The Epoch Times

Mar 31, 2004

China failed to manage yet another crowd of protestors recently, as police rounded up thousands of people who journeyed to Beijing to file petitions to the central government. Petitioning the central government is the last resort for Chinese citizens who have gotten nowhere trying to resolve situations with local authorities.

The Chinese Government's reaction was to herd the petitioners like animals into Shijingshan Gymnasium in the city's outskirts. The Gymnasium can hold up to 3,000 people, although observers said that more were detained.

China has obviously not learnt how to deal with large groups of protestors who follow the laws of China by appealing to the Central Government. One cannot help but remember the public demonstration of the 10,000 peaceful Falun Gong practitioners who went to Beijing in April 1999 to voice their grievances to the Chinese leadership. In this particular instance, the Falun Gong protestors were able to rationally and calmly explain their practice to the Chinese leaders and to tell them about the brutal harassment and crackdown that was occurring in Tianjin and other places in China. These 10,000 demonstrators came and went peacefully and quietly and had a chance to have their voices heard. The demonstration was later exploited by a few officials with ulterior motives who began to interfere and spread all kinds of rumors calculated to mislead the Chinese government.

Following the peaceful protest, the then-leader of the Communist party, Jiang Zemin, (now in command of the military) instigated a campaign of persecution against the Falun Gong, completely denying them any form of human rights in an escalating catalogue of violence, torture, unlawful imprisonment and murder. It is a human rights violation that is still being exploited continuously and quietly on a massive scale behind closed doors in China. Jiang has become the focus of numerous lawsuits in the West for genocide and crimes against humanity.

The irony of the protest by the recent petitioners is that the National People's Congress (NPC), China's parliament, was preparing to add an amendment about respecting human rights to the state constitution. It is well known that the Chinese parliament has almost no actual powers and serves mainly to pay lip service to Communist Party policies- policies that also pay lip service to human rights in China.

Why does China need to enclose people who go to protest according to Chinese law by detaining them in labor camps, psychiatric hospitals, and "re-education" centers, as is the case with Falun Gong, or in gymnasiums as with the recent petitioners? Is this a practice run for crowd control during the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing? Or will the Chinese Government want us to see its carefully constructed fa ade churned out on numerous television programs broadcast in the West by unsuspecting TV companies?

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