San Francisco Examiner: Falun Gong shows its quiet strength in City

OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

They walked silently down Market Street wearing bright yellow T-shirts and carrying bright yellow banners.

They spoke no words as they sat Indian-style for rows and rows on the red brick surface of Justin Herman Plaza. All around them were signs declaring "truthfulness, benevolence and forbearance."

And yet their counterparts practicing these same three principles of Falun Gong in China were being jailed, beaten, sometimes killed.

"This is just exercise," said Chun Yang, 35, of Denver, describing Falun Gong, which he has been practicing for three years.

Yang joined about 300 other followers of Falun Gong for a meditative walk Friday in San Francisco from the Civic Center to Justin Herman Plaza as a way to raise awareness about the practice as well as shed light on the alleged human rights violations in China.

Falun Gong is a spiritual movement born in China in 1992. It combines exercise and meditation as a means to achieve mental and physical wellness.

Today, it claims more than 100 million practitioners worldwide. But its practitioners in China are the ones who are suffering. Chinese leaders call Falun Gong [] and accuse its followers of trying to overthrow the Communist government.

Initially, Falun Gong was allowed in public arenas, and even in offices during lunch breaks. But last July, as its swelling popularity became more visible, the Chinese government clamped down and banned the practice, event in homes.

Police arrested followers and monitored those whom they suspected to be involved in the movement.

Friday, stories of the atrocities in China were repeated over and over again.

Alicia Zhao, a permanent U.S. resident who lives in San Francisco, told the crowd assembled at the plaza of her own run-in with the Chinese government when visiting her homeland last December.

Zhao, a Falun Gong practitioner, described the night when police came banging on the door of her hotel room. After three hours of interrogation and having all her travel documents confiscated, she was taken to a detention center, she said.

"I was told I had disrupted the social order," Zhao recalled the police saying, using it s their excuse to detain her.

At the detention center, she was strip-searched and afterward tossed into a one-room cell with 38 other inmates, most of whom were drug addicts and prostitutes.

For food, she was served tofu and cabbage, which she and the other inmates ate off a cement floor.

By day, she worked 14 hours assembling plastic combs, her fingers bleeding from the jagged teeth. By night, she slept with her coat over her head since there were few blankets.

After two weeks of this, Zhao was released with help from the company she works for in San Francisco and the office of Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Burlingame.

"I was lucky I was released from the detention center after 13 days," Zhao said. Others have been known to receive sentences of up to 18 years.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, also made an appearance at Friday's demonstration, urging the public to fight against China's crackdown on Falun Gong.

"We must speak against this and Congress has," Pelosi said, pointing to a resolution that both the House and Senate passed last November condemning the Chinese government for human rights violations against Falun Gong's followers.

Leaflets distributed at the demonstration showed pictures of a Falun Gong practitioner being beaten earlier this month in Tiananmen Square, his body crumpled on the ground and a policeman's foot pushed against his face. Next to it is a hospitalized Zhao Xin, a lecturer at Beijing University who was left paralyzed after the police tortured her for practicing Falun Gong in a public park.

Posters quantified the casualties of Falun Gong in China. Since last July, there have been more than 50,000 practitioners arrested and another 500 who have been sent to labor camps, they said.

At last count, there have been 61 deaths because of the government.