Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 9, No. 9, September 2021
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.jpolrisk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/640px-Destruction_douvrages_du_Falun_Gong_lors_de_la_repression_de_1999_en_Chine.jpg?resize=300%2C236&ssl=1)
Destruction of Falun Gong books during the 1999 China crackdown. Wikimedia/ClearWisdom
Helen Hintjens, Ph.D.
International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague
“Genocide is a crime for which there has to be proof of a particular hostile state of mind in an individual or in a government body towards a group that qualifies under the Genocide Convention’s or the ICC Statute’s limited set of groups against whom genocide can be committed”.[1]
Since at least 2000, at the behest of Jiang Zemin, President of the PRC from 1993 to 2003, Falun Gong have been labelled a ‘heretical (or deviated) religion’, and its members systematically persecuted through a covert ‘6-10 Office’ group of Chinese government security officers.