Daily Breeze, California: Falun Gong adherent brings protest to South Bay cities (Photo)

By Sandy Mazza, Staff Writer

(Clearwisdom.net) June 20, 2009

Falun Gong practitioners perform meditative exercises at Torrance's Wilson Park. American followers of the spiritual discipline try to get US lawmakers to chastise the communist nation over the treatment of Falun Gong members still residing in China. (Brad Graverson, Staff Photographer)

Jie Li was just 23 years old when she and a group of friends were rounded up by police in Beijing and taken to a detention center, where she would serve five years as an enemy of the Chinese government.

They were arrested because they are practitioners of Falun Gong, a belief system set down by Li Hongzhi in 1992 that stresses meditative exercises and careful cultivation of virtuous character.

The Chinese government banned Falun Gong after a large-scale peaceful protest by the group in 1999. Since then, the government has aggressively prosecuted those who express their beliefs.

But, unlike the Chinese government, Falun Gong practitioners can't do much to strike back at their adversaries. One outlet where they have found some success is in pleading for help from law-making bodies in other countries.

That's what recently brought Li, now a 33-year-old Torrance shopping assistant, to ask city council members in Torrance, Gardena, and Carson to draft a resolution opposing China's alleged practice of torturing and killing Falun Gong practitioners and harvesting their organs to sell for profit.

"Just because I refused to renounce my belief in Falun Gong, I was sentenced to a five-year jail term," Li told the Gardena City Council earlier this month. "I'm asking the City Council to pass a resolution that condemns organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and inform our residents not to go to China for organ transplants. A resolution granted by the city will directly affect people who live in China. People will remember you."

[...]

Chief among Li's concerns is what she contends is the practice of organ harvesting. Americans often have to wait years for an organ transplant but, in China, they can get an organ in days because the government will kill prisoners for it, Li said. This practice has not been confirmed by US government officials.

Chinese officials have said that organs are only harvested from prisoners who consent to their removal before their deaths. But human rights groups such as Amnesty International contend that prisoners' organs are removed against their will after they are executed.

Cities that have drafted resolutions condemning the treatment of Falun Gong practitioners quickly learned that their stance was not taken lightly by the People's Republic of China.

Officials in hundreds of US cities have been contacted by Chinese officials in the past 10 years, and urged to ignore Falun Gong practitioners, according to the US State Department.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Baltimore rescinded their resolutions of Falun Gong support in 1999, in the face of Chinese pressure.

Locally, most cities that have been lobbied by Falun Gong practitioners have turned them down. But in 2007, Pomona issued a resolution declaring that "the brutal crackdown by the Chinese government on Falun Gong is in direct violation of the fundamental human right to freedom of personal believe and practice, expression and assembly."

In China, where there are estimated to be millions of Falun Gong practitioners, believers are described in the state-run media as delusional people who threaten peaceful social order.

But Li said her faith rests in the belief system's exercise regimen and moral code that rests on three tenets---truth, compassion and tolerance.

Li said the group believes in "exercise, reading books, don't do bad things."

[...]

"The Communist Party is really evil," Li said. "They want to control people's minds. Falun Gong has independent thinking and, if people have their own thinking, the government can't control them."

Li was arrested in February 2000 with a group of other Falun Gong practitioners who participated in a protest in Tiananmen Square. Though Li said she didn't attend the protest, she was involved in planning and preparing for the event, in which they unfurled pro-Falun Gong banners and preached about Falun Gong.

The group was prosecuted for "being suspected of organizing and making use of heresy organization to break law enforcement," according to a written judgment from the district court where she was prosecuted.

Li was instrumental in making banners and organizing people for the protest, the documents state.

For her crime, Li says she spent many days in cramped detention rooms, wrapping chopsticks in paper and other tasks. She reported she was given only three minutes each morning to brush her teeth, use the bathroom and wash and that her meals consisted of pig slop.

"Some people are tortured, beaten until their whole body is purple," she said. "They use electric batons, needles. I saw many people tortured.

"We want people to know what's happening in China. We want to stop it," Li said. "If all the people know and say 'no,' I think it will stop."

June 20, 2009

Source http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_12654994

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2009/6/22/203225.html

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