September 22, 2006

(Clearwisdom.net) This week sixteen Kansas cities heard from three Kansas residents about what they say is an ongoing campaign of oppression in one of America's main trading partners.

Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa), used as a way to improve the body and mind, consists of exercise, meditation and teachings rooted in ancient Chinese culture.

El Dorado was one of the stops for the Falun Dafa Association's "SOS Car Tour."

According to information provided by tour members, the practice of Falun Gong has been banned by the Chinese Communist Party since July of 1999.

That, said the association, is because of its popularity, with the number of practitioners (10 million) [editor: actual number is closer to 100 million] exceeding the number of card-holding party members.

According to the association, practitioners in China are being sent to brainwashing centers, prisons and forced labor camps in an attempt to make them give up their beliefs.

So far, the group said, nearly 3,000 practitioners have been confirmed to have died from torture, with thousands taken to mental hospitals to be injected with nerve-damaging substances and more than 100,000 believed to be in forced labor camps.

On March 9 of this year, according to the association, a journalist escaped from China after providing to the world the first information about Falun Gong practitioners being locked up in a concentration camp and their organs being harvested for transplant operations. [Editor's note: In March this year, a Chinese journalist stationed in Japan came to the U.S. and told newspaper Epoch Times about the organ harvesting.]

"That has a lot to do with the principles of the Chinese Communist Party," said Falun Gong practitioner Felice Boeue of Leawood about why practitioners are being persecuted in China.

She was born in China and came to this country from Thailand.

Accompanying her were Jane Huang, who was also born in China and grew up in Taiwan, and Gary Du, who was born and raised in China.

All three are Falun Gong practitioners.

In America, Boeue said, people will see the phrase "In God We Trust" on their money.

However, she said, "the Chinese Communist Party does not want you to trust, to believe this God," because it is an atheist party.

"Here we talk about compassion, love and tolerance," Boeue said, but in China fighting seems to be at the center of the societal theme imposed by the Chinese Communist Party.

"The Mafia times one million" is how she described the party.

"If you talk to them you assume they are honest," Boeue said of the Chinese Communist Party, but normally that is not the case.

"They lie because that is how they gain power," she said.

"We are not the only group they persecute," Boeue said, adding there are more than 100,000 people in jail in China because they are Christians.

Catholics, Buddhists, followers of Llama, people in the democratic movement and political dissidents are also being persecuted, she said.

If a group does "not obey and follow everything the party says," Boeue said, "they become enemies" of the Chinese Communist Party.

Actually, she said, "in China, if you have a group of 100 people you're in trouble."

If the people in mainland China could live exactly as they would like to, Boeue said, that would be a reflection of the way people live in Taiwan.

Taiwan people are free to do whatever they want to, she said, and they also maintain the traditional Chinese culture.

Boeue said the Chinese people would love to have their Chinese culture back.

However, she said, during the Cultural Revolution which occurred after communism took over China the Communist Party eliminated everything that was part of the actual Chinese culture.

"They want the people to buy into whatever is in Communism," Boeue said.

In China, she said, there is a "party culture."

That, she said, means that from a "very young age" children are taught to say "they do not love their father or their mother," but instead the Communist Party or a figurehead like Chairman Mao.

"They want people to grow up thinking the Communist Party is the country, it's the race," she said. "It's not."

What it comes down to, she said, is the imposing of a dictatorship and a one-party system which does "not allow anybody to say anything different from what the party says."

More information can be obtained at www.fdkansas.net or at www.faluninfo.net.