Jiang Zemin’s Two ‘Regrets’: Persecuting Falun Gong, Hiding Serbian Spies

It has been kicking around on overseas Chinese media for a couple of weeks already and was recently picked up by the New York Post: apparently Jiang Zemin's two greatest regrets are the actions that led to the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and the persecution of Falun Gong.

These are the two "stupid things" he did during his reign as Party boss, it was said. The notes were published in the Hong Kong magazine Qianshao (the name is "Front Line Magazine" in English–it has no website). The Post says that they came from a memoir Jiang was preparing, but this does not appear to be the case–at least, according to the information in Chinese, taken from the magazine directly.

The Chinese article says that, seeing as no other top Party leaders have written a memoir, he did not want to set the precedent and risk being criticized as someone who's been "Westernized." And, after all, any such enterprise would implicate others. He held off. People close to his son were the source of the information, the Chinese piece says. Jiang had spoken of his regrets to people around him previously, including his son. His son was preparing some of these remarks in a memoir that he would publish before he (the son) died. They are now said to be held in a safe deposit box and include all manner of secrets that even the Central Party's General Office does not know about. Qianshao is supposed to have gotten the information from associate's of Jiang's son.

The Post already has a lengthy analysis of the Belgrade incident (Jiang let Serbian military officials hang out in the embassy, along with their electronic communication set-up—this was the target), and our writer Heng He will have something substantial on the apparent regret about Falun Gong next week. But there is one point to make: what, can it be presumed, is the kind of regret Jiang feels?

Is it the regret of having committed an enormous crime, sent thousands to their painful deaths, and having destroyed millions of families? I think it is more likely to be the regret of having caused a headache for the CCP. Falun Gong hasn't been wiped out, not within three months as was originally planned, and not in 11 years. That is at once embarrassing and worrying for the Party. The catastrophic results of the persecution–both for Falun Gong practitioners and even more so for Chinese society as a whole–have not yet been tallied. They are impossible to tally, because China would not look as it does today if Falun Gong had not been persecuted. But does Jiang really regret his wrongdoing, or merely the fact that it turned into such a nightmare for his political clique?