Epoch Times: Refugee Cycles to Canberra, Hoping to Stay

By Kate Vereshaka & David Bryceson

The Epoch Times

May 10, 2005

A Chinese dissident and Falun Gong practitioner facing deportation will make a last-ditch appeal directly to Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone in Canberra, having bicycled 600 km from Melbourne.

Tang Xianhui, 42, closed the remaining 45 km to the Department of Immigration on Monday 9 May, having departed Melbourne on his bicycle on April 29. He hopes Ms. Vanstone will exercise her personal powers to override a High Court ruling that he leave Australia by May 25, 2005.

Tang fears he will be imprisoned upon entering China, given his history of participation in China's underground democracy movement, and especially now that he practices Falun Gong, a meditation which has been brutally repressed in China for almost six years.

"I want to tell the people about the truth about the persecution of Falun Gong in China," said Mr. Tang. "That's why I'm doing this trip."

In 1996 Mr. Tang fled China, leaving behind his wife and six-year-old son, after his involvement with the student democracy movement brought him under threat from the authorities. He has not seen his family since.

After his application for a protection visa in Australia was refused, he stayed on illegally as his wife had told him police were searching for him in China. He says he was reluctant to stay in Australia illegally, but his wife had begged him not to return.

He began practicing Falun Gong early in 1999, before it was outlawed only months later by then Chinese leader Jiang Zemin.

"In June 1999 I was very sick. I read a paper which said that Falun Gong can help to improve your health. That's why I started to practice. Only a few months later, in July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started to persecute Falun Gong."

According to the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDI), the persecution of Falun Gong in China has dramatically escalated in the past three weeks.

The Department of Immigration has refused to take into account Mr. Tang's practice of Falun Gong in his refugee application.

According to the German edition of The Epoch Times, Falun Gong practitioner Jiang Renzheng was sentenced to three years in a forced labor camp a month after the German government deported him and his family back to China in March this year.

This is a common fate for Falun Gong practitioners in China, with hundreds of thousands of adherents sent to labour camps without trial since the practice was outlawed in July 1999.

Falun Gong is a meditation practice which combines slow movements with adherence to the principles of truth, compassion and tolerance.

Source: http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-5-10/28645.html

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