610 Office

The 610 Office is the main organization created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to eliminate Falun Gong. It is nominally subordinate to the Political and Legal Affairs Committee of the CCP Central Committee. The Political and Legal Affairs Committee purview was expanded after the 610 Office was incorporated into it.

With a structure extending from top to bottom throughout the Party, government, and military, it has the power to command all police and judicial organs. This organization is akin to the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Cultural Revolution Group, and is dedicated to carrying out the systematic eradication of the practice of Falun Gong. It is an ad hoc agency at the highest levels endowed with extraordinary and extralegal power.

The 610 Office derives its name from the date of its founding, June 10th, 1999. After that date, almost every Party branch, from the province to the county to the district level, established its own 610 Office. The source of the 610 Office’s ability to operate extralegally and with impunity is not drawn from the State. Neither the People's Congress nor the State Council has authorized its actions. Rather, approval and support for its deeds comes from the CCP. Each 610 Office takes orders from the 610 Office one level above it, going up to the Central Committee 610 Office. The local 610 Offices also take orders from the leadership team of the CCP Committee at its same organizational level.

It later changed its name to the Central Leading Group on Dealing with Heretical Religions or Office of Maintaining Stability.

Official data of the annual reported expenditures from 13 local 610 Offices in various counties and districts across nine provinces in 2014 and 2015 are available online. The total expenditure for these branches, covering a population of some 14 million, was 8.9 million yuan ($1.37 million). If that per capita investment is applied to China’s total population of 1.37 billion, the estimated annual budget for all 610 Offices nationwide is 879 million yuan ($135 million). This represents only one part of the party-state apparatus involved in the suppression of Falun Gong.

The ultimate form of financial exploitation has been reported: the killing of Falun Gong detainees and the extraction of their organs to be sold at high prices to Chinese patients and foreign “transplant tourists” as part of a multibillion-dollar industry. Judicial systems sold organs to the transplant centres. Forensic hospitals actively conducted organ transplant. Special institutions under Public Security Bureaus carried out organ transplantation and human body experiments on a large scale.