Sydney Morning Herald: How Devotion To Falun Gong Made Tang Yiwen A Spiritual Outlaw (Excerpt)
October 16, 2004 She had her legs and wrists bound, her mouth taped over and her body and soul
battered, but, as Tang Yiwen tells Hamish McDonald, she never gave up her faith
in the Falun Gong. Tang Yiwen seems to materialise from nowhere when she approaches at the
agreed rendezvous outside a Beijing restaurant. She cuts a nun-like figure in a
girlish dress, white ankle socks and black shoes. Tang's conversion to Falun Gong followed a familiar pattern. Tang, or Amelia
as she also calls herself, had been an especially bright student at her high
school in Maoming, a town in Guangdong province not far from the provincial
capital Guangzhou. She won a place at a top foreign languages university in
Beijing, emerging at the top of her graduating year in Japanese as well as
teaching herself excellent English. Back in Guangzhou, she soon prospered as an
interpreter for visiting Japanese delegations and, with a friend, invested in a
new restaurant. Tang, 37, says that as she headed towards 30 her life seemed empty. She
suffered aches and pains which expensive visits to doctors couldn't cure. She
had been estranged from her parents for years: her father, a Korean War veteran
of the Chinese military, followed stiff patriarchal ways. She couldn't commit to
marriage with her boyfriend of long standing, another Japanese translator. "Most devastatingly it was a spiritual problem," she says.
"Growing up in China, our minds were just stuffed with empty communist
ideas. We didn't have any chance, like the Bible said, to get any education, any
perceptions, any ideas about love, mercy, forgiving, and what was the meaning of
life and humanity. Only very false, empty, shallow Chinese Government communist
ideas." Her sister, Lisa, who had lived in Sydney since 1989, meanwhile had taken up
Falun Gong after hearing its founder, Li Hongzhi, speak in Sydney in 1996.
Visiting Maoming, Lisa radiated a new serenity. Tang decided to try out the
Falun Gong exercise routines and soon her aches faded, while the movement's
moral code made her feel a new, "less selfish" person. She dropped her
interpreting job, started teaching at a commercial college for much less money
and married her boyfriend. "It changed me slowly," Tang says. "I
am becoming the person I have always wanted to be. I have found the
person." Then, after Falun Gong was officially banned in 1999, she was pressured into
quitting her teaching job. The next year she travelled to Beijing for Falun
Gong's special date of May 13, which marks Li Hongzhi's claimed birthday (the
same as Buddha's), and went out with other practitioners into Tiananmen Square
to protest. She was arrested immediately and handed over to Guangdong police.
She was released after seven days of a hunger strike. The police came again, and on August 23, 2000, sent her for two years of
reform-through-labour. They took her across the river to Chatou, where a few
hundred Falun Gong women shared crowded barracks with female drug users,
prostitutes and petty criminals. The days were spent in sweaty workshops, on
10-hour shifts processing goods brought in by Guangzhou manufacturers:
artificial flowers, fluffy toys and tablewear. Throughout her two-year sentence, extended by a year for recalcitrance, Tang
says she was under daily pressure to sign letters renouncing Falun Gong.
Periodically she and other practitioners were taken to detention rooms. The
criminal prisoners would be drafted to read aloud for hours from anti-Falun Gong
government tracts. Loudspeakers and monitors would repeat the same propaganda
videos at high volume, accusing Falun Gong of murder and mass suicide. "At the end of the day, you have to write your so-called homework before
you're allowed to go to sleep," she says. "They give you a topic: what
do you think of your position here as a prisoner? You are supposed to be a
teacher, teaching outside, what do you think? What do you think of your master
running away to America, having a good time, and you practitioners so foolishly
suffer here? Don't you feel cheated by him? Don't you think you're doing
terrible things against Chinese law." For the first year, Tang says, she used the homework to try to explain her
beliefs. "We thought we could communicate, get the police to understand
us," she says. "But we found out they weren't really reading it, they
were just trying to find out something they could use as a weapon to attack you
back. In the last year I refused to write at all and told them it was no use ...
It prolonged my sentence an extra year." In October 2002 Tang was taken to a room. Her legs and wrists were bound, and
her mouth taped over. Teams of interrogators forced her to stand up to 19 hours
a time as they shouted insults, slapped and kicked her. The two women leading the interrogation were Falun Gong specialists sent down
from Beijing, named by Tang as Zhang Lijun and Yue Huiling. "When they got tired they would chat to each other cheerfully, laughing
loudly," she says. After long stretches of this punishment, she would be
released, forced to stand up, then be tied up again even more painfully. After three days Tang was sent back to her dormitory, barely able to walk.
Cries came from other prisoners receiving the same treatment. The camp's staff
were said to be trying to meet a quota of Falun Gong conversions linked to the
Communist Party congress being held around that time. Two months later Tang went
through the same experience, until a camp doctor warned interrogators they would
have to let up. Her right leg has remained stiff and painful ever since. Early last year the interrogators seemed to give up. In February her father
had talked his way into seeing her. Shocked at her injuries and appearance, the
old soldier began firing angry letters and queries to Guangdong officials.
Released prisoners had also begun spreading the names of their oppressors in the
camps and these were starting to appear on websites. Even the more strict
jailers may have begun to realise they were prime scapegoats in any clean-up
campaign that Beijing might launch to appease foreign critics. In May last year Tang was shifted to a labour camp in outlying Shanshui,
where the conversion effort continued, but with less violence. Her husband came
to visit, telling her he wanted a divorce. He was tired and frightened by the
constant police harassment. "Reality is more important than the
ideal," he told her. On her release from Shanshui in August last year he came to pick her up,
then, with his mother ringing on his mobile urging him not to stay, he left her
at a hotel. Newly reconciled with her father, who had hugged her in Chatou for the first
time she could remember, Tang went back to Maoming, but was under constant watch
by the local 6-10 office, named for the date in 1999 when the then Chinese
leader, Jiang Zemin, is thought to have decided on the crackdown. Potential
employers and friends were warned off. Then on February 23 she was picked up by a group of six officials as she
walked on a Guangzhou street and was taken to the Guangzhou City Law School, a
"brainwashing centre" for those who still refuse to renounce their
beliefs after years of punishment at the labour camps. "Many fellow practitioners had told me it was more brutal than the
labour camp," she says. "I knew what would happen." She announced
the start of a hunger strike, refusing to talk, eat or drink. As she lay
weakening, alone in her cell, doctors were brought in to feed her through tubes. From distant parts of the building she could hear sounds of distress.
"Often I could hear some thumping sound, some grunts, struggling noises
like someone being beaten," she says. "Then I could hear guards
running towards the sounds." Officials tried to persuade her to give in. "'You are going to die
here,' they told me. 'You will have lots of chronic illnesses; you will never
have children,"' Tang says. "They kept giving me names of
practitioners who had gone on hunger strike and what diseases they
developed." A senior official in the Guangzhou Political and Legal Committee, the party
organ supervising the 6-10 offices, came to see her. She asked him why she was
there. He replied: "It was necessary for you to receive legal education.
Because you are still persistent, you still believe in Falun Gong, we can put
you in here. This is what our country's law requires." Tang also asked him how they had found her in a city street. "No matter
where you hide, we can finally track you down, unless you go abroad," he
said. "But you know, people like you cannot go abroad." After 20 days Tang was taken to a Guangzhou hospital and her parents
summoned. The guards refused to give her up until her mother signed a paper
exonerating the law school from any responsibility. In June Tang smuggled out a handwritten, seven-page letter to John Howard's
office, setting out her difficult position and asking to be allowed into
Australia where she had her sister and the promise of employment. A reply
arrived, saying that the Prime Minister had referred her case to the Foreign
Minister, Alexander Downer, and the Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone. In any case, Tang did not wait for the reaction from her watchers in
Maoming's 6-10 office. On August 9 she slipped out of her parents' flat late at
night to avoid being reported by the building's janitors, went into Guangzhou to
finalise her divorce, then began a series of train trips that eventually took
her to Beijing. Tang now spends her days meditating, reading her well-thumbed copy of Li's
writings or listening religiously to his voice on tape. She survives on tiny
amounts of fruit, rice and bread, drinking only water. She still wants to move to Australia. "There is nothing for me here
now," she says. Her life has dwindled to her self-cultivation and devotion
to Falun Gong. She insists her full name and details be used in this report,
whether it helps get her out of China or brings more punishment from the Chinese
police. She believes that communist rule is coming to an end, an expectation she says
is widespread in China. "I respect Master Li and I fully trust him, even
though I have never met him in person and he is so distant away in body from
China," she insists. "It is not out of thoughtless impulsiveness or
out of ridiculous worship, like many Chinese people did previously towards Mao
Zedong." Australia is no longer doing anything for Tang, and she was not mentioned
during Thursday's meeting of Australian and Chinese officials in Canberra for
the annual bilateral human rights talks. The Government had raised her case
"several times" during her imprisonment, according to an Australian
embassy spokesman. "Now that Ms Tang has been released and in the absence
of evidence that she is being subject to ongoing human rights abuse, the
Australian Government has no grounds to pursue her case further with the Chinese
Government." [...]
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