BEIJING, Feb 13 (AFP) -A section called Bureau 610 is in charge of suppressing the outlawed Falungong spiritual sect, and following the detention of more than 1,000 members of the group at Tiananmen Square on January 1, its duties have taken on a drastic new look.
"It's like a Russian pogrom," one Western diplomat said, referring to the organized means by which Tsarist Russia decimated the country's Jews last century.
"They are going after Falungong followers in an unabated and methodical fashion," he told AFP.
Following the January 1 protests, Bureau 610 issued orders for local government and police to take all necessary measures to prevent Falungong followers making similar protests on Tiananmen Square during the Lunar New Year holiday and the March parliamentary session.
Luo Gan, the Chinese Communist Party's main official in charge of the maintenance of law and order, ordered police nationwide "to intensify their struggle against the Falungong cult by keeping a close watch on their movement," the official Xinhua news agency said.
The warning came three days before five members of the group breached tight security around Tiananmen Square on Chinese New Year's eve and set themselves on fire.
The grisly mass suicide attempt sent shock waves throughout China and worldwide.
However very few other Falungong followers were seen on or around the square during the holiday, a sharp contrast to the January 1 demonstrations and the last Lunar New Year, when at times protesters were seen being dragged away by police nearly every two minutes.
"Previously they would imprison the hard core followers and try to 're-educate' and then release the marginal believers, but now it appears that even the marginal believers are getting lengthy prison sentences," the diplomat said.
During the 18-month crackdown police have obtained the names and addresses of thousands of Falungong followers they have arrested and re-arrested, allowing the state to set up surveillance at their homes.
Falungong followers in Beijing told AFP that before the Lunar New Year, police and officials from local neighborhood committees came to their homes either to detain them or make them sign statements promising to end their public protests.
"They are using a variety of methods to control them, including pressure by local police, neighborhood committees and work units," Frank Lu, of the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy told AFP.
Lu said China's reform-through-labor detention centers were also witnessing a large rise in detainees since January, but the actual numbers were hard to estimate because of the secret nature of police and judicial systems.
"They are also making families responsible for the actions of other family members through the use of economic penalties," he said.
Such sanctions include firing family members from state-run enterprises and institutions, withholding salaries and retirement pay and refusing promotions, health care and education benefits, Lu said.
The newly-intensified crackdown also calls on police in jails and detention centers to step up efforts to "re-educate" the followers.
This often means an intensification of torture and beatings aimed at making followers sign written denunciations of the group, Lu said.
The information center has documented the deaths of 112 Falungong followers in police custody since the beginning of the 18-month crackdown, while reports of prison beatings of group members in prisons is widespread.
Meanwhile a new propaganda campaign has also saturated the state-run press, alternating between incessant footage of the self-immolation on Tiananmen Square with condemnations and denunciations of the group from every sector of Chinese society.
"The fight against the cult will be complicated, keen-edged and long," an editorial in the leading People's Daily said this week.
While stepping up pressure on foreign news agencies in Beijing that have reported on Falungong activities in China, the state press has also stirred up opposition to "hostile Western foreign forces" who are blamed for inciting the banned group to action.