Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 12, 2000; Page A37
BEIJING, May 11 -- Police today detained dozens of Falun Gong practitioners who sought to mark the birthday of the spiritual movement's exiled leader by demonstrating and unfurling banners in Tiananmen Square.
Witnesses said officers beat and kicked many of the protesters as they bundled them into waiting police vehicles and drove them away. The protesters, some accompanied by young children, celebrated Li Hongzhi's birthday in groups of three to five, witnesses said, and all were set upon by uniformed and plainclothes police who stand constant guard in Tiananmen Square.
The roundup was another indication of the Chinese government's difficulty in suppressing the Buddhist-like spiritual movement 10 months after declaring it unlawful and "an evil cult." The People's Daily, the Communist Party's official newspaper, said recently that Falun Gong-related arrests occur every day in what has become the biggest political campaign since student-led protests around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Chinese people have criticized the crackdown as out-of-date and ineffective. "Falun Gong and Li Hongzhi are very strange, and I don't quite understand these theories of his. Maybe he does have political goals, but I still can't support [President] Jiang Zemin," said Liu Wei, 48, from the bicycle repair stand he runs a few blocks east of Tiananmen Square. "With all the corruption, and all the poor people in China now, why is he spending so much effort on this?"
"Falun Gong is the biggest challenge for China's ruling party since the founding of the People's Republic of China," said a highly unusual article in a recent issue of China Society, a magazine published by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. "In today's China the most profound challenge is not unemployment, inflation or corruption. The most profound challenge is that there is no effective ideology."
The article criticized the crackdown on Falun Gong as "stupid" and called on the Chinese government to loosen its hold on nongovernment organizations and religions.
"Falun Gong satisfies some of its practitioners' needs for belief, social interaction, security and righteousness," the article said. "These needs can only be satisfied, not eliminated. A faithless, isolated, insecure society in which people cannot tell black from white is just the same as hell."
China's leaders, however, are not heeding those words. Instead, they have launched a campaign against superstition and are calling for renewed study of Marxism, a philosophy with no practical following in China today.
"This again warns us that when Marxism does not occupy a forward position in the realm of ideology, non-Marxist or anti-Marxist thought will inevitably take over," an article by the New China News Agency said today.
Li Hongzhi, the former grain bureau employee from northeastern China who founded Falun Gong in 1992 and now lives in the United States, lists May 11, 1952, as his date of birth. If true, this would give him the same birthday as the Buddha. But Chinese authorities say this is one of many lies Li has told his followers. They claim to have documents proving he was born on July 7, 1952.
China issued a warrant for Li's arrest last year. He has not been heard from or seen for months at his base in New York. The only clue to his whereabouts is a photo posted last July on the group's Web site showing him meditating on a mountainside somewhere in the United States.
(c) 2000 The Washington Post Company
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Category: Falun Dafa in the Media
