Falun Gong Keeps Up Heat Over Ban

Saturday, July 22, 2000

STAFF REPORTERS and AGENCIES

Falun Gong practitioners kept up the pressure in their protest campaign against the country's year-old ban on the sect yesterday, meditating and chanting slogans in Tiananmen Square and drawing a swift, often rough response from police. Amid throngs of school groups on summer holiday tourists, one man stood in the square shouting, "Falun Gong is good". Police grabbed him and, when he refused to climb into a van, they jerked his hair and shoved him inside.

In another police van packed with mostly middle-aged followers, a woman shouted and officers closed the blinds. From inside a slapping sound could be heard, witnesses said.

Thousands of people are reported to be making their way to Beijing to pressure the Government into allowing followers to practise freely and police throughout the mainland have launched a massive effort to curb the protests.

Police in Beijing are prepared for large-scale protests on the first anniversary today of the ban on the spiritual movement. A water canon and tear-gas launchers stood on a pavement near Tiananmen Square yesterday, and 100 uniformed and plain-clothes officers rested in a side street, ready to augment the strong police presence in the square.

Hundreds of uniformed and plain-clothes police mixed with swarms of mainland tour groups, questioning dozens of visitors about why they had come to the vast plaza and checking identification cards.

Police detained at least 30 young men and women, some of whom identified themselves as Falun Gong members, and piled them into vans which sped to a nearby police station. Practitioners in other cities were under house arrest, with officers watching their movements and tapping their telephones, Hong Kong Falun Gong spokeswoman Sophie Xiao said.

A statement from US Falun Gong practitioners said tens of thousands of group members on the mainland had been arrested or detained since the ban on July 22 last year, and at least 5,000 had been sent to labour camps without trial.

Many had suffered police torture, rape and beatings, while others were drugged in psychiatric hospitals, said the statement issued on the group's official Web site.

"We ask only to have the opportunity to speak face-to-face with government officials in China, to sit down and come to a mutual understanding," the statement said.

Beijing says Falun Gong cheats its followers and blames it for 1,500 deaths by suicide or refusal to accept medical care in favour of faith in the teachings of its US-based leader, Li Hongzhi.

Mr Li recently published an essay on the Internet encouraging people to speak the truth about Falun Gong, interpreted by many as encouraging defiance.

Ms Xiao said Mr Li was plotting a mass protest, but said she did not know when he wanted it to take place. "He feels the time has come for some kind of conclusion," she said. The group's membership in China had fallen from 80 million to 70 million in the past year.

More than 100 Falun Gong protesters exercised quietly and stood vigil in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington on Thursday, as the embassy spokesman held a news conference to condemn the movement as a dangerous, mind-controlling cult. As the first anniversary of the mainland's ban on the group approached, followers protested over the deaths of 24 practitioners they said were killed while in custody and the detention of thousands more. "We're going to hear a lot of noise from the remaining zealots of that cause," embassy press spokesman Zhang Yuanyuan said, claiming that 98 per cent of Falun Gong's practitioners had rejected the group.