Waco Tribune: Falun Gong practitioners seek to raise awareness of persecution

Jason Wang says the Chinese government put his mother in a mental hospital because of her beliefs.

Wang, a researcher at the University of Houston, says his mother was arrested in December 1999 after she went to Beijing to protest the government's treatment of practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. After learning she had been put in a hospital, Wang flew back to China to try and help her.

"A doctor openly told us, 'She is not hospitalized because she has mental problems. It is because she practices Falun Gong,'" he recalled. "She was given injections every day. They gave her medication that made her brain feel scattered, and when she refused to take it, they would tie her up and stuff it down her throat."

Wang returned to Houston after his mother was released from the hospital a few months later, but police continue to go to her home and threaten to take her back to the hospital if she does not renounce Falun Gong, he says.

On Friday, Wang will join potentially hundreds of other Falun Gong practitioners from across the country who will travel to Crawford to demonstrate during President George W. Bush's meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Practitioners have said the Chinese leader orchestrated the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners after the Chinese government labeled the group a cult and banned it in 1999.

In contrast to previous, more vocal, protests near the Western White House, Falun Gong participants will likely engage in the silent exercises so central to their practice. The slow, deliberate movements of exercises with names like "Buddha Showing A Thousand Hands" and "Penetrating the Two Cosmic Extremes" first alarmed the Chinese leadership in 1999.

On April 25 that year, thousands of Falun Gong practitioners stood exercising the entire day near government headquarters in Beijing.

"What triggered the ban was the fact that this demonstration happened right outside a building where the top government leaders live," said Suzanne Wright, a member of the China coordination group of the human rights watchdog Amnesty International. "I think when the government saw Falun Gong was able to mobilize thousands, it got scared.

"More troubling to the government was that (Falun Gong) had drawn some Communist Party officials, some of them highly placed."

Since the ban, according to Falun Gong literature, more than 400 practitioners have died in police custody, at least 1,000 have been forced into mental hospitals, and tens of thousands have been arrested. Wright says that although exact numbers are hard to verify, Amnesty International investigators have heard many stories that tend to bolster the claims.

"Torture has been endemic in China," she said. "We have heard of 400 or so cases of (Falun Gong) deaths in police custody. Usually they say the person died due to medical reasons."

Attempts to contact officials at the Chinese consulate in Houston for a response to the charges were unsuccessful. However, a posting on a Web site for the Chinese mission to the United Nations addresses the government's views toward the group.

[...]

Members deny the [...] label. They say the practice, founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi in China, draws upon exercises and meditations long used in Asia to bring people a sense of spiritual balance and inner peace. In the years since, the practice has spread beyond China's borders with a substantial presence in the United States.

"There's no way it could be called a [...]," said Mary Jo Ard, a former Waco resident who has practiced Falun Gong for three years. "There is no membership. You never sign anything. You are free to come and go as you please. And no way could it be considered a threat. It has never been political.

"Jiang Zemin saw all these people with reverence for Li, but how could they have reverence for Li and the Communist Party at the same time? So, he made a very rash decision and outlawed Falun Gong."

The Chinese government has said more than 1,600 practitioners have committed
suicide or died after refusing medical treatment as part of their [...] (slanderous words omitted) beliefs.

Ard, who says she will take part in Friday's demonstrations, took issue with the Chinese government's claim that Falun Gong members have died because they were told to avoid medical treatment.

"If people do drop medicines, it is completely voluntary," she said. "You are advised that you are moving your body into a new level of health and probably won't need medicine anymore. It's sort of a purification process. When you balance your body's energies, you find you don't want anything to interfere with that. But it's completely voluntary."

Julia Jiang, a practitioner from Missouri who plans to attend the demonstration, also discounted the idea that Falun Gong is a political threat.

"We are not challenging President Bush," she said. "We are not protesting anything the U.S. does. We just want to let the world know what is happening to us in China. We just want to bring the message that what we do brings peace."