AFP: Falungong pressures Bush over New York acupuncturist jailed in China

Saturday September 8, 2:21 AM

WASHINGTON, Sept 7 (AFP) - China's banned Falungong spiritual group on Friday called on President George W. Bush to use his upcoming trip to China to demand the release of a New York-based adherent jailed for spying.

US-based practitioners are pressuring Bush to make the plight of acupuncturist and US resident Teng Chunyan a major focus of his visit next month.

"We call on President Bush to listen, to listen to his own people, when he visits China next month," said Falungong spokesman Erping Zhang.

"We call on our president to do all in his power to free Teng Chunyan and bring her home," he said at a press conference.

Bush is due to attend the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) in Shanghai in October, and is then due to move on to Beijing to see top Chinese leaders, with whom his administration has already had a strained relationship.

Falungong activists hope Bush will be encouraged by the fact that US pressure has been credited with freeing a group of scholars with US links in recent months, including Gao Zhan, who teaches in Washington.

In the past, visits by presidents and other senior US officials have prompted China to free high profile dissidents, as an act of goodwill or to ease domestic political pressure on visitors from the United States.

Teng, 38, was jailed last December for three years on a charge of gathering intelligence, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.

She was arrested the previous May after she videotaped what the group described as evidence of human rights abuses inside Chinese mental hospitals and passed the tape to Western journalists.

As Teng is not yet a US citizen, but a US resident, the United States has no right to consular access.

Teng gave up her acupuncture practice on Fifth Avenue in New York to travel to China to collect evidence of the government's maltreatment of Falungong members.

The Chinese government has never defined what constitutes state intelligence, giving it wide-ranging authority to arrest citizens as well as foreign visitors who obtain information on a large spectrum of topics.

Since the Chinese government banned Falungong in July 1999, more than 10,000 members of the movement [...] have been sent to "reeducation through labor" camps, practitioners say.

Exiled members of the group have since mounted a highly vocal campaign against the Chinese leadership, which currently includes a hunger strike outside Chinese embassies and consulates in the United States and around the world.

Although Falungong maintains it has no political agenda, analysts say Chinese leaders are paranoid over the group's ability to organize large groups of supporters at short notice -- forming one of the few threats to [party's name omitted] Party control.

Falungong founder Li Hongzhi lives in exile in the United States.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010907/1/1es3v.html

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