November 15, 2004

Some days, looking past the new gleaming apartment blocks and ritzy shopping malls, China looks like a mountain of human misery.

Prominent on the misery mountain are city intellectuals and officials who want the system to change. At best they are disillusioned, at worst they are locked up.

There are the tens of millions of migrant workers who flood to the cities in search of work to be either underpaid or not paid at all. There are the child beggars and petitioners who travel to Beijing from all over the country, seeking to have their complaints heard by the central complaints office but regularly, brutally, rounded up by the police and sent home.

At the bottom of the misery mountain are the rural peasantry: powerless, isolated and at the mercy of mendacious local party operatives.

And then there is the Falun Gong, the spiritual movement whose [practitioners] have been the subject of a vicious persecution campaign since it was [...] outlawed by [Jiang's faction of] the Chinese government in 1999.

A woman from Shandong province named Wang Lixuan and her eight-month-old son, Meng Hao, were detained on October 22, 2000 while travelling to Beijing, where Wang Lixuan was planning to petition on behalf of Falun Gong, the advocacy group, Human Rights in China, reported.

The mother and baby both died at the Tuanhe Forced Labor Dispatch Division in Beijing less than three weeks later on November 7, 2000. The coroner's examination determined that Wang Lixuan's neck and fingers were broken, her skull was fractured and she had a needle stuck in her lower back. Her baby, Meng Hao, was found to have deep bruises on his ankles and head and blood in his nose.

It is believed that little Meng Hao had been hung upside down by his ankles.

Ming Ouyang, Falun Gong practitioner and brother of Australian citizen Yu Ouyang from Melbourne, was arrested in China in early 2001 and sentenced to forced labour for a year. He was rearrested in May 2002, suffering from tuberculosis as a result of torture, according to the Falun Dafa Association's senate inquiry submission.

In January 2003, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade sent its Chinese counterpart a list of cases of concern including that of Ming. During the annual human rights dialogue in July that year the Australian delegation was told that the Chinese side could not identify the people on the list including Ming. The following month Ming was tortured to death.