Asia Wall Street Journal: Falun Dafa Members Sue Chinese Leaders

10/8/00 16:31 (New York)

HONG KONG -- Two Falun Dafa members have filed suit with China's supreme court, alleging several senior Communist Party leaders are personally responsible for the 15-month crackdown against the spiritual group.

The suit highlights a growing belief among Falun Dafa adherents that the government's ban is directly attributable to a handful of Chinese leaders centered around President Jiang Zemin, the head of the Communist Party.

Although the suit stands little chance of being heard -- indeed, the men who filed the suit are said to be in jail -- it reflects a growing personalization of the conflict, which pits regular protesters in downtown Beijing against the party's formidable security apparatus.

Since late September, for example, Falun Dafa's main overseas Web site (http://clearwisdom.net) has started carrying articles blaming Mr. Jiang for the crackdown and chronicling what it described as a well-laid plan to stigmatize and ultimately ban the group. The piece was widely disseminated in China, helping to galvanize protests last week in Beijing that resulted in more than 1,000 Falun Dafa practitioners' being arrested.

The suit was filed in late August but a copy of it was obtained only in the past few days. Friends of the jailed litigants say they smuggled a copy out of China after police pursued them for more than a month through several cities.

They arrived in Hong Kong and then departed for another country.

The suit says Mr. Jiang and two of his top lieutenants, Zeng Qinghong and Luo Gan, pushed for the ban during the spring and summer of 1999 because they had been humiliated by a protest in downtown Beijing that April. More than 10,000 Falun Dafa adherents peacefully surrounded the leadership compound, called Zhongnanhai, demanding an end to what they said was slanted reporting of their organization in the government-controlled media. Mr. Zeng controls senior leadership appointments and Mr. Luo overseas security. Both are considered rising stars in the leadership and top candidates to replace Mr. Jiang upon his expected retirement in two years.

Government officials said they hadn't seen the suit and declined to comment. The 22-page document points to specific meetings that the three leaders attended where they insisted that the police be especially severe - thousands have been arrested and numerous killed during the 15-month crackdown. Although Mr. Jiang is sometimes seen as a moderate among China's leaders, the banned spiritual group says the 74-year-old leader has taken a personal interest in stamping out the group. "He (Jiang) was very dissatisfied with how the Zhongnanhai incident was handled and felt his legacy was threatened," the suit says in its introduction.

The suit also rebuts government charges used to justify the crackdown. For example, it says that nowhere in the works of Falun Dafa founder Li Hongzhi are members told to refrain from modern medicine. The government says 1,500 of its members died over the past few years when they refused medical care, preferring instead to carry out the group's distinctive slow-motion calisthenics, called Falun Gong.

The suit was filed by Wang Jie, 37, an editor with the Survey and Mapping Publishing House, and Hong Kong resident Zhu Keming, 43, an artist and businessman. The two are being held on the outskirts of Beijing in the Fangshan Public Security Bureau Detention Center, according to people who have been held in the detention center and have seen them there.