San Jose Mercury News: An ocean away, a brother's cry for tolerance

Tue, Oct. 29, 2002

Sitting in a breezy Millbrae park under the flight path of San Francisco-bound planes, engineer Hu Zhihua explained why he has taken a week off from work, dogging the trail of Chinese president Jiang Zemin on his farewell U.S. visit.

With about 100 other yellow-clad practitioners of Falun Gong, he held up the now-familiar banners in Chinese and English in the Bayfront Park, an obscure but pleasant greenbelt by the Westin hotel.

Would the president of China see it from the plane as he left North America after a final stop in San Francisco? Who knows, Hu shrugged, but it's the least he can do.

After all, his brothers, Zhiqiang and Zhiming are in prison -- and there are others just like them.

The 33-year-old San Jose circuit designer says he has flown to Chicago to Houston to Cabo San Lucas this past week, not to make political statements or push religious beliefs, though Jiang might see it that way.

It's for the distant hope of releasing his two younger brothers.

''Disturbing the social order,'' is what the Chinese police tell you when they take you away for practicing Falun Gong. ''Revealing state secrets'' is another one, though not in the Hu brothers' cases.

Falun Gong is described by its practitioners as an exercise regime with spiritual aspects. It has roots in qigong, an ancient exercise for healing and harnessing energy. Go to parks from San Jose to Fremont to San Mateo and you can see people practicing it. [...]

Reports have surfaced about brutal treatment and deaths of Falun Gong practitioners. [...]

Hitting home

''I didn't realize the seriousness of this until my brothers were detained,'' said Hu, who first came to the United States to get his doctorate in 1997. When the crackdown occurred in 1999, Hu was working at Micrel Semiconductor pursuing the Silicon Valley dream.

Both his brothers had respectable middle-level officer ranks in the Chinese Air Force, but were forced to quit after Falun Gong was banned, he said. First Zhiming was arrested in late September 2000 in Shanghai, where he had gone to search for work as an electrical engineer. His parents had no idea where he was until they received a notice from the police that Zhiming been sentenced to four years' hard labor for ''disturbing the social order.''

Then Zhiqiang was arrested in Liaoning province in 2001. He's now serving a three-year term. Zhiqiang's wife filed for divorce, a development that saddened Zhihua and his family.

Since then, Hu Zhihua has filed a case for Amnesty International to research and written to Reps. Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren about his brothers.

When he found out about Jiang's tour -- which culminated this weekend at the Asian-Pacific Economic summit in Baja California -- Hu said he had to be there.

For family's sake

From Houston, he and his wife even navigated the four-hour drive to Crawford, the tiny town where President George Bush was hosting the outgoing president at his ranch. Police had designated intersections and parks for demonstrators in the drizzly weather. In Cabo San Lucas, demonstrators spent hours on hot dusty desert roads waiting for Jiang.

The cult label and crackdown has had its impact even in my own family. A distant cousin in China had divorced, my father got word some months ago. ''She was involved in that Falun Gong stuff,'' he said with that tone he uses when he thinks there's trouble.

It rings like the bad old days of the Cultural Revolution, when neighbor turned in neighbor, to disassociate oneself from trouble.

You know it's bad when family abandons you. Zhihua, even an ocean away from home, won't let that happen to his brothers.

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/4393841.htm