Globe and Mail: Falun Gong follower's flight aided

Saturday, February 17, 2001

OTTAWA -- With some help from the Canadian government, the wife of a Chinese-Canadian professor who was jailed in China for practising falun gong has returned to Canada.

Zhang Shumei, wife of Zhang Kunlun, arrived in Canada about midnight on Thursday after eluding Chinese surveillance in Beijing.

Her husband had been released from a labour camp and returned to Canada last month after an international pressure campaign helped gain his freedom long before his three-year sentence was up.

The couple's troubles began when they returned to China from Canada in the mid-1990s to take care of Ms. Zhang's ailing mother. (Ms. Zhang says she has found someone else to care for the elderly woman.)

Both were practitioners of falun gong, a spiritual and physical discipline that has attracted fierce repression from China's government.

Prof. Zhang's adherence to falun gong resulted in him being sent to a labour camp in November.

After that, Ms. Zhang said, she was closely watched at her home by authorities.

Ms. Zhang said that by December she was being visited daily and believed her phone was tapped.

At the end of January, she said, police came to arrest her but she refused to open the door. On Feb. 2, she pretended she was going out grocery shopping and evaded authorities for 12 days by staying at various people's houses.

Ms. Zhang eventually ended up at the Canadian embassy in Beijing, and with the help of Canadian officials she was able to return to Canada, where she has landed-immigrant status, without incident.

"They just facilitated the logistics of being able to leave, and you might say they provided the protective umbrella of the Canadian government," Liberal MP Irwin Cotler said.

Mr. Cotler said yesterday that he was contacted late last week by Ms. Zhang's daughter, a University of Ottawa student, who said harassment of Ms. Zhang had reached intolerable levels.

Mr. Cotler said yesterday that his intervention and that of the Canadian embassy and Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley helped pave the way for Ms. Zhang's flight out of Beijing.

Comments by the Prime Minister in China this week also helped, Mr. Cotler said: "I think China would have realized that had they sought to restrain her . . . that that would made a mockery of China's commitment to respect the rule of law."

Ms. Zhang said at a press conference yesterday that her beliefs -- falun gong [匽 -- got her into trouble several times with Chinese authorities.

At a press conference yesterday, Ms. Zhang was greeted by fellow falun gong practitioners. The arrest of Prof. Zhang mobilized such groups in Canada and they now send communiqu閟 to media almost daily.

The Chinese government likens falun gong to [Chinese government抯 slanderous word], a charge that offends group members.

Yesterday, falun gong supporters released a translated Chinese article Ms. Zhang wrote in 1996, in which she describes her return to China. At that time she met a neighbour whose health had dramatically improved.

"She said that the demon of disease had forced her to the end of the road," Ms. Zhang wrote. "Fortunately, falun gong pulled her back from the King of Terrors . . . The improvement of the gong is very quick."

From there, Ms. Zhang describes her interest in learning falun gong, watching days of videotaped lectures. She describes her own health improving to a "miraculous" extent.