Newsday: Silencing the Movement Crackdown from afar

September 6, 2001

FOR TWO YEARS NOW, Janet Xiong has felt the chill.

In the streets of New York, her adopted city, there have been taunts and jeers against the meditation movement she follows, called Falun Gong. In her native China, friends have been hauled off to prison for those same beliefs.

Halfway around the world, the 47-year- old city researcher from Flushing was told, Chinese authorities were asking questions about her. Police wanted to know about the role that Xiong, a U.S. citizen who arrived from China 14 years ago, plays in the Falun Gong spiritual movement, target of a brutal crackdown in China. First, the word came back from a Falun Gong practitioner from Forest Hills, who was detained and interrogated while in China on business. "He told me, 'Never go back again because they are watching you,'" she said. Then another practitioner, a woman, was questioned. "She was asked the same questions about us," Xiong said.

The Chinese government's relentless drive to beat down the popular meditation movement echoes, faint but chilling, in New York. Government officials have appeared at "seminars" in Manhattan to decry [Jiang Zemin government's slanderous terms omitted], egging on local Chinese immigrants to oppose the movement. In one session, the consul-general told his audience that immigrants who have not become U.S. citizens were expected to obey Chinese laws, which ban Falun Gong. Further poisoning the atmosphere for local Falun Gong practitioners, powerful organizations in Chinatown -- which had expressed no concern about Falun Gong before the government crackdown started in July 1999 -- began holding countermarches against the group, their charges echoing the government's virulent accusations. Even small details have not escaped the government's hawklike attention: The New York consulate contacted a councilman in Queens when he issued a routine proclamation praising Falun Gong.

It is a highly unusual attempt by a foreign government to tackle a spiritual movement within U.S. borders -- complementing a campaign inside China that the State Department and human rights monitors say includes widespread brainwashing and torture. "It just shows how desperate, in my experience, the PRC [People's Republic of China] really is," said Gail Rachlin, Manhattan-based spokeswoman for Falun Gong.

For those who have watched Falun Gong adherents practice their slow-motion exercises in public parks, it's hard to imagine what the fuss is about.

The movement's founder is Li Hongzhi, once a clerk and trumpet player in China. He studied with a Buddhist monk and then Taoist masters, he told Newsday in 1999 in one of his rare interviews. Li, said to live at an undisclosed location in Queens, explained that in the late 1980s, his spiritual masters encouraged him to teach qigong, a traditional Chinese meditative exercise.

[...] In 1992, Li began to teach. According to the Master, as he is called, there is a wheel of energy within the lower abdomen that spins off a healing force. (Falun Gong means "wheel of the law.") Through exercises and meditation, followers try to cultivate this force, which Li says brings both mental and physical benefits. The idea that the connection between body and mind can improve health is hardly new in the Far East, but the focus on physical well-being -- Li, 50, says he has never been sick -- helped make the movement hugely popular in China.

"The Chinese government chose for a long time just to ignore them," said James Richardson, dean of the law department of the University of Nevada in Reno and a sociologist who has studied the crackdown on Falun Gong. "They were under the guise of just an exercise regime. The medical care in many parts of China is so poor that the Chinese government actually recommends these exercise regimes."

[...]

But in April 1999, Falun Gong members protested outside a student newspaper in China that would not recant its negative coverage. The government refused to order it; 10,000 Falun Gong adherents responded by protesting outside party headquarters in Beijing, seeking recognition for their movement. While Li says he has no interest in political might, this show of force sent shock waves through [party's name omitted] leadership in China, [...]

[...]

On July 22, 1999, President Jiang Zemin ordered a crackdown. According to Falun Gong, 50,000 of its practitioners have been detained in China; 10,000 sentenced to labor "re-education" camps; 1,000 committed to mental hospitals where torture and forced use of psychiatric drugs are common. So far, the group says, it has identified 265 people tortured to death in police custody.

Amnesty International, finding that torture or force-feeding hunger strikers had caused many of the deaths in police .custody, called the abuses "appalling" and urged the international community to speak out. And a State Department report on religious freedom that covered the early months of the crackdown largely confirmed the Falun Gong allegations to that point. It said "there were numerous credible reports of police involvement in beatings, detention under extremely harsh conditions, torture (including by electric shock and by having hands and feet shackled and linked with crossed steel chains), and other abuses of detained Falun Gong practitioners."

THE CHINESE CONSULATE in Manhattan is in a shopworn building that used to house a "motor inn" -- a portion of the sign is visible -- at the end of 42nd Street, across from the Hudson River. The ground floor has a brightly lit office where people line up for passports and visas.

In most consulates, the walls display colorful, scenic pictures of the homeland, a welcome to tourists. But at the Chinese Consulate, visitors are welcomed with posters featuring graphic pictures of dead bodies: charred by fire, ripped open with scissors, beaten on the head with a spade, hung from a rope.

[...]

These same posters, in English and Chinese, found their way into the hands of counterdemonstrators who jeered Falun Gong members when they marched through Chinatown on April 21. About 500 practitioners marched, hoping to counter the government propaganda campaign.

[...]

Wai Lind Lam, 54, a Falun Gong practitioner from Manhattan, said one of the opponents tried to burn her hair with a cigarette lighter during the China.town march.

"They said, 'Don't burn yourself,' and that kind of thing," said Yun Song, a 30-year-old actuarial consultant from Manhattan who is a Falun Gong practitioner. "This is one of many instances that we got disturbed or harassed."

Guan Liang, chairman of the umbrella group that led the Chinatown counterdemonstration, the United Chinese Associations of Greater New York, said in an interview that his association has not had contact with Chinese Consulate officials about Falun Gong.

And a spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York said he had no information about meetings between government officials and the Chinese community in New York about Falun Gong.

But information on a Web site maintained by the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan makes clear that the government has, in fact, been urging Liang and the New York Chinese community to join its crusade against Falun Gong.

[...]

ACROSS the country, Chinese consulates have not been shy about expressing that view to American elected .officials.

City Councilman Sheldon Leffler, a Queens Democrat, said he recalled issuing a proclamation on behalf of the council in support of Falun Gong practitioners on a Thursday. On Saturday, he went to his district office and found a two-page letter with a book and a videotape from the New York Chinese Consulate.

"It was basically saying they were disappointed I had presented such a proclamation," he said. Leffler didn't consider it threatening, but added, "When you get something from [party's name omitted] China saying you shouldn't have done this ... it's a bit of pressure."

But because of China's importance in international trade, officials in some U.S. cities, including Seattle, have rescinded proclamations. More than a dozen mayors have reported pressure from Chinese officials who often mention the importance of China-U.S. trade, The Associated Press reported.

In a speech in New York, Consul-General Zhang Hongxi even suggested that China's ban on Falun Gong was binding on Chinese immigrants living here if they have not yet become U.S. citizens.

"Of course, if you still hold the Chinese passports, that is, if you are still Chinese nationals without being naturalized as the U.S. citizens, you have dual obligations, you must abide by both the Chinese and the U.S. laws," he told the audience, according to a transcript on the consulate's Web site.

While the Chinese government can't enforce its ban in the United States, a number of New Yorkers have felt its force. In some cases, Falun Gong practitioners here said they've been unable to return to China to visit relatives.

Zhen Mei Xu, a 44-year-old Jackson Heights resident who works as a secretary at the United Nations, said she was turned back at Beijing International Airport when she went to visit her ailing father in August last year.

"I was not allowed to enter my own country," she said.

Wei Lu, 50, a textile designer from Manhattan who is an organizer of local Falun Gong activities, said she had gotten a passport extension pending a background check. "They canceled it," she said, adding that the consulate would not explain why. But Falun Gong practitioners assume the Chinese government knows of their connection to the group by photographing demonstrations or exercise sessions.

For some, the stakes have been higher.

Chunyan Teng, a Flushing woman who is a professor of traditional Chinese medicine at New York College for holistic Health, Education and Research in Syosset, was sentenced to three years in prison in China for leaking information about the abuse of Falun Gong adherents in mental hospitals to foreign reporters. The State Department has urged that Teng, 38, a legal permanent U.S. resident, be released on humanitarian grounds and allowed to join her family in the United States.

Last month, her mother, Yun Fang Qiu, 70, of Flushing, made a tearful plea at a news conference outside the Chinese Consulate for her daughter's release. "Chunyan did nothing but telling the truth," she said. "For telling the truth, she was put into prison and was tortured there."

The following week, a colleague at the school, Lorraine Kabacinski of Huntington Station, took part in a hunger strike for 48 hours to call attention to Teng's plight. "She actually introduced me to Falun Gong," Kabacinski said, adding that it had given her an inner calm. "I'm so grateful to her."

Janet Xiong, too, joined portions of a 130-hour sit-in across the street from the Chinese Consulate on 42nd Street, hoping to help Teng, a friend and .fellow Falun Gong practitioner in Flushing.

"We met almost every day, even in the snow," she said. "She was very determined. We practiced meditation for two years."

Xiong gestured toward the river. "You have the Statue of Liberty here -- New York is like a symbol of democracy," she said. "It's a harbor for liberty. But people are suffering in mainland China, and what are we doing here? Keeping quiet?"

For the first time in three interviews, Xiong's emotions pushed to the surface. As the emotions surged in her throat, she said she was crying. "I put myself in their shoes," Xiong said. "If I were there, I would probably do the same thing. I would probably be in jail. It's like something that could happen to me."

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