Sun, Apr 26, 2009 page5

• China's decade-long ban on Falun Gong holds firm

  CHINESE GULAG International rights groups, the UN and Western governments have criticized China for putting practitioners in labor camps for re-education

  • AP WITH STAFF WRITER
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  Now entering its second decade, China’s relentless drive to obliterate the Falun Gong spiritual movement has left a human toll ranging from the deaths of followers in custody to the self-exile of others and the beatings of their lawyers.

  Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of a silent protest by an estimated 10,000 practitioners around the Communist Party leadership compound in Beijing, alerting the government to the group’s strength and wide appeal.

  The April 25, 1999, demonstration was intended to show how Falun Gong believers had learned compassion, forbearance and tolerance, practitioner Bu Dongwei said in a telephone interview from the US, where he fled six months ago.

  But the size and discipline of those who gathered unsettled the communist leadership, ever wary of independent groups that could threaten its authority.

  Two months later, the group was labeled an “evil cult” and banned, leaders arrested and a campaign launched to force millions of believers to renounce their faith. Anyone practicing Falun Gong or possessing materials about it could be arrested.

  Falun Gong attracted millions of followers in the 1990s with its program of traditional Chinese calisthenics and philosophy drawn from Buddhism, Taoism and the teachings of founder Li Hongzhi (李洪志), a former government grain clerk now living in the US.

  Falun Gong practitioners say they have no political agenda.

  Some followers say the crackdown has cost the lives of thousands of practitioners, while the Chinese government says only that some followers have died in detention because of hunger strikes or refusing medical help. It denies any have been intentionally killed.

  International human rights groups, the UN and Western governments have criticized China for putting practitioners in laogai. The re-education through labor system allows authorities to imprison suspects without trial.

  US-based Falun Gong practitioner Levi Browde said that since 1999, Falun Gong followers had gathered information about more than 87,000 cases of torture. Estimates of the number of Falun Gong followers that have been detained range from between 200,000 and 1 million people, he said.

  And the crackdown remains as vicious as ever, he said.

  “The brutality continues and the systematic nature is the same and may have escalated a bit,” Browde said.

  At a highway off-ramp on the outskirts of Beijing, Yu Qun, a non-practitioner, reluctantly met a reporter to show pictures and tell the story of her younger brother, Yu Zhou, a folk musician and practitioner who died last year in police custody.

  Tall and musically gifted, Yu Zhou studied French at the elite Peking University and later lived a Bohemian existence in China’s capital with his wife, an artist and poet.

  “He had a gentle personality and was always thinking of other people,” she said.

  Yu, 41, and his wife were stopped, allegedly for speeding, as they drove home from a concert. Police detained the couple after finding CDs and printed material about Falun Gong in their car.

  Ten days later, Yu Qun was called to the detention center’s hospital. Her brother had died, but authorities were unclear about the cause, saying first it was an illness and then later dehydration as a result of a hunger strike. More than a year later, the case remains unresolved. The family’s demands for an autopsy and an investigation have not been met.
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