February 17, 2005 Thursday

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 18

You have to wonder about China's leaders. In the past couple of years, they've spent millions of dollars and a great deal of energy trying to play down their human rights abuses and persuade the rest of the world that China is a suitable country to host the world's greatest sporting event, the Olympic Games.

Now they've apparently launched a crude global telephone hate campaign aimed at harassing members of the enigmatic spiritual movement, Falun Gong, with which they have an irrational obsession. It's a sinister act that will reinforce some of our worst fears about the world's biggest nation.

In the past few days, dozens of people throughout Australia and thousands more in other parts of the world have been getting recorded messages on their home and mobile phones demonising the practice of Falun Gong and claiming that the Chinese Government is defending human rights by saving people from the movement.

The messages, in both Chinese and English, centre on reports linking Falun Gong with an alleged self-immolation incident in 2001.

Australian Falun Gong practitioners have called on the Federal Government to investigate the source of the calls and take steps to block them.

Falun Gong defies simple description and its practitioners resent any suggestion that it's a cult. It is a spiritual movement that began in China in the latter half of the last century [...]. Many people, including non-Chinese, are drawn to it because of the beneficial effects of the physical exercises associated with it.

The movement grew rapidly in China in the 1990s, to the point that it had more practitioners than the Communist Party had members. Its founder, Li Hongzhi, moved to America in 1996 and the Chinese Government outlawed Falun Gong three years later after accusing it of "spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances and jeopardising social stability."

Since then the Beijing regime has intensified its propaganda campaign to turn public opinion against the practice while imprisoning, torturing and even murdering those who practice it. By one count, more than 100,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been sent to forced labour camps, most without being tried.

There has never been any evidence of any subversive political activity by Falun Gong members. The only reason for the relentless persecution seems to be that the paranoid Chinese leadership appears to fear any national group that is capable of organising its followers into direct action.

Political freedoms are virtually unknown in China and ill-treatment is a daily reality for those sent to crowded and poorly maintained prisons. As well as followers of Falun Gong, the targets of persecution include internet journalists, ethnic and religious minorities and labour activists.

In WA, there are about 40 regular practitioners of Falun Gong. A spokesman, Sean Hutchison, said yesterday that the calls had been received by six of them.

These were all to telephone numbers that were available from websites and pamphlets.

He said the people who got the calls had complained to their service providers, who had traced the calls to an overseas database but were unable to track them further.

He said the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation had traced calls to Falun Gong members in the US to a source in Beijing.

Mr Hutchison said that apart from the nuisance value of the calls, the people who got them were perturbed about the extremes the Chinese officials seemed prepared to go to harass Falun Gong followers overseas.