07/07/2001

In an effort to decry China's suppression of the Falun Gong movement, about a dozen people gathered Friday on the steps of City Hall to show their support for family and friends caught up in the crackdown.

"My family in China is being monitored by the government, and my father has disappeared," Danielle Wang, a 21-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin, told reporters.

Her father, she explained, was arrested three years ago in Beijing, where he was a spokesman for the movement.

The Chinese government has outlawed the group and has labeled it [Jiang Zemin government's slanderous term omitted].

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is based on traditional meditative techniques.

Its followers say it is not a religion or a political movement, but the ability of organizers to mobilize demonstrations in defiance of the government sparked mass arrests and attempts to re-educate them in labor camps starting in 1999.

Practitioners say the repression has accelerated in the past six months and has been marked by increasing brutality.

Even before the crackdown, Wang's father was sentenced to six years in prison, but six months ago the family lost track of him, she said.

"The government said he was transferred to another prison, but they haven't told us where," said Wang, who is in the United States on a student visa. "I'm appealing to all the people in the world to help my father and other people in China who are being persecuted."

On Wednesday, a Chinese government official told the Associated Press that 14 followers of the outlawed movement hanged themselves at a prison camp. Practitioners say 15 were tortured to death, based on the conditions of bodies released to family members.

"There is ongoing physical and mental torture," said Hongyi Pan, a former resident of Beijing and now a research fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. "We want the people in San Antonio to take a stand against what is happening."

Falun Gong's system of physical movements and exercises was introduced in China by the movement's founder, Li Hongzhi, in 1992.

Practitioners claim that close to 100 million people practice it daily. In San Antonio, they number several hundred, Pan said.

Pan said practitioners from across the United States will gather July 20 in Washington to observe the second anniversary of a demonstration in Beijing that triggered the crackdown.

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