According to Wall Street Journal (April 26, 2001), "In the past three months, Beijing has stepped up pressure on local governments to account for all known Falun Gong practitioners, jail the activists and get die-hard believers to renounce their faith, according to a [party's name omitted] official, practitioners and their family members. That is a shift from a past practice in some areas of tacitly allowing adherents to continue practicing as long as they did so in private." "Now, you can't even practice at home," says a relative of Meng Qinglin, a follower from northeastern China who was put in a labor camp in late January at the start of the reinvigorated campaign. The report said, "The fruit of the government's efforts was on display Wednesday, the second anniversary of a massive demonstration in central Beijing by Falun Gong practitioners that provoked the government to outlaw the group in July 1999. Only about 30 people staged scattered, sporadic protests on Tiananmen Square Wednesday before being swiftly detained, less than a third of the number of practitioners who turned out at last year's anniversary. By contrast, in the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, where Falun Gong remains legal but whose government has raised concerns it might restrict the group, 200 followers demonstrated against the mainland crackdown with a group display of slow-motion meditation exercises. Chinese leaders have tried to enforce their crackdown all along by relying on extensive networks of [party's name omitted] members and police surveillance that reaches down into every neighborhood, factory and village. Yet China is no longer as easily controlled as it once was. Two decades of rapid economic change have slackened Beijing's hold over the daily lives of its citizens and allowed local officials to loosely apply central-government orders. In some far-flung localities, officials quietly permitted Falun Gong believers to practice their [] meditation exercises, as long as they did so in private and didn't travel to the capital to protest, says the [party's name omitted] official, who is involved in security work." The report continued, "President Jiang Zemin conveyed the message to influential provincial and big-city party members at a secretive work conference in early February, says the official. At the same time, a special commission overseeing the crackdown, known as the 6-10 Office for the date it was set up in 1999, issued detailed instructions. Among them, the official says, were new orders on dealing with followers: Those who actively practice were to be sent to prison or labor camps while those who didn't formally renounce their beliefs were to be isolated by making their families or employers promise to keep watch over them. Interviews with Falun Gong followers or their family members in five provinces bear out the official's account of a tightening grip on practitioners. In Hunchun, a commercial hub near the North Korean border, hundreds of followers used to practice in public spaces before the 1999 ban, and for months afterward they continued to do so privately. Now they only dare hint at their beliefs." The report mentioned, "The estimates put at 10,000 the number of Falun Gong followers now in prison or labor camps, and an additional 5,000 are refusing to recant but are being kept under watch, says the party official. Not counted are the tens of thousands of others briefly held over the course of the campaign in detention centers or "transformation points" -- makeshift holding centers where followers were harangued and sometimes beaten until they renounced. " The report concluded, " 'China has so many social problems,' the official says, citing official corruption and widespread discontent among farmers and laborers who missed out on the fruits of economic reforms. 'The design is to keep these groups apart. If they link up and there's a major disaster, it will be like throwing a spark on a pile of dry tinder.' "
Category: Falun Dafa in the Media
