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Falun Gong head would ‘damage cross-strait ties’

National Security Bureau (NSB) Director Tsai Der-sheng (蔡得勝) said yesterday that now is not an appropriate time for Li Hongzhi (李洪志), the founder of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, to visit Taiwan. Tsai cited national interest and security considerations while saying the government would not grant Li a visa if he were to apply for one.

A visit from Li would “damage cross-strait ties,” Tsai said in a Legislative Yuan committee meeting.

Falun Gong is banned in China. Beijing branded the spiritual group as an evil cult in 1999 and has since carried out a campaign to detain, re-educate and jail Falun Gong members. China has been accused of torturing, murdering and harvesting the organs of Falun Gong practitioners.

Li was born in Jilin Province and now lives in New York.

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) queried the NSC director on the matter during the legislative National Defense Committee meeting after a local newspaper reported last week that the DPP planned to invite Li to visit Taiwan. The party previously invited the Dalai Lama, who visited the island in late August to console Typhoon Morakot victims.

The DPP dismissed the report.

Asked whether the government was treating Falun Gong as an evil cult, director Tsai said it wasn’t.

Tsai Der-sheng also told legislators yesterday that during the 15 months since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office, phone monitoring had decreased and that he would step down if the government’s wiretapping were proven illegal.

The director said that wiretapping for intelligence reasons had dropped 65.46 percent, while wiretapping in criminal investigations had decreased 56.99 percent.

Many legislators expressed skepticism, with some saying their phone calls had been monitored by the authorities.

Tsai Der-sheng’s comments followed a newspaper report last month that quoted an anonymous source at the monitoring unit of an intelligence agency as saying that wiretapping conducted by intelligence agencies had increased over the past year. Ma promised during his election campaign that there would be no more illegal wiretapping if he was elected, and reiterated his determination to end the practice of illegal eavesdropping during his inaugural speech.

Meanwhile, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) yesterday asked the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau to probe former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) comments about being an “agent” for the US government to determine whether Chen could be charged with treason.

Wu was referring to a comment by Roger Lin (林志昇), a member of the Taiwan Civil Rights Litigation Organization. Lin said Chen had declared himself an “agent” of the US government during his eight-year presidency and said the Republic of China government was in exile because the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty left Taiwan under the jurisdiction of the US military government. At the committee meeting, Investigation Bureau Director-胃eneral Wu Ying (吳瑛) agreed to form a task force to probe the “agent” claim for any violations of the law.
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