Friday December 1 8:37 AM ET
HONG KONG (Reuters) - China has sent a Canadian Chinese follower of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement to a labor camp for three year, a Hong Kong human rights group said.
It was the first time any Falun Gong adherent who holds overseas nationality had been sent to a Chinese labor camp, the Information Center for Human Rights & Democracy said on Friday.
The center also said two more practitioners of the movement were known to have died while being detained by Chinese authorities.
Authorities in Jinan city in eastern China's Shandong province sent 60-year-old sculpture professor and Falun Gong practitioner Zhang Kunlun to a labor camp on November 15 without any trial, the center said.
It said Zhang was penalized for staging a hunger strike after his arrest in October.
Zhang, who teaches in Shandong, emigrated to Canada in 1989 and became a Canadian national in 1995 while retaining his Chinese nationality. With his Chinese papers, he returned to China in 1996 to continue his teaching career.
A spokesman for the Jinan police told the center that as Zhang re-entered China using a Chinese passport he could not enjoy the protection available to Canadians.
China has extended its crackdown on Falun Gong to overseas Chinese. On November 23, U.S.-based adherent Teng Chunyan was tried in Beijing. The result has not yet been made public. China is also known to have jailed a Hong Kong practitioner for eight months, and arrested another.
Deaths
While Falun Gong is banned in China, it is legal in Hong Kong, a former British colony which was returned to China in mid-1997 as a highly autonomous administrative region.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, combines meditation and exercise with a doctrine loosely rooted in Buddhist and Taoist teachings.
The center said Chinese Falun Gong adherent Meng Qingshi, 42, died in detention in Shandong's Mucun town on November 20. He was taken to a detention center on September 30 and the township government asked him to pay a fine of $242. But after his family failed to bring the money, Meng was beaten and died in detention, the center said.
Local authorities in Shandong were not immediately available for comment.
Kong Qinghuang, a 33-year-old practitioner from the southwestern province of Yunnan, died in hospital on September 3. Authorities had sent him to hospital after he went on repeated hunger strikes following his arrest on June 13.
The information center said the latest deaths brought to 72 the total number of Falun Gong followers who had died in detention since July last year. But practitioners in Hong Kong last month said the number was "at least 86."
Authorities have acknowledged several deaths in custody, but say most resulted from suicide or illnesses.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20001201/wl/religion_china_dc_1.html
Category: Falun Dafa in the Media
