The Economist: Jiang almost meets the Falun Gong

May 10th 2001 THE campaign by China's president, Jiang Zemin, against the Falun Gong may be achieving partial success on the Chinese mainland, but supporters of the [...] movement in Hong Kong are far from cowed. During a visit to Hong Kong this week, Mr Jiang, who has made crushing the movement a personal quest, was subjected to the provocation of peaceful public protests by some 400 Falun Gong practitioners. Although he probably never caught sight of them-a huge police presence kept them well out of range-Mr Jiang was surely riled by their presence on sovereign Chinese territory. The Chinese-appointed Hong Kong leadership bent over backwards to keep Mr Jiang's irritation to a minimum. At the only place where the Chinese leader made a public appearance, some 3,000 police were deployed to ensure security. That was 1,000 more than were stationed around the same place-the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre-when it was used in 1997 for the ceremonies to mark Hong Kong's handover from Britain to China. And in 1997 the police had even more dignitaries to worry about than at the function Mr Jiang attended, the Fortune Global Forum-a three-day gathering of business leaders, senior officials and luminaries such as Bill Clinton, with whom he had a friendly hour-long chat. It was Mr Jiang's first visit to Hong Kong since his decision in July 1999 to outlaw the Falun Gong. Its followers plausibly estimate that since then many thousands have been detained, and scores killed. The problem for Mr Jiang is that the Falun Gong is a legally registered body in Hong Kong. To ban it there would require evidence of wrongdoing. As on the mainland, the Falun Gong's most egregious transgression in Hong Kong has been to stage occasional public protests that have mainly involved members' sitting in the lotus position or standing still and slowly moving their arms to harness the benign energy of the spinning wheel of the cosmos. Though China calls this disturbing public order, Hong Kong does not-at least, not yet. As with other religious groups, Mr Jiang can find plenty of examples of people harming themselves or others. But his argument that the Falun Gong [Chinese government's slanderous terms omitted], is particularly unconvincing in Hong Kong, where the [group] has a docile following of just a few hundred people. Hong Kong bends the knee Mr Jiang's struggle against the Falun Gong, part of a wider effort to keep control of a fast-evolving China, risks undermining the high degree of autonomy that Hong Kong is supposed to enjoy. In the build-up to Mr Jiang's visit, the Hong Kong immigration authorities turned away some 100 people at the airport who Falun Gong followers said were simply trying to enter the territory to join the [group]'s peaceful and officially authorised demonstrations. Many people in Hong Kong suspect that China secretly issued a blacklist of Falun Gong activists who were to be barred. Western governments, including Britain's and America's, have expressed concern about the exclusion. This was not exactly the image of Hong Kong that the organisers of the Fortune Global Forum wanted to project. But Mr Jiang was at least careful in his address to the gathering not to go on the attack against the Falun Gong. Instead, he pledged that "come what may" China would never change its "one country, two systems" policy for running Hong Kong. Yet this is unlikely to reassure many in Hong Kong, where the chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, is widely regarded as a poor leader who, under pressure, would do the bidding of his Chinese masters even to the extent of jeopardising the territory's freedoms. Earlier this year, some pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong called for the swift enactment of a law against subversion that they felt would enable the government to outlaw the [group]. The outcry this provoked from pro-democracy groups and the media appears to have deterred the government from taking up the suggestion, for now. "The government won't be rushed," says Michael DeGolyer of Hong Kong Baptist University. "Every time they touch such issues, there is an explosion." [...] But Mr Jiang sees the Falun Gong as a personal affront. The peaceful demonstration by some 10,000 practioners outside [party' name omitted] Party headquarters in Beijing in April 1999 caught him unawares and suggested that he had lost his grip over a security apparatus riddled with Falun Gong sympathisers. There is a danger that, if Hong Kong fails to keep the Falun Gong in check, Mr Jiang will increase the pressure on Mr Tung to introduce an anti-subversion bill. That would cause alarm among many groups and individuals who, if they lived on the other side of the border, would be considered subversives. http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=617136

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