BEIJING has ordered local governments and major state units across the mainland to set up anti-cult task forces in a further escalation of its already intensive crackdown on the Falun Gong movement.
The order to all levels of regional governments followed hard on Beijing's recent move to set up two central task forces to oversee the campaign, several sources with connections to the government said.
The two central task forces are headed by senior Communist Party officials.
The so-called ``June 10 Working Office'' is headed by Luo Gan, the party's main official in charge of maintaining law and order. It oversees the overall nationwide crackdown.
The second, the ``propaganda work office'', is headed by Liu Yunshan, the second-in-command of the party central committee's Propaganda Department. It is in charge of winning the media war.
Mr Liu's second-in-command is Li Dongsheng, the party chief at and deputy head of China Central Television.
Mr Luo will have two deputies - Minister of Public Security Jia Chunwang and Minister of State Security Xu Yongyue.
The move to set up the task forces at both federal and state levels came after the Politburo, the party's top decision-making body, recently ordered an all-out campaign to completely root out the Falun Gong ``evil cult''.
Local governments in provinces, municipalities and counties are expected to set up their task forces immediately to enforce federal edicts in the nationwide campaign, according to an internal government circular recently sent to regional governments, sources said.
Major state-run enterprises, universities and social institutions are also expected to set up similar organs.
Propaganda officials said they had not seen a campaign undertaken on such a scale since the years of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976.
The propaganda office has ordered all state-run media to mount a saturation campaign to condemn the sect and educate the masses.
The Falun Gong, which claims 70 million members in the mainland alone, was banned by Beijing in July 1999 as an ``evil cult''.
The move to set up the task forces follows the sect's vocal protests in Hong Kong and a mass suicide attempt in Tiananmen Square last month that the leadership blamed on the ``evil cult''.
Beijing launched its propaganda offensive on January 30 with official media giving prominent coverage to its allegations that the mass suicide attempt showed the ``evil'' nature of the sect.
In that event, a group of seven sect members tried to set fire to themselves in Tiananmen Square a week before, on the eve of the Lunar New Year. Five of them, including a 12-year-old girl and her mother, succeeded. The mother died. Cary Huang