Jerseyan back home after jailing in China

02/08/2000 The Star-Ledger Newark, NJ

Page 026

A New Jersey woman jailed for nearly two weeks by Chinese police because of her membership in an outlawed spiritual movement returned safely to New Jersey yesterday.

Jackie Yu of Bridgewater and her 14-year-old son, David Wei Cui, were exhausted from their all- night flight but relieved to be back on American soil.

''There is too much freedom here," she said, laughing. "I feel, somehow, that it's strange. I've been in jail for awhile."

Yu, a 44-year-old financial systems analyst, said she was beaten several times after her Jan. 23 arrest in Tiananmen Square by police who wanted her to renounce her praise of the Falun Gong movement. She was released Friday.

''I was slapped, kicked, pushed to the ground and stepped on," she said. "When I was in jail, I practiced every day, and they also punished me for that."

Practitioners say Falun Gong is neither a religion nor a cult, as the Communist government has branded it. Rather, they say it is a beneficial form of self-cultivation that stresses ancient stretching and breathing exercises.

Yu said practitioners go to Tiananmen Square regularly, risking arrest, in an effort to get answers from the Chinese government about why it views the practice as dangerous. Although government officials say they are concerned about practitioners' safety, human rights groups say the communists are spooked by large-scale demonstrations of Falun Gong's popularity.

''A lot of practitioners got great benefit from Falun Dafa (another name for Falun Gong), so they cannot accept the Chinese government's position that it is a cult," Yu said. "They try to find somewhere to complain, but the government shut all the doors."

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