Practitioners of meditation group tell of maltreatment by government

("St. Louis Post-Dispatch," May 25, 2000)

NANJING - Police officials in Nanjing deny allegations that practitioners of the exercise and meditation group known as Falun Gong have been detained, beaten and involuntarily committed to mental institutions.

The city's journalists say there's no story.

Even sophisticated, Western-oriented professors here dismiss the controversy over Falun Gong. They say Western critics are making far too much about a bunch of laughably misdirected people at the far margins of Chinese society.

But if all that's true, what about the eight individuals who risked jail to meet with a Post-Dispatch reporter and give detailed accounts of how they had been arrested and detained, sometimes for weeks, just for protesting the government's decision last summer to ban an exercise practice that up until then millions of Chinese had been peacefully pursuing in public parks?

And what about Li An Nin, the retired manager for an investment company, locked in a closed ward at the Nanjing Mental Hospital?

The individuals who met with a reporter in a working-class apartment gave harrowing accounts of what the government's crackdown against Falun Gong had meant for them:

* A 55-year-old driver said he had been dismissed from his job and made a common laborer instead, at a 60 percent reduction in pay. A 24-year-old factory worker said police stood passively by while common criminals beat another woman practitioner who was sharing her cell.

* A 34-year-old worker at a Nanjing refinery said she had been arrested after joining a Beijing protest in December and was held at the Nanjing police station for two months. She was then committed involuntarily to the Nanjing Mental Hospital and held for three weeks more.

* The woman's husband protested the incarceration and was presented with a classic Catch-22. Police officials told him that his wife would be permitted to leave the mental hospital early -- but only if he signed papers affirming that in his opinion she was insane. He refused. She was eventually released, they said, but only on payment of a $600 fine.

The meeting was arranged by a teacher in a Nanjing technical institute who has been practicing Falun Gong for four years. The Post-Dispatch located him through a friend who had immigrated to Canada.

"When I was given your name, I wasn't sure at first what to do," he said, "but I thought it was inhumane to be forcing people in the hospital. These practitioners aren't meeting publicly. They're not breaking any laws. It is only for their beliefs that they are being punished.

"I hope that with your report readers in the West will know something of what is happening here," he added. "Report it to your readers as objectively as you can. Don't exaggerate. Just tell the truth, and let them know."

The man said he had not told his wife that he was arranging the meeting with practitioners. "She doesn't want me involved in any of this," he said. "She's afraid for her safety."

The saddest case of all was that of Li An Nin.

Clear-eyed, with her black hair well-groomed and wearing a stylish brown sweater, Li, 51, looked out of place in the raucous common room of Ward Five at the Nanjing Mental Hospital. A television blared in the corner and a dozen or so women, many of them obviously disturbed, milled about.

Li said her troubles began when she went to Beijing in January to protest the banning of Falun Gong. She was arrested at Tiananmen Square and transported to the Nanjing police department. She was detained there for a month and then released into the custody of her grown son. A few weeks later, the son signed the commitment papers that forced her into the mental hospital.

"I don't blame my son," Li said, sitting on a bench before a bare wood table. She said she understood his fears, that the fact of her being a practitioner would end up affecting his job and his family, too. "He could not bear the suffering this would bring to him," she said.

The conversation took place during regular visiting hours but lasted only a few minutes -- cut short by a nurse who told Li that if the presence of a foreigner in the ward was reported to her superiors, it could cost her her job.

Practitioners in Nanjing said there are half a dozen being held at the hospital. Human rights activists claim there are hundreds more in similar straits around the country, although statistics are difficult to verify in a country that officially denies that there are detentions at all.

The Nanjing municipal government has sponsored an exhibit downtown, with photographs and text suggesting that Falun Gong is similar to the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, the victims of the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana and other "vicious cults." The media here have quoted the government denunciations but have attempted no independent investigations of alleged mistreatment.

"So far as I know," said Chen Longqui, director of the law department at the Nanjing Public Security Bureau, "no practitioners of Falun Gong have been held in prison or anywhere else in Nanjing."

At the Nanjing Mental Hospital, meanwhile, the patients are actually allowed to continue the five-position routines of Falun Gong -- but only as long as they take the medicine that is supposed to cure them of the Falun Gong disease.

Not so long ago in China, of course, a Western reporter never would have gotten access to a detainee being held in a mental ward.

But China even today is a place where people can be hauled off to mental wards for reasons that are suspect at best -- and where journalists, officials and ordinary people for the most part choose not to see.