UPI Feature: Falun Gong 'greets' Jiang at APEC (Excerpt)

By Ian Campbell

UPI Chief Economics Correspondent
From the Business & Economics Desk
Published 10/27/2002 3:54 PM

LOS CABOS, BAJA CALIFORNIA, Mexico, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- It was terrorists most of all and perhaps anti-globalization protesters who were feared.

The world's most powerful man, U.S. President George W. Bush, and the leaders of China and Japan and numerous other countries are present: huge and attractive targets to some.

But it would seem the only protesters in this unlikely spot for an international conference, the sun-baked peninsula of sea-surrounded desert that is Baja California, are the Falun Gong, practitioners of meditative exercises who have become victims of repression in China.

They are there, at the roadside in the pitiless sun, standing in a line holding a banner that says "Stop Repression of Falun Gong."

And they were there, too, in the van that took me from the airport, in the surprising form of a Swedish family: Mr. and Mrs. Nordstrand traveling with a baby of four months and a daughter of four years.

"Our protests are peaceful," Mrs. Nordstrand tells me, "People are tortured to death in China. We want to find a peaceful solution." What she says is documented.

According to Amnesty International, "many (Falun Gong) followers have been tortured. Some have been detained in psychiatric hospitals and forced to take drugs and at least 10 people have died in police custody in suspicious circumstances."

What is it that provokes the government's hostility?

Nordstrand says that the three principles of the Falun Gong are truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. The movement [...] is recent, formed only 10 years ago by a master, Li Hongzhi. It claims to be neither political nor religious, merely a "practice for improving mind, body and spirit."

Nordstrand says that the founder, now living [...] in New York, brought to millions an art that had been known previously only to a few masters. The group, she says, now has 70 million practitioners in China.

The Falun Gong movement was banned in China in July 1999. The Chinese government is thought to have been become nervous and hostile after the Falun Gong mobilized about 10,000 followers for a protest in front of the leadership compound in Beijing in April 1999.

The government accuses the Falun Gong of "organizing illegal gatherings" and "leaking state secrets."

Nordstrand blames Jiang Zemin above all for the crackdown.

"He is a dictator and he thinks everyone wants the same thing: power," she says.

When Jiang went to Iceland this year, Nordstrand tells me, the government there prevented Falun Gong followers from entering the country, to prevent demonstrations against the Chinese leader.

"The Icelandic people were shocked," Nordstrand says, "Jiang is a dictator who makes demands on democratic governments."

What led the Nordstrands to become practitioners of Falun Gong?

"I became ill 10 years ago with rheumatoid arthritis," says the tanned and attractive Nordstrand. "Four years ago I began to practice Falun Gong and I have got better."

Also on the van heading from the airport to the hotels is a Chinese couple living in Canada.

Mr. Wenzhen, 40, has a doctorate he earned in Germany and works as a computer scientist. He and his wife are also Falun Gong practitioners, originally from Shenzhen.

"Now we are on a blacklist," Mr. Wenzhen tells me. "We do not dare to go back to China on holiday."

[...]

At the APEC summit dinner on Saturday night, a summit that has been dominated by the question of how to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and how to combat Islamic extremism, Jiang sits at the right hand of the summit's host, Mexican President Vicente Fox.

These are good times for China's government. Its voice has been heard. The voices of its victims have not.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021027-031411-5289r

 Yearly Archive   Printer Version