May 10, 2001

BEIJING -- A woman who unsuccessfully battled China's bureaucracy to make police admit they tortured her mother to death has been sent without trial to three years in a labor camp, in another sign of the government's intensifying efforts to suppress the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Police in the eastern city of Weifang ordered Zhang Xueling's punishment on April 24, sending her to the Wang Village labor camp in the nearby city of Zibo, according to a Falun Gong spokeswoman in New York and the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. The Hong Kong group said Wednesday that she was accused of "using a [term omitted] to undermine the implementation of law" -- a vague, catchall charge that has been frequently used against Falun Gong followers to send them to labor camps.

Reports of Ms. Zhang's imprisonment couldn't be independently confirmed. Police and labor camp officers refused to comment, and Ms. Zhang's family members couldn't be contacted by telephone. But her fate fits the pattern of an increasingly vigorous government campaign to wipe out the group by coercing followers to renounce their beliefs and jailing those who won't.

Ms. Zhang's mother, Chen Zixiu, was an ardent Falun Gong follower who was detained twice for trying to protest the ban on the group that the government imposed in July 1999. During her second detention, in February of last year, fellow inmates and family members said police beat the 58-year-old woman to death as they tried to force her to recant. Police denied the mistreatment and said Ms. Chen died from natural causes.

Initially supportive of the ban, Ms. Zhang grew doubtful about the government's crackdown in its first few months. After her mother's death, she repeatedly -- and unsuccessfully -- petitioned the police and government to issue a death certificate. Along the way, Ms. Zhang drew support from Falun Gong followers and became a practitioner herself. Ms. Chen's death and her daughter's quest for justice were chronicled by The Asian Wall Street Journal in a series of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in the U.S. last month.