BEIJING - In a rare official glimpse into China's use of labor camps to crush the banned Falun Gong sect, a state newspaper reported Thursday that one camp has held at least 470 group followers.
China's government has refused during its 18-month crackdown on the sect to say how many Falun Gong practitioners have been sent to labor camps. A Hong Kong rights group estimates that at least 10,000 are being held in 300 camps nationwide.
The Legal Daily said the Masanjiazi Education Through Labor Center in northeastern Liaoning province held an award ceremony Wednesday for detained Falun Gong followers, apparently to reward those who had renounced the sect.
The newspaper said 47 Falun Gong followers were granted early release, 86 were allowed to serve out their sentences outside of the camp and 337 had their sentences reduced — making a total of 470 people.
The report did not say how many sect followers in total were in the camp. In an indication the numbers likely exceeded 470, the report said the camp extracted 4,200 letters of repentance and written denunciations of Falun Gong and its U.S.-based leader, Li Hongzhi, from detained sect members.
Labor camp sentences are imposed without trial. The government says no sect members are in labor camps purely for practicing Falun Gong and that most of those held were sentenced for protesting the ban on the group.
The Legal Daily said the Masanjiazi camp started receiving female Falun Gong members at the end of October 1999. At that time, protests against the ban surged and the government tightened anti-cult regulations to facilitate efforts to crush Falun Gong.
Meanwhile, a senior local legislator who waved a Falun Gong banner and shouted slogans during a protest on Tiananmen Square has been expelled from the Communist Party, the official Guangzhou Daily said.
Luo Jianzhong's participation in the Oct. 18 protest "created an extremely bad political impression," the newspaper said. Luo, who headed the executive committee of the local People's Congress in central Hubei province's Shiyan city, also distributed Falun Gong leaflets twice in October, the newspaper said.
The government banned Falun Gong in July 1999, saying it threatened social order and Communist Party rule and led 1,600 followers to their deaths, mostly by encouraging them to forgo modern medical treatment.
Followers of Falun Gong, which attracted millions of Chinese adherents in the 1990s, say the sect's slow-motion meditation exercises and beliefs based on Buddhism, Taoism and Li's unorthodox theories promote health and good citizenship.
China gave a rare indication today of the vast scale of its campaign against on the Falun Gong spiritual group by revealing that at least 470 followers were held at just one labour camp in northeast China.
The official Legal Daily said 47 followers were granted early release from the Masanjiazi camp in Liaoning province, while 86 would be allowed to serve their sentences outside the camp and that a further 337 had sentences reduced.
The paper did not give the total number of members held at the camp, but it hinted the number was much higher by revealing that about 4,200 letters of repentance had been extracted from Falun Gong members at the camp.
China has not said how many Falun Gong followers have been detained since it banned the movement in July last year.
Human rights groups estimate that thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of followers have been sent for re-education through labour at hundreds of camps around China.
BEIJING - In a rare official glimpse into China's use of labor camps to crush the banned Falun Gong sect, a state newspaper reported Thursday that one camp has held at least 470 group followers.
China's government has refused during its 18-month crackdown on the sect to say how many Falun Gong practitioners have been sent to labor camps. A Hong Kong rights group estimates that at least 10,000 are being held in 300 camps nationwide.
The Legal Daily said the Masanjiazi Education Through Labor Center in northeastern Liaoning province held an award ceremony Wednesday for detained Falun Gong followers, apparently to reward those who had renounced the sect.
The newspaper said 47 Falun Gong followers were granted early release, 86 were allowed to serve out their sentences outside of the camp and 337 had their sentences reduced - making a total of 470 people.
The report did not say how many sect followers in total were in the camp. In an indication the numbers likely exceeded 470, the report said the camp extracted 4,200 letters of repentance and written denunciations of Falun Gong and its U.S.-based leader, Li Hongzhi, from detained sect members.
Labor camp sentences are imposed without trial. The government says no sect members are in labor camps purely for practicing Falun Gong and that most of those held were sentenced for protesting the ban on the group.
The Legal Daily said the Masanjiazi camp started receiving female Falun Gong members at the end of October 1999. At that time, protests against the ban surged and the government tightened anti-cult regulations to facilitate efforts to crush Falun Gong.
Meanwhile, a senior local legislator who waved a Falun Gong banner and shouted slogans during a protest on Tiananmen Square has been expelled from the Communist Party, the official Guangzhou Daily said.
Luo Jianzhong's participation in the Oct. 18 protest ``created an extremely bad political impression,'' the newspaper said. Luo, who headed the executive committee of the local People's Congress in central Hubei province's Shiyan city, also distributed Falun Gong leaflets twice in October, the newspaper said.
The government banned Falun Gong in July 1999, saying it threatened social order and Communist Party rule and led 1,600 followers to their deaths, mostly by encouraging them to forgo modern medical treatment.
Followers of Falun Gong, which attracted millions of Chinese adherents in the 1990s, say the sect's slow-motion meditation exercises and beliefs based on Buddhism, Taoism and Li's unorthodox theories promote health and good citizenship.
Frustrated by its inability to wipe out Falun Gong, the central Government has embarked on a new strategy to turn public opinion against the outlawed religious sect. In Beijing, authorities hope to collect one million signatures for a petition denouncing the group. Signatures started being collected at Beijing University last week, an appropriate symbol of "science and democracy".
"It is decided that the masses should be mobilised to legitimise the intensified crackdown," a Beijing source said, adding that Chinese leaders were alarmed by the recurring protests at Tiananmen Square by sect members despite the year-long clampdown.
A Beijing University source said the institution was chosen as a symbolic starting point because it emphasised science and anti-superstition. The petition has been extended to other Beijing universities and local committees.
Authorities hope that the campaign will help to educate students as academic circles are understood to be sympathetic to Falun Gong members who have suffered oppression under the crackdown.
"The new party line for future articles attacking Falun Gong is that such a movement was launched in reaction to a strong urging by the masses," a senior editor in Beijing said.
Meanwhile, public security officials have been placed on alert after intelligence sources suggested that sect members were preparing for major protests in Tiananmen Square for Lunar New Year next week.
Public security officials in Beijing are determined to maintain stability during the festivities, saying they are targeting "destabilising elements".
Beijing police violently quashed protests by followers of the sect in the square on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day this year, detaining hundreds.
It is a scene that has been repeated in Tiananmen Square on every major holiday since mid-1999 when the sect was banned. Hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes police scour the square amid throngs of tourists, pouncing on protesters and dragging them away.
Beijing sources said police were concerned that increasing numbers of Falun Gong protesters were coming to Beijing from other provinces without their identity cards, making it difficult for public security authorities to send them home.
Falun Gong sources said authorities would have to find more space to hold the followers as most detention centres are overcrowded, with many of the detainees sect members.
Chinese state media last week published a barrage of criticism of the group and its exiled leader Li Hongzhi, accusing them of being a tool of Western forces trying to topple the Communist Party.
Ugly scenes: a video image shows immigration officers in airport scuffles with Falun Gong members as a practitioner with US citizenship was being deported on Saturday.
Video footage showing airport scuffles between immigration officers and Falun Gong members was posted on the Internet yesterday by practitioners who claim excessive force was used in the deportations. The sequence, put on the homepage of the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in China, showed one of three scuffles in the airport on Saturday, said Falun Gong deportee Lei Shuhong, who shot the video.
Ms Lei was one of the 13 barred from entering the SAR to attend the sect's conference in City Hall on Sunday. Her claims that officers used excessive force were strongly denied by the Immigration Department last night.
The film captured the moment when sect members confronted immigration officials as they tried to put US citizen Yu Shan on a plane back home at about noon on Saturday.
Speaking from her Tokyo home yesterday, Ms Lei said: "I don't think the force the officials used was necessary."
In the film, a female member screams at the officers: "What you are doing is unlawful." Other sect members then tried to stop the officers hauling Ms Yu away.
The footage then shows officials using force to pull the sect members apart. A few members' hands are held up against their backs and one woman is pushed on to a sofa.
Ms Lei said immigration officers had warned her not to film. "They shouted at me 'You can't film any pictures here', and asked if I had recorded anything. I did not utter a word, but other people said we did not film anything so they didn't take the videotape away." She claimed two other confrontations occurred in the airport's detention room at about 8am and 3pm on the same day as immigration officers tried to deport sect members.
Ms Lei said: "I hope the Hong Kong Government is not going to follow the example of the Chinese Government."
Frank Lu Siqing, from the information centre, criticised the immigration officers on the film. "The footage shows clearly that the sect members do not resist but the officers use force to pull them apart," he said.
But Human Rights Monitor director Law Yuk-kai said he was not concerned by the video evidence although he disagreed with the deportations in principle. "I do not see there is a huge problem," he said. "But given the preparation time available to the officers, they should have avoided physical contact between male officers and female members."
The Immigration Department denied using unnecessary force to remove sect members. A department spokesman said that under the Immigration Ordinance, an officer may remove by force any person or thing obstructing any arrest, boarding, entry, search, seizure, removal or detention.
He said there were clear guidelines as to when reasonable force should be applied. He stressed that people without valid travel documents are subject to removal, and in enforcing the law immigration officers may have to use reasonable and necessary force.
Commenting on the footage, the spokesman stressed that only minimum and reasonable force was deployed. "It is understood that in that particular incident, the person to be repatriated was subsequently persuaded by immigration officers to leave Hong Kong voluntarily."
Hong Kong authorities have warned the Falungong spiritual group against making "offensive" political comments in a public hall which it said breached a rental agreement, an official said Tuesday.
A spokeswoman for the Leisure and Cultural Services Department said the warning was given to the Falungong group in Hong Kong which hosted a major rally and conference here at the weekend.
"We have given them a warning letter because they have deviated from their original purpose which was to share experiences mainly on culture and religion," she said.
"The meeting was different from what was original planned," she said, adding Falungong practitioners were heard making "offensive" and "insulting" comments at Sunday's meeting which drew some 1,000 members.
"According to the agreement, the event was to be strictly cultural, but it has become a political complaints conference," a letter addressed to Falungong said.
Officials gave no more details and declined to say whether the department would ban Falungong from using government venues in the future.
The spiritual movement remains legal in Hong Kong, but has been banned on mainland China since July 1999 as an "evil cult."
Meanwhile, the Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China on Tuesday put a video on the Internet to back claims by some Falungong members that immigration officers at Hong Kong airport deported them by force in scuffles.
The video was said to have been filmed by one member who was denied entry to Hong Kong to attend the Falungong conference, local television and radio said.
Frank Lu, head of the centre, earlier told AFP that some scuffles broke out as Falungong followers tried to stop immigration officers from deporting their members.
However, the immigration authorities in a statement refuted allegations that the department had deployed unnecessary force.
An immigration spokesman said under the law, "an immigration officer may remove by force any person or thing obstructing any arrest, boarding, entry, search, seizure, removal or detention which he is empowered to make."
But he added there were clear guidelines about when reasonable force should be applied.
The spokesman stressed that people without valid travel documents were subject to removal and, in enforcing the law, immigration officers may have to use reasonable force to carry out their duties.
He said a total of 13 people claiming to be Falungong followers were refused entry at the airport between January 12 and 13, adding they were removed because they did not have valid entry visas for entry into Hong Kong or because they had a bad immigration record.
A report in the pro-Beijing Ta Kung Pao daily said the meeting was a political gathering where speakers denounced China for cracking down on the sect.
The South China Morning Post quoted an unnamed official as saying he believed the sect was abusing the government's tolerance.
However, Falungong spokesman Kan Hung-cheung denied the charge, saying, "the department never told practitioners not to talk about politics or about the fact that they were oppressed by the Chinese government."
He told Hong Kong i-Mail that the sharing of experiences meant political remarks were inevitable.
China has dispatched thousands of secret agents to Hong Kong to keep watch on political dissidents, a human rights group claimed here Tuesday.
Since the 1997 handover of the former British colony, the Chinese Security Ministry's activities in Hong Kong have been "rampant," the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said in a statement.
It said 1,000 surveillance officers were being sent annually to settle in the territory.
"They (security agents) collect stolen telephone bills and bank statements and use hi-tech innovations to eavesdrop on telephone conversations" of activists considered a danger to state security, centre head Frank Lu told AFP.
"It is a known secret in Hong Kong, as the territory is also an information place for counter espionage activities" by Western governments, he added.
The centre claimed the Hong Kong government knew of the operations but maintained an attitude of "one eye open and one eye closed."
In the statement, it cited a report in the official mainland Chinese Legal Daily that in 2000, 148 public security officers came to Hong Kong to carry out investigations into 57 different groups.
The allegations came at a time of renewed concern over political freedom and activities by mainland security officers in the territory, which was guaranteed judicial autonomy for 50 years under the "one country, two systems" model on its handover to China in 1997.
Also on Tuesday, the centre put a videotape on the Internet to back claims by some members of the Falungong spiritual group that immigration officers at Hong Kong airport deported them by force.
Immigration authorities, who refused a total of 13 people entry to Hong Kong over the weekend when the Falungong held a conference in the territory, denied they had deployed unnecessary force.
But a government official said the Hong Kong authorities have warned the Falungong over what she said were "offensive" political comments made during the conference, which was held in a government building.
A spokeswoman for the Leisure and Cultural Services Department said: "We have given them a warning letter because they have deviated from their original purpose which was to share experiences mainly on culture and religion.
"The meeting was different from what was original planned," she said, adding Falungong practitioners were heard making "offensive" and "insulting" comments at Sunday's meeting which drew 1,000 members.
The spiritual movement remains legal in Hong Kong, but has been banned on mainland China since July 1999 as an "evil cult."
Meanwhile Hong Kong's legislators Tuesday passed a motion questioning if the police thoroughly investigated allegations that three mainland policemen raided the Hong Kong home of a couple in connection with a corruption case on the mainland nearly six years ago.
Chinese authorities have denied the accusations.
The couple, Su Zhi-yi, 66, and Kam Shuk-yee, 56, were convicted of corruption and sentenced to life imprisonment and 15 years respectively for siphoning four million Hong Kong dollars (513,281 US) from state-owned trading company Paraway Industries in Hong Kong between 1989 and 1994.
Their daughter, Su Suet, 33, alleges police from China illegally entered Hong Kong and held her hostage while raiding the family's home to collect documents.
Kunlun Zhang, a follower of the meditative sect of Falun Gong, was to arrive in Ottawa last night.
OTTAWA - The daughter of a Chinese-Canadian follower of Falun Gong who was jailed in China for his beliefs said she was overjoyed at his return to Canada yesterday, but said they now fear for her mother.
Kunlun Zhang, 60, was to arrive at an Ottawa airport late last night after spending two months in a prison in the eastern province of Shandong.
Chinese authorities released him last Wednesday after he had served only part of his three-year labour camp sentence.
His daughter, LindDi Zhang, said he is feeling weak because he was tortured in prison with electric shocks.
The former Montreal sculptor's imprisonment sparked a diplomatic row between the Canadian and Chinese governments.
"I decided to call Foreign Affairs [yesterday] morning to find out if they had heard anything new," said Ms. Zhang, a University of Ottawa student who first drew attention to her father's plight at a Nov. 17 press conference that detailed China's brutal crackdown against practitioners of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong.
"They told me, 'Your father is already on the plane.' I was so surprised and so happy."
Ms. Zhang said her father was not planning to make a statement to reporters partly because he is afraid the Chinese government will go after his wife, Shumei, who has remained in China to look after her 90-year-old mother. She is also a follower of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
"He is worried the government will do something to her," said Ms. Zhang. "But I think it's OK for her because of the high profile" of Mr. Zhang's case, she said.
Marie-Christine Lilkoff, spokeswoman with the Department of Foreign Affairs, confirmed yesterday that Mr. Zhang had left China and was scheduled to arrive in Ottawa late last night.
"He has returned to Canada," she said, adding that before his departure from China, "Canadian embassy officials in Beijing had met with him and confirmed with him that he's well, but tired."
Mr. Zhang holds Canadian citizenship but returned to his native China in 1996 to care for his ailing mother-in-law. He was arrested last summer while practising Falun Gong.
Ms. Zhang said her father would "be staying with my friends for a couple of days" while she helps him look for his own apartment.
"It's a great thing to finally get him over here and out of the labour camp," said Lucy Zhou, the Falun Gong co-ordinator in Ottawa who spearheaded efforts to publicize Mr. Zhang's imprisonment.
Jillian Ye, the Toronto-based Canadian co-ordinator for Falun Gong, said: "Mr. Zhang is only one person out of the tens of thousands of persecuted practitioners. But I definitely think it's a significant achievement. Contrary to the assumption that China won't bend to international pressure, this case proves that they do."
Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada, cautioned that this isn't the first time China has made a "token" gesture in a human rights dispute on the eve of a trade mission from another country, such as the upcoming Canadian mission to Beijing in February.
"I don't think it's much of a leap to suggest this [release of Mr. Zhang] is connected to the trade mission," said Mr. Neve. "But generally we have not seen that kind of demonstration translate into a wider, ongoing improvement in the human rights situation in China."
As recently as one week ago, Mr. Zhang's future appeared particularly bleak after he'd been transferred to the notorious Wangcun labour camp in northeastern China -- nicknamed "Hell on Earth" by human rights organizations because of frequent reports of torture deaths.
But in a stunning reversal last Wednesday, the Chinese embassy in Ottawa announced that Mr. Zhang had been released from the labour camp and returned to his home, Jinan.
BEIJING -- China today defended its 18-month-long, sometimes violent crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement, calling the group a "social cancer" and disclosing that 242 of its leaders have been sentenced to prison terms.
In two unusual and sometimes bizarre documents, released just a day after 1,000 Falun Gong practitioners from around the world rallied in Hong Kong against the crackdown, the official New China News Agency said the campaign was supported by "people from all walks of life."
The release was timed to counter claims from Falun Gong practitioners and human rights groups that thousands have been jailed and scores killed during the crackdown, the most extensive such roundup since the suppression of the student-led protests around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
In an apparent bid to address frequent reports that Beijing was persecuting religious believers, the State Council information office said Falun Gong was a "social cancer."
The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy contends that as many as 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners are being held in more than 300 labor camps and that 98 sect members have died in police custody.
Falun Gong is a movement that combines elements of Buddhism and other Chinese religions. It is led by Li Hongzhi, a former low-ranking government functionary who left China in 1995 and settled in the United States, where he now lives in the New York City borough of Queens. Li, who says he is an alien and can fly, teaches the cultivation of a wheel of energy inside the belly of each participant. Through that cultivation, Li promises health and spiritual well-being.
China says Li misled his followers into abandoning medical treatment and has blamed the sect for 1,600 deaths.
In a rare disclosure today, the New China News Agency quoted a spokesman for the government information office as saying 242 organizers of the sect had been jailed and an unspecified number of "stubborn elements" who had broken laws against illegal demonstrations had been sent to labor reeducation camps.
Most members sent to labor camps took part "many times in disturbances, making trouble and disrupting social order," the spokesman said. None are in camps "purely because they practiced Falun Gong."
Authorities offered reduced sentences and early release to some of the detainees to "educate and save them to the maximum extent," the spokesman said.
The spokesman denied reports on Falun Gong Internet sites that a sect member was killed in Beijing's Tiananmen Square during a protest by hundreds of practitioners on Jan. 1. Chinese officials have previously admitted the deaths of some practitioners but attributed them to suicide, natural causes or hunger strikes.
China launched its crackdown against Falun Gong in July 1999, six weeks after 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners surrounded the Communist Party headquarters in central Beijing in a bid to win legal status for their sect.
All indications until today were that the crackdown was personally ordered, overseen and prompted by President Jiang Zemin, who viewed the demonstration at party headquarters from behind the blackened windows of a government car.
But in a shift, the statements today contend that the crackdown was triggered by complaints by local authorities and ordinary citizens dating to 1996 -- something that the Chinese government has not said before.
"People from all segments of society and the masses had voiced strong complaints that Falun Gong was destroying families, endangering the physical and spiritual health of followers, threatening social order and illegally raising funds," one statement said.
One of the statements cited several articles and news programs published or aired before the crackdown began as proof of support for Falun Gong's suppression. Among others, it cited the work of He Zuoxiu, a physicist who has criticized the sect, and a report on a TV program, "Beijing Express," that accused Falun Gong of excesses.
In reality, until late 1999, the government protected Falun Gong and took steps to limit criticism of the group. Although it lauded He in the statement today, the government would not allow him to publish tracts against the group in mainstream publications several years ago. And although it mentioned the Beijing TV report today, at the time it aired, the government ordered "Beijing Express" to apologize to the group and arranged for several reporters to be fired from the show.
What Is Falun Gong? See "Falun Gong 101", by Massimo Introvigne
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