Colorado Daily: U. Colorado's Chinese students raise flag of peace

(U-WIRE) BOULDER, Colo. -- Some of University of Colorado's Chinese students and faculty rallied on Sunday in support of world peace even as two of them found themselves at odds with organizers of the event due to their support of the Falun Gong religious practice.

About 40 undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members rallied at Farrand Field on Sunday to celebrate a traditional Chinese autumn festival, the Chinese "National Day," and to show support for world peace in the wake of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Jiang Bo, the Education Consul for the Midwestern United States from the General Consul of the People's Republic of China, addressed organizers of the event, who raised the flag and played the national anthem of the People's Republic of China.

Despite the pageantry of the event, not all was good will among those assembled. As the group gathered for a group picture, one woman was asked to go to the back row in order to obscure a message on her shirt.

Bin Zou, of Boulder, wore a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with blue letters reading "China: free the jailed Falun Gong practitioners." She stood with the larger group to hear Bo's address and even photographed the event before being shunned at the time of the photo at Bo's behest.

"I want to tell people the truth -- people have been jailed in China for practicing Falun Gong. Many Chinese people don't know the truth," Zou said.

After the event Zou's husband, Qu Zheng, a CU research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), said he and his wife felt perfectly safe in staging their quiet demonstration against Chinese governmental actions against the Falun Gong, which is said to be a traditional Chinese spiritual practice involving exercise and meditation and practices based upon "the principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance," according to a hand-out Zheng supplied to the Daily.

"This is America. It's a free land. We have our rights, just as people have rights to know the truth," Zheng said.

Zheng said that the reach of the Chinese government against protesters was long indeed, citing a recent incident in San Francisco in which, he claimed, a group of Falun Gong practitioners were "assaulted by members of a Chinese gang" that he said had contacts to the Chinese government.

Bo, who witnessed the Daily's interview with Zheng, quickly sought the opportunity to address the issue, saying he thought staging a Falun Gong protest during the flag-raising event was inappropriate.

Bo said that regarding Falun Gong protesters in Boulder, he was "surprised that they would want to be included" in Sunday's events at all, given their hostility to the Chinese government.

Zheng said that views toward the movement were mixed among CU's Chinese students at the event. Some, he said, wanted his wife to go to the rear for the group picture, but others supported her, he said.

Zheng also said his experiences with the Chinese government's Falun Gong policies at home were brutal and first-hand. Chinese police routinely patrol public areas asking citizens if they are members of the group and arresting them if they say "yes."

That happened to Zheng and Zou in 1999, he said.

"We were arrested simply for being on the street," he said. "We -- my wife, myself, and our 2-year-old son -- were detained in a jail for 24 hours with no water or food, even for my child," he said.

A flyer that Zheng gave to the Daily claims that since the crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999, at least 50,000 of its practitioners have been detained and more than 10,000 have been sent to labor camps. The brief claims at least 257 practitioners have been confirmed killed.

http://news.excite.com/news/uw/011001/politics-143