Saturday, July 7, 2001 00:01 PDT

Mingjing Xue says she spent more than 100 days in a Chinese labor camp, where she and other practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement were not allowed to speak, meditate or even close their eyes.

At one point, she and another person were handcuffed together to the window of their cell.

"This position made us unable to squat or use the toilet," she said. "For three days and two nights, we were not given any food or water, nor were we allowed to sleep."

The 53-year-old Chinese resident was one of 11 people who boarded vans in Los Angeles on Friday for a cross-country trip to protest persecution in China that they claim took the lives of 15 women in a labor camp last month.

Others left San Francisco, with their first stop set for Sacramento.

During send-off rallies outside the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles and City Hall in San Francisco, speakers gave personal accounts of mistreatment in China while blaming the June 20 deaths of the Falun Gong practitioners on beatings by guards at the Laogai labor camp in Heilongjiang Province.

"We are traveling the entire breadth of America to send an SOS," said Gina Sanchez, an organizer of the trip in Los Angeles. "We are seeking every means diplomatic, legal and humanitarian to stop any further killing of innocent people in China."

[...]

During the government's two-year crackdown on the spiritual movement, thousands of followers have been sent to labor camps.

[...]

Falun Gong followers deny those allegations and say 250 followers have died from police brutality since July 1999.

Sanchez expected as many as 3,000 people from throughout the country to converge on Washington on July 17 for rallies and meetings with lawmakers.

http://www.inlandempireonline.com/news/ap/20010707/CA_Banned_Sect_Journey_32 172N.shtml