There's one other factor that I think people neglect sometimes. One of the ideas of the anti-Falun Gong campaign was to make everybody in society complicit. That meant you went down to the lowest party level, the old women with the arm bands who walked around the hutong making sure it was clean. Everybody had to get involved. Everybody had to make statements against Falun Gong, from dog catcher all the way up to the top.
So it becomes a sort of “thick as thieves” situation for the entire society. This is, of course, is the great problem and the great tragedy for China, because this ultimately makes democracy impossible, when everybody is guilty.