 |
Geng He, the wife of missing Chinese dissident Gao Zhisheng, speaks to the media in Washington, Jan. 18, 2011. At left is the picture of her husband. (AFP)
|
Editorial
After 12 Years, Repression of Falun Gong in China Still a Grave Concern
July 13, 2011, 12:00 am
As the 12th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) launch of a massive crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual group approaches on July 20, Freedom House remains deeply concerned about the ongoing human rights abuses committed against adherents, their families, and increasingly, their lawyers.
"Over the past twelve years, Falun Gong practitioners and their families have suffered greatly at the hands of the Communist Party, simply for exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of belief and peaceful expression of their views,” Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn, Freedom House’s senior program manager for international religious freedom. “In recent years, we've also seen the CCP expanding the repressive tactics used against Falun Gong to others in China, including human rights lawyers."
On July 20, 1999, the Chinese Communist Party, led by Jiang Zemin, initiated a large-scale campaign to wipe out Falun Gong, seeing the spread of the independent spiritual movement as a threat to the CCP's power.
Today, Falun Gong adherents remain among those most severely persecuted in China, alongside Tibetans, Uighurs and other vulnerable minorities. They are targeted for surveillance, imprisonment, and torture, particularly surrounding international events like the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to be in detention for their affiliation with Falun Gong, while others face daily challenges like internet censorship and discrimination.
Since early 2011, numerous human rights lawyers who had represented Falun Gong practitioners in court among other cases they took—including Teng Biao, Tang Jitian, and Jiang Tianyong—have been abducted and reportedly tortured, including being beaten and forcibly medicated. Gao Zhisheng, known for publishing open letters documenting the torture of Falun Gong adherents, has been disappeared since April 2010.
Meanwhile, agencies like the extralegal 6-10 Office, a CCP security apparatus created in 1999 to implement the crackdown, remain active across China, arbitrarily detaining citizens, interfering with judicial procedures, and undermining rule of law development. In 2010, the central 6-10 Office launched a three-year nationwide campaign to intensify efforts to “transform” Falun Gong adherents, a coercive process typically involving physical and psychological torture aimed at forcing them to renounce their beliefs.
“The ongoing campaign against Falun Gong not only puts innocent people’s lives at risk, but it also undermines the possibility of genuine legal reforms in China,” says Vaughn. “Freedom House calls on the Communist Party to abolish the 6-10 Office and immediately release all Falun Gong prisoners of conscience.”
Freedom House co-sponsored a rally on the western lawn of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on July 14, 2011 EST. The above is the press release Freedom House disseminated for the event. To find out more about Freedom House, you can visit its website by clicking here.
full story
|
|
|
 |
'Waiting For a Call'
By Zhang Min, Radio Free Asia
The wife of a top Chinese human rights lawyer is awaiting her husband's return from she doesn't know where.
Beijing human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has defended some of China's most vulnerable people, including Christians, coal miners and followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. Convicted of subversion and put on probation for five years, Gao has been "disappeared" and tortured several times. His wife, Geng He, who fled China in early 2009 along with the couple's two children, spoke to RFA Mandarin service reporter Zhang Min about Gao's most recent disappearance in April 2010:
"Gao Zhisheng was illegally detained by the Chinese Communist Party on Aug. 15, 2006, and sentenced to three years, which was later extended to five years. He should be set free on Aug. 15 this year. Not only is he not at home, nobody knows where he actually is."
"His elder brother called up a guy surnamed Sun in Beijing [state security police], and he said, 'We don't know. He has got lost. Don't call me again.' Now we can't get through to his brother's home phone number. Either no one picks up, or there's a message saying no such number exists. It's not normal. I told him to discontinue the service ... but he said they couldn't cancel it, because it would be the only way for Gao Zhisheng to get in touch, just in case he tried."
"We are all just waiting for a call."
'Missing person posters'
"The last time I ever had contact with [Gao] was around April 15-16. We were getting ready for our daughter's birthday party on April 17, and she wanted to talk to her father. She couldn't find him—couldn't get through on the phone. And we haven't been able to since ... His brother has put out missing person notices. He wanted me to post them online."
"I have them right here. I'll read it to you. 'Missing Person. Gao Zhisheng. Aged 49. Han Chinese. Height: one meter, eighty centimeters (five feet, nine inches). Native of Beijing. Traveled back to his ancestral home for the grave-sweeping festival, to visit his mother's grave, in February 2010 ... No word has been heard from him since his return to Beijing 10 days later, when he communicated by phone. The family is extremely worried.'"
full story
|
United States
Falun Gong Rally for Freedom in China
The rally for freedom in China sponsored every July by adherents of Falun Gong is by far the most orderly and well-organized political demonstration that takes place in Washington, DC. This year’s rally of July 14 was no exception. Practitioners of the spiritual discipline combining meditation, graceful exercises, and breathing techniques with cultivation of virtue sat cross-legged on the ground in dozens and dozens of rows facing the U.S. Capitol. But few realize how, behind the scenes, Falun Gong is more successfully rocking repressive regimes around the world than could the most riotous of demonstrators.
Unlike many Washington protestors and demonstrators, Falun Gong members attending the rally for freedom were almost totally silent. There were no shouts of “No justice, no peace!” No chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Hu Jintao has got to go.” But for their applause for the rally speakers, Falun Gong followers sat quietly in the hot sun. Members of Congress and representatives of human rights and religious freedom organizations that come every year to the rally brought greetings, condemned the actions of the Chinese government, and pledged their support to Falun Gong, persecuted Christians, and all those who are oppressed by the Communist regime.
In addition to sheer numbers, (seated adherents stretched all the way to the edge of the Capitol West Lawn) visual images spoke for the practitioners. Most of the hundreds of participants held posters declaring “Stop the Persecution of Falun Gong” or “Abolish the Chinese Communist Party.” Other participants’ peaceful expressions belied the horrific photos they displayed of the battered faces of friends and family members, practitioners who have been arrested, beaten, and put in China’s vast gulag, or brutally tortured to death. Flanking the seated participants on all sides stood other demonstrators supporting large, colorful banners that proclaimed both the goodness of Falun Gong, or “Falun Dafa,” as it is also known, and the evil of the CCP and Communism. It was a refreshing change in a climate where Chairman Mao and Che Guevara are fashion statements and in which we are informed by our betters at Newsweek that “we are all socialists now.”
July 2011 marked twelve years of the CCP’s brutal persecution of Falun Gong. First founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992, Falun Gong’s practitioners numbered over 70 million by the mid-1990’s, to the great alarm of the Communist regime. Falun Gong was outlawed on July 20, 1999 as “neither a religion nor a spiritual movement” but “an evil cult against humanity, science and society.” Communist Party Chairman Jiang Zemin created a government office to “eradicate” Falun Gong, and leading practitioners immediately were arrested. By 2008 the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report on China noted that “some foreign observers estimated that Falun Gong adherents constituted at least half of the 250,000 officially recorded inmates in re-education through labor (RTL) camps, while Falun Gong sources overseas placed the number even higher.”
full story
|
Nine New Falun Gong Deaths Recorded in June
NEW YORK--From June 10 to July 10, the Falun Dafa Information Center obtained information on nine new cases of Falun Gong practitioners who died in 2011 due to persecution. The victims come from around the country and all strata of society, including a farmer from Shandong, a bookstore owner from Guangdong, and a retired accountant from Sichuan.
As rumors circulate in China that former Communist Party-head Jiang Zemin is brain dead or dead, these cases highlight the brutality of the campaign he launched, as well as its continuation nationwide even with Jiang incapacitated.
"We must not forget that Jiang Zemin is a mass murderer. He is directly responsible for the unjust campaign of terror against Falun Gong that has gone on for 12 years and has devastated tens of millions of lives, including those of these nine victims and their families," says Falun Gong spokesperson Erping Zhang.
"Jiang’s legacy will be a stain on China’s human rights record for generations to come. We hope those in China who have been following his lead will listen to their conscience and stop cooperating with orders to persecute Falun Gong practitioners.”
Several of the victims were forcibly injected with unknown drugs while in custody that caused permanent mental and physical damage from which they never recovered.
On May 30, the center published the details of 26 other individuals who died from abuse since January 1, 2011 (news / photo gallery). The new cases bring this total to 35. Given the Chinese authorities' efforts to cover up such deaths and the difficulty smuggling information out of China, the actual Falun Gong death toll is likely even higher.
The following are brief summaries of the cases and the circumstances of the victims' deaths. Additional details are available upon request:
* Mr. Liu Yiming, a retired accountant from Sichuan, died on February 21, 2011, after having been detained in 2005 when distributing information about Falun Gong and the abuses suffered by practitioners. He was released four months later but in a dazed state after apparently having been injected with drugs; he never fully recovered from the experience.
full story
|
|
