Cheng was removed from his chief editor’s position after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin made a direct order to investigate him. Cheng secretly left China with help from other supporters of the democracy movement.

The PLAC was formerly the stronghold of current Party leader Xi Jinping’s political rivals, namely, officials who were loyal to former Party leader Jiang Zemin.

But its rapidly growing popularity—with government surveys showing that between 70 million and 100 million people were practicing by 1999—was more than then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin could tolerate.

For Europeans, the image of then-French President Jacques Chirac accompanying the then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin in 1999 to inspect the latest high-speed train near Lyon is still vivid.

Zemin].”

It became an official policy in 2002, when former Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin spoke of the “Go Out” strategy during a major political meeting. Since then, large-sized Chinese companies began to make investments abroad.

In 1999, then CCP leader Jiang Zemin signed an agreement with Russia, acknowledging all the treaties signed between the Qing government and Russia, giving away more than 1 million square kilometers of land—which is equal to the size of several dozen Taiwans

Yet, all this changed when former communist party leader Jiang Zemin perceived Falun Dafa's popularity as a threat to the regime's totalitarian rule and its atheistic Marxist ideologies.

The 14 Chinese officials listed in the e-petition include former CCP leader Jiang Zemin, the main perpetrator and architect of the persecution, who sought to eradicate Falun Gong because of its popularity and its refusal to surrender to Party control.

(Minghui.org) According to Minghui, Jiang Zemin is directly responsible for the inception and continuation of the persecution campaign.

However, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Jiang Zemin viewed the practice’s enormous popularity as a potential threat to his power. In 1999, he launched a brutal persecution against Falun Gong that has continued to this day.

Fearing that its popularity would jeopardize the Chinese regime’s authoritarian rule, in July 1999, then-regime leader Jiang Zemin launched a nationwide persecution campaign.

China Press’s media executives are regulars at high-profile media forums held in China and have nabbed several exclusive interviews with the communist regime’s highest leaders over the years, including former regime leader Jiang Zemin, now deceased; former

The CCP's former leader Jiang Zemin then initiated a persecution campaign in July 1999 to eradicate Falun Gong and its adherents, which continues to date. Lucy Mingyuan Liu with her father, Yong Liu, and mother, Yan Liu.

-based website that tracks the persecution of Falun Gong in China, documented how authorities in Gaocheng followed orders from the highest level of the CCP leadership—former Party leader Jiang Zemin, who launched the persecution against Falun Gong.

Then-head of the CCP Jiang Zemin launched a brutal persecution of Falun Gong on July 20, 1999, with authorities rounding up practitioners and detaining them inside prisons, jails, and brainwashing centers.

In recent years, there has been a wave of backlash against Xi within the CCP, from a faction that include former Party leader Jiang Zemin, his right-hand-man Zeng Qinghong, and their followers.

The practice’s enormous popularity—with 70 million to 100 million followers by the late 1990s, according to official estimates—was deemed as a threat by former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin.

Former CCP leader Jiang Zemin, who started the persecution campaign against the Falun Gong spiritual practice, spent several years fabricating lies and slandering its adherents.

Xi's campaign has seen the purge of corrupt officials belonging to the political faction of former CCP leader Jiang Zemin. Jiang and his associates make up a faction that is still in a bitter power struggle with the current leader Xi and his allies.

Then-Party leader Jiang Zemin considered the group’s popularity a threat to the atheist regime’s rule, and in July 1999, launched a nationwide campaign to round up and throw practitioners into prisons, labor camps, and psychiatric wards in an attempt

Fearing its popularity, on July 20, 1999, then-Party leader Jiang Zemin launched a campaign to suppress Falun Gong.

Fearing its rapid spread, former CCP leader Jiang Zemin launched a brutal campaign against Falun Gong in 1999.

After Xi came to power, many officials in the faction loyal to former paramount leader Jiang Zemin were sacked through Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. Xi has continually stressed to his officials that he is the one who calls the shots.

It is noteworthy that these princelings are all members of the “Jiang faction”; that is, they are loyal to the former Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin.

-based Chinese media, citing a high-ranking Party insider who was close to former Party leader Jiang Zemin.

In June 2015, Wang proclaimed her support to China's Falun Gong adherents who had filed lawsuits with the supreme court against Jiang Zemin, then-Chinese leader, on a charge of genocide against the Falun Gong population.

Xi’s anti-corruption campaign purged many “tigers and flies”—CCP jargon for high- and low-ranking officials—who were loyal to former CCP leader Jiang Zemin.

Xi has ousted many powerful officials—most of them part of an enemy faction loyal to former leader Jiang Zemin—since launching his anti-corruption campaign when he came to power in 2012. The Epoch Times contributed to this report.

It has been brutally suppressed in China since 1999, when then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin started a wide-ranging campaign of persecution against the practice.