April 5, 2006

(Clearwisdom.net) UNM (University of New Mexico) student Lanlan Wang said she began practicing Falun Dafa [...] in March 1998. A year later, she was kicked out of Tsinghua University in China.

"At that time many of my colleagues were practicing in a little forest by the university. The persecution began, and the university asked us to go home - some for a half a year," she said.

Falun Dafa is an ancient form of meditation, which was first introduced to the public in 1992. It consists of controlled [...] exercises and meticulous body positions.

Wang had a booth outside Zimmerman Library on Tuesday, where information was distributed on the Chinese government's persecution of Falun Dafa, also called Falun Gong. Wang and others also spoke about their personal experiences of being persecuted for practicing Falun Dafa.

Wang was only imprisoned for practicing Falun Dafa, she said, but others were not as fortunate.

Truthfulness, compassion and forbearance make up the governing trinity of the meditation system, Wang said.

Wang said the administration at Tsinghua University asked her to leave because the university has ties to the Chinese government.

"A lot of practitioners from all over the country came to Tiananmen Square to say Falun Dafa was good," she said. "They were all beaten and sent to the prison."

She said practicing Falun Dafa can heal the body and mind and prolong one's life.

[...]

Wang said the inner strength Falun Dafa can give people scares the Chinese government.

"It heals and can help," she said. "It has helped me become a better person."

It is this independence of body and mind that intimidated the Chinese government into inhuman action, Wang said. She said a Chinese death camp for Falun Dafa practitioners has been discovered in Sujiatun, China.

According to the Falun Dafa Information Center's Web site, the camp can hold up to 6,000 prisoners, and there is evidence of about 40 more camps around China.

Wang handed out pamphlets containing photographs illustrating dead practitioners who were subjected to organ harvesting. A Chinese journalist, under the pseudonym Jin Zhong, took the photographs in the pamphlet. Zhong was forced to flee China, the pamphlet stated.

Persecution of Falun Dafa is not new to China, Zhong wrote, and called the situation "murder sponsored by the state."

Wang recalled a Bejing teacher who was practicing early in the morning in a park. The teacher was brutally beaten by a policeman, she said. Wang cared for the teacher for two months, but she eventually died.

"She was a very good person," Wang said. "Her students said she had a crystal heart."

On July 21, 1999, Wang said she and some of her fellow practitioners were taken from their homes for re-education.

Wang was able to escape China but said she was lucky.

"There are still many of my friends who are in prison," she said. "I'm very worried about them, especially with the death camps being exposed."

Chen Hou is a graduate student at the Santa Fe Institute. He volunteered to help Wang distribute information on the persecution at UNM.

"The worst part is the brainwashing," Hou said. "Even my parents, college professors, thought in the beginning that Falun Dafa was bad because the Chinese government did a lot of propaganda on TV and in the newspapers. They said that the Falun Dafa people kill people and all sorts of other stupid ridiculous lies."

Hou said the Chinese buy into the propaganda because it is the only information they receive.

Student David Plaza was interested in the information being distributed to him. Plaza spent a summer in China two years ago, he said.

"I had no idea that this was happening," he said. "But I can believe it because there is a lot of secrecy going on there."

Upon entering China, Plaza said he made a lot of friends right away.

"Unfortunately, there was a motive behind it," he said. "A lot of these people that came up to us and were overly friendly were members of the Communist Party. They said they had been assigned to study us."

He said it is difficult to go anywhere with the government agents tagging along.

"They wanted to only show us the best that China had to offer," he said.

Wang and Hou said a single student can make a difference.

"The English, the Canadians and the United States have helped us to save many practitioners from China," Wang said. "There are many successful cases."