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.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS