Houston Chronicle: Falun Gong followers march on

July 14, 2001, 9:00PM

Amy Lee, a soft-spoken woman standing barefoot with her arms stretched toward the sky, doesn't appear to be much of a threat to society.

Yet that's what the Chinese government would evidently have her be. Lee, 33, says she fled the government and her country earlier this year to escape persecution for her belief in the spiritual Falun Gong movement. For two months, Lee says, she was held in detention camps, stripped at times and beaten unconscious.

"They gave me no choice but to run away from home, from everything" said Lee, speaking through an interpreter.

Even as China exults in its selection Friday as host of the 2008 Summer Olympics, the country is being driven by a growing movement condemned by the government that practitioners say improves their lives.

Lee and about two dozen Falun Gong followers marched in Houston on Saturday as part of an effort by the organization to raise awareness of the plight faced by their fellow practitioners in China, where the [party' name omitted] leaders have sought to suppress the movement. A few thousand marchers will rally in Washington later this month.

Few of the members, who meditated in Montrose for about two hours Saturday morning, think the international spotlight on Beijing from the Olympics will change the government's stance.

"The Chinese government has always used violence to maintain control, [...]" said A Yuefeng, a research technician at the Baylor College of Medicine, speaking with an interpreter's help.

[...]

Practitioners say their exercises and philosophies that promote good health and moral living are drawn from [...] Li Hongzhi, the group's U.S.-based founder. They deny causing any deaths and claim nearly 200 followers have been tortured to death in Chinese police custody.

Hongzhi, a former Chinese soldier now in exile in New York, began the movement nine years ago. It has steadily grown, claiming as many as 60 million to 100 million followers in China.

The organization has a modest presence in Houston, with perhaps a few hundred followers.

In April, 1999, followers assembled nearly 10,000 protesters outside a government leadership compound in Beijing to protest treatment in other cities. The government was struck by the swift organization of the protest, which ended peacefully. It banned Falun Gong three months later.

[...]

Yuefeng, who left China before the crackdown in 1999, said he is worried because his 30-year-old sister was held at the labor camp. He does not know whether she is alive.

A spokesman for the U.S. State Department called the reports of torture "chilling," and called on China to allow visits by impartial observers.

One of the followers in Houston on Saturday, Danielle Wang, said she has lost track of her father, an organizer in the movement.

He was among the first protesters arrested in 1999. The only time she has seen him since was during a televised court hearing when Zhiwen Wang was sentenced to 16 years in prison, she said.

"I truly believe the government is evil," said Wang, 21, a sophomore engineering major at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jason Wang, who is not related, said a bulletin board flier advertising meditation first attracted him to Falun Gong while a graduate student at the University of Houston in 1997.

"People may have heard of us, and may even know of some persecution," he said. "But they don't know the true extent of the cruelness of the labor camps."

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/968136