November 30, 2005

There are murders happening on the other side of the world right now and it's not because of war. It's not because of famine or a plague. But people killing people, people dying because of their beliefs.

According to Amnesty International's Web site, the Chinese government has arrested more than 20,000 practitioners of Falun Gong -- a spiritual movement in China -- with at least 10 of them dying while in custody.

Sheldon Lu, the head of Pittsburgh's chapter of Falun Gong, said it's even worse than that.

Lu said the figure relates to more than 100,000 people arrested because of their practice, with between 700 to 3,000 people killed while in custody. [Editor's note: As of December 1, 2005, there were 2792 confirmed deaths due to the persecution.]

Falun Gong involves a series of five [...] exercises that are said to affect the body in good health.

By doing them, the body is said to undergo a healthy universality that allows it to become in tune with, truthfulness, compassion and tolerance, the three primary principles of the Falun Gong.

The group's open resistance to the Communist government has caused its members to be arrested and brutally repressed in some cases. Numbers of protests in China's Tiananmen Square have been broken up.

Lu said that the government is making the practitioners look like a "threat to national security."

Liu Xiaoyan, another Pittsburgh practitioner, gives the Falun Gong credit for healing her body holistically.

Under an intolerable amount of stress brought on by her rapid need to learn English when she immigrated to the United States in 1995, Liu suffered from both short- and long-term memory loss.

She took to practicing the Falun Gong when medicine proved useless, and in fact, found through the exercises a rejuvenation of her health and well-being.

Practitioners of the Falun Gong say that many people, particularly in China, have found it to be an exceptional health rescue.

In Pittsburgh, the practitioners are trying to raise consciousness for Falun Gong. They want to make it known that it's a peaceful exercise and to shed light on the oppressed people on the other side of the globe.

According to a U.S. Department of State report from 2005, "The [Chinese] government banned the Falun Gong spiritual group in 1999, criminal proceedings involving accused Falun Gong activists were held almost entirely outside the formal court system."

The report added, "Several hundred Falun Gong adherents reportedly have died in detention due to torture, abuse and neglect since the crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999."

The State Department also reported that "there were reports of persons, including Falun Gong adherents, sentenced to psychiatric hospitals for expressing their political or religious beliefs. Some reportedly were forced to undergo electric shock treatments."

According to Lu, the best thing to do about it is to expose the atrocity.

"We need as many people's help and support as we can get," he said, after finishing his exercises in front of the Frick fountain. "[With] attention, it might come to an end."