By Cheng Jing and Luo Ya
Epoch Times Staff
Epoch Times Staff
The Epoch Times Chinese website has been repeatedly attacked over the last week by hackers based in China, according to the company’s technical personnel. The reason for the attacks appears to be the newspaper’s close reporting on the concealed misdeeds of Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai, who was recently given a suspended death sentence for a single murder.
The newspaper’s reporting over the last several weeks throws into question the Chinese regime’s tidy narrative presented at the recent trial—that Gu killed only the British businessman Neil Heywood—and says that, according to sources, Gu and Bo Xilai were involved in the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience, and also the sale of the corpses of executed Falun Gong practitioners to plastination factories primarily in the northeastern city in Dalian, where Bo was mayor from 1993 to 2001.
“We’ve been changing people’s focus from the surface details of the trial process, and explaining the dark background of Gu and Bo,” says Zhang Tianliang, a columnist for The Epoch Times and a commentator on Chinese politics.
“The Communist Party has no legitimacy, so when we report on the internal matters of this mafia organization, it’s serious for them,” he said. “The Epoch Times is reporting the truth about the behind-the-curtain actions of the CCP, and this is very scary to them.”
Mr. Xiong, a member of The Epoch Times’ technical team, said that attacks have happened daily since around Aug. 20, the date that Gu’s sentence for murder was handed down. He said that some of the IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses of the attackers have been from China. The attacks have grown in frequency and scale since then, he said in a telephone interview. The Epoch Times has a standing policy of protecting the identity of its technical staff that have in the past been targeted by agents of the Chinese regime, even when stationed in the United States.
The former chief technical officer of the paper, Peter Yuan Li, was assailed by unidentified men in his Atlanta home in 2006. Three armed Chinese men charged into his home, bundled him up in a quilt, and repeatedly struck him in the temple with a blunt metal object, before stealing his laptop computers and leaving all other valuables.
Unwelcome Reportage
Since Bo Xilai’s former right-hand man Wang Lijun fled on Feb. 6 to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, the regime has had to deal with a cascade of highly sensitive events: the purging of Wang Lijun, the removal of Bo Xilai from his Party posts and being investigated, stripping power from domestic security czar Zhou Yongkang, the reconfiguration of the leadership of the security forces, and the trial of Gu Kailai.
Wang Lijun, former Chief of Chongqing Public Security Bureau, in March, 2011. (Feng Li/Getty Images)
The Epoch Times has reported on these events and on what lies behind them: how Wang’s attempted defection exposed a battle for control of the Party and the crimes that made that battle necessary.
The Epoch Times and dissident website Boxun reported that Wang told the U.S. Consulate staff of a plan by Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang to stage a coup after Xi Jinping became head of the CCP. Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beaconreported that the intelligence Wang gave the United States supported the claims of some U.S. officials that hard-line Chinese nationalists were seeking power.
The Epoch Times also reported on how the Bo-Zhou plot was a desperate attempt not to be held accountable for the crimes they had committed in the persecution of the spiritual group Falun Gong.
Forced live organ harvesting was the most severe of these crimes. Wang was himself responsible for harvesting the organs of thousands and is believed to have implicated Bo and Gu in these atrocities in the information he gave the U.S. Consulate.
A source told The Epoch Times that Bo and Gu were responsible for forced live organ harvesting and for the provision of bodies to factories for plastination—the process of injecting a corpse with polymers to preserve a specimen capable of being exhibited.
The same source also told The Epoch Times that Gu murdered Heywood because he had begun talking about his involvement with her in forced live organ harvesting and the selling of corpses.
The reaction from the Chinese blogosphere was swift, with the news quickly quoted, retweeted, and blogged about. Often some of the most sensitive information—such as the identities of the sources of the bodies—was obscured so as to circumvent the Chinese regime’s army of Internet censors.
“The CCP is scared of people finding out about this, but this is the information that Chinese people want to find out about most,” said Zhang of the newspaper’s reporting.
Undeterred
Mr. Xiong said that the attacks resulted in occasional interruption of service, but that the technical team was mostly able to repel them.
The chief executive officer of The Epoch Times, John Tang, said that no amount of attempted hacking by the Chinese regime would deter the newspaper’s reporting. Tang said the attacks demonstrated the Party’s deep unease with the paper’s reportage, while demonstrating its impact and accuracy. He said that technical information collected from the attempted hacking will be submitted to the FBI.
“The Epoch Times is reporting the truth about the behind-the-curtain actions of the CCP, and this is very scary to them,” Zhang Tianliang said.
If the reports of the involvement of high-level Party officials in the harvesting of organs from tens of thousands of living prisoners of conscience were widely known inside and outside China, Zhang said, “because of the blow it would strike to the regime’s legitimacy, the Party would be finished.”
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Read the original Chinese article.
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大家都来看”九评共产党” ( VCD, 书)!
Let’s find “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party”(VCD, books)!
快上大纪元声明退出共产党和共产党其它组织(/团/队)，抹去邪恶的印记!
Quit the Evil Chinese Communist Party or its affiliated organizations today!
