Washington Post Foreign Service

Wednesday, September 27, 2000

BEIJING, Sept. 27, 2000; A Chinese intelligence officer who refused to renounce his belief in the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement died last week after he was confined to a cell at a labor camp and denied medical treatment for two months, a Hong Kong-based human rights group said today.

Tao Hongsheng, 44, had been serving a three-year term of "thought reform through labor" for unfurling a banner in Tiananmen Square in December protesting the government's continuing crackdown on what it considers a dangerous cult. He died Sept. 20 after suffering extreme diarrhea and edema for weeks, the rights group said.

"He couldn't get out of bed for 20 days . . . but the officials wouldn't do anything," his wife, Yu Fengyun, said in a telephone interview from their home in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province about 175 miles southwest of Beijing.

Tao's treatment fits the government's pattern of meting out harsh punishments to practitioners of Falun Gong, the Buddhist-like spiritual group that the state has declared an unprecedented threat to Communist rule. Yet more than 13 months into the country's largest campaign of repression since the 1989 crackdown on student-led protests in Tiananmen Square, China has been unable to crush Falun Gong.

The Party has been especially troubled by its penetration into the government's military and security apparatus, key pillars of the regime's stability. Tao was one of many security and military officials who participated in Falun Gong; others include the chief of China's central military hospital, a high-ranking public security official, and numerous senior officers in the People's Liberation Army.

Tao's wife said her husband served 18 years in China's air force and once ranked as a deputy battalion commander at a base outside Shijiazhuang, a garrison area where Falun Gong is believed to have strong support among junior officers and soldiers. In 1994, Yu said, he transferred to the Hebei State Security Bureau, which reports directly to the Ministry of State Security, China's main intelligence agency.

Yu said she was unsure of her husband's duties, though she believed he handled the cases of residents who have been abroad or want to leave the country.

"He loved his country," she said. "He wasn't against the government. He just wanted tell the leaders that Falun Gong is not a cult, that it's good."

At least 32 Falun Gong members are believed to have died in police custody, and an estimated 3,000 have been sent to labor camps. The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy today also reported the Sept. 10 death in Hangzhou Province of a practitioner who had been forced into a psychiatric institution.

But Falun Gong adherents, organizing beyond the grasp of state security through e-mail and phone, continue to protest in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere. And many Chinese who once supported the government's ban now express exasperation at the brutality of the crackdown.

At least 10 million people are believed to have practiced Falun Gong's breathing and spiritual exercises in China. The group has attracted a broad cross section of followers, from urban workers on the margins of society drawn to its promise of health and well-being to old Party bureaucrats alienated by China's fast-changing society.

Yu said Tao, the father of two daughters, joined Falun Gong in 1996 because of health problems. When his condition improved, she said, he became a believer.

(c) 2000 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27729-2000Sep27.html