July 15, 2001

When at last it became apparent that the beatings and the interrogations and the humiliations were not going to move Amy Lee, her captors brought in her 4-year-old daughter.

Amy Lee, 33, spent about a month in a detention center last year, enduring beatings, and was prohibited from seeing her young daughter as part of China's crackdown on Falun Gong. She refused to renounce her beliefs, and early this year she fled China and settled in the New York area. She will join this week's protest in Washington. Fifteen days earlier, Lee says, she had journeyed from her home in southern China to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to unfurl a homemade banner proclaiming "Falun Dafa Is Good." The plainclothes policemen had come running, punching and kicking her to the ground and dragging her by the hair to a van filled with fellow followers of the spiritual exercise regimen banned by the Chinese government.

At the detention center, Lee says, guards slapped her, beat her with plastic truncheons and banged her head on the concrete floor. But still she would not renounce Falun Gong. So they had summoned her husband - and told him to bring their little girl.

Now Dou Dou, crying at the sight of the bruises and scabs, was reaching out to her mother. Guards told Lee she could hold her daughter and go home with her husband if she promised to stop practicing her faith. Lee refused. So they whisked her family away, and escorted her back to the detention center.

A year later, Lee, now 33 and alone in New York, tried to explain her resolve.

"I know the benefits of Falun Gong for health and life," she says in her native Mandarin. "Why should I give it up? I am a good person. I'm not going to give up my beliefs for the evil people."

This week, Lee plans to take her story to Washington, D.C., joining thousands of supporters expected to plead for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. Recalling the journeys of peasants to Beijing, several are walking - a group from Boston passed through Connecticut earlier this month - to the gathering outside the U.S. Capitol Thursday, the second anniversary of the crackdown.

Falun Gong followers say detentions, torture and deaths in custody all are on the rise in recent months. Diplomats say China, criticized lately by foreign governments and human rights groups for mass executions and the detention of several scholars, has been pressuring officials in Asia and the West to distance themselves from Falun Gong. The criticism did not prevent the International Olympic Committee on Friday from granting Beijing the 2008 Summer Games. Police detain a Falun Gong supporter by gagging her with her protest banner last fall in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Thousands of the banned [group]'s supporters will gather at the U.S. Capitol this week.

Falun Gong supporters, connected by cellular phones, e-mail and websites, are mounting an international campaign of their own, in the hope of stirring overseas support for the longest sustained public challenge to the [party' name omitted] government in its 52-year rule of China.

"Unfortunately, the people in China now have no voice," says Gail Rachlin, a spokeswoman for Friends of Falun Gong in New York. "Those of us outside of China are free to express ourselves. We feel we're their voices."

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, was introduced in 1992 by a former government grain clerk and military trumpet player from Manchuria named Li Hongzhi. [...]. By practicing the exercises and studying the works of Master Li, adherents attempt to cultivate - in the oft-repeated phrase - truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. By the mid-1990s, Falun Gong claimed as many as 100 million followers in China, far more than the Chinese [party' name omitted] Party's 64.5 million members.

Once, Amy Lee practiced Falun Gong openly, joining fellow adherents to do the exercises each morning in the park across from the Guangzhou fashion house where she was director of design. Falun Gong was legal then, its virtues even extolled in some state-controlled newspapers and television programs by officials eager to embrace a homegrown "science" that they hoped would help contain health care costs.

But not all the coverage was positive. In 1998, the prominent Chinese physicist He Zuoxio told a television audience that the practice had led one of his students to become mentally unstable. The following year, the [party name omitted] Party member criticized Falun Gong again in a widely circulated magazine article - arousing the ire of Falun Gong.

In April 1999, 10,000 practitioners surrounded party headquarters in Beijing to demand an end to the negative reports. The demonstration was peaceful, with most followers simply meditating quietly for several hours before heading home.

But the government, alarmed by the unprecedented sit-in, arrested hundreds of Falun Gong organizers. Worried about the size and apparent organization of the movement - and dismayed to learn that it included government employees, soldiers and party members - President Jiang Zemin branded Falun Gong an "[Jiang Zemin government's slanderous term omitted]," and in July 1999 the government banned it.

In the last two years, tens of thousands of practitioners have been sent to labor camps and so-called transformation centers, where they are pressured to renounce Li and Falun Gong. Reports have surfaced of authorities denying followers sleep, abusing them sexually, shocking them with electric batons and beating them, sometimes to death.

Falun Gong followers say more than 250 adherents have died in government custody since the crackdown began. In its annual report on human rights earlier this year, the U.S. State Department estimated the deaths of at least 100. Independent groups have not been allowed the access necessary to confirm the numbers.

"Clearly people have died, there's no doubt about that - and died under extraordinarily suspicious circumstances," says Mickey Spiegel, a China expert with Human Rights Watch in New York. "And they shouldn't have been in custody in the first place."

Chinese officials have acknowledged some of the deaths, but they maintain that abuses do not occur. They say [Jiang Zemin government's slanderous terms omitted].

Falun Gong adherents say the practice prohibits any killing, including suicide. Both houses of Congress have passed resolutions against the crackdown.

After the government ban, Lee continued to practice Falun Gong quietly in her home. Then last May, she says, she learned one of her friends in Guangzhou had died at a detention center nearby. She says Gao Xianming choked to death while being force-fed by guards. That's when she took her banner to Tiananmen Square.

She spent a month in detention before her husband was able to gain her freedom. A [party name omitted] Party member and government employee, he promised that she would stop practicing Falun Gong, and he paid a fine. Then he bowed to pressure to divorce her. A court granted him sole custody of Dou Dou.

Cast out of her home, unable to see her daughter and followed constantly by state security, Lee fled China earlier this year. She has been granted asylum by the U.S. government. It could not be determined Friday how many asylum requests the State Department has granted to Falun Gong followers.

Falun Gong followers say the pace of the persecution is quickening. Of the 250 deaths during the past two years, they say, more than 100 occurred in the past six months, and more than 50 in the past month.

In June, the Chinese government tightened laws against Falun Gong with a new directive indicating that followers who distribute information about the group or the crackdown can be prosecuted under subversion laws. Punishment for such violations includes death.

Critics say Beijing is expanding its campaign beyond China proper. In May, authorities in Hong Kong, where Falun Gong remains legal, denied entry to about 100 followers, including U.S. citizens, during a visit by Jiang. And officials in Japan, Australia and the United States say Chinese officials have pressured them to distance themselves from Falun Gong in their countries.

Connecticut was drawn into that campaign earlier this year when Gov. John G. Rowland signed a proclamation recognizing Falun Dafa here. Chinese officials complained, and the administration quietly sent a letter of apology to the Chinese consulate in New York.

"People are deceived by the lies of the Chinese government," says Pin Li, a homemaker from Xian who lives in Storrs. "Of course Falun Gong is not an [Jiang Zemin government's slanderous term omitted]. It only teaches people truthfulness, compassion and forbearance."

With little public practice or protest now in China, it is unclear how many continue to follow Falun Gong, but it is believed there are millions, connected by the Internet and word of mouth. [...].

[...]

After six months in the United States, Amy Lee says it remains painful to talk about her experiences in China. But by speaking this week in Washington, she says, she hopes she can help bring an end to the persecution back home.

"It is the shame of China," she says. "I hope it will stop soon because I miss my daughter very much, and my old parents miss me."