Wednesday, December 13, 2000
BEIJING -- A U.S. permanent resident has been sentenced to three years in jail for falun gong activities, a signal Beijing now has a policy of zero tolerance toward those who come to China to oppose the Communist regime's continuing crackdown of the spiritual movement.
Teng Chunyan, 37, was convicted of spying and leaking state secrets to foreign journalists. Ms. Teng, who is a Chinese citizen but has permanent-resident rights in the United States (the equivalent of landed-immigrant status in Canada) and who lives in New York, returned to China this year to try to oppose the 17-month-old campaign to crush falun gong.
She is alleged to have arranged for pictures to be taken of falun gong members in detention at state mental institutions. The court ruled that she passed them on to foreign journalists, an act viewed as passing state secrets, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights.
The jailing of Ms. Teng closely resembles the case of Canadian Zhang Kunlun, who also chose to return to China to fight for falun gong, an eight-year-old meditative movement that combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism and the traditional breathing exercises of qi gong.
Mr. Kunlun, a Canadian citizen who entered China on his Chinese passport, was sentenced to three years in jail, making him the first foreigner to receive such a stiff sentence for his repeated protests.
"The message from these two cases is clear," a Western diplomat said. "Even if you are a foreigner, if you come to take part in falun gong protests you will not be immune from prosecution under Chinese law. There's not much we can do for you."
U.S. and Canadian diplomats tried to intervene in the two recent arrests, but to no avail. China does not recognize dual nationality, so if someone enters the country on a Chinese passport, as in both these cases, they are regarded as Chinese nationals.
The only hope of release in such circumstances is political pressure on the part of the foreign governments.
In the case of Mr. Zhang, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien will bring up the case during his trade mission to China in February, but sources say he will not push so hard that it will sour relations.
The same is true for the U.S. government. On the day that news was released of Ms. Teng's sentencing, U.S. diplomats were telling reporters in Beijing that Washington may take a more low-key strategy on human rights in China. The plan is to play down individual cases and instead try to encourage the Chinese to push ahead reforms of their judicial system, where secret trials are still common.
The general Western view is that embarrassing the Chinese over individual cases will anger the government and slow broader human-rights reforms.
After more than 10,000 falun gong members dared to protest in Beijing last year to press for recognition, the government labelled [...] Millions of Chinese joined the movement, including some senior Communists and members of the military. There are still almost daily protests by the group's members in Tiananmen Square.
The New York-based group Human Rights Watch has released a scathing report on Beijing's crackdown on pro-democracy groups and falun gong members, which resulted in an attack from the Foreign Ministry.
"Human Rights Watch, regardless of the facts, has wantonly distorted the human rights situation in China," government spokesman Zhang Qiyue told reporters.
Human rights groups say that thousands of members of falun gong, many of them elderly, have been detained in the past 17 months, causing at least 74 deaths.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/gam/International/20001213/UCHINM.html
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Category: Falun Dafa in the Media
