Tuesday, January 21, 2003

By MATT KATZ

Courier-Post Staff

The 12-year-old's eyelids closed and his brow furrowed as he followed his father's commands in soft Mandarin Chinese. He stretched his hands outward and then over his head, forcing the sleeves of his oversized sweatshirt to roll off his arms.

Performed every day in his Cherry Hill apartment, these movements have kept Kevin Yang and his family healthy, enabled his father Michael to quit smoking and prevented family arguments for years, the Yangs say.

But across the globe in China, these same movements have landed Michael's 55-year-old sister in prison, put untold relatives of South Jerseyans in labor camps and resulted in the deaths of hundreds.

These are the complexities of Falun Gong - [persecuted] in communist China but hailed as a miracle cure for life's ills among its practitioners, many of whom live in pockets of the United States.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, was started in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, who now lives in New York. It is a [set of five gentle exercises] coupled with teachings based on truthfulness, compassion and tolerance.

Publicly, the Yang family is part of a growing American campaign to fight the arrests and alleged murders of Falun Gong practitioners in China by drawing attention to their cases and lobbying congressional representatives.

"It is my hope that once my sister's case is exposed, they will be very careful in how they treat her," said Jingduan "Michael" Yang.

Privately, the Yangs' practice of Falun Gong indicates the spiritual movement has taken root where there's a significant Chinese-born population, including South Jersey. Some 1,500 people of Chinese descent live in Cherry Hill, and the Yang family is part of a group of a dozen people who practice every Saturday at Cooper River Park in Pennsauken.

"Falun Dafa teaches human beings to follow the nature of the universe," said Yang, who was a neurologist in China and is now training to be a psychiatrist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. "Most people feel more calm and peaceful, and their relationships with others improve."

According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, 545 Falun Gong practitioners have been confirmed killed from torture and forced labor at the hands of the Chinese authorities, and hundreds of thousands have been detained.

One of these prisoners is Yang's sister, Jingfang Yang. In October, the married 55-year-old mother, who lived in a province near Shanghai, got a phone call from a man who wanted to order something from her small business.

"He said he needed it urgently," Yang said. "She went to go meet the guy, and she never returned."

The family did not hear from her for a week. Then police officers came to search her 79-year-old mother's apartment, looking for Falun Gong materials, Yang said.

"At the time they didn't tell my mom or my sister's family what my sister did wrong, where they took her, why she was detained," he said.

In December, the family was told by Chinese authorities that Jingfang was being held with hundreds of other Falun Gong practitioners. Yang fears she will be sent to a labor camp where, Falun Gong groups and human rights organizations say, practitioners are put into " transformation" classes where they're forced to write letters denouncing the practice.

"The problem is the pressure is so immense and coming down from the top level of the government, from (President) Jiang Zemin himself," said Shiyu Zho, spokesman for the Falun Dafa Information Center. "And if they don't obey the order from the top-level government then they will probably lose their jobs, their bonuses, their benefits.

Yang and other Falun Gong supporters describe labor camps where prisoners face forced sleep deprivation, beatings and the bounding of hands and feet. [...]

"She benefited greatly from this practice," Yang, 40, said of his sister. "She became a very compassionate, tolerant person. She used to be short-tempered and pretty aggressive. She has had very good health, and never gets sick. ... She couldn't really understand why this wonderful practice had to be banned and people had to be prosecuted for this."

Jingfang Yang was actually jailed before for the same offense, but her brother is more worried now because he fears the labor camps.

Sharing his fears are American officials.

"We want the president and the administration to know that we care a lot about the persecution of these people," said Rep. Rob Andrews, D-N.J., who said the American campaign against China's treatment of Falun Gong mirrors that of the fight against apartheid.

U.S. officials watching

Andrews is writing a letter, to be signed by others in the state's congressional delegation, urging the Bush administration to pressure China to allow Falun Gong practitioners to join relatives in New Jersey.

"If members of the U.S. Congress ask and call attention to the problem, over time it will make a difference," he said.

Similarly, Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J., has met with victims of Chinese oppression of Falun Gong and has written a letter to the State Department seeking help.

But even as U.S. public and political opinion mounts to support Falun Gong, the Chinese government's stranglehold on the practice hasn't softened.

[...]

Yang said China's claims are bogus and the government itself staged the Tiananmen Square burnings. "Because they can't control it, they try to destroy it," he said.

Zho, of the Falun Dafa Information Center and a computer science professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, said about 30 detainees are known to be related to Americans. While more than 500 are confirmed dead, he said, more than 1,600 are feared to have been killed.

"The top leadership of the Chinese government simply cannot tolerate such a large group of people practicing or believing something other than their own communist ideology," Zho said, noting that communism is Russian-based and Falun Gong is based on traditional Chinese culture.

'I found the truth' Ying Chen, 34, of Marlton, has seen this intolerance up close. Her mother, a renowned musician, was detained for a month and her brother for 1 1/2 years for practicing Falun Gong, she said.

In June 2000, she said, more than a dozen people stormed her brother's Beijing home, dragged him out of bed, ransacked his possessions and took Falun Gong-related material. He was "subjected to severe torture many times," she said, and not allowed to sleep for as many as 10 days at a time.

"They were using all kinds of torture to make him say he wouldn't practice Falun Gong anymore," she said.

A surveillance system monitors his activities now that he's free. Still, her brother practices because of the physical and spiritual benefits he gets, Chen said.

"If I was in China, I would probably do the same," said Chen, 34, who came to the United States 15 years ago and works for Cendant Mortgage as a systems manager. "I found the truth in life and I'm not going to lie out of coercion. ... It's such a beautiful practice."

Indeed, these are the universal feelings of Falun Gong practitioners, even 12-year-old Kevin Yang. A portrait of Master Li, as the founder of Falun Gong is called, hangs in his family's living room along with a poster of the Falun Gong symbol.

"It really helps with your health, your physical condition and the way you look at things," he said. "If in school someone starts a fight I would fight back, and now I just leave them alone."

He said his father used to get angry at him often, and the Yangs recalled one time when he threw dishes on the floor in disgust. Not anymore.

"The three of us have the same principles, so we watch each other," said Michael Yang, who credits Falun Gong for his decisions to quit smoking two packs a day and to stop gambling. And his wife Laura's allergies and ulcer disappeared once she started, he said.

Kevin, who had lived with his now-imprisoned aunt in China before joining his parents here in 1998, reads Falun Gong books in Chinese every day. He said his friends in the sixth grade at Rosa International School know he practices Falun Gong.

"They do their thing on Sunday," he said. "I do my thing every day."

Key points

About Falun Gong:

-- Falun Gong is considered a spiritual movement, not a religion. It incorporates five sets of meditative exercises meant to facilitate energy flows, or chi, to maintain health.

-- At its core are theoretical principles, rooted in traditional Chinese culture, stressing truthfulness, compassion and tolerance.

-- Li Hongzhi founded the movement in 1992, but there are no Falun Gong preachers or organized structure requiring paid membership. Followers learn the practice from friends, family, the Internet, videos and DVDs, and books.

-- It was banned in 1999 by the communist Chinese government, which [defames] movement [...] and continues to jail people in labor camps for practicing it. The government [uses] self-immolation [to slander] Falun Gong, a charge practitioners reject as propaganda.

-- Supporters say it's practiced by at least 70 million people in China and 10,000 in the United States.

http://www.courierpostonline.com/news/southjersey/m012103j.htm