4/18/2001

The Falun Gong spiritual movement appealed for international help yesterday to stop what it calls murder, torture, and sexual abuse of followers by the Chinese government, and released a video that it said undercuts China's portrayal of the movement as [Chinese government's slanderous words omitted].

On the eve of a vote on China's human rights record by the UN Commission on Human Rights, Falun Gong members locally and internationally held news conferences and vigils to draw attention to what they said is a deteriorating situation because of China's efforts to repress the organization.

The United States has proposed resolutions to the Geneva-based commission criticizing China on human rights eight times in the past 11 years. None of the resolutions has passed.

At a news conference in Cambridge, activists said that about 50,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been detained in China, 10,000 sentenced to labor camps for up to 10 years without trials, 1,000 forced into mental institutions, and 500 convicted at show trials.

But members continue to defy the government. The organization is one of the fastest-growing spiritual movements in the country, with a membership by some estimates exceeding that of the ruling, 64-million-member Chinese [party's name omitted].

The most striking part of yesterday's local presentation was the screening of a slow-motion, stop-action version of a videotape that the Chinese government says shows Falun Gong members burning themselves to death Jan. 23 on Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. The government has broadcast the film repeatedly.

In the slowed version, it appears that Liu Chunling, one of two people who died, collapsed not from the flames but from being bludgeoned by a man in a military overcoat. Falun Gong members identified the man as a police officer.

A Washington Post reporter who looked into the backgrounds of Liu and her 12-year-old daughter, who also died in the incident, found no evidence that either had ever practiced Falun Gong. Michael He, a Falun Gong practitioner who identified himself at the news conference as a research scientist at MIT, said no link has been established between any of the other people alleged to have immolated themselves.

Haiying He, who identified himself as a researcher at Harvard Medical School, said the government was attempting to use the event to divert popular dissatisfaction with its policies, just as it did during the Cultural Revolution and the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s.

He described how his family has been shattered by the attempts to silence Falun Gong. His mother, a former model worker and retired kindergarten teacher, was sentenced to drug rehabilitation, and his sister to a prison camp. His brother and sister-in-law are being held incommunicado, he said.

Grace Feng, who recently left China to join her mother, a US citizen who works in the electronics industry in the Boston area, said that in retaliation for appealing to Chinese officials on behalf of Falun Gong, she was confined in a small room with 20 other women without drinking water and required to sleep on the floor for a week.