Miami Herald, FL: Torch Relay Focuses on China's Human Rights Record

(Clearwisdom.net) Yanling Zhang still remembers the day -- July 19, 2000 -- when Chinese security forces came to her Beijing home, asking if she planned to attend a national holiday at Tiananmen Square, where protesters would not be welcome.

When she didn't answer, Zhang says, she was tossed in jail until the holiday was over.

Zhang and her family are members of the spiritual movement Falun Gong, which was outlawed by the Chinese government in 1999. Her brother was tortured, her parents sentenced to labor camps, Zhang said, and she herself was committed to a "brainwashing center" in an attempt to steer her from Falun Gong.

"I suffered a lot physically, but that's nothing," she told The Miami Herald through a translator. "They want to change your mind. They want to kill people spiritually."

Zhang, who now lives in Hollywood, was one of the featured speakers Saturday in Miami at the Human Rights Torch Relay, a protest condemning China's human rights record just months before that country hosts the Olympic Games.

Organizers dressed in Greek robes lit a ceremonial torch along Biscayne Boulevard in front of Bayfront Park, and passed out literature to passersby.

"We stand with the Chinese people, we stand with the jailed journalists, the people of faith, the Falun Gong," said Louise Rothman of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, which sponsored the event.

Some protesters sought to raise awareness of dissident arrests in Cuba, and of human rights abuses in Haiti and Darfur. But the primary mission was to highlight China's treatment of Falun Gong -- whose followers are routinely jailed -- [...] as well as the government's arms sales to Sudan, and its suppression of Tibet.

In an interview, Zhang said Chinese police tried to compel her and her family to renounce Falun Gong as part of the government's campaign against the [group], which believes a combination of breathing exercises, calisthenics and meditation can lead to spiritual health.

At a re-education center, Zhang said, she was forced to watch anti-Falun Gong videos and stand for hours with her nose pressed to a wall. Her brother received a more brutal lesson: He was hung from his handcuffed wrists for seven days and seven nights in prison, she said.

Last year, Zhang fled to the United States through Hawaii, with the help of a friend at a travel agency who smuggled her a tourist visa. The 36-year-old, who once worked as an accountant at a telecommunications company in China's capital, said she plans to seek political asylum in the United States.

A month ago, Zhang moved to South Florida. She's working as a tour guide for Chinese tourists with a Miami-area travel agency, but her mission is human rights work.

"I want to contact Chinese people more, because that way I can tell Chinese people the truth about Falun Gong," she said.

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