BEIJING, April 23 (Reuters) - China mobilised scores of police in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Sunday, taking no chances with Falun Gong devotees before the anniversary of a sit-in that put the spiritual group in the Communist Party's crosshairs.
Sunday tourist throngs were riddled with uniformed and plainclothes police, two days before the first anniversary of the April 25 demonstration, when 10,000 Falun Gong members surrounded Beijing's Zhongnanhai leadership compound.
The adherents were demanding official recognition of Falun Gong, a synthesis of Buddhism, Taoism and meditation and a halt to vicious attacks against their group in state media.
What they got instead was the label of ``evil cult'' and an extermination campaign that has seen thousands sentenced to hard labour, many suffer severe beatings and forced drugging and some 15 die in police custody, human rights groups have said.
But the group has defied the crackdown and kept up sporadic protests for almost an entire year, frustrating a Communist Party that is used to snuffing out perceived threats.
A commentary by the official Xinhua news agency recently summed up the frustration.
``The Chinese government has won decisive victory in its ongoing battle against Falun Gong, but the cult group led by Li Hongzhi has not recognised their defeat and continues to cause trouble,'' it said, quoting a cabinet spokesman.
The fight against the movement would be ``long-term, complex and serious'' the spokesman acknowledged.
READY FOR APRIL 25 TROUBLE?
``The number of Falun Gong troublemakers rises on significant dates or when important activities are scheduled,'' Xinhua said and noted that Tiananmen Square had experienced almost daily agitation by adherents since China banned Falun Gong last July.
Tiananmen Square was quiet on Sunday, but the vanloads of police left no doubt it will be closely watched in the run up to April 25, a year after a bold but peaceful sit-in brought Falun Gong international prominence and domestic persecution.
In a repeat of police tactics during earlier cycles of Falun Gong protest activity, including the Chinese New Year and the annual parliament session, some Western reporters in Beijing say they have been followed by plainclothes police in recent days.
A U.S.-based Falun Gong activist said some 60 adherents were staging a hunger strike in a female labour camp in Jiangxi province, where one follower died from not eating on April 14.
She had confirmed the deaths of two other Falun Gong members in Chinese police custody in March and April. The deaths were initially reported by a Hong Kong-based human rights group.
The Information Centre of Human Rights and Democracy said the deaths of the hunger strike and two in police beatings brought the total of such deaths to 15 since China banned the spiritual movement in July of last year.
China has acknowledged a handful of Falun Gong deaths in custody, but said they were either suicides or deaths from pre-existing conditions, such as heart ailments. It says the movement has caused 1,500 deaths and made 600 mentally ill.
CHINA SHRUGS OFF FOREIGN CRITICS
Spokesmen for Falun Gong, which claims between 70 million and 100 million adherents, have accused China of arresting more than 35,000 people since the Communist Party banned the movement.
At least 5,000 members have been sent to labour camps without trial and others have been sentenced to up to 18 years in prison after ``show trials,'' according to the group.
Gail Rachlin, a U.S.-based spokeswoman, said the group was scheduled to hold a series of meditation demonstrations in New York at the weekend, culminating in a call for peaceful dialogue with China on the eve of the April 25th anniversary.
China last week quashed debate at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights on a U.S.-sponsored resolution accusing Beijing of increased political and religious repression. Beijing 's treatment of Falun Gong featured prominently in the resolution.
The newest Chinese propaganda campaign against Falun Gong has seized on the group's international sympathy, saying it has ``publicly given themselves up to the anti-China forces and actively serve as their anti-China tool.''
BEIJING (AP) - On alert for protests, police detained followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement Sunday on Tiananmen Square, including a group of 11 women and a child who were herded into a van and driven away.
Another person was taken away for trying to unfurl a banner and at least six others were detained individually. Because of the throngs of visitors on the huge square, it was impossible to see how many practitioners were taken away in total. But police regularly detain 40 to 50 there each day, sometimes more.
Police have stepped up surveillance of the square and railroad and bus stations ahead of Tuesday's anniversary of a protest by 10,000 Falun Gong followers outside Communist Party headquarters in Beijing last year.
The protest, the largest in Beijing since the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989, prompted Chinese leaders to ban Falun Gong three months later and launch a crackdown in which thousands of followers have been detained. Leaders have been imprisoned for up to 18 years.
The government says the group caused the deaths of 1,500 followers and that it is an evil cult which must be eradicated.
The group of 11 women looked like other tourists on the square, sitting together eating fruit and drinking water. But a plainclothes security officer grew suspicious and asked if they were practitioners.
The women ignored several questions until they suddenly stood up, formed a circle and meditated, eyes shut and arms raised above their head. The officer shouted at them to stop and tried forcing their arms down. He kicked one of the women in the thighs.
Uniformed officers ran over and began herding the women, kicking two of them, into a van. A young girl, who was with the women but remained seated during their protest, also was taken away.
An amalgam of traditional beliefs, slow-motion exercises and ideas drawn from its founder, Falun Gong is believed to promote health and morality and has attracted millions of Chinese.
BEIJING (AP) - Chinese police have detained the daughter of a member of the banned Falun Gong sect, apparently for trying to publicize her mother's death while in custody, her husband said Saturday.
Police took Zhang Xueling from her home on Monday, said her husband, Ding Zhongyuan. Police would not let Ding visit his wife, but he said the 15-day detention order police showed him at the prison accused her of ``distorting facts to undermine social peace.''
While police would not explain the charge, Ding said Zhang had been trying to publicize the circumstances of her mother's death and had met with foreign reporters.
Zhang's detention comes just before the one-year anniversary Tuesday of a huge Falun Gong protest outside the communist leadership's compound in Beijing. The daylong silent protest last April 25 drew 10,000 Falun Gong followers and shocked Chinese President Jiang Zemin. He ordered a crackdown and the group was publicly banned in July.
Zhang's mother Chen Zixiu was an avid follower of Falun Gong, a mixture of traditional beliefs, slow-motion exercises and ideas drawn from its founder that is believed to promote health and that attracted millions of Chinese in the 1990s. Like thousands of followers, Chen traveled to Beijing to protest the July ban.
According to the government, Chen, 59, was intercepted on her way to Beijing in February and taken to an office for ``education.''
Four days later, authorities told the family Chen was dead. In an account Zhang posted on the Internet, she described Chen's body as covered in bruises, her ears a dark purple, her teeth broken. Out in the yard, she found Chen's clothes cut to ribbons, her underwear soiled.
People detained along with Chen claimed that police beat her and others who refused to sign a written pledge to renounce Falun Gong, the account said.
The information office for China's cabinet claims that Chen was never mistreated. In its account, Chen's health worsened while in custody and she was taken to a hospital where she died from a heart attack.
At least 15 Falun Gong followers have died in custody since the group was banned nine months ago. The government has denied any abuse, saying that the practitioners either committed suicide or died of natural causes.
The tourist cameras clicked. The totem poles in Stanley Park stood in mute testimony while a group of people raised their hands to the sky.
A child who scampered by told his mother: "Look, they're doing exercises."
"They," in this case, refers to adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has been violently repressed in China, but is gaining converts here.
Banners with Chinese characters fluttered close by, a tape recorder played faintly in the background, and the 20 or so practitioners went through a series of exercises as gentle as the spring breeze.
They were here to promote a movement that combines meditation with exercise, to explain themselves to the world outside and to mark the first anniversary of a protest by thousands of Falun Gong practitioners halfway around the world against the Chinese government, which has labelled the movement a dangerous sect.
The Chinese authorities claim the "evil cult" has brought about the deaths of at least 1,400 of its followers, many through the refusal of medical treatment. To date, the sect appears to have survived the arrest of more than 100 of its leaders, and the detention of thousands of believers.
At least one of the hundreds of Chinese migrants who arrived on the B.C. coast last summer in rusting ships has successfully claimed refugee status on the basis that, as a believer, he faced religious persecution in China.
Another practitioner, Ying Lee, was among the group in Stanley Park Friday.
Every morning, the 35-year-old urban planner rises at 6 a.m. and heads for Kits Beach to go through an hour-long series of exercises designed to purify the body and expel the "black" energy while bringing in the "good" energy.
To her, it was normal and natural to do the exercises in Stanley Park in front of the gawkers, the mildly curious and the truly reverential.
Closing one's eyes helps.
Think of the exercises as a kind of antithesis to jogging. No huffing and puffing required. The movements are so slow, so measured, so mellifluous that they had the effect of making a reporter want to curl up under a Stanley Park tree and go to sleep.
Lee smiles serenely as she describes the magic of Falun Gong. Like so many, she says she had been searching for the meaning of life, even before moving here from China in 1989. She searched for it all the while she was an urban planning student at the University of B.C. "There was a void in my heart." Then, on a return trip to China in 1996, she found what she was looking for. An old classmate introduced her to Falun Gong.
What's so attractive to Lee are the missing parts to this spiritual venture. Absent are the rules and the trappings that seem to go along with many organized religions.
There are no membership lists, no collection plates and no churches, although adherents do gather at various parks and community centres in the Vancouver area at prescribed times to offer each other mutual support and to go through the exercises together.
If Lee had to take a guess, she would say there are between 200 and 300 followers in the Vancouver area.
There is no Bible, although there are two books laying out the tenets of Falun Gong. Claiming to be an ancient practice as old as the universe itself, it has no priests or ministers, although one living man -- and here's where things get a bit tricky -- is considered the founder and master teacher. His name is Li Hong Zhi.
On Falun Gong's North American Web site (http://www.minghui.ca), he is pictured on a mountainside "quietly watching his disciples." The Chinese government has described the "cult" in terms that are anything but benign.
Since it banned the movement in July, the state media have been filled with stories of believers refusing medicine at the urging of the founder who says practising their faith will cure them, or slashing their stomachs open to find their falun -- the Wheel of Law that is said to revolve constantly within practitioners, drawing in good powers and expelling evil ones.
It's hard to imagine the soft-spoken Lee engaging in anything so extreme.
For her, what counts are the three tenets of the movement: truthfulness, tolerance, compassion.
In the lexicon of the movement, she says she keeps trying to "upgrade Xinxing" -- which stands for heart, mind and nature.
The practitioners folded their arms in front of them and gazed into the distance, as if searching for some unknown deity.
A tour bus revved its engine. A bird squawked. And in the middle of a busy Canadian city, something considered so dangerous in China brought a few moments of peace.
BEIJING -- China has issued a strong defence of its crackdown on Falungong, comparing the sect to mass-murder and suicide cults across the world, as the anniversary of the group's 10,000-strong protest nears.
As the deaths in police custody of three more followers of the outlawed group were reported, bringing the total to 15 since July, China said Falungong, like cults in the United States, France, Japan and Uganda, was "a malignant tumour in the world community".
"It is widely known that the Falungong is a cult that has forcibly indoctrinated its practitioners with its dangerous theories and brainwashed them," the official Xinhua news agency said late on Thursday.
Sect leader Li Hongzhi "threatens, controls and violates his followers with his evil thinkings", leading practitioners to refuse medicine, go insane, injure themselves, commit suicide or murder, or be disowned or killed by their families, it added.
To date, more than 1,500 Falungong practitioners had died as a result of his teachings, the agency claimed.
The sect was banned last July, after about 10,000 followers surrounded the Zhongnanhai Chinese Communist Party headquarters in central Beijing on April 25, almost a year ago.
The communist government labelled the group the biggest threat to its rule since the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests, which were suppressed violently.
The group advocates clean living and practises meditation and breathing exercises.
As proof of Washington's attitude to such groups within its shores, Xinhua cited the deaths of 86 people in the government assault on the Branch Davidian sect compound at Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993.
"The 'human rights guardians' did not put forward any human-rights proposals when there was a heavy presence of armed police officers, tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters in the attacks against cults and even the headquarters of the cult groups was levelled," the agency said in its article, headlined "Xinhua blasts America's double standards on cults". "Some in the US are inordinately fond of Falungong, not because they believe in the mystical powers of Li Hongzhi, but because the issue just gives them another opportunity to interfere in China's internal affairs." -- AFP, Xinhua.
'The "human-rights guardians" did not put forward any human-rights proposals when there was a heavy presence of armed police officers, tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters in the attacks against cults and even the headquarters of the cult groups was levelled.' - Xinhua, citing Washington's assault on the Branch Davidian sect compound at Waco, Texas, in 1993 as proof of its tough attitude towards cults
Beijing has conceded it is unable to stamp out the banned Falun Gong religious sect, which is expected to continue to cause embarrassment to the leadership.
A security source in Beijing said despite President Jiang Zemin's repeated orders to devote "whatever resources are needed" to crush the Falun Gong movement, the police were unable to prevent frequent demonstrations in Beijing and other cities.
"Departments such as the Ministries of Public Security and State Security have boosted staff to handle the Falun Gong," the source said.
"Yet there are limits as to what the police can do. For example, they can spot - and later stop - a large number of affiliates coming from the provinces to Beijing to stage protests. But if the numbers involved are just 800 people or so, the latter can often slip through."
The source said the police could spot a big group of Falun Gong practitioners as they were about to congregate. But often, small groups of 70 or 80 could escape detection and stage protests.
National papers yesterday carried a Xinhua report acknowledging that the protests had been frequent and sometimes large.
"Since July 22, 1999, Falun Gong members have been causing trouble on and around Tiananmen Square nearly every day," Xinhua said.
Political sources said the Jiang leadership was trying to prevent detainees suiciding and becoming martyrs.
Quote for the day: I'd rather confess I'm wrong and be right than claim I'm right and be wrong.
BEIJING, Apr 21, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) China late Thursday issued a strong defence of its crackdown on the Falungong spiritual group, lashing out at American critics and comparing the sect to mass murder and suicide cults across the world.
As the deaths in policy custody of three more followers of the outlawed group were reported, bringing the total to 15 since July, China said the Falungong, like cults in the United States, France, Japan and Uganda were "a malignant tumor in the world community."
"It is widely known that the Falungong is a cult that has forcibly indoctrinated its practitioners with its dangerous theories and brainwashed them," said the official news agency Xinhua.
Sect leader Li Hongzhi "threatens, controls and violates his followers with his evil thinkings," it said, leading practitioners to refuse medicine, go insane, injure themselves, commit suicide or murder, or be disowned or killed by their families.
To date, more than 1,500 Falungong practitioners have died as a result of Li's teachings, Xinhua claimed.
Was not its crackdown, it asked, in fact "a protection of human rights for the people, especially the Falungong practicers?"
Falungong was banned last July, after some 10,000 followers surrounded the Zhongnanhai Chinese Communist Party headquarters in central Beijing on April 25, almost a year ago.
The communist government labeled the group the biggest threat to its rule since the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests, which were violently suppressed by the army.
The Buddhist-inspired group advocates clean living and practices meditation and breathing exercises.
As proof of Washington's attitude to such groups within its shores, Xinhua cited the deaths of 86 people in the government assault on the Branch-Davidian sect compound at Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993.
"The U.S. government, which is clear-minded on the infringement of American people's human rights by cults, has never been softhearted when cracking down on cults in the United States," the agency said in its article, headlined "Xinhua blasts America's Double Standards on Cults."
"The U.S. government is keenly aware of the threat cults pose to social order.
"The 'human rights guardians' did not put forward any human rights proposals when there was a heavy presence of armed police officers, tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters in the attacks against cults and even the headquarters of the cult groups was leveled.
By contrast, Xinhua said, "anti-China forces in the United States roared when the Chinese government legally banned a cult group that had not followed legal registration procedures."
Falungong members' frequent illegal gatherings also infringed on others' human rights and endangered social stability, it said.
Xinhua accused its enemies, particularly in the United States, of using the "pretext" of human rights as a stick to beat China.
"Some in the U.S. are inordinately fond of Falungong, not because they believe in the mystical powers of Li Hongzhi, but because the issue just gives them another opportunity to interfere in China's internal affairs."
And it said the U.S. was ignoring its own "prevalent" human rights problems.
"One fourth of the prisoners in the world are housed in the U.S. prisons; 49 percent of U.S. prisoners are black people who account for 13 percent of the country's total," it said.
"In the United States, the infant mortality rate of black people is three times that of white; 15 out of every 100,000 young people are killed a year."
Moreover America last year led the attacks on Yugoslavia, "a sovereign country," killing more than 2,000 civilians and leaving almost one million others homeless, it said.
"Why don't they do something substantial to improve the human rights situation in their own country?" Xinhua asked.
BEIJING, Apr 21, 2000 -- (Reuters) Three members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group died in Chinese police custody in March and April, bringing the total of such deaths to 15 since last year, a Hong Kong-based human rights group said on Thursday.
The Information Center of Human Rights and Democracy said one Falun Gong follower had died after staging a hunger strike and two were beaten by police.
One of the dead practitioners, Zhang Zhengang, a 36-year-old banker from Jiangsu province, was beaten unconscious and forcibly taken from the hospital to a crematorium on March 30, it said.
"It is possible that Zhang Zhengang was still alive when he was cremated,"
the center said in a statement.
The other two Falun Gong followers were Guan Zhaosheng, who died of beatings while in Beijing police custody this month, and Li Yanhua, who died on April 14 after an 11-day hunger strike by 60 followers in a labor camp in Jiangxi province, it said.
The latest reported deaths bring to 15 the number of Falun Gong members to have died in police custody since China banned the spiritual movement in July of last year.
ANNIVERSARY BRINGS CLAMPDOWN
China has escalated its crackdown against the group ahead of the first anniversary of a demonstration on April 25 last year, when 10,000 Falun Gong members gathered outside Beijing's Zhongnanhai leadership compound, the Center said.
China won a vote at the UN Commission on Human Rights on Tuesday to end debate on a U.S.-sponsored resolution accusing Beijing of increasing rights abuses with greater political and religious repression.
China's treatment of the Falun Gong movement featured prominently in the U.S.
resolution, sparking a recent Chinese propaganda campaign accusing the group as a pawn of anti-China forces in the U.S. government.
State-run Xinhua news agency said on Thursday the United States applied double standards to human rights by criticising China's crackdown on Falun Gong while U.S. authorities had dealt violently with sects in the past.
China banned Falun Gong, which combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism and meditation, after members demanded official recognition for their faith in a series of protests. In October the government declared it an "evil cult".
But the group has defied the crackdown and kept up sporadic protests for almost an entire year.
THOUSANDS IN DETENTION
Spokesmen for Falun Gong, which claims between 70 million and 100 million adherents, have accused China of arresting more than 35,000 people since the Communist Party banned the movement.
Beijing denies it represses political and religious groups, and has said Falun Gong had caused the deaths of more than 1,500 people, mostly by forcing them to forego medical care for serious illnesses.
At least 5,000 members have been sent to labor camps without trial and others have been sentenced to up to 18 years in prison after "show trials", according to Gail Rachlin, a U.S.-based spokeswoman.
BEIJING China's state-controlled media acknowledged for the first time Thursday the government's persistent difficulty in stamping out the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, even as fresh allegations emerged about police brutality toward practitioners held in detention.
Three jailed members of the movement have died as a result of beatings or hunger strikes in the last month, according to human-rights groups and family members, bringing the total number of deaths to 15.
The government has been mostly silent about Falun Gong in recent months, and state media have never openly acknowledged the sporadic silent protests by small groups of its members on Tiananmen Square over the last nine months.
For observers, it has been difficult to tally the frequency of such scattered protests, because the square is vast and police have immediately whisked away protesters.
But Thursday, the official New China news agency acknowledged that the protests have been daily and sometimes very large.
"Since July 22, 1999, Falun Gong members have been causing trouble on and around Tiananmen Square in central Beijing nearly every day," the government news agency quoted a high-level official as saying.
"Some of the troublemakers were practicing Falun Gong, some were protesting, banners in hand and shouting slogans, and some were even attempting to detonate explosives," the agency said.
It added that a protest at the Chinese New Year holiday involved 1,000 Falun Gong members from China and abroad. Li Hongzhi, the Chinese founder of the movement, now lives in the United States.
Although the quoted official contended that "the Chinese government has won a decisive victory in its ongoing battle against Falun Gong," he added that "the cult group led by Li Hongzhi has not recognized their defeat and continues to cause trouble."
Falun Gong was widely popular in China until the government denounced it as an "evil cult" and banned it last July. Combining eastern philosophies and slow-motion traditional Chinese exercises, the group attracted international attention a year ago when 10,000 members staged a sit-in around a government compound to seek official recognition. The anniversary of that protest is Tuesday, and the government is nervous.
Since the ban last summer, most members have broken with the movement. But a group of devoted followers has remained, and the police have detained tens of thousands of people in connection with the practice, although many of them only briefly.
According to official statistics released Thursday, there are 2,591 cases related to Falun Gong in the courts. Ninety-nine of them have been concluded, according to news agency, leading to 84 prison sentences, some longer than 10 years.
But human-rights groups say that at least 5,000 more members are in "re-education" camps and that many others are being held in lesser forms of detention.
Their harsh treatment in part led the United States to seek censure of China earlier this month at the UN Human Rights meeting in Geneva, but the motion failed. In the wake of the censure effort, Beijing on Thursday offered the prospect of renewed talks with Washington on protecting civil liberties.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said China hoped to resume an official dialogue on human rights with the United States, if Washington first takes "concrete actions" in that direction.
Many of the imprisoned Falun Gong members have been mistreated, human-rights groups say.
Three have died in the last month, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a watchdog group based in Hong Kong.
They include Zhang Zhenggang, 36, a bank clerk from Huai'an City in Jiangsu Province, who the center said was beaten March 25 and then lapsed into a coma.
Although he had been hospitalized on March 30, police forcibly took Zhang to a crematorium, the center said. "It is possible that Zhang was still alive when he was cremated," it said.
Two other followers died after they were detained for traveling to Beijing to stage protests, the center said. Guan Zhaosheng, from Hunan province, was beaten to death, and Li Yanhua died after a hunger strike at the Women's Labor Reeducation Camp in the city of Nanchang.
Beijing late last night issued a strong defence of its crackdown on the Falun Gong sect, comparing the group to mass-murder and suicide cults around the world. As the deaths in police custody of three more sect followers were reported, bringing the total to 15 since July, the mainland said the Falun Gong, like cults in the US, France, Japan and Uganda were "a malignant tumour in the world community".
"It is widely known that the Falun Gong is a cult that has forcibly indoctrinated its practitioners with its dangerous theories and brainwashed them," Xinhua said. To date, more than 1,500 sect practitioners had died as a result of sect leader Li Hongzhi's teachings, the agency claimed.
On April 25 last year, 10,000 Falun Gong members gathered outside Beijing's Zhongnanhai leadership compound, leading the Government to label the group the biggest threat to its rule since the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests.
The Hong Kong-based Information Centre of Human Rights and Democracy said three more followers of the group had died in police custody in the past month.
Li Yanhua, 46, Guan Zhaosheng and Zhang Zhenggang, were jailed for refusing to renounce their belief in the group. Li's husband, Mr Yang, said Li was sentenced without trial to two years re-education through labour in January and died on April 14 of heart failure after taking part in an 11-day hunger strike.
The family requested medical parole in February but this was refused, Mr Yang said.
A government office in charge of the Falun Gong crackdown in Hunan province said Guan's death was due to his refusal to take medicine. But the information centre said Guan was beaten to death by Beijing police. Zhang Zhenggang was also said to have been beaten into a coma in Hua An, Jiangsu province.
Weifang, China--The day before Chen Zixiu died, her captors again demanded that she renounce her faith in Falun Dafa. Barely conscious after repeated jolts from a cattle prod, the 58-year old stubbornly shook her head.
Enraged, the local officials ordered Ms. Chen to run barefoot in the snow. Two days of torture had left her legs bruised and her short black hear matted with pus and blood, said cellmates and other prisoners who witnessed the incident. She crawled outside, vomited and collapsed. She never regained consciousness, and died on Feb. 21.
A year ago, few outside of China had heard of Falu Dafa and its regimen of practices, know as Falun Gong, which include breathing exercises, meditation and readings from the moralistic, and sometimes unusual, works of group founder Le Hongzhi.
Although popular among millions of Chinese, Falun Gong didn't jump to international prominence until April 25 last year when 10,000 of its believers converged on Beijing, surrounding the government's leadership compound in the Forbidden City and demanding an end to state press reports that portrayed them as a superstitious cult. The crowd caught an odd sight: Mostly middle-age, working-class people, they simply meditated quietly for the better part of a day before leaving the center of town to return to their homes across the country.
But to a government that doesn't much tolerate open challenges to its rule the protest was an unforgivable provocation. The government arrested hundreds of Falun Gong organizers and discovered that some were officials in the central government, the police and even the military. Worried that a cancerous religion was infecting its atheist state, Beijing declared Falun Gong an "evil cult" last July and formally banned it.
Confronted with the full weight of China's security apparatus, Falun Gong should have died a quick death. But unlike the dissidents who occasionally challenged the Communist Party, Falun Gong activists haven't been stopped, despite mass arrest, beatings and even killings. Instead, a hard core continues to protest, with several dozen arrested every day in downtown Beijing when they try to unfurl banners calling for their group's legalization. A year on, Falun Gong faithful have mustered what is arguably the most sustained challenge to authority in 50 years of Communist rule.
Pyrrhic Victory? Ms. Chen's tale is one of extremes. On one end is the Communist Party, which is so determined to break Falun Gong that it has resorted to public-security measures on a scale not seen since 1989, when an anti-government movement led by students was crushed in Tiananmen Square. The government's victory in this fight, should it come, may well be Pyrrhic; its heavy-handed approach has disillusioned millions of ordinary people, such as Ms. Chen's daughter, who were apolitical until last year's events. It has also damaged China's international standing just as it need foreign help on an array of pressing economic issues.
One the other end are people such as Ms. Chen, who in their simple, and perhaps naïve, way are at the forefront of a slow trend to demand the freedoms guaranteed by China's laws and constitution. While Many Falun Gong practitioners have compromised--by practicing secretly at home for example--thousands have insisted openly on their right to freedom of belief and assembly. "We're good people," Ms. Chen's friends recall her telling officials from the Weifang city government who interrogated her in her barren concrete cell two days before she died. "Why shouldn't we practice what we want?" The story of Ms. Chen's last days is reconstructed from interviews with family, friends and prisoners, as well as two accounts written by cellmates and smuggled out of jail in recent weeks. Originals of these accounts were examined and shown to the authors' friends and relatives, who verified the documents as having been written by their love ones. Allegations of mistreatment also are backed by more than two dozen separate interviews with Falun Gong adherents in other cities, who independently said they too were beaten with clubs and electric batons, chained to bars and made to disavow their faith.
Local officials rejected efforts to interview them for this story, while Beijing's official position on all allegations of prison abuse is that no Falun Gong practitioner has been mistreated in custody. It says 35,000 adherents came to Beijing but were sent back safely, with only three dying accidentally when they tried to escape. International human rights groups say it is likely that at least seven more deaths like Ms. Chen's occurred through mistreatment in prison.
"All she had to do was say she renounced Falun Gong and they would have let her go," said Zhang Xueling, Ms. Chen's 32 year-old daughter. "But she refused." Three years ago, Ms. Chen hardly imagined that she would be risking her life by practicing Falun Gong. She was 55 and had taken early retirement from a state-run truck-repair garage where she had worked for 30 years making auto parts. One day while out walking in the neighborhood near her family's one-story brick bungalow, Ms. Chen noticed some practitioners of Falun Gong.
A widow for 20 years whose children were grown, Ms. Chen had little to do during the day, so she started attending the exercise sessions regularly.
"My mother was never anyone who believed in superstitious things," said Ms. Zhang, who doesn't practice Falun Gong herself. "Frankly, she had a bad temper because she felt she was getting old and had sacrificed so much to raise us alone. When she joined Falun Gong her temper improved a lot and she became a better person. We really supported her."
Over the next two years, Ms. Chen because an enthusiastic participant, rising at 4:30 a.m. to exercise for 90 minutes in a small dirt lot with half a dozen other practitioners. After a day running errands for her children and grandchildren, Ms. Chen spent evenings reading the works of Mr. Li, the group's founder, and discussing his ideas with fellow members. Those beliefs incorporate traditional morality-do good works, speak honestly, never be evasive-as well as some idiosyncratic notions, such as the existence of extraterrestrial life and separate-but-equal heavens for people of different races.
Gradually, Falun Gong gained adherents in her neighborhood, Xu Family Hamlet, which is located in an industrial suburb of Weifang, a city of 1.3 million in eastern China's Shandong province. The hamlet is a dusty maze of poplar-lined dirt roads and bungalows surrounded by crumbling brown brick walls-a typical village being swallowed up by its urban neighbor. By last year, her local group had doubled in size to a dozen regular members-hardly a giant organization, but a regular presence in the community.
For Ms. Chen, Chin'as decision to ban Falun Gong last July came out of the blue. She hadn't noticed the articles and television shows that had attacked the group, and she paid little attention a year ago when members surrounded the Communist Party's leadership compound in Beijing. The day the government ban was announced "was the bitterest of her life," said her daughter, Ms. Zhang. "She couldn't accept that they were criticizing Falun Gong and calling it an evil cult." Although barely literate and never before interested in politics, Ms. Chen resisted the ban. She invited group members to practice at her home and refused to deny her affiliation with the group or her love for Mr. Li, whom she respectfully called "Master Li." Then, last November, several top organizers of Falun Gong were given long prison sentences. Shocked, Ms. Chen joined thousands of fellow practitioners by traveling to Beijing with the vague idea of protesting against the government. Since the ban in July, many had gone to Tiananmen Square and sat cross-legged with their arms stretched in an arc over their heads-the classic starting pose for Falun Gong exercises.
Ms. Chen never made it that far. On Dec. 4, the day after she arrived in Beijing, she was walking through the Temple of Heaven park when a plain-clothes security agent asked if she was a member. She answered truthfully and was arrested, her daughter said.
She was taken to the Weifang municipal government's Beijing representative office, a sort of lobbying bureau-cum-dormitory that scores of Chinese cities and provinces have set up in the capital to house local officials visiting Beijing.
The next day, Ms. Zhnag and three local officials made the seven hour drive to Beijing to pick up Ms. Chen, a humiliation for the officials who were criticized for not keeping better control of their people. Ms. Zhang paid the equivalent of a $60 fine-a month's wages-and returned home with her mother, who complained that police had confiscated the $75 in cash she had brought with her.
As punishment, officials from the Chengguan Street Committee (street committees are the lowest level in China's system of government) confined Ms.
Chen to their offices, just 200 yards from her home. She stayed there for two weeks, in a form of "administrative detention" that the state can impose almost indefinitely. Ms. Zhang had to pay another $45 for her mother's room and board.
On Jan. 3, Ms. Chen celebrated her 58th birthday. Despite being underday-and-night observation, she was in great spirits, Ms. Zhang said. "She knew she was right. All she wanted was to make the government not make a criminal out of her because she knew she wasn't a criminal." Then, on Chinese New Year, which this year fell on Feb. 4, hundreds of Falun Gong protesters were arrested and beaten in Beijing. (Though no longer under surveillance, Ms. Chen wasn't a protester.) Officials in the capital were stunned by the outbreak. On Feb. 16, the local district chief came to see Ms. Chen and told her that Beijing wanted to make sure no other Falun Gong adherents went to Beijing, especially since China's annual session of parliament was due to begin in a few days. He asked Ms. Chen to promise she wouldn't leave home.
"My mother told them very clearly that she wouldn't guarantee that she wouldn't go anywhere. She said she had the right to go where she pleased," Ms. Zhang said. The officials left in a huff.
Two days later, Ms. Zhang came home to find half a dozen officials in her living room. They said her mother had been spotted outside by a special squad of informants who roamed the neighborhood looking for Falun Gong participants who dared to leave home.
Ms. Chen was taken into custody and never seen by her daughter again. She was held for a day in the Chengguan Street Committee offices, but then during the night she managed to escape-exactly how isn't clear, officials told Ms. Zhang. Ms. Chen was arrested the next day, Feb. 17, heading for the train station, apparently hoping to go to Beijing to plead her case before the Petitions and Appeals Office, a last resort for people who feel they have been wronged.
This time, officials from the local district Communist Party office sent Ms. Chen to a small, unofficial prison run by the street committee, described to practitioners as the Falun Gong Education Study Class.
People who have been held there describe it as more of a torture chamber.
The building is two stories with a yard in the middle. In the corner of the yard is a squat one-story building with two rooms. This is where beatings took place, according to four detainees who described the building in separated accounts.
While Ms. Chen was transferred to the detention center, officials called Ms. Zhang and said her mother would be released if she would pay a $241 fine.
Ms. Zhang was fed up with the government's "fines" and she said, her mother's insistence on standing up for her rights. She told the officials that their fines were illegal and that she would complain to the local procurator's office if they didn't release her mother. She rejected another call on Feb. 18 and again threatened legal action, though she didn't follow through.
Meanwhile, Ms. Chen spent a night in the jail, listening to the screams emanating from the squat building, according to two of her cellmates. Before she was led in, she was allowed another phone call. She called her daughter later on the 18th and asked her to bring the money. Irritated by the troubles brought on by her mother's uncompromising attitude, Ms. Zhang argued with her. Give in and come home, the daughter pleaded. Her mother quietly refused.
Ms. Chen's ordeal began that night. Wrote an adherent who was in the next room of the squat building: "We heard her screaming. Our hearts were tortured and our spirits almost collapsed." Officials from the Chengguan Street Committee used plastic truncheons on her calves, feet and lower back, as well as a cattle prod on her head and neck, according to witnesses. They shouted at her repeatedly to give up Falun Gong and curse Mr. Li, according to her cellmates. Each time Ms. Chen refused.
The next day, the 19th, Ms. Zhang got another call. Bring the money, she was told. Ms. Zhange hesitated. Her mother came on the line. Her voice, usually so strong and confident, was soft and pained. She pleaded with her daughter to bring the money. The caller came back on the phone. Bring the money, she said.
Ms. Zhang got a sick feeling and rushed over with the money and some clothes. But the building was surrounded by agents who wouldn't let her see her mother. Suspicious that this was a ruse to get more money from her--and that her mother wasn't really in the building at all--she returned home. An hour later, a practitioner came to see Ms. Zhang. Falun Gong adherents were being beaten in the center, she was told.
Ms. Zhang raced back with her brother, carrying fruit as a small bribe for the police. She was refused entrance and her money was refused as well.
She noted an old woman in a room and shouted up to her: "Is my mother being beaten?" The old woman waved her hand to signify "no," although Ms. Zhang wondered whether she might have been trying to wave her away from the prison, fearing she, too, would be arrested. Ms. Zhang and her brother went home for a fitful, sleepless night.
That night, Ms. Chen was taken back into the room. After again refusing to give up Falun Gong, she was beaten and jolted with the stun stick, according to two prisoners who heard the incident and one who caught glimpses of it through a door. Here cellmates heard her curse the officials, saying the central government would punish them once they were exposed. But in an answer that Falun Gong adherents say they heard repeatedly in different parts of the country, the Weifang officials told Ms. Chen that they had been told by the central government that "no measures are too excessive" to wipe out Falun Gong. The beatings continued and would stop only when Ms. Chen changed her thinking, according to two prisoners who say they overheard the incident.
Two hours after she went in , Ms. Chen was pushed back into her cell on the second story of the main building, an unheated room with only a sheet of steel for a bed. Her three cellmates tended to her wounds, but she fell into a delirium. One of the cell mates remembers her moaning "mommy, mommy." The next morning, the 20th, she was ordered out to jog. "I saw from the window that she crawled out with difficulty," wrote a cellmate in a letter smuggled out by her husband. Ms. Chen collapsed and was dragged back into the cell.
"I was a medical major. When I saw her dying, I suggested moving her into another (heated) room," the cellmate wrote in her letter. Instead, local government officials gave her "sanqi," herbal pills for light internal bleeding. "But she couldn't swallow and spat them out." Cellmates implored the officials to send Ms. Chen to a hospital, but the officials--who often criticize Falun Gong practitioners for forgoing modern medical treatment in favor of a superstitious belief in their exercises--refused, her cellmates said. Eventually they brought a doctor, who pronounce her healthy.
But, wrote the cellmate: "She wasn't conscious and didn't talk, and only spat dark-colored sticky liquid. We guessed it was blood. Only the next morning did they confirm that she's dying." An employee of the local Public Security Bureau, Liu Guangming, "tried her pulse and his face froze." Ms.Chen was dead.
That evening, officials went over to Ms. Zhang's house and said her mother was ill, according to Ms. Zhang and her brother. The two-piled into a car and wee driven to a hotel about a mile from the detention center. The hotel was surrounded by police. The local party secretary told them Ms. Chen had died of a heart attack, but they wouldn't allow them to see her body. After hours of arguing, the officials finally said they could see the body, but only the next day, and insisted they spend the night in the heavily guarded hotel. The siblings refused and finally were allowed to go home.
One the 22nd, Ms Zhang and her brother were taken to the local hospital, which was also ringed by police. Their mother, they recalled, was laid out on a table in traditional mourning garb: a simple blue cotton tunic over pants. In a bag tossed in the corner of the room, Ms. Zhang said she spotted her mother's torn and bloodied clothes, the underwear badly soiled. Her calves were black. Six-inch welts streaked along her back. Her teeth were broken. Her ear was swollen and blue. Ms Zhang fainted and her brother, weeping, caught her.
That day, the hospital issued a report on Ms. Chen. It said that cause of death was natural. The hospital declines to comment on the matter. Ms. Zhang said she challenged officials about the clothing she had seen, but they told her her mother had become incontinent after the heart attack and that was why her clothes were soled.
Ms. Zhang and her brother tried filing a lawsuit, but no lawyer would accept the case. Meantime, her mothers body lay in refrigeration, until the threatened litigation was resolved.
Then, on March 17, Ms. Zhang received a letter from the hospital saying the body would be cremated that day. Ms. Zhang called the hospital to try to prevent it, but she said officials didn't give her a clear answer and said they would have to call her back. They didn't. Ms Zhang never saw her mother's body again.
BEIJING (AP) - Three more members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement have died of beatings or hunger strikes while in custody, including one who may still have been breathing when police cremated him, a human rights group said Thursday.
At least 15 Falun Gong practitioners have died in custody since the group was banned nine months ago, the Hong Hong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
The government has disputed some of those claims, saying practitioners committed suicide or died of natural causes, not because of any mistreatment.
The Information Center cited family members of those killed, unidentified officials and unidentified Falun Gong practitioners.
It said Zhang Zhenggang, a 36-year-old bank worker and Falun Gong organizer in Huaian city in eastern Jiangsu province, was beaten March 25 by a guard and another prisoner with wooden batons, leaving him in a coma.
Five days later, police took the comatose Zhang, who was still breathing and had a pulse, from the hospital to a crematorium, the Information Center said.
``Zhang Zhenggang may still have been alive when he was cremated,'' it said.
A city police official, contacted by telephone, said he knew nothing about the case.
The Information Center said Falun Gong member Guan Chaosheng was beaten to death by police in Beijing after he came to the capital to protest.
Members have been coming to Beijing almost every day to protest the ban, and are often picked up on Tiananmen Square.
The Information Center said authorities paid $1,200 in compensation to Guan's family.
A police official in Guan's hometown, in Qidong county in southern Hunan province, said he did not know about the case.
Falun Gong member Li Yanhua died April 14 in a labor camp after a hunger strike, the Information Center said.
Li, an employee at an aircraft manufacturer in Nanchang, a city in the southern province of Jiangxi, was sentenced in January to two years in prison after she came to Beijing to protest, the group said.
It said 60 other Falun Gong members imprisoned in the labor camp are on a hunger strike that began April 4.
BEIJING, April 20 (Reuters) - Three members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group died in Chinese police custody in March and April, bringing the total of such deaths to 15 since last year, a Hong Kong-based human rights group said on Thursday.
The Information Centre of Human Rights and Democracy said one Falun Gong follower had died after staging a hunger strike and two were beaten by police.
One of the dead practitioners, Zhang Zhengang, a 36-year-old banker from Jiangsu province, was beaten unconscious and forcibly taken from the hospital to a crematorium on March 30, it said.
``It is possible that Zhang Zhengang was still alive when he was cremated,'' the centre said in a statement.
The other two Falun Gong followers were Guan Zhaosheng, who died of beatings while in Beijing police custody this month, and Li Yanhua, who died on April 14 after an 11-day hunger strike by 60 followers in a labour camp in Jiangxi province, it said.
The latest reported deaths bring to 15 the number of Falun Gong members to have died in police custody since China banned the spiritual movement in July of last year.
ANNIVERSARY BRINGS CLAMPDOWN
China has escalated its crackdown against the group ahead of the first anniversary of a demonstration on April 25 last year, when 10,000 Falun Gong members gathered outside Beijing's Zhongnanhai leadership compound, the Centre said.
China won a vote at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights on Tuesday to end debate on a U.S.-sponsored resolution accusing Beijing of increasing rights abuses with greater political and religious repression.
China's treatment of the Falun Gong movement featured prominently in the U.S. resolution, sparking a recent Chinese propaganda campaign accusing the group as a pawn of anti-China forces in the U.S. government.
State-run Xinhua news agency said on Thursday the United States applied double standards to human rights by criticising China's crackdown on Falun Gong while U.S. authorities had dealt violently with sects in the past.
China banned Falun Gong, which combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism and meditation, after members demanded official recognition for their faith in a series of protests. In October the government declared it an ``evil cult.'' But the group has defied the crackdown and kept up sporadic protests for almost an entire year.
THOUSANDS IN DETENTION
Spokesmen for Falun Gong, which claims between 70 million and 100 million adherents, have accused China of arresting more than 35,000 people since the Communist Party banned the movement.
Beijing denies it represses political and religious groups, and has said Falun Gong had caused the deaths of more than 1,500 people, mostly by forcing them to forego medical care for serious illnesses.
At least 5,000 members have been sent to labour camps without trial and others have been sentenced to up to 18 years in prison after ``show trials,'' according to Gail Rachlin, a U.S.-based spokeswoman.
BEIJING, Apr 20, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) The outlawed Falungong spiritual group Thursday repudiated a campaign against it by the Chinese government and called for "peaceful dialogue" to overcome differences.
"China's denunciation of Falungong as a 'pawn' of the United States is entirely unfounded," a statement by Zhang Erping, spokesman for the group's exiled members said.
"Instead of engaging us in dialogue to peacefully resolve our differences, the People's Republic of China continues to resort to name-calling, groundless accusations and flawed arguments," Zhang said in the statement e-mailed to AFP.
Zhang also said the failure Tuesday of the UN Human Rights Commission to censure China's human rights record and widespread violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was "disappointing."
Zhang's statement came as Beijing appeared ready to heat up the rhetoric denouncing the group as the first anniversary of an April 25 protest by some 10,000 members of the group around the Zhongnanhai headquarters of the communist party in central Beijing approaches.
On Wednesday, a Chinese official said China's ongoing crackdown against the outlawed group would be a long-term and complicated "struggle," while revealing that every day Falungong followers were protesting in Tiananmen Square.
The unnamed "senior official," in an interview carried by Xinhua news agency, also revealed that on April 5 police in Tiananmen Square prevented a Falungong follower named Li from detonating explosives strapped to his body.
Exiled Falungong leader "Li Hongzhi and his ilk refuse to taste defeat and continue to cause disturbances and riots," the official said in the interview that appeared in most Chinese dailies Thursday.
As of March 25, 91 Falungong-related cases involving 99 people had been heard by Chinese courts resulting in prison sentences for 84 of the defendants, the official said.
Since the group was outlawed last July "Falungong members have been causing trouble in and around Tiananmen Square in central Beijing nearly every day, under orders from cult leader Li Hongzhi," he said.
Now the Falungong practioners have also "linked up with anti-China forces" abroad, the official said, and have advocated democracy, freedom of religion and human rights in China at international meetings.
"These acts and more have clearly indicated that Li Hongzhi and his Falungong organization have publicly given themselves up to the anti-China forces and actively served as their anti-China tool," he said.
"The struggle (against the Falungong) from today onwards will be a long-term, sharp and complicated struggle," he said.
He reiterated the government's claim that the group was directly responsible for more than 1,500 deaths, "more than the number killed by the Ugandan 'Ten Commandments of God' cult," he said.
The Chinese government has branded the Falungong group a cult like Japan's Aum Shinryko, known for its sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway and the American Branch Davidians, who stockpiled weapons and perished in a standoff with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
According to government publications, of the 1,500 people who died at least 1,218 died from "refusing medical treatment" for such terminal illnesses as heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver, renal failure and strokes, while at least 144 committed suicide and 600 had mental problems.
The government estimated that there were up to two million followers of the group before it was banned, making the incidence of suicide and mental illness relatively normal, analysts said.
The group claims 100 million followers worldwide and some 80 million in China.
The mainland has apparently intensified its purge of the banned Falun Gong group by sacking the "sect-related" head of the nation's sports administration.
The sacking came as Beijing trumpeted yesterday its victory over what it called US "hegemony" at the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
"Wu Shaozu, chairman of the State Administration for Sports, was removed and has been replaced by Yuan Weimin," said Shao Shiwei, a spokesman for the sports administration.
Li Zhijian, former deputy party secretary of the Beijing municipality, was named to replace Mr Wu in his role as party secretary in the sports administration, Mr Shao said.
He denied Mr Wu's removal was because of his support for qi gong groups, including the banned Falun Gong and Zhong Gong spiritual groups.
However, official sources in Beijing said Mr Wu tried to intervene on behalf of the groups before they were banned last year.
Beijing also announced yesterday it had sentenced An Jun, an independent anti-corruption campaigner, to four years' jail for subversion.
Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in China spokesman Frank Lu expressed concern over Beijing's oppression of dissidents and sect members.
An's China Corrupt Behavioural Observer, an independent watchdog of corruption in government, uncovered more than 100 cases of graft, but the Chinese Government refused to allow the group to officially register.
Mr Lu said the verdict on An was handed down by a court in Xinyang, in the central province of Henan, just hours after China foiled a United States-sponsored UN resolution condemning mainland human rights violations.
All major mainland dailies hailed China's success in quelling the resolution to condemn its rights record and blasted the US.
"Such a practice by US and some other Western countries of utilising the human rights issue as a political tool to create ideological confrontation and exercise hegemonism is a typical illustration of politicising the human rights issue," Xinhua quoted a Beijing official as saying.
Meanwhile, the China Education Daily reported that Falun Gong followers had been banned from taking university entrance exams, once assessments decided whether they were members.
About 91 Falun Gong-related cases involving 99 people had been heard by Chinese courts resulting in prison sentences for 84 of the defendants, a spokesman of the State Council said.
What Is Falun Gong? See "Falun Gong 101", by Massimo Introvigne
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