COLIN FREEZE AND MIRO CERNETIG

With a report from Daniel Leblanc in Ottawa

Saturday, December 2, 2000

TORONTO and BEIJING -- Prime Minister Jean Chrétien will lead another Team Canada mission to China amid a growing outcry over the imprisonment of a Canadian falun-gong supporter in a Chinese hard-labour camp.

"I would like the Prime Minister to speak up publicly to urge China to stop the persecutions [of falun-gong supporters]," LingDi Zhang, daughter of the jailed Canadian, said from her home last night.

Last month, her father Kunlun Zhang was sentenced to three years in Liu Chan Shan No. 24 labour camp in Shandong. He is one of thousands of prisoners held by China in its falun-gong crackdown.

Supporters call falun gong a meditation movement that promotes health and benevolence, while the Communist regime believes [...]á

According to Amnesty International, at least 53 falun-gong members who've been arrested in China have died in prison, on their way there or shortly after release.

"Since my father is in jail, his life is in danger. . . . I think it's very urgent to get him out of China," Ms. Zhang, a University of Ottawa student, said. "But I cannot just appeal for my father, but on behalf on all practitioners who are suffering."

An Ottawa resident who is the former head of the Federation for a Democratic China, an organization of former Chinese dissidents, asked whether the Prime Minister's trade mission means Canadians are "sacrificing principle for profit" in China.

"This argument that we can trade with them, and hopefully over time they'll come around, isn't working," said Zhifu Du, who argues that the financial reward of previous Team Canada missions is dubious. He added that Canada still does nearly all its trade with the United States, while populous-but-poor China needs access to North American markets.

"The West does not need China," he said. "But they need us."

The Canadian Alliance said yesterday's announcement of the Team Canada mission was sending the "wrong message" to China.

"It would have been prudent to say that we will delay the announcement until we got assurances that [Mr. Zhang's] case is being seriously considered," foreign affairs critic Monte Solberg said.

Since the last Canadian trade mission in 1998, the Chinese government has increased its efforts to stop people who openly practise falun gong.

In announcing the Team Canada mission, Mr. Chrétien talked of trade, not human rights. There's no indication the Prime Minister yet knows about the situation of Mr. Zhang. A Foreign Affairs spokesman said Mr. Chrétien will be briefed.

"We are still at the preparatory stages of the Team Canada trip," Reynald Doiron said. "If this issue was not solved by then, it's certainly one of the subjects that Mr. Chrétien could eventually raise with his Chinese counterparts.

"For now, we can't say more, it's too early."

In making one of his first major announcements since his re-election, the Prime Minister said in a statement that he was "delighted" that he will lead the group that will travel to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong in February, during the first weeks of the Chinese New Year.

"It is fitting that we visit this vital trading partner at this time of new beginnings to express our renewed commitment to our trade and investment relationships in China and Hong Kong," Mr. Chrétien said of a trip that was planned for last month but scuttled by the federal election.

Mr. Zhang, who immigrated to Canada in 1989, became a citizen in 1995.

While in Montreal, he taught at McGill University and helped arrange art shows, his daughter said.

Ms. Zhang said her parents returned to China to take care of her ailing grandmother in 1996. Around that time, Mr. Zhang started practising falun gong, and his daughter says the family's health has improved since then.

But this past year, Mr. Zhang was persecuted by the Chinese government for practising falun gong.

Mr. Zhang's supporters in Canada say that in July, he was tortured with electric shocks after practising falun gong in a public park.

Later, he was fined the equivalent of a year's salary, prompting him to begin a hunger strike that ended in early November.

He had recovered his health, Ms. Zhang said, when he was sentenced on Nov. 15 to three years in a Chinese labour camp.

Despite repeated protests, the Canadian government has yet to be granted a formal discussion on the case or to negotiate a meeting with Mr. Zhang in prison, Canadian embassy officials in Beijing say.

"This is a loss of face for Canada," said Frank Lu, who runs the Hong Kong Centre for Human Rights.

"The Chinese government knew he was a Canadian, but chose to do put him in labour camp anyway."

The jail term, one of longest yet given to a foreigner connected with the eight-year-old movement steeped in Taoist meditation, is apparently the result of Mr. Zhang's decision to stage repeated public protests that angered Chinese authorities.