.
Now she assumed the ringing phone was going to be the school principal, taking her to task.
“Wéi,” she answered cautiously, regretting the hat fiasco.
But no voice greeted her back, only a rush of air. A port city just forty minutes by train from Beijing, Tianjin is a breezy place, especially in the spring. Mingxia repeated her hello. This time, she heard a quiet sob in reply. It was followed by an agonized cry.
“Don’t say a word,” her sixty-year-old mother said after regaining control of herself. “Just get home. Now. And stay off your phone.”
She was an only child who still lived with her parents. The family flat was on the forty-third floor of a high-rise in Tianjin’s Wuqing district. Though the windows faced the sea, the view was ruined by row on row of identical skyscrapers, stacked neatly as combs’ teeth.
When Mingxia made it through the door, she found her mother lying on the carpet, hugging her knees, trembling.
“They arrested him,” the older woman said. “I don’t know if he’s coming back.”
Mingxia lay next to her mother, spooning her, shaking right along with her. Through tears of her own, she asked if there was any more information on the charges against her father, where he’d been taken, anything. Her mother didn’t know.
But Mingxia would learn all about those details soon enough—because in less than a year, the police would come for her too.
She and her father had come into the crosshairs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Ministry of Public Security. Their crime? They’d been practicing members of a quasi-Buddhist meditative sect called Falun Gong, which means “law wheel practice” in Chinese. The doctrine consists of a set of exercises and texts that preach the virtues of truth, benevolence, and forbearance.
Founded in northwest China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, a former trumpet player, adherents practice slow meditative movements redolent of Tai Chi. In the late nineties, Falun Gong’s followers had grown into the tens of millions—way too big for the CCP to tolerate.
Jiang Zemin, China’s President in the 90s, declared it an “evil cult.” Along with Tibetans, Uighur Muslims, democracy activists, and pro-independence Taiwanese, Falun Gong would now round out the “five poisons”—existential threats to the CCP. It needed to go.
On June 10, 1999, Zemin ordered his Ministry of Public Security to act. The MPS created Unit 610—so named for the date of the President’s order. The unit’s mission was clear: sanitize the country of Falun Gong followers.
Mingxia’s family was swept up in the purge.
I met Mingxia a few weeks ago in the process of researching a book. Though both her parents are deceased now, she’s resettled in the US with a family, house, and career, the American dream. But seven years ago, she was living a nightmare.
She only told me her story under strict conditions of anonymity. Names, details, and locations have been changed to protect her identity.
Like her father, Mingxia was arrested on charges of terrorism in the fall of 2016. It was at the end of the school day. The bells had rung and the students had been dismissed. A man in a suit entered Mingxia’s classroom as she was cleaning up. He wanted to talk to her.
A half-hour later, she was sitting across from him in a narrow interrogation room with yellowed walls and no windows. He’d thrust photos of her friends under her face, asking her if she knew them. She told him the truth. They were her meditation partners.
After admitting her guilt, Mingxia was taken out of the police station in cuffs. They put a fabric blue hood over her head, cinched at the throat. With someone tugging her shackled arm, she was loaded onto a bus for the ride to the new “school.” She couldn’t see anything during the two-hour transit. She could hear other women crying.
Mingxia’s dormitory room was on the first floor. The walls were bare concrete, the floor linoleum. There was a splintered tabletop. She realized it was her bunk. The only other objects in the cell were a reeking bucket for a toilet and two ceiling-mounted cameras that hummed with maddening detachment.
The facility was somewhere in the country—to this day, Mingxia doesn’t know where. The reeducation center held only women. They wore light blue cotton pants and shirts that she describes as surgical scrubs. The guards were all men.
Suspected construction of a re-education center, 2018, Korla City, Xinjiang China
Every morning, they led the women from the dormitory onto a grassy field. For the next sixty minutes, the guards would bark left-right-left commands and march them through military drills. They called it “exercise.” Those who fell out of step caught the guards’ attention. Sometimes that meant a simple neck slap. For more serious offenses, it meant a jolt from an electric club, which she describes as a cattle prod.
After exercise, they were led into the classroom. The lectures were repetitious, whitewashed bromides about the dynastic glories of imperial China. Ironic, Mingxia had thought at first, since she’d taught many of these same lessons to her students, even recognizing one of the workbooks. But a month later, she’d lose her capacity for irony.
At the beginning of class, the women recited a long, extravagant thank-you to “dear President Xi Jinping” and the “great Communist Party of China.” At the end of the day, they bookended the recitation with an expression of pride in China’s destiny and its benevolent President. In a chorus, they wished Xi a long and fruitful life, thanking him again.
At first, Mingxia thought it all childish and stupid. She’d make it through this ordeal, she told herself, by pretending to go along, simply waiting it out. One of Falun Gong’s root teachings is forbearance. She could handle this.
In hours-long meditations at night, she would seek the form of enlightenment adherents call “transformation.” In this state, calm replaces anxiety. Forgiveness replaces anger. All is right with the world because the world is all within you. The practice worked—for a while.
Over time, she admits, her mental and physical strength waned. She estimates it took six months for her to question who she even was. The rote recitations had crowded out everything else in her head. Reality had become the Party’s teachings.
Looking back now, she sees the devilish simplicity of the reeducation center’s methods. They’d been so effective that when she’d been marched before five party officials for questioning, she’d responded like a robot. But that’s exactly what the parole board had been waiting for. Mingxia was ready to reenter society now.
Forced to live in another city, she went back to teaching. They told her she’d be watched carefully. She describes it as a form of probation.
In her new job, she followed the curriculum to the letter of the law. Gone were her attempts at creative educational engagement—no more paper hats. She stayed far away from anything having to do with Falun Gong. She was allowed to write to her mother. Her father had never come back. More on his fate below.
A year after leaving the reeducation center, Mingxia was allowed to take a vacation to South Korea’s Jeju Island where she met an American businessman. After a long-distance courtship and two follow-on visits to Hawaii, they fell in love and married. She went to the immigration office and asked for permission to leave. The Ministry let her go. She’s a happy mother now, settled in an eastern state.
In her new country, she’s still a Falun Gong adherent, but only in private. She’s not alone. Mingxia contributes to the Friends of the Falun Gong, an organization that publicizes both the spiritual message and the fate of its adherents. One of its more visible aspects is the Shen Yun Performing Arts. The theater company does a dancing, singing celebration of China’s 5,000-year history—albeit laced with anti-communist messages. Each year they perform in 150 cities across the globe. Seattle’s show is at McCaw Hall in December.
When I asked Mingxia what had become of her father, her answer stunned me. She said he was executed in captivity—so that his organs could be harvested.
She can’t prove that of course. But Mingxia’s accusation has some standing. Within the last two years, Chinese organ harvesting and trafficking has been acknowledged and condemned by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the American Journal of Transplantation, the International China Tribunal, and even the US Congress.
A few weeks ago, the US House of Representatives put The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (HR 1154) up for a vote. The bill passed 413-2. In a letter to the sponsoring Congressman, a Chinese diplomat condemned the Act, calling it a result of propaganda by Falun Gong, an evil cult.
Mingxia was understandably conflicted about whether she should recount her experience to me. On the one hand, she wishes more Americans understood the plight of families like hers. On the other, she knows the CCP has become much more aggressive about keeping a lid on the international Chinese diaspora. Earlier this week, April 17, two men were arrested by the FBI in connection with operating a secret police station in Brooklyn. It’s one of hundreds of global secret international stations operated by China’s Ministry of Public Security abroad.
I was personally shaken by Mingxia’s story. At first, I thought she was exaggerating. A quick Google dive revealed similar accounts from other refugees, whether they’re Falun Gong, Tibetan, or Uighurs.
It’s easy for world events to feel like an abstraction. But when you meet a soft-spoken thirty-five-year-old former teacher who withstood such brutality, you think about it differently.
And I, for one, am grateful to have that luxury.
