(Clearwisdom.net) On April 20, 2004, Ian Johnson, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his reporting on China's repression of Falun Gong as Beijing's correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, was invited to discuss his new book Wild Grass, Three Stories of Change in Modern China on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" talk show. Johnson's new book, "Wild Grass," tells three stories of Chinese citizens including Falun Gong practitioner Chen Zixiu, a grandmother who was tortured to death.

During the show, Johnson described in detail the compelling story of Chen Zixiu, "People, as I said, had been practicing Falun Gong in parks, and she (Chen Zixiu) thought, 'Well, maybe if I go to a park early in the morning, I can find some other practitioners and ask them where we can go and protest.'(1) She was quite a naive person, quite a simple person. She'd been in a factory her whole life. She had had very little formal education and was, you know, basically barely literate. So she goes to this park, and she's looking around to see, 'Do I see any people practicing Falun Gong?' And she's completely out of place here. She's dressed in a simple sort of peasant outfit. And these police officers come up to her and ask her, 'Are you an adherent to Falun Gong?' And one of the things that Falun Gong teaches is that you're not supposed to lie, and she said, 'Yes, I am.'"

"That was it. She was detained." Johnson continued.

"She was held in one of these centers, re-education. They were called transformation centers where they tried to transform you to get you to change your mind, to renounce your belief. And she refused to. They asked her again and again. They held her there. They called her daughter and said, 'Look, you need to come down and get your mother to change her mind. You need to pay a big fine.'"

Johnson said that the daughter didn't go down, and so her mother was held another night. "They tried to get her again to recant. She wouldn't, and they began to beat her. And I was able to talk to witnesses in the cell and people who had smuggled letters out of prison who describe how she was beaten and ultimately beaten to death."

When asked whether the brutality and the killing of Mrs. Chen was an aberration or an isolated occurrence, Johnson said, "Well, not really. By conservative estimates, thousands of people were detained for their belief in Falun Gong, and dozens of people were killed. Falun Gong claims that hundreds of people were killed. That's hard to document. But human rights organizations and conservative estimates would show that certainly dozens of people died in police custody."(2)

In response to the question why the repression of Falun Gong was so brutal in the city of Weihai where Mrs. Chen was from, Johnson replied, "Well, the government used a system that it used actually for economic reforms. It sort of holds the lower-level person responsible for fulfilling goals. And it's like that with, say, if you want to reform the economy, you say, 'Well, you have to privatize so many companies.' The lower-level official actually signs a contract with you and says, 'OK, I promise to fulfill X-Y-Z goals,' and they do it. With Falun Gong, the government called all the provincial leaders to Beijing and said, 'You have to stop people from coming to Beijing. We don't care what you do. "No measure is excessive,"' to quote the order that they gave, 'but you just stop people from coming to Beijing and protesting.' (1) And so the provincial officials then went down to the county, went down to the city and on and on and just sort of said, 'You have to stop people from coming from your county, from your city, from your village.' And so the local officials just had a very strong interest in preventing anybody from doing anything like that.

Now in this particular city, it's not too far from Beijing, so it was possible for people to take a bus. Some people even rode their bicycles to Beijing. And some people even walked. And so they had a large number of people who were going to Beijing, and then they just implemented very harsh tactics against them. Basically they just beat the faith out of people. If they didn't repent, if they didn't give up Falun Gong, they were beaten, and several people died."(2)

Johnson also mentioned that he spoke to some local officials who thought that the repression was a terrible mistake. "Many people, many local officials, felt really bad about what had been happening. They knew a lot of the people who were involved, and they thought that this is not the smartest way to handle things." He added, "These people weren't criminals. They didn't need to be thrown in jail and beaten."

When asked about whether Chinese have the same access to the kind of range of opinions and material on the Internet, Johnson commented, "Well, I think the first thing one has to remember is that China is still largely a rural country and still very much a poor country, and the Internet use is not that wide, not as wide as in some countries, like in the West. But in the cities it has had an impact, but the material is controlled. Sites are blocked. Anything with sensitive material on human rights or Taiwan or Tibet or any issues like that, they're all blocked. And chat rooms and things like that are often monitored, so that there's like often a 15- or 30-second delay in a chat room. And if there's anything really bad or something that somebody's written, the government can just snip that out."

Johnson acknowledged that when he communicated with the Falun Gong people, he ended up having to send encrypted e-mail. "But you still have to be careful because you can still tell where the e-mail was sent from, which computer. So it's still--if the government wants to keep a lid on something, they can still do it, despite the Internet," he added.

(1) Falun Gong practitioners traveled to Beijing to exercise their constitutional right to appeal to the government, not to protest.

(2) To date, 942 practitioners are verified to have died in the persecution, although the actual figure is believed to be much higher.