The Clinton administration has told Beijing to stop its crackdown on the Falun Gong after scores of peaceful practitioners were arrested at a protest on Tuesday.
State Department spokesman James Rubin said the mainland had violated its commitments in international human rights instruments and that arrests of peaceful protesters profoundly disturbed the US.
"We call on the Chinese Government to cease its crackdown on the Falun Gong, release all those in custody for the peaceful expression of their beliefs and guarantee . . . freedom of speech, conscience and association and peaceful assembly," said Mr Rubin.
Asked if he believed China understood such arrests hurt its chances of the trade pact winning approval, Mr Rubin said: "I suppose China has the ability to understand the consequences of its actions."
The Falun Gong meditation sect made its presence known Tuesday in its China heartland as well as downtown Chicago, with demonstrations a year after a crackdown by the Chinese government.
More than 100 protesters were taken away by police in the heart of Beijing.
In Chicago's chilly Loop Tuesday night, some 30 Falun Gong sympathizers gathered in front of the Chinese Consulate in memory of three sect members who died in Chinese police custody recently.
Protesters demonstrated passively with legs and hands folded on welcome mat-sized carpets on the sidewalks across Erie Street. Candles burned as soft music played in the background.
Practitioners from around the globe gathered to show that Falun Gong is a "peaceful, mind-body-spirit exercise," said Yuqian Lou of Naperville, a Loop research scientist born near Beijing who has practiced for three years.
"You learn to be unselfish and not to fight with people," Lou said. "These types of demonstrations show what kind of people we are, compassionate, truthful and forebearing."
Jack Oblaza, a native of Poland, compared Falun Gong to the Solidarity movement.
"The beauty of this exercise is simplicity," said Oblaza. "We have also gone through struggles of human rights. The dignity of spiritual development is being denied."
In Tiananmen Square, Chinese police detained dozens of protesters who evaded heavy security to unfurl banners and meditate. Falun Gong has remained active despite a 9-month-old crackdown and thousands of arrests. Members stage small protests daily in Tiananmen Square--an unusual feat in the tightly controlled capital.
The crackdown was prompted by a massive protest on April 25, 1999, when police watched 10,000 members meditate outside the leadership compound in Beijing to protest official harassment.
But President Jiang Zemin, alarmed at the group's ability to mobilize followers, ordered the group banned last July and arrested sect leaders.
One group of 15 people sat down together to meditate and were pulled to their feet and pushed into a minibus. Police tackled four people who unfurled a banner, punching one man in the face. Police muzzled a middle-aged woman and pulled her backward as she tried to yell.
A group of at least six other women, all carrying children in their arms, were bundled into a van on the square's edge.
U.S. lawmakers, on a study trip aimed at deciding whether to pass a
landmark trade deal granting China the same permanent low-tariff import status as other U.S. trading partners, expressed concern over the arrests.
Foreign tourists watched the arrests, gaping in surprise as police confiscated film and videotapes and detained at least eight foreign reporters.
At least 16 followers have died in custody, either from abuse or because of hunger strikes, according to the Hong Kong-based group, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
Falun Gong attracted millions of followers.
The government says Falun Gong is an evil cult that threatens public order and Communist Party rule. It also says the movement has caused 1,559 deaths among followers.
BEIJING At first, the scene in Tiananmen Square seemed directly out of a guidebook. Tourists strolled the vast plaza Tuesday morning, pointing their cameras toward Chairman Mao's oversize portrait and the Great Hall of the People.
Suddenly there was a commotion, as China's most unlikely protest movement showed itself again, a defiant face or two at a time.
Two otherwise unremarkable women, wearing cotton shoes, their hair in ponytails, stepped from the milling crowd and thrust their fists outward in a silent meditative pose identified with the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual cult.
They were surrounded by a throng of poorly disguised undercover security agents, who rushed from all sides to drag the women toward a police van. A rebellious smirk of satisfaction washed across one detainee's face.
In two hours, the time it takes a typical tourist to see the entire square, more than 100 practitioners of the outlawed movement challenged authorities--one and two at a time--and accepted arrest in one of the largest and most public protests by adherents since the group became known around the world exactly one year ago.
After the first two practitioners were arrested, the crowds dispersed. The security agents, many carrying little black bags containing cellular phones, went back to posing stiffly as tourists, and another police van silently took up position.
Then a woman hurriedly unfurled a red and yellow Falun Gong banner. She was hustled to the van, resisting as she shouted a message: "Falun Gong is good! Falun Gong is the way of truth!" Authorities and Falun Gong members had been heading toward this mini-showdown for weeks.
The state-run media had published a string of harshly worded criticisms of the "evil cult," branding it a dangerous group that deceived practitioners into beliefs that made them ill or poor or would drive them crazy.
The hard-core members haven't backed down.
Though they face certain arrest and the possibility of imprisonment and even torture for identifying themselves, at least a few Falun Gong members have turned up at Tiananmen Square nearly every day recently to protest their treatment.
In one day earlier this month, more than 100 Falun Gong activists were stopped on the square.
Tuesday was expected to bring a significant confrontation because it marked the one-year anniversary of Falun Gong's transformation from a virtually unknown spiritual movement to a gentle but effectively organized threat to the government.
On April 25, 1999, about 10,000 Falun Gong adherents unexpectedly approached the Chinese government's leadership compound and stood in silent meditation to protest the group's unflattering depiction in the Chinese media as a superstitious cult.
Since then, China's government has banned the movement, aggressively pursued its leadership and tried to intimidate followers to give up the combination of traditional spiritual practices, slow-motion exercises and teachings of Falun Gong's founder, Li Hongzhi, who is said to live in New York but has not been seen in months.
Much of what is happening to Falun Gong members is going on out of public view. It cannot be confirmed, but the group claims that it has 70 million or more members and that 35,000 have been detained, while another 5,000 have been sent to labor camps.
There are credible reports from human-rights groups that at least several members have died in custody after being beaten and tortured.
"In the one year since that gathering, we have come to witness the Chinese government execute one of the largest, harshest and most arbitrary persecutions in modern history," Gail Rachlin, a New York-based spokeswoman for Falun Gong said in a statement.
Chinese authorities claim Falun Gong has been responsible for "at least 1,559 deaths" among followers who have committed suicide or refused medical treatment, and it says 650 have suffered psychological disorders.
The government says there were about 2 million adherents but nearly all have quit the group and "returned to normal life." The government has acknowledged that perhaps three people have died while in custody.
"No responsible government would take a laissez-faire attitude toward an evil cult and allow it to endanger people's lives," the Chinese press quoted a government official as saying.
The confrontation has affected U.S.-China relations, with the Clinton administration criticizing China's treatment of Falun Gong during a United Nations human-rights meeting. American officials say members' basic rights of association are under siege in Tiananmen Square.
China has fought back in several published tirades, claiming that the U.S. seems "clear-minded" when dealing with American cults like the Branch Davidians, but that it won't grant China a similar right.
China watchers, who have puzzled over the government's extraordinarily harsh, almost paranoid reaction to the cult, say there are several ways to analyze the standoff.
The broadest, most dramatic interpretation is that Falun Gong's mobilization of thousands, if not millions, of adherents into an anti-government faction could become the galvanizing force for a sweeping pro-democracy movement not seen since the 1989 protests that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
There are numerous historical precedents in China for fringe quasi-religious groups touching off political unrest, but many analysts think Falun Gong, with its peculiar amalgamation of New Age teachings, isn't in a position to unite unemployed workers, advocates of democracy and other groups that believe they are disenfranchised.
"You can't completely dismiss the idea," a diplomat in Beijing said. "Some people completely missed identifying the fall of the Soviet Union. Sometimes signs of change are signs of cataclysmic change. But fundamentally, Falun Gong is still a very fringe group."
The idea that Falun Gong could become a tripwire for a major challenge to China's authoritarian system does not come just from the fact that it attracted millions of adherents, but from who they are. The group's followers include Communist Party members and other bulwarks of Chinese society like military families and middle-class citizens who never considered themselves outsiders and have been shaken by their treatment as criminals.
On Tuesday, Falun Gong adherents approached a Westerner in Tiananmen Square and said in English that they came with a message: "We're here to tell people that Falun Gong is good, and the government shouldn't do this to us."
A few minutes later, at least one was picked up by authorities.
James Mulvenon, a China analyst at the Rand Corp. in Washington, said the most significant aspect of the Falun Gong protest movement is the government's prickly, paranoid response, which seems out of proportion to the private beliefs being practiced.
"It really sobers us about the self-perceived vulnerability of the regime," he said. "Think about how a confident regime that was fully on its game would react. There would be much more co-option. They could take a much softer line."
The implication, he said, is that China watchers will have to reconsider how the government might react to any number of issues, including, for example, Taiwan, given its lack of confidence and predilection for meeting challenges with force.
"If you don't have a Mao with inner strength and confidence, if you have a relatively weak collective leadership whose self-perception is so vulnerable, you have a real problem," Mulvenon said.
NEWARK -- The Immigration and Naturalization Service has granted asylum to a member of the Falun Gong sect, showing a new level of acceptance for asylum bids by people who fear persecution in China for following the banned spiritual movement.
An INS officer approved M. Zeng's request for political asylum after an April 10 hearing in which the 77-year-old doctor told officers he likely would be imprisoned if forced to return to China.
Although immigration courts in San Francisco and New York granted separate asylum requests to Falun Gong members last year, immigration lawyers say this is the first time the INS itself has taken such an action.
The INS "has now demonstrated that the United States is ready to recognize the atrocities being perpetrated by the People's Republic of China upon its people," said Zeng's attorney, Andrew Bayne. "This landmark decision . . .
shows that the United States government will not stand by while innocents are oppressed abroad."
Zeng, whose first name and hometown were withheld by Bayne, came with his wife in September to visit his daughter in Edison and stayed after learning that China had stepped up its crackdown on Falun Gong members.
Police in Beijing detained dozens of members of the meditation sect Tuesday, the anniversary of a demonstration by 10,000 Falun Gong followers near Tiananmen Square.
Since then, the Chinese government has outlawed Falun Gong, detained 35,000 followers, and sent 5,000 without a trial to labor camps, human rights groups say. Sixteen followers have died in custody, the groups say.
Falun Gong is a belief based on meditation, slow-motion exercises, and the ideas of founder Li Hongzhi, a former government grain clerk who now lives in New York. Followers say it promotes health and good citizenship.
The Chinese government says Falun Gong is an evil cult that threatens public order and Communist Party rule and has caused 1,559 deaths.
Immigration lawyers say more Chinese in recent months have claimed Falun Gong membership as their reason for seeking asylum.
"I turn down at least three cases a week," said New York attorney H. Raymond Fasano. He said he has 30 active case files of Falun Gong members. The New Jersey ruling, he said, could lead to the INS creating a new ground for seeking asylum, allowing members to "claim Falun Gong."
Zeng, who applied for asylum in January, was successful in proving his case to an INS asylum officer because of his specific knowledge of the movement's practices, Bayne said. Many of the recent applications have been fraudulent, he said.
"It's basically the asylum claim du jour," he said.
INS asylum officer Susan Raufer's letter to Zeng, dated April 14 and received Tuesday by Bayne, says that his approval is pending a federal investigation of his background and requires him and his wife to obtain green cards. Zeng's wife received derivative asylum as his spouse.
Raufer declined to comment on the case Tuesday, saying all asylum matters are confidential. She said she does not know how many Falun Gong members have recently applied for asylum in New Jersey.
Zeng, who spent two years as a political prisoner in the early Seventies for what his government called anti-revolutionary behavior, declined through his attorney to comment on the ruling . His family is "extremely relieved," Bayne said.
In November, a San Francisco immigration judge granted asylum to a Chinese detainee based on her fears of persecution because of her Falun Gong membership. Also that month, a New York immigration judge granted asylum to 17-year-old Chen Rong, who participated in a June rally in China in support of the movement.
BEIJING (AP) - A year after a protest that prompted an official crackdown, the Falun Gong meditation sect showed it was still a force Tuesday with a demonstration by more than 100 members in the heart of Beijing.
Police detained dozens of protesters who evaded heavy security to unfurl banners and meditate on Tiananmen Square. Officers rushed from one part of the vast square to another to stop the scattered protests.
Falun Gong has remained active despite a 9-month-old crackdown and thousands of arrests. Members stage small protests daily in Tiananmen Square - an unusual feat in the tightly controlled Chinese capital.
The crackdown was prompted by a massive protest on April 25, 1999. At that time, police stood by as 10,000 members meditated in silence outside the leadership compound in Beijing to protest official harassment.
But President Jiang Zemin, alarmed at the group's ability to mobilize followers, ordered a crackdown that ended in an outright ban in July. Sect leaders were arrested and members told to recant.
On Tuesday, more than 100 people were taken away by police.
One group of 15 people sat down together to meditate and were pulled to their feet and pushed into a minibus. Police tackled four people who unfurled a banner, punching one man in the face. Police muzzled a middle-aged woman and pulled her backward as she tried to yell.
A group of at least six other women, all carrying children in their arms, were bundled into a van on the square's edge.
``The Great Way of Falun is good,'' shouted one middle-aged protester, leaning out of a police bus window, his fist raised.
Protesters included Chinese of all ages and walks of life, evidence of the group's popularity: elderly women, young men, a man in a civil servant's uniform. In one busload of detainees, a woman held her young daughter, who was wailing.
Adding to the confusion were throngs of Chinese tourists who ran across the square to glimpse the rare act of civil disobedience. Police shouted at bystanders to disperse.
U.S. lawmakers, on a study trip aimed at deciding whether to pass a landmark trade deal granting China the same permanent low-tariff import status as other U.S. trading partners, expressed concern over the arrests.
``For me, it raises an initial red flag,'' said U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York. ``I don't think we can bypass situations where human rights and workers' rights are violated.''
Foreign tourists watched the arrests, gaping in surprise.
Police made an American woman rip the film out of her camera because they suspected her of photographing an arrest.
A tour guide told one group of American tourists not to photograph anyone in uniform. ``China is still a comparatively strict country,'' the guide said.
Plainclothes police tried to separate Falun Gong followers from the tourists, asking people: ``Do you practice Falun Gong?''
Police confiscated film and videotapes and detained at least eight foreign reporters, including an Associated Press photographer and a producer for Associated Press Television News.
Since the April 25, 1999, demonstration, 35,000 followers have been detained, a New York-based spokeswoman for Falun Gong said in a statement. She said 5,000 more were sent without trial to labor camps.
At least 16 followers have died in custody, either from abuse or because of hunger strikes, according to the Hong Kong-based group, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
Falun Gong attracted millions of followers with its blend of traditional beliefs, slow-motion exercises and the ideas of founder Li Hongzhi, a former government grain clerk who now lives in New York. Followers say Falun Gong promotes health and good citizenship.
The government says Falun Gong is an evil cult that threatens public order and Communist Party rule. It also says the movement has caused 1,559 deaths among followers.
The government declared victory anew against the group Tuesday.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said 98 percent of members had left. But he said unnamed foreign ``anti-China forces'' were keeping the sect alive because of ``ulterior motives.'' ``Our struggle will continue,'' Sun said.
The blend of religious conviction and political courage that motivates Chinese Falun Gong followers inspires awe. Consider Mei Yulan, who was among members of the group who came to Beijing yesterday for a demonstration calling for an end to the persecution that began one year ago when the group surprised the government with a peaceful protest by 10,000 people. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Ms. Mei made the journey despite having previously been tortured by police and having seen 11 members of her family arrested as well. By now, harsh treatment of Falun Gong adherents has become routine in China. The Journal also described how officials beat a woman named Chen Zixiu, shocked her with cattle prods and forced her to run barefoot through snow until she died in custody Feb. 21. Authorities have now arrested Ms. Chen's daughter, apparently for confirming these details to the newspaper.
So it was not surprising yesterday when the group's attempt to commemorate the anniversary was quashed. Police dragged dozens of people to jail (no word yet on whether Ms. Mei was among them), where no doubt more will be abused and ordered to renounce their beliefs.
All of this violates the commitments China undertook in signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1998. And China is no more respectful of international law with regard to non-Chinese. Thousands of people from famine-stricken North Korea have made their way to northeast China, where they live at the margins of society, fearing arrest and repatriation, but where they can at least find something to eat. This week, about 100 North Koreans at a Chinese detention camp rioted to resist being returned, according to a Japan-based group that assists North Korean refugees. China's authorities subdued them and sent them home--just as seven other North Koreans recently were repatriated despite warnings by the U.N.
High Commissioner on Refugees that they would face "grave consequences." Execution is likely. China's alleged actions would violate the 1951 international convention on refugees, of which the People's Republic is a signatory. But this is a regime that plays by its own rules.
When considering the ongoing questions of what policies to adopt toward China, and whether Taiwan and eventually the entire Pacific Rim would be worth defending against Chinese aggression, policymakers should keep in mind an absolutely chilling feature story that ran in The Wall Street Journal last week.
To avoid any misimpression of some ideological animus, let's be clear: The story ran not on the Journal's conservative editorial pages, but on its oft-liberal news pages - in this case, at the top of Page One.
No decent human being could read the story and not despise the communist regime that runs China. No reasonable person could read it and not understand why China's expansionist aims should be thwarted.
The story tells of the arrest, imprisonment, torture and death of Chen Zixiu, a 58-year-old Chinese grandmother recently retired from working in an auto-parts factory. The only crime committed by Ms. Chen - a moderately literate, apolitical, ordinary citizen - was to have joined the peaceful, quasi-religious movement known as Falun Gong.
Falun Gong requires daily meditations and exercises, and its members read the idiosyncratic works of movement founder Li Hongzhi, which combine a belief in basic moral practices - such as doing good works and speaking honestly - with some seemingly odd but harmless notions of a kind of afterlife and of the existence of extraterrestrial life. It bears repeating that Falun Gong is an entirely non-violent and apolitical movement. All its practitioners want is to be left to their meditations.
But the Chinese government, angered that Falun Gong adherents refuse to renounce what the government considers to be a cult, have cracked down on its members with a brutality almost beyond belief.
When Ms. Chen refused to give up her membership, she was arrested. Then she was carted off to a jail with unheated rooms. Then she was beaten with plastic truncheons on her calves, a cattle prod on her head and neck, and an electric "stun stick" on her back - and then forced the next morning to run barefoot in the snow.
Unable to run, she collapsed, vomited blood, went into a delirium and then, finally, died.
Her story is like those of thousands of others in a movement that, despite the state's brutality, refuses to go underground (that would require dishonesty) and continues to grow.
China's vicious repression shocks the conscience. It should give serious pause to anybody who has said that China has a right to dominate Taiwan, or to extend its influence throughout Asia.
Opposition to such repression should inform all American diplomacy in the region, and reinforce our commitment to, and our strategic interests in, defending Taiwan from any Chinese invasion.
BEIJING, April 25 - One year after a mass protest sparked a crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement, followers of the group remain locked in a simmering battle of wills with Chinese authorities that shows little sign of ending.
On the government's side are two powerful weapons: the vast, state-run media and the huge Chinese police establishment. Falun Gong seems to have an inexhaustible supply of adherents with an unshakable belief in their cause and a willingness to be arrested for demonstrating for the right to practice.
In the latest confrontation, nearly 100 Falun Gong followers were detained today for holding a defiant demonstration in Tiananmen Square marking the anniversary of the daylong sit-in at a nearby government building that catapulted the little-known movement to prominence.
"Falun Gong is good; it's just good!" a middle-aged woman screamed today as she and another woman were dragged by plainclothes officers into one of several police vans that cruised all morning around the vast square.
"Falun Dafa is the way of truth!" she shouted, using another name for the complex practice of exercise and meditation.
Such scenes have played out almost daily since 10,000 adherents staged the sit-in last April. The government responded to that demonstration by branding the group "an evil cult" and steadily escalated its condemnation until July, when the group was banned.
In the same time period, countless newspaper articles and television shows have vilified Falun Gong's leader and founder, Li Hongzhi, as a charlatan who has duped followers, conspired against the government and, by discouraging followers from seeking medical care, caused the deaths of more than 1,500 people.
Li has lived in New York for several years, but has not appeared in public since July.
Police throughout China have been authorized to deal as harshly as they see fit with those who refuse to renounce Falun Gong. Many adherents have been subjected to severe abuse and a number have died, according to human rights groups.
Falun Gong claims 70 million Chinese practitioners. In addition to the 35,000 arrested since the ban, the group says, 5,000 have been sent to labor camps without trial and at least 15 have died in police custody as a result of abuse and torture.
Many Chinese consider the high-intensity campaign against Falun Gong to be an overreaction to a group with bizarre but harmless beliefs, especially given the government's claim that the group has only 2 million practitioners. But according to one Asian diplomat, Falun Gong's recalcitrance poses an alarming and unfamiliar challenge.
"Things are getting looser all the time in China, and the government accepts that people can more and more do what they want," he said. "But such clear-cut, open defiance must be a very scary thing for them." A government statement last week said the crackdown "has shown no mercy" and has succeeded in persuading 98 percent of practitioners to cut ties with the group. But the statement also acknowledged that protests occur nearly every day and warned that "the struggle against Falun Gong is long-term, complex and serious."
WASHINGTON, April 25 (Reuters) - U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration, which is pushing for a trade pact with China, told Beijing to stop its crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement after scores of peaceful practitioners were arrested at a protest on Tuesday.
State Department spokesman James Rubin said China had violated its commitments in international human rights instruments and that arrests of peaceful protesters were a matter that ``profoundly disturbs'' the United States.
``We call on the Chinese government to cease its crackdown on the Falun Gong, release all those in custody for the peaceful expression of their beliefs and guarantee the rights of citizens to freedom of speech, conscience and association and peaceful assembly,'' Rubin told a news briefing.
The Falun Gong members were detained in Tiananmen Square while marking the anniversary of a mass sit-in that sparked a crackdown against the movement by China's Communist rulers.
Witnesses said it was impossible to say exactly how many were detained but that scores had been hauled away.
The crackdown on the Falun Gong and other rights issues have moved Democrats in Washington to demand a special commission be set up to monitor the situation in China in return for their support for a trade pact.
U.S. officials say the White House has tentatively agreed to back legislation that would set up the commission as part of a plan to shore up congressionalsupport.
Asked if he believed that China understood such arrests hurt its chances of the trade pact winning approval, Rubin said: ``I suppose that China has the ability to understand the conseqeunces of its actions.'' He added: ``I don't know exactly what their calculus was, but whatever their calculus was, we oppose it.''
The deal, which would pave the way for China's entry into the Geneva-based World Trade Organisation, calls on Beijing to open a wide range of markets, from agriculture to telecommunications.
WASHINGTON, April 25 (Kyodo) - The United States on Tuesday criticized China for the mass arrest of Falun Gong followers at Beijing's Tiananmen Square, calling the action ''disturbing.''
The crackdown ''profoundly disturbs us,'' State Department spokesman James Rubin told a news briefing.
Chinese authorities arrested nearly 80 adherents of the banned Falun Gong group who gathered in Tiananmen on Tuesday, a year after members of the meditation movement staged a massive sit-in outside the Chinese leadership compound at Zhongnanhai.
''Such detentions are in direct contravention of internationally recognized standards of human rights that are enshrined in international human rights instruments to which China has acceded,'' Rubin said.
Rubin said the Chinese government should release all those in custody and understand the repercussions that would otherwise follow.
''I suppose that China has the ability to understand the consequences of its actions,'' Rubin said, hinting at possible negative effects on congressional debate on a proposal to grant China the most-favored-nation trading status on a permanent basis.
BEIJING, April 25 (Reuters) - U.S. rejection of a landmark trade agreement with China could jeopardise Beijing's progress in improving human rights, a top Clinton administration official said on Tuesday.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman arrived in Beijing hours after scores of defiant members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement were detained inTiananmen Square for protesting the government crackdown on the group one year ago.
``To weaken commercial ties would slow the pace of change in China on important issues like religious freedom and labour rights,'' Glickman said shortly after arriving in China for a six-day visit.
Glickman is leading a presidential mission aimed at bolstering support for a landmark trade pact that requires Congress to approve ``permanent normal trade relations'' with China.
In exchange, China has promised to slash tariffs and open markets on a range of goods and services once it becomes a member of the 135-nation World Trade Organisation, which governs international trade.
The agreement is strongly opposed by U.S. labour and human rights group who want to keep an annual review of China's trade status.
Glickman had little to say about the detention of Falun Gong members on Tuesday.
``Our nation strongly disagrees with the detention of anybody who is peacefully practicing or expressing their political or spiritual beliefs, and we call on all countries and all nations, including China, to observe these international standards,'' said James Prueher, U.S. ambassador to China, who met Glickman.
The U.S. delegation includes two members of the U.S. House of Representatives -- Norman Dicks, Washington Democrat, and Greg Walden, Oregon Republican -- who intend to support PNTR.
The two other House members on the trip -- Reuben Hinojosa, Texas Democrat, and Gregory Meeks, New York Democrat -- have not decided how they will vote.
The Chinese government's detention of Falun Gong protesters shortly before the U.S. group's arrival ``raises an initial red flag,'' Meeks said. He promised to raise the religious rights issue when the delegation met Chinese leaders on Wednesday.
The team includes Republican North Dakota Governor Ed Schafer, who said he represented the 44 U.S. state governors who support permanently normalising trade with China.
Opponents have criticised the trip as a waste of taxpayers' money that will give the congressmen a one-sided view of the trade pact negotiated by the Clinton administration last year.
TEAM TO REVIEW ENTIRE U.S.-CHINA RELATIONSHIP
Glickman promised the delegation would explore ``the entire U.S.-China relationship,'' including labour and human rights issues, in its meetings with senior Chinese officials.
The team will also urge China to resolve its differences with Taiwan peacefully and will meet religious leaders when it travels later this week to Shanghai, he said.
The United States can only be a positive force for change in China if it remains commercially engaged, Glickman said.
Both Dicks and Walden said the benefits of permanently normalising trade with China were clear.
``This is not a difficult decision for me'' said Dicks, a twelve-term congressman whose state has the headquarters of Boeing Co., the giant U.S.
airplane manufacturer.
``We want to sell our Boeing airplanes here in China. This is a huge potential market, about $120 billion over the next 20 years,'' Dicks said.
``We recognise if they're not buying Boeing planes, they're buying Airbus, our friendly competitor.''
Walden, whose state is home to Nike Co., the tennis shoe giant, said the issue was also an easy one for him. Many of Nike's shoes are manufactured in China, which help to maintain 5,000 well-paid jobs at company headquarters in Oregon, he said.
DECISION A DILEMMA FOR SOME
But Hinojosa and Meeks said they were still struggling with how they would vote when the issue goes to the House floor during the week of May 22. The Senate will vote in early June.
Hinojosa said he was attracted by the prospect of increased sales for farmers in his south Texas district.
``I also have a strong feeling and a very strong commitment to trying to improve human rights,'' he said, noting his concerns about the rights of minorities and women in China.
Meeks said he was faced with a similar dilemma. The agreement may lead to more jobs loading cargo on planes at the JFK International airport in New York City, but the long-term impact could be net U.S. job losses, he said.
HONG KONG, April 25 (Kyodo) - The number of followers in Hong Kong of the Falun Gong group has shrunk by half since China outlawed it and labeled it an ''evil cult'' last year, a Falun Gong spokesman in Hong Kong said Tuesday.
Only about 500 people currently follow the group, which teaches a mixture of Buddhist-oriented meditation and breathing exercises, in Hong Kong, down from its peak membership of nearly 1,000 last July, Kan Hung-cheung said in a telephone interview with Kyodo News.
While Falun Gong is banned in China, it remains legal in Hong Kong, a Chinese special administrative region.
Kan said many members, especially those new to Falun Gong, had quit out of fear.
Meanwhile, at a press conference Tuesday in Hong Kong, 10 followers from Hong Kong, Australia and the United States said they remain committed to spreading the group's teachings.
Earlier in the day, at least 70 believers were taken away by Chinese police in Beijing's Tiananmen Square after unfurling banners supporting their banned spiritual movement and marking the anniversary of a protest by followers in the capital.
China outlawed Falun Gong last July after 10,000 practitioners surrounded the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing to protest against maltreatment of their supporters on April 25 last year.
The Chinese government branded the group an ''evil cult'' last October and said Falun Gong's teachings had caused 1,559 deaths in the country.
A number of key leaders and members of Falun Gong have been arrested and jailed by Chinese authorities.
Reviewing the group's development in Hong Kong, Kan said some members, intimidated by China's ban and campaign against Falun Gong, had left the group.
''A number of new members with shallow understanding (of the group's doctrine) have withdrawn or become too frightened to continue practicing,'' Kan said.
He said Hong Kong practitioners have decided to strengthen their promotion of Falun Gong in the territory by organizing regular public exercises and gatherings.
He also called on the Chinese government to stop its ''unreasonable'' crackdown on Falun Gong believers in China.
''As long as China bans Falun Gong, practitioners will have no way to redress their grievances, and surely some members will try to tell the truth to the world by staging peaceful protests,'' Kan said.
"Falun Gong unbowed by China clampdown one year on"
by Jeremy Page (Reuters, April 25, 2000)
BEIJING, April 25 (Reuters) - Few people outside China had heard of Falun Gong before April 25 last year, when 10,000 elderly followers of the spiritual movement suddenly appeared outside Beijing's heavily-guarded leadership compound.
Inside China, the group was familiar to many as one of several schools of ``qigong'' whose followers would meet in parks to practise meditation and callisthenics.
A year on, however, the group has become Beijing's public enemy number one, a symbol of defiance to the Communist Party, and a focus of China's human rights critics overseas after almost daily protests against government attempts to crush it.
Scores of defiant Falun Gong members were detained in Tiananmen Square on Tuesday for demonstrating to mark the first anniversary of the mass sit-in that sparked the crackdown.
Now many are asking why Beijing is so determined to stamp out Falun Gong, and what makes the group so determined to survive.
BEIJING SAYS GROUP IS EVIL CULT
Beijing says the organisation is an ``evil cult'' that dupes, corrupts and seeks to overthrow the state. It draws parallels with doomsday cults like Japan's Aum Shinri Kyo and the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.
Falun Gong followers and sympathisers say it is a peaceful spiritual movement based on Buddhist and Taoist precepts which provide moral and physical sustenance in China's spiritual void.
It has many traits of traditional Chinese beliefs and practices. But it also bears the hallmarks of a more modern personality cult based on the beliefs of its founder Li Hongzhi, whose writings range from the mystical to the downright bizarre.
Li pledges to cure sickness and reverse a tide of evil sweeping mankind to the brink of destruction using the Falun, which translates as Wheel of the Buddhist Law, planted in practitioners' lower abdomens.
``Falun is an intelligent, spinning body of high energy substance,'' Li, 48, wrote on one of his five books.
Followers acquire a Falun by reading Li's books, watching his videos and listening to his tapes.
Li sees human corruption in everything from homosexuality and rock and roll to children's toys. ``Now the uglier it is the faster it sells. The death's head, the devil, and even the image of faeces are sold as toys,'' he wrote.
Li, who now has his home in New York, is especially derogatory about other religious groups.
Buddhists in Taiwan are ``demons,'' religious masters in India are ``possessed with boas'' and ``qigong'' teachers in China are ``possessed with foxes or yellow weasels, and some with snakes.''
He preaches that modern medicine only treats the symptoms rather than the supernatural causes of disease.
His views on science and technology are even less orthodox.
``Without trains and planes, people would be able to levitate into the air from where they sit, without using an elevator,'' he wrote. ``The flying saucers of extra-terrestrials can travel back and forth at an inconceivable speed and become large or small.''
FILLING THE SPIRITUAL VOID
Li's eclectic blend of the traditional, puritan, and supernatural has tapped into Chinese concern with physical health and a need for spiritual guidance amid wrenching social changes as China moves from Communism to a market economy.
But for China's atheist leaders, the movement has conjured memories of rebellions through Chinese history which sprang from religious movements in times of social upheaval -- such as the bloody Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64.
Analysts say Beijing grew concerned about the group when its membership surpassed the Communist Party's 60 million.
The government says Falun Gong never had more than two million members in China and that more than 98 percent of those have now given up.
Official media began publishing articles critical of the group. The articles triggered protests in several cities, which state media said Li organised himself.
After police detained demonstrators in the eastern city of Tianjin, followers decided to take their protest to Beijing to demand official recognition of their faith.
The peaceful demonstration by 10,000 mostly retirees appeared harmless enough.
But to Chinese leaders, it presented a chilling threat -- an organisation claiming 70-100 million members devoted to a leader overseas and not afraid to challenge the state openly.
The response was swift and harsh.
Beijing banned Falun Gong in July and declared it an ``illegal cult'' in October. Over the last year, Beijing has jailed some of the movement's leaders for up to 18 years and sent thousands of members to labour camps without trial, rights groups say.
Yet Falun Gong appears unbowed, forcing a cabinet spokesman to admit the fight against the movement would be ``long-term, complex, and serious.''
``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,'' state media quoted him as saying.
Beijing's international propaganda war against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement is failing, a diplomatic source said yesterday.
A Western diplomat in Beijing said: "A measure of the domestic effectiveness of the campaign is whether there is an end in sight to the campaign. That is not the case at the moment," he said.
"The campaign has stopped the further growth of Falun Gong but it has led to the formation of a hard core of believers who are proving hard to deal with."
He also said the campaign had failed as a number of Western governments had criticised the crackdown as a human rights violation.
Tiananmen Square bustled with police yesterday as security was tightened ahead of the first anniversary of the April 25 demonstration, when 10,000 Falun Gong members surrounded Beijing's Zhongnanhai leadership compound.
Two women and one man who were allegedly detained after trying to unfurl a Falun Gong banner, a method of protest members have tried almost daily since they were banned last July.
Amid the throngs of tourists who normally crowd the square, another three middle-aged men raised their arms in a meditation pose associated with the group.
Plainclothes police quickly ordered them to put their arms down, and within minutes the three were put in a police van and driven off the square.
Accounts by witnesses of detentions in the vast square have tended to underestimate the daily police haul of mostly elderly devotees from distant provinces who risk arrest and possible beatings to plead for a reversal of the Government's ban.
Police were checking trains arriving at railway stations and motorists entering the capital.
But despite the Government's heavy-handed campaign, including the airing of shocking images such as the gory aftermath of a practitioner's suicide by self-disembowelment, most Chinese do not share the authorities' hostility to the Falun Gong.
"I don't like them. But I don't think they are harmful. I don't know why the Government is so afraid of them," said a taxi driver.
Falun Gong preaches a blend of traditional beliefs, slow-motion exercises and the unconventional thinking of leader Li Hongzhi. Li, a former government grain clerk, now lives in New York.
China has labelled Falun Gong an "evil cult" and blamed it for causing 1,500 deaths by suicide or from refusing medical care.
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.
Falun Gong called for international help yesterday as it saw "no end in sight" to its persecution by the communist authorities.
"In the one year since the gathering, we have come to witness the Chinese Government execute one of the largest, harshest and most arbitrary of persecutions in modern history," Gail Rachlin, a New York-based spokeswoman for Falun Gong, said.
"Chinese leaders turned their country upside down by banning the group," Ms Rachlin said.
In the year since the first mass protest, public securities' maltreatment of Falun Gong supporters had included beatings with electric batons and cattle prods, forced abortions and sanctioned rape and the forced consumption of anti-psychotic drugs, according to the group.
Police had detained 35,000 practitioners, while 15 members had died in police custody, mostly as a result of torture, the group said.
Some Falun Gong followers have been sentenced for up to 18 years in prison while others have been forced into mental hospitals, it said.
The central Government said last week courts had heard 91 Falun Gong-related cases involving 99 people, resulting in prison sentences for 84 of the defendants.
Falun Gong members in the SAR will not bend to Beijing's pressure, and more promotional activities will be organised in the future, a spokesman said yesterday.
Claiming there had been no centralised effort to organise protests outside Beijing's Liaison Office in the SAR today, spokesman Kan Hung-cheung said some individual members might stage protests on their own.
He denied adherents wanted to avoid enraging Beijing on the sensitive date.
"I believe there are many other ways to commemorate the anniversary [of the Zhongnanhai sit-in] apart from protesting outside the Liaison Office."
"We will have activities commemorating the date around the period anyway."
Mr Kan, who a State Council spokesman said last week was one of the tools used by "Western powers" to subvert the central Government, said practitioners were undeterred by Beijing's "unfounded" criticism.
He said Beijing was referring to a practice session in Victoria Park on April 16, days ahead of the voting on a US motion in the United Nations to denounce China's human rights record.
About 200 practitioners took part in the session.
"They said we wanted to lobby for the UN motion, but actually an application to hold the exercise session in Victoria Park had been filed long before we knew the date of the vote."
The SAR Government said in a letter people who ex ercised in parks did not need to seek permission.
The number of Falun Gong practitioners in Hong Kong is said to have dropped from 1,000 to around 600 since the crackdown in July.
1992: Li Hongzhi, 47, a former security staff member in a grain company in Changchun, northeastern Jilin province, founds the Falun Gong group.
April 19, 1999: Physicist He Zuoxiu publishes an article in the port city of Tianjin denouncing Falun Gong as superstitious, sparking off demonstrations.
April 20-24: Demonstrations in Tianjin, some leaders arrested.
April 25: More than 10,000 adherents rounded up at Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, the residence of Chinese top leaders.
May 3: Li Hongzhi calls on Beijing to start dialogue with the movement.
June 6: Police round up busloads of members at a stadium in western Beijing after 100 members stage a protest. .
July 22: Beijing outlaws Falun Gong and brands it a cult. Thousands of followers rounded up throughout the country.
July 27: US State Department calls on Beijing to exercise restraint.
July 29: Beijing issues an arrest warrant for US-based Li Hongzhi, accusing him of seeking to overturn the regime. Interpol refuses to help with the warrant.
October 30: Anti-cult law passed, branding Falun Gong as an "evil cult", sparking a week of protests in Tiananmen Square.
November 12: First Falun Gong "show trials" end with four followers sentenced to between two and 12 years' prison. Hundreds of others sent to "re-education through labour" camps for three years.
December 26: Four senior figures in the group sentenced by a Beijing court to prison terms of seven to 18 years.
February 5, 2000: More than 1,000 followers protest in Tiananmen Square during the Lunar New Year.
February-March: Deaths in custody of 15 members disclosed. Dozens of detained members stage hunger strike.
April 19: Crackdown intensifies, State Council spokesman says a total of 84 Falun Gong supporters have been given jail terms.
When the mainland Government launched its crackdown on the Falun Gong sect, it intended to stop the movement in its tracks.
But a year after the Beijing leadership was shaken by the appearance of 10,000 silent devotees at the Communist Party's headquarters in Zhongnanhai to protest against official persecution, the sect continues to flourish.
Today's protests are smaller, mainly because security forces keep a close watch on rail terminals and bus stations to try to stop members from entering the capital. But the steady stream of protesters turning up at Tiananmen Square expecting to be arrested shows that many adherents cannot be intimidated into abandoning their beliefs.
The Government's panic reaction after the Zhongnanhai demonstration has given greater momentum to the movement's crusade. Falun Gong followers are aggrieved that beliefs they see as healthy, benign and non-political should be labelled an evil cult. They use peaceful demonstrations as the only way to publicise injustice against thousands of fellow members serving prison sentences, and who - according to reports - are as undaunted behind bars as the daily protesters in Tiananmen Square.
There is no escape for the Government from this embarrassing situation. It has vilified the movement so thoroughly that it could not backtrack even if it felt inclined to. Social control remains its driving force. However apolitical Falun Gong followers claim to be, they represent the most formidable challenge to authority since the democracy movement in 1989.
Rioting farmers and disgruntled workers have failed to make as powerful an impact as the silent legions of Falun Gong followers, mainly middle-aged ladies, calmly carrying out physical exercises and talking about spiritual purity. That is because the sect's teachings point up a malaise and address a spiritual void in China that economic reform cannot fill.
However illogical and superstitious Falun Gong doctrines may sound to non-believers, they appeal to the generation born and raised during the Mao era, whose guiding force was once the Communist Party, and who have lived to see the old certainties overturned, with nothing to replace them but materialism.
The sect has offered a substitute that the Government has not been able to supply. It offers a path that does not depend on money, or influence or success. In that, it is not unlike many other religions flourishing in China and elsewhere.
Persecution will not bring it to a halt. Eventually the Government may recognise the best guarantee of social order is individual freedom.
BEIJING --AP-On alert for protests, Chinese police detained followers of the banned Falungong spiritual movement in Tiananmen Square yesterday. Those arrested included 11 women and a child, who were herded and kicked 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.
Police regularly detain about 40 to 50 Falungong practitioners in Tiananmen Square each day.
The authorities have stepped up surveillance ahead of tomorrow's first anniversary of a protest by 10,000 Falungong followers outside Communist Party headquarters in Beijing.
The protest prompted Chinese leaders to ban Falungong three months later and to launch a crackdown in which thousands were detained, with leaders imprisoned for up to 18 years.
At first, the 11 women appeared to be tourists.
But a plainclothes security officer grew suspicious and asked where they were from and if they were practitioners.
"Don't you know how many people have been harmed by Falungong?" he asked.
When the women ignored him, the officer tried coaxing them into admitting they were practitioners by asking: "Could you teach me how to do it?"
Still in silence, the women suddenly stood up, formed a circle and meditated, eyes shut, 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, was also taken away.
BEIJING: 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." The fight against the movement would be "long-term, complex and serious", the spokesman acknowledged.
"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 US-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.
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.
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 US-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 25 anniversary.
China last week quashed debate at the UN Commission on Human Rights on a US-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) - Police detained three Falun Gong followers for protesting in Tiananmen Square today, the eve of the first anniversary of a massive demonstration that prompted the Chinese government to ban the spiritual movement.
Amid the throngs of tourists who normally crowd the square, the three middle-aged men raised their arms in a meditation pose associated with the group. Plainclothes police quickly ordered them to put their arms down, and within minutes the three were put in a police van and driven off the square.
Such protests have become a common sight in Tiananmen Square since the government banned the widely popular group nine months ago. A year ago Tuesday, 10,000 Falun Gong followers surrounded the communist leadership's compound near Tiananmen, silently meditating for a day to protest official harassment.
It was unclear whether followers planned any major protests to mark the anniversary, but in the last few days police have stepped up surveillance of the square and of known Falun Gong members in Beijing.
The April 25 demonstration last year shocked Chinese leaders, who ordered a crackdown on the widely popular group as a public menace and a threat to Communist Party rule.
``In the one year since that gathering, we have come to witness the Chinese government execute one of the largest, harshest and most arbitrary persecutions in modern history,'' Gail Rachlin, a New York-based spokeswoman for Falun Gong, said in a statement. ``Chinese leaders turned their country upside down'' by banning the group.
The statement said 35,000 followers have been detained, with another 5,000 being sent without trial to labor camps. Practitioners have been tortured, held in psychiatric institutions and given anti-psychotic drugs while others have been fired from their jobs or refused permission to attend school, the statement said.
Claiming 70 million followers in China, the statement said ``the social upheaval is hard to fathom. Hardly anyone has gone unaffected.'' In another report about the group's alleged misdeeds, police in eastern China's Weifang city have arrested three principal Falun Gong members for cheating other followers out of $36,000, national state-run newspapers said today.
Tan Weijun, Li Weihua and his wife, Li Fang, had told followers that Tan was even more powerful than Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi, the Guangming Daily and other newspapers said. The reports said the three promised that Tan would protect followers if they gave money.
The three allegedly concocted the scam to pay a $4,230 fine from August for selling Falun Gong literature.
Falun Gong preaches a blend of traditional beliefs, slow-motion exercises and the unconventional thinking of Li Hongzhi, and it is said to promote health and morality. Li, a former government grain clerk, now lives in New York.
BEIJING (AP) - For two years, the young disciple worked in the wilderness of China's far north, winning converts. Then, last year, police descended on the center he set up to spread his master's health and healing practices, rifling through its books and instructional tapes.
Within months, his school and more than 3,000 businesses and teaching and treatment centers belonging to the Zhong Gong group had been closed, its millions of followers dispersed, practitioners said.
The movement ``collapsed, died in complete silence,'' said Bai, the disciple, who did not want his full name used for fear of official reprisals.
Behind the scenes of China's highly publicized war on the Falun Gong spiritual movement, the government is also waging a devastating campaign against Zhong Gong and other health and meditation groups. Like Falun Gong, the communist leadership views them as a threat to its monopoly on power.
Falun Gong exploded into Chinese leaders' consciousness last April 25 when 10,000 followers protested outside Communist Party headquarters in Beijing to seek legal protection from official harassment.
The group's organizational flair, multimillion-member following and adherents' devotion to founder Li Hongzhi sharpened official suspicions of all groups derived from traditional Chinese ``qi gong'' (pronounced chee-gong) - meditation and breathing exercises to promote health.
China's entirely state-run media and the government have trumpeted the crackdown on Falun Gong. Thousands of practitioners have been detained since it was outlawed in July in the campaign against what the government says is an evil cult.
But authorities refuse to talk about the clampdown on other qi gong organizations, and state media have all but ignored it. So far the campaign has affected at least five groups, practitioners, government sources and human rights organizations say.
China's Foreign Ministry, police, Cabinet and Religious Affairs Bureau refused to answer questions about the wider crackdown. With the U.S. Congress set to vote in May on trade with China, officials may be trying to avoid adding to the international criticism generated by the assault on Falun Gong.
According to Amnesty International, the purported founder of Cibei Gong was arrested Sept. 8 and at least five leaders of Guo Gong were detained in November. A Bodhi Gong training center in Beidaihe, a seaside resort where Chinese leaders meet annually, was shut down last year, an official there said. Xiang Gong followers are reportedly being monitored.
Zhong Gong, founded in 1987, was the largest of the groups. It attracted millions of followers.
In an appeal to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the group said authorities have detained nearly 600 followers, including 25 organizers.
One of those, Cheng Yaqin, has been held for six months in a detention center in Baoding, a city 95 miles south of Beijing, her daughter said. The daughter was detained with Cheng, held for three weeks and released. Authorities have refused to say why Cheng is being held, she said.
Zhong Gong's founder, Zhang Hongbao, is thought to be in hiding. His first company, a three-story clinic and teaching center in Beijing, stands empty, its gates padlocked, its sky-blue exterior weathered.
Before it was closed around the time of the government's Oct. 1 celebration of 50 years of Communist Party rule, hundreds of people from all over China visited the center each day for classes and treatment, practitioners said.
Zhong Gong ran clinics, training retreats and businesses throughout China that sold tapes, books, qi gong uniforms, health products and sundries like Tibetan incense and mineral water, according to reports sent by Zhong Gong adherents to a Hong Kong-based rights group, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
By 1990, Zhong Gong had 38 million followers, including many local government officials, said Bai, the disciple who worked as a security guard at group gatherings before moving north to Inner Mongolia in 1997 to set up a center there.
Like Falun Gong followers, Zhong Gong members refer to their founder as ``master'' and themselves as ``disciples.'' They said they use Zhong Gong to open energy channels in their bodies, promoting health and vitality. They also said Zhang's teachings promote moral living.
Bai said that with Zhong Gong exercises, he can get by on two hours sleep a night.
Zhao Liping, a Zhong Gong teacher who moved around China teaching and healing people, said it helped her overcome a history of illness and her husband's death in a car crash. ``Our master gave me a second life,'' she said.
Before the crackdown, practitioners met in parks at dawn to perform breathing and meditation exercises. Bai said the more people who practice together, the greater the energy they create, like putting electric batteries in a row.
``I do miss it,'' he said. ``You can't eradicate qi gong from people's hearts.''
BEIJING (AP) - A year ago, Wang Kai was Falun Gong's man on the inside, a convert and a well-placed official who championed the spiritual movement within China's communist government.
Since Falun Gong shocked Chinese leaders with a mass protest last April 25 and precipitated a relentless crackdown, Wang has fallen from grace. He has been brutally interrogated, demoted from his prestigious job in the state sports commission and harangued to renounce his beliefs.
``But I won't change my ways. If I think something is good, I say it's good,'' said Wang. ``Falun Gong just preaches speaking the truth.''
Through the unbending faith of Wang and thousands of others, Falun Gong has withstood China's broadest political witch-hunt in a decade. It has countered with the most sustained public challenge to communist rule ever, weathering a ban, a media smear campaign, mass arrests and beatings.
Followers persist in practicing, many in private, some openly. They have staged peaceful protests daily in Tiananmen Square, China's political heart, with police detaining 40 to 50 followers a day, said a Communist Party official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
An amalgam of traditional beliefs, New Age thinking and slow-motion meditation exercises believed to promote health and morality, Falun Gong has infiltrated the fabric of Chinese society. While popularly thought to be filled with legions of retirees, the group has attracted university professors, military officers and government officials - the very elite that the Communist Party relies on.
According to Wang, and others in the party and government who asked not to be quoted by name, Falun Gong counts more than 150 top-level bureaucrats among its followers. They include Propaganda Ministry functionaries, aides to the Cabinet, two staff members to the national legislature, even an assistant to Wei Jianxing, No. 6 in the ruling inner circle in charge of enforcing party discipline, the sources said.
``These are all people who can communicate directly with the top,'' said Wang.
For a decade, Wang helped the government monitor the many health and exercise groups that fall under the rubric of ``qi gong'' (pronounced chee-gong). Long an avid practitioner of tai chi, the traditional slow-motion exercises that aid meditation, Wang took up Falun Gong four years ago.
He was smitten by its discipline, its demands for moral living, honesty and spiritual cultivation. Soon, he began urging that the officially atheistic government do more to promote Falun Gong, despite a growing wariness among lower-level officials about the group's soaring popularity.
Then a year ago Tuesday, 10,000 followers surrounded the communist leadership compound and silently meditated to protest official harassment. It was the largest protest in Beijing since the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989.
Some protesters, invited inside to air grievances, said Falun Gong and not communism held the remedy for China's ills.
Incensed and alarmed by the group's organizational skill, President Jiang Zemin ordered a crackdown, although the official ban did not come until July.
Since then, courts have tried 99 key organizers, 84 of whom were sent to prison, state media said last week. A Hong Kong rights group says as many as 5,000 believers were put in labor camps without trial. Tens of thousands of others shuffled through deprogramming sessions.
Chinese leaders are leery of Tuesday's anniversary. Police in Beijing have stepped up surveillance of Tiananmen Square and railroad and bus stations and officials elsewhere are under orders to keep believers out of the capital, the government sources said.
``The Falun Gong evil cult still has the ability to stir up trouble,'' the government's Xinhua News Agency warned last week. Group leaders ``have ceaselessly incited Falun Gong stalwarts to provoke quarrels and spread trouble,'' it said.
Many jailed Falun Gong followers have brought out tales of abuse. Wang Yufeng, detained with 139 other adherents on their way to Beijing from Jiamusi city in the northeast in November, said half her group was sent to a labor camp after they refused to pay 5,000 yuan ($600) and renounce Falun Gong in writing.
Compelled to work 13-hour days, dozens went on a hunger strike last month for three days or more, until guards force-fed them, Wang Yufeng said. Guards used electric prods to beat those who did not obey, she said.
Wang Kai, the disgraced sports official, was spared the worst of abuses, partly because he persuaded police he was never an organizer and partly because of his position. Still he was arrested July 20, two days before the official ban on Falun Gong, and held for more than five weeks.
His interrogators kept him sleepless for 10 days and questioned him for 30 hours straight at one point, he said.
Wang's superiors have since lectured him to recant, and he was removed from his post overseeing qi gong groups and put in charge of a small storeroom holding notebooks and other office supplies.
``I'm still better off than many,'' Wang said. ``We hope that time will show people that we have done nothing bad.''
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. A plainclothes Chinese policeman tries to stop a group of Falun Gong practitioners from protesting in Beijing's Tiananmen Square Sunday. (AP Photo/Greg Baker) 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.
What Is Falun Gong? See "Falun Gong 101", by Massimo Introvigne
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