January 12, 2004

Supporters of a Chinese citizen who recently died while in Chinese police custody gathered Sunday in San Francisco to remember the man they say was tortured throughout the 21 months he spent in jail. About 100 people attended the memorial for Liu Chengjun in Portsmouth Square in Chinatown, according to Alex Ma, spokesman for the Chinese Press Freedom and Human Rights League, which organized the event. Ma said Liu had been arrested following a March 2002 incident in which Liu participated in tapping into a cable television signal in Changchung, China and [...] broadcasting foreign-made programs about the Chinese government's persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. Falun Gong is described by Human Rights Watch as a practice involving [...] meditation, used to improve practitioners' physical, mental and spiritual well-being. The practice has been banned in China since 1999. Ma said he does not know why Falun Gong is illegal, but said he thinks the Chinese government is afraid that the number of Falun Gong practitioners will exceed the number of members in the Communist Party. One of the speakers at Sunday's memorial was the fiancée of Menlo Park resident Charles Li, a U.S. citizen arrested at a Chinese airport in January 2003 while on a trip to visit his family members there for the Lunar New Year. Li's supporters say he was officially arrested for allegedly planning to interrupt television signals in China, but that the real reason Li was targeted was his practice of Falun Gong.

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