October 11, 2005

Local practitioners of a meditative exercise whose Chinese practitioners are persecuted for participating held a workshop Saturday for those interested in learning the simple exercise.

The exercise, Falun Dafa, was handed down in secrecy through chosen disciples for thousands of years before Li Hongzhi introduced it to the public in China in 1992.

Practitioners in the Golden Triangle area are involved in providing international support for those being persecuted. Many Saturday afternoons, on the corner of Lee Boulevard and George Perry Street, they perform the exercises with signs posted nearby to promote awareness of the persecution.

"Until '99, 100 million people practiced [Falun Dafa] in China," Chyi-Hong Lin, 59, a civil engineering graduate of Mississippi State University from Taiwan, said.

Jason Wang, 41, a professor at Alabama A&M, his mother practiced Falun Dafa in China, but the authorities took her into custody and put her into a mental institution.

"The police put her into a mental hospital for torture, and she was forced to take injections harmful to the nervous system," Wang said.

Wang's mother is still alive, but the government will not allow her to leave China, he said.

The reason the Chinese government is persecuting practitioners of Falun Dafa is due to the three principles the exercise is based on: truthfulness, compassion and tolerance, Wang said.

These principles contradict what the Chinese government hopes to accomplish complete. They want control over their citizens. They use propaganda and persecution to cause Chinese citizens to give up this practice and to view practitioners in a bad light, Wang said.

"What's going on in China is really against human rights," Lin said.

The United Nations Economic and Social Council collected information on hundreds of reported cases of torture and mistreatment of Falun Dafa practitioners.

One United Nations report said Zhang Whenfu of Dalian City was arrested and subjected to severe living conditions in several labor camps. He went on a hunger strike to protest his treatment, and the guards tortured him.

"He was also beaten with a wooden board," the report said.

More than 700 people had been tortured as of May 2003, but that number rose to 2,800 the following year, Wang said.

Falun Dafa is not something that will conflict with someone's beliefs, Lin added.

"It's not a religion," he said.