Monitoring News of the Persecution of Falun Gong

FALUN DAFA INFORMATION CENTER- Contacts: Gail Rachlin 212-501-8080, Adam Montanaro 917-405-4507 or Feng Yuan 917-912-3301. Email: faluninfoctr@nycmail.com, Website: http://www.faluninfo.net/

  • FALUN GONG FOUNDER MAKES SURPRISE APPEARANCE
  • ONE HUNDRED FALUN GONG PRACTITIONERS BANNED FROM HONG KONG
  • CHINESE-AMERICAN WOMAN SENTENCED TO THREE YEARS IN LABOR CAMP
  • MOTHER OF PRACTITIONER DEAD IN CUSTODY AFTER HER SON DIES

FALUN GONG FOUNDER MAKES SURPRISE APPEARANCE

OTTAWA, Canada, May 19 (CNN) ... [The] founder of the Falun Gong movement made a surprise visit to a Canadian festival where he addressed North American practitioners of the meditation movement. Li Hongzhi arrived unannounced Saturday afternoon for the festival in the Canadian capital of Ottawa put on by Falun Dafa ... and delivered a 20-minute speech in Mandarin, organizers said. Li, who moved from China to the United States, has made only a few public appearances since Beijing banned the movement in July 1999 ... Organizers said nearly 1,000 people attended the week-long festival, which included a demonstration of meditative exercises on the lawn in front of Canada's Parliament buildings. In the speech, Li focused on his spiritual teachings, Wollensak said, but also said that Falun Gong members were facing "vicious persecution."

HONG KONG DELIBERATES UNDER PRESSURE FROM BEIJING

The Asian Wall Street Journal commented: "Last week's Fortune Global Forum was a test of Hong Kong's autonomy, and the Special Administrative Region failed. When Chinese President Jiang Zemin came to town, the administration of Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa tried to protect him from embarrassment instead of defending the right of peaceful demonstrators to express their views.... A troubling question is whether this slippery slope will lead to the anti-sedition law. The precedent is China's 1997 Criminal Code in which crimes 'endangering state security' were so broadly defined as to make enforcement inherently arbitrary. There's no assurance that under Beijing's thumb Hong Kong's legal officials will produce anything different. No wonder the territory's Roman Catholic diocese, warning how the concept of state security in the mainland is used to justify violations of basic rights, including peaceful acts of freedom of statement and association, has vigorously defended the Falun Gong. If Hong Kong insists on becoming more like China in the worst ways, then the U.S., Britain and other nations should of course take note."

The government of Hong Kong is in a difficult position with business interests on the one hand looking for a free and stable investment climate and the dictatorship in Beijing noticeably unclear on the concept of civil liberties. In a sense, Falun Dafa brings up a moral issue for the people of Hong Kong, as it has become a touchstone for all basic freedoms in the territory. If an anti-sedition law is enacted in the territory in order to crack down on Falun Gong practitioners, then no resident of Hong Kong will be safe to hold an opinion, let alone a faith. It is up to the people of Hong Kong to take a stand now, or their fifty years will be up a lot sooner than they expected.

CHINA REJECTS APPEAL OF US WOMAN CONVICTED OF GATHERING 'STATE SECRETS'

BEIJING, May 13 (AFP) - China has rejected the appeal of a Chinese- American Falungong member who was convicted of spying for trying to expose the government's incarceration of Falungong members in mental hospitals, a rights group said Sunday. A Beijing appeals court upheld a lower court's sentence and ordered Teng Chunyan, who went by the pseudonym of Hanna Li, to spend three years in prison on a charge of gathering intelligence, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said... The 38-year-old acupuncturist from New York was arrested in May last year after Chinese authorities discovered she had arranged to have photos taken of members of the banned spiritual group detained at a mental hospital and gave the photos to foreign media agencies.... Teng immigrated to the US several years ago but had not become a US citizen, which made it difficult for the US government to demand her release. She was sentenced in December following a one-day secret trial on charges of "prying into state intelligence for overseas organisations" at the Beijing Intermediate People's Court... The government has never defined what constitutes state intelligence, giving it wide-ranging authority to arrest citizens as well as foreign visitors who obtain information on a large spectrum of topics.

DAUGHTER OF WOMAN FEATURED IN PULITZER-WINNING ARTICLE SENT TO LABOR CAMP

WALL STREET JOURNAL, May 10 BEIJING -- A woman who unsuccessfully battled China's bureaucracy to make police admit they tortured her mother to death has been sent without trial to three years in a labor camp, in another sign of the government's intensifying efforts to suppress the Falun Gong spiritual movement... Police in the eastern city of Weifang ordered Zhang Xueling's punishment on April 24, sending her to the Wang Village labor camp in the nearby city of Zibo, according to a Falun Gong spokeswoman in New York and the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.... ...her fate fits the pattern of an increasingly vigorous government campaign to wipe out the group by coercing followers to renounce their beliefs and jailing those who won't. Ms. Zhang's mother, Chen Zixiu, was an ardent Falun Gong follower who was detained twice for trying to protest the ban on the group that the government imposed in July 1999. During her second detention, in February of last year, fellow inmates and family members said police beat the 58-year-old woman to death as they tried to force her to recant... Initially supportive of the ban, Ms. Zhang grew doubtful about the government's crackdown in its first few months. After her mother's death, she repeatedly -- and unsuccessfully -- petitioned the police and government to issue a death certificate. Along the way, Ms. Zhang drew support from Falun Gong followers and became a practitioner herself. Ms. Chen's death and her daughter's quest for justice were chronicled by The Asian Wall Street Journal in a series of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in the U.S. last month.

A MOTHER'S DAY TRIBUTE

[Wuhan, Hubei Province] Li Yingxiu Dies Shortly After Her Son is Killed in Police Custody Peng Min was a practitioner who was paralyzed under police detention and later passed away. Shortly after he died, his mother also died tragically in the No. 7 Hospital. Her husband Peng, detained in the Hewan Labor Camp, was allowed to go in handcuffs to the hospital to view her remains. Upon seeing the bloodstains on her head, Peng, grief-stricken, asked the police and medical personnel as to the cause of Li Yingxiu's death. The doctor said her death was caused by a brain hemorrhage and that the bloodstains were left due to the brain being punctured during the autopsy. Peng didn't believe their explanation, and after much questioning, one policeman inadvertently admitted that Li Yingxiu had died because she had "talked too much" after the death of her son. After Peng Min's death, his mother and his brother, Peng Liang, were secretly sent to the Hongxia "Reform" Class in the Qingling area of Wuchang City to be "re-educated." I personally talked to them less than a month ago and did not notice any unusual symptoms that could have caused the mother's death. How, within one month's time, can a healthy life end up as a corpse lying in the morgue, with bloodstains and countless scars showing all over her body? We have learned that Peng Min's brother, Peng Liang, is also in serious condition. He is still under detention and has been tortured so severely that his body is covered with running sores and wounds. - Testimony from a fellow practitioner in Wuhan

[Changchun, Jilin Province] Practitioner Wang Juncheng Disemboweled On April 3, it was reported that practitioner Wang Juncheng suffered from severe torture in the Public Security Bureau of the city of Changchun. He was beaten so severely that his intestines came out of his body. According to sources inside the Public Security Bureau, he had a hole in his abdomen as the result of the beating, and his internal organs were unable to be contained.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT THE FALUN DAFA INFORMATION CENTER- Contacts: Gail Rachlin 212-501-8080, Adam Montanaro 917-405-4507 or Feng Yuan 917-912-3301. Email: faluninfoctr@nycmail.com, Website: http://www.faluninfo.net/

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Category: Accounts of Persecution