01/30/2003

(Clearwisdom.net)

In late July, 1999, Zhiwan Dong received a chilling phone call from his sister. Dong, a graduate student in molecular medicine at the UT Health Science Center, had come to San Antonio from the Shandong Province of China, where the rest of his family continued to live. His sister told him that Chinese police officers had knocked on their mother's door, grabbed her, and taken her away to an unknown location.

Dong's mother was neither a criminal nor a political dissident. She saw herself as no threat to Chinese society. A retired provincial government worker who doted on her family, she filled her spare time trying to attain a higher degree of enlightenment through the practice of Falun Gong, establishing herself as a local contact person who taught it on a volunteer basis.

[...]

"Police officers came to my mother's home the day the [persecution] initiated," Dong recalls, during a break from his studies at the Health Science Center. "Afterward, she was detained for 30 days, in a detention center, even though it's illegal to detain someone for more than 15 days without charging them with something. They didn't allow family members to visit."

Since China launched its [persecution of] Falun Gong, hundreds of thousands of practitioners have allegedly faced a similar detention, with more than 100,000 sent to labor camps, and more than 500 tortured to death by police.

Falun Gong advocates believe the systematic persecution has escalated in recent months, and they have stepped up their own protest efforts. They recently united for a three-day worldwide appeal, and Texas practitioners are in the early stages of what they plan to be a year-long protest outside the Chinese consulate in Houston, with demonstrators camping out in shifts.

To many Westerners, who are only casually aware of the practice, the subsequent public-relations battle between the Chinese government and Falun Gong loyalists has been confusing and bewildering. If Falun Gong is, as its followers state, merely a spiritual discipline that emphasizes "truth, compassion, and tolerance," why does it scare the Chinese government so much? [...]

Such social critiques surely made Chinese communist leader Jiang Zemin anxious, particularly considering Falun Gong's growth of popularity in the '90s. Jiang's all-out offensive against Falun Gong also recalled Mao Zedong's brutal Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the '60s, which tried to rid China of all its pre-Communist traditions. Some Falun Gong advocates have suggested that Jiang doesn't want to compete with anything that reminds China of its ancient history.

"I think there are some personal reasons from the top leaders of China," says Victor Fong, a local Falun Gong practitioner. "He's not an elected official, he took the reins of power after the 1989 Tiananmen Square events, so he's not yet very justified in people's hearts. He's very nervous about his position, and he personally initiated this [persecution]."

In San Antonio, a small, but committed group of practitioners (usually between five and 12 people) meet Saturday mornings at Unlimited Thought Bookstore, on Blanco Road, to cultivate and enhance their xinxing ("mind-nature"). One of the regulars at Unlimited Thought is Hongyi Pan, a research fellow specializing in studying the AIDS-related virus at UT Health Science Center. In 1995, he moved from Beijing to San Antonio for graduate study.

About five years ago, Pan explains, his father-in-law started practicing Falun Gong in China; his brother-in-law subsequently took it up and introduced it to Pan and his wife. "At that time, I was putting a lot of time into my studying and research, so I kind of hesitated," Pan says. "But later my wife developed very severe allergies and she could not sleep, but the practice helped her to completely recover."

"It's very simple," he adds. "It's very gentle, very slow, and very relaxing. It's very easy to learn. You don't have to spend hours at it. It's really flexible. You might just do five minutes. It has a therapeutic effect, but it's about going to a higher level. It's not just about treating diseases. When I started practicing, I was very busy and feeling the pressure from my studies. But after practicing, you feel more relaxed, and it's easier to deal with pressures and conflicts. And you feel very energized. You can really feel your life changing for the better."

San Antonio resident Annabelle Tiemann taught fifth grade at Kelly Elementary School, and recently retired after 27 years in the public-school system. She swears by the power of Falun Gong.

"My acupuncturist introduced me to it, but I actually learned the exercises from Hongyi and his wife," Tiemann says. "I was a practitioner the last three years I was teaching, and it just made an incredible difference - helping you to have more energy, to sleep better. More importantly than all that is just your mental outlook and the degree of acceptance and calmness with which you can deal with everything."

[...]

But literally the most explosive charge against Falun Gong is that its devotees practice self-immolation. The only basis for this argument comes from a controversial piece of video footage taken on January 23, 2001. The government alleged that two Falun Gong members burned themselves to death in Tiananmen Square, and repeatedly broadcast it on national television.

Washington Post reporter Phillip Pan went to the hometown of one of the victims, Liu Chunling, and found that no one ever saw her practice Falun Gong. Seven months after the incident, the International Education Development Bureau concluded that the entire event had been staged by the government.

"It's the government trying to propagandize," Fong says about such attacks. "With all the media controlled by the government in China, the use of propaganda to spread these kinds of confusions is common."

Dong says local police departments in China face pressure from the federal level to decrease the number of Falun Gong practitioners to less than 5 percent of the population. As a result, practitioners are allegedly subjected to brutal beatings, tortured with electric needles and cattle prods, or forced to walk barefoot in the snow for hours, until they renounce Falun Gong.

He says police officers forced his mother to sign a pledge that she'd quit. "Her phone is monitored, so anytime I call home, I have to be careful about what I say," Dong claims. "They ended up sending her to a brainwashing class, what they would call a re-education class. You're forced to watch TV footage, with everything negative about Falun Gong that you can imagine."

Tiemann emphasizes the international growth of Falun Gong can only strengthen the resolve of Chinese followers. "I think the thing that surprises the Chinese most now is when they get any word from the rest of the world, how in Australia, Taiwan, United States, we can all practice it freely. Everybody all over practices, and there's no thought of persecuting us, so they're amazed when they find out." ?

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