Hartford Courant: Storrs Woman Joins Protest

By Matthew Hay Brown

August 22, 2001

A Connecticut woman has joined a hunger strike in Washington, D.C., to protest Beijing's crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement in China.

Li Pin, a homemaker from Storrs who walked from Boston to Washington last month to demonstrate at the U.S. Capitol, joined about a dozen hunger strikers outside the Chinese Embassy on Sunday, Falun Gong spokeswoman Tracy Zhu said.

Those protesters, and others outside Chinese embassies and consulates in New York, London, Toronto and other cities, are demanding the immediate release of 130 Falun Gong adherents on a hunger strike at a labor camp in China.

Falun Gong says the prisoners at Masanjia labor camp in the northeastern province of Liaoning began their hunger strike three weeks ago after officials failed to release practitioners whose sentences had ended. The movement says Masanjia officials have used rape and torture to pressure adherents to renounce their beliefs.

Falun Gong says more than 20,000 practitioners have been sent without trial to labor camps and more than 260 have died in custody in the two years since the [party's name omitted] government banned the movement as an [Jiang Zemin government's slanderous term omitted].

The Chinese government says Falun Gong practitioners have not been mistreated.

On Monday, the U.S. State Department expressed concern over reports that Chinese courts had sentenced as many as 45 adherents to up to 13 years in prison.

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said the sentences were handed down for such activities as helping organize protests, manufacturing banners and printing leaflets. He suggested that the Chinese action may be in violation of the freedom of expression provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China has signed.

"We've raised with China on many occasions our concerns about the crackdown on the Falun Gong, and reports of torture and mistreatment of detained and imprisoned practitioners," Reeker said. "And we're going to continue to raise those issues."

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