7.1 Falun Gong Practitioners Have Been Punished for Revealing Suffering and for Asking the UN for Help

Case 1

Falun Gong practitioners were arrested because they sent the news to foreign media about the inhumane tortures of themselves and other practitioners by the policemen in China.

Victims: Liang Qing, Yi Xingqin and Yang Xiujuan

Location of incident: Dalian City, Liaoning Province

Description: On October 24,1999, Liang Qing was arrested at home because she was suspected of sending the reports and photos about the inhumane police torture of Zhang Chunqing and other practitioners to foreign media. Her computer and other equipment were also confiscated. Later, Liang Qing was sentenced to 3 years of forced labor.

Meaning while, Yi Xingqin and Yang Xiujuan from Dalian City were detained in a drug-rehabilitation center because their experiences of mistreatment were exposed on the Internet (A photo which shows scars on Yi Xingqin’s wrist resulting from long-time handcuffing, had been posted on overseas Falun Gong web sites.). Their families were not allowed to visit them.

Case 2

Practitioners are suffering further persecutions for exposing police tortures they suffered earlier

Victims: Zhang Chunqing and Zhu Hang Location of incident: Dalian City, Liaoning Province

Description:

According to news sent from China (December 27, 1999), Zhang Chunqing and Zhu Hang are suffering further persecutions for exposing police tortures they suffered eariler. Zhang Chunqing has been sent to the Mashanjia labor camp for three years of forced labor. Her family only received a verbal notice on her detention without detailed information.

Zhu Hang, an associate professor in Dalian Polytechnic University, has been sent to a psychiatric hospital and forced to accept treatments for mental patients.

Case 3

Professors sentenced to jail and three graduate students expelled from school due to being suspected of drafting a letter of appeal to the General Secretary of UN, Mr. Annan

Victims: Hong Jirong, Luo Mingpu, Liu Bin, Chen Minyong

Location of incident: Chengdu City, Sichuan Province

Description:

News from China (February 3, 2000), Hong Jirong, a professor in Sichuan University, was sentenced to three years of forced labor because of his suspected involvement in drafting and signing “an appeal letter to United Nations General Secretary Mr. Annan from Practitioners in Sichuan Province”. Two graduate students from Sichuan University, Luo Mingpu and Liu Bin, and a graduate student from Sichuan Industrial College have also been expelled from their schools because they were also suspected to have taken part in drafting the letter and in collecting signatures.

News from China (February 8, 2000), the three students mentioned above, Luo Mingpu, Liu Bin, Chen Minyong, were transferred to Linxia street Jail of Chengdu City, waiting for severe sentence. They were held together with murders, drug dealers and other criminals.

Case 4

Falun Gong practitioner gets four-year sentence for so called “leaking state secrets”

Victim: Xu Xinmu

Location of incident: Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province

Description:

Xu Xinmu, a Falun Gong Practitioner, male, a manager in the human resources department of Hebei province’s Bureau of Affairs and Administration, Shijiazhuang City, was sentenced Monday (January 4, 2000) after a secret trial that convened on Dec. 28, 1999, the Hong Kong-based Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China reported.

 Xu worked for the provincial government in Shijiazhuang in northern Hebei, the province adjacent to Beijing. His family was not allowed to attend his trial and were told of the verdict and sentence by lawyers, the Information Center said. It said Xu had appealed.

Xu had access to secret government documents due to his position as a manager in the human resources department of Hebei province’s Bureau of Affairs and Administration. He learned of government plans to outlaw Falun Gong in mid-June and alerted practitioners in Shijiazhuang. In reaction, 13,742 Falun Gong practitioners wrote an open letter to President Jiang Zemin to appeal.

Xu, his wife and daughter, all Falun Gong practitioners, were arrested on July 20, 1999. Xu’s wife and daughter were released eight days later.

7.2

Various Media Reports and Stories are Fabricated to Deceive the Public in China and Around the world, Defaming Falun Gong and Justifying the Crackdown

Case 1

TV stations slander and attack Falun Gong without any restraint

In July 1999, Chinese Central TV (CCTV) played a piece of video showing Mr. Li Hongzhi giving lecture in USA in March 1998, in which the audio sound of a word “NOT” was erased deliberately so that the meaning is completely opposite. With such high-tech fabrication, the Chinese authority accuses Mr. Li Hongzhi of preaching a millennium teaching of “the end of the world”.

CCTV also aired a program on August 12, 1999, “The Inside Story of April 25”, in which two arrested Falun Gong key contact persons in Beijing, Li Chang and Ji LieWu, were interrogated. Ji’s testimony had been apparently edited, with video frames drop and unsynchronized mouth movements, in particular when Mr. Li Hongzhi’s name was mentioned in the video. Technical analysis done by overseas professionals concluded that Ji’s original words “Chang”, had been obviously falsified into “I made a call to Li Hong-Zhi” to incriminate Mr. Li Hongzhi.

Case 2

People’s Daily, along with the newspapers in other provinces, has run all kinds of articles to attack Falun Gong

Since July 22, 1999, a specialized column in People’s Daily, called “Expose and Criticize Falun Gong” has been built up. The articles and news of defaming Falun Gong appear everywhere, in the front page, in “Important News”, in “Editorial Commentary”, or in this kind of specialized column. There are too many to enumerate. Only a few titles of those articles are listed below:

“News and Media in Capital Held Forum to Enhance the Propaganda Campaign Against Falun Dafa” (People’s Daily, 07/25/99);

“Sports personnel should stand in the frontier of opposing Falun Gong” (People’s Daily 08/07/99);

“Military and armed security forces stand firmly by the central government to fight against Falun Gong to the end” (People’s Daily, 10/30/99);

“Do Deep-Going and Painstaking Education and Transformation”(People’s Daily, 11/11/99)

“Mobilize All Forces, Adopt Various Forms, XianYang Is Doing a Good Job of Transforming Falun Gong Practitioners (Expose and Criticize Falun Gong Further)” (People’s Daily, 01/25/00)

Case 3

The practitioners were kept silent and alienated while the false evidence about them were used to attack Falun Gong, or while state media claimed their successes on “re-educate and transform” them to delude people.

Victim: Jin Youmin Description: Practitioner Jin Youmin’s mother, Ma Jinxiu, was counted by the Chinese government as one of the “1,400 cases of death attributed to Falun Gong”. Her death “caused by Falun Gong” has been publicized on TV controlled by the Chinese government. On January 26, 2000, Jin Youmin talked about the truth. In fact, the health of Jin’s mom obviously improved in her 2-year practice of Falun Gong. Not at all dying due to refusal to take medicine, instead, “she was sent to the hospital soon after she felt uncomfortable, without delay, and hence received adequate medical treatment. She took medicine, was given injections and died in the hospital” after a few months hospitalization.

(Jin Youmin’s article,“The Truth Behind One Of The 1,400 Cases”, is available in the column, “Clarifying Misconceptions”, at http://www.minghui.ca/eng.html  )

Victim: Li Guanghua

Description:

Guanghua Li, 37 years old, a lecturer at the Department of Foreign Language of Foreign Language Institute in affiliation with Anhui Normal Institute, were slandered by an article originally published on Anhui Daily on January 11, 2000. Many other major newspapers including People’s Daily also published the same article. In February 2000, Li Guanhua managed to send out an article to the overseas Falun Gong web site to clarify himself. The following is the first and the last paragraphs from his own article.

January 11, 2000, AnHui Daily published an article titled “Walk Out of The Falun Gong Mud” on its front page. There were three points in that untruthful article. 1. “I declared renouncement from Falun Gong illegal organization”. 2. “I did not care about the quality of my teaching while I was a practitioner of Falun Gong, and the teaching quality has been improved after I was transformed”. 3. “I did not give much attention to scientific research, but after being transformed I published two papers”. I must point out that these are simply NOT true.

......

In order to prove to the people of the world the greatness of Falun Dafa and to eliminate the sufferings that the evil force has caused to Falun Dafa practitioners using my name, I came alone to Beijing in the Chinese traditional New Year’s Eve to appeal. As long as the damages to Falun Dafa practitioners caused by the false news report could be recovered, I am willing to sacrifice ...for it.

(Li Guanghua’s article, “False news reports must be exposed”, is available in the column, “Clarifying Misconceptions”, at http://www.minghui.ca/eng.html.)

Victim: Po Ruchun

Location of incident: Capital city Nanjing, Jiangsu Province

Description:

According to news from China, a false report appeared as the newspaper headline news on in Nanjing, on the day after the program “The Truth of April 25 Event” was shown on CCTV (in August 1999). The news is about the Falun Gong contact person of Chaomen district in Nanjing, Ms. Po Ruchun. The news reported how she felt repentant and how she realized that she was cheated by Falun Gong, etc. However, the truth was that at the night when the journalist planed to inter-view her at her home, she was still at her workplace waiting the heavy rain to stop so that she could go home, therefore the journalist never interviewed herself. Her colleagues were together with her at that time.

The next morning after she saw that fabricated report about her, she went in the rain to the editors of the newspaper Service Guide to request them to write an article clarifying those misleading facts and apologize to her. The Newspaper dared not to do that. Later, that journal-ist who did the report went to her home to apologize to her privately. This incident was well known to all practitioners in Nanjing. Po’s supervisors and colleagues all knew about this. They could serve as witnesses if independent investigation was allowed.

7.3 Chinese Communist Authorities Admitted that a Slanderous Report was a Total Fabrication

The following is a report by a journalist, Hai Tao, of the Voice of America, reported from Los Angeles.

Since the Chinese government started to crack down on Falun Gong in July 1999, all state-run media agencies started to attack Falun Gong, its founder and its key members. On November 28, a special report authored by Li Xingang was published in the newspaper “the Xian Workers”. The article “reported” that “Zhang Zhiwen”, who was a lady living in Weinan region of Shanxi province, burned her six month-old daughter and then committed suicide by setting herself on fire, in protest of the government’s crackdown on Falun Gong. This report made a stir in the country and it has been reprinted by many newspapers in Shenzhen, Harbin, Shanghai and other places.

Recently, the Hong Kong Information Center for Human Rights and Democratic Movement conducted an investigation and found out that the report was a total fabrication. The center said, by quoting Chinese officials, that the person, location, time and the story in that report were all fabricated. An official in the Weinan Communist Political and Law Committee of Shanxi province named Wu testified that there was absolutely no fire-suicide event and moreover there did not exist a lady named Zhang Zhiwen at all. In addition, many news agencies in China called them for verification and got the same answer.

John Li, a Falun Gong practitioner in Caltech, said that in China, a lot of slandering news about Falun Gong is fabricated. When some Chinese Falun Gong practitioners asked the author why he fabricated the news, the author’s reply was, “I was writing fiction.”

Senior journalist Mr. Weiguo Zhang commented, “Since the Chinese news agencies are “pens” for the Communist Party, they must speak for the party and the government. So it loses its journalistic function as a public monitor. Therefore, they are full of corruption, paid news, and fabricated news. It is very serious.”

A commentator of current events in the US, Mr. Changqin Cao, who was a former journalist in China, thought that it was not strange to have this type of news appear in China. The Chinese news media follows “one country, two polices”. Different news is published in party newspapers and small newspapers. Small newspapers accept free submissions. Because of the shortage of manpower, they have no way, nor do they want, to verify the authenticity of news. Meanwhile, in order to gain market and expand their circulation, small newspapers resort to all possible means to please the public with claptrap. Their first priority is to attract more readers, with no respect for facts and authenticity of news.

The problem here, however, is that newspapers such as “Xian Workers” and “Harbin Metro Newspaper”, that published the article about “murdering daughter and committing suicide”, are not typical small newspapers. Mr. Changqin Cao said, “This phenomenon indicates another problem. There are two kinds of news that the media dare not fabricate: first, they dare not fabricate articles with opinions differing from those of the government, nor dare they fabricate big economical or financial news. Otherwise, they would be punished by the government. Second, for those famous figures such as writers and high ranking officials, they dare not fabricate news about them because they would be sued.”

“Under these circumstances,” said Mr. Cao, “there is only one type of news that they dare to fabricate, namely, news about those figures disliked by the government, such as exiled dissidents or political criminals in jail. Obviously, the government will not find trouble with them if they do that.”

In addition, recently, somebody has posted on the Internet an article in the name of the founder of Falun Gong, saying that he would return to China to argue with the government even at the risk of being jailed. John Li, a Ph.D. candidate in Caltech, testified that this is another piece of false news.

7.4 Email Correspondence of Falun Gong Practitioners was Monitored

The email correspondence of Falun Gong practitioners is under the control of public security department of China. One will be charged and sentenced to jail if he communicates information about Falun Gong.

Case 1

Victim: Zhang Ji, 20, a student at Qiqihar University,

Location of incident: Qiqihar City, Heilongjiang Province

Description:

On Monday November 8, 1999, a Hong Kong-based human rights group said that China had charged Zhang Ji with spreading Falun Gong information on the Internet. The group said that since August the student sent information on what was happening to Falun Gong in China to United States and Canada and downloaded latest news about Falun Gong from the Internet and passed the news to other Falun Gong practitioners.

Zhang was arrested last month and was expected to be sentenced to jail for three to five years, it said. Chinese police had stepped up monitoring of the Internet to prevent Falun Gong practitioners from communicating with the outside world or with each other within China. They also made use of special software to read email messages of Falun Gong practitioners.

Case 2

Victims: Falun Gong practitioners

Location of incident: Wuhan City, Hubei Province

Description: News received from China on August 16, 1999, as reported by a practitioner in the capital city Wuhan, Hubei Province, “The email correspondence of Falun Gong practitioners are under the control of public security department. Once they are found to receive or send out any email related to Falun Gong, their email service will be closed down.”

Part II

Previous

Next