US FALUN DAFA INFORMATION CENTER - Contacts: Gail Rachlin 212-501-8080, Erping Zhang 917-679-6944, Feng Yuan 917-734-6913, or Levi Browde 914-720-0963. Email: usinfo@falundafa.orgá
AS JUNE 4TH TIANANMEN ANNIVERSARY NEARS, THE COMMUNIST PARTY WARNS FALUN GONG "MAY CAUSE TROUBLE" EVEN THOUGH THE SPIRITUAL PRACTICE WAS NOT INVOLVEDá
(YAHOO) Communist Party authorities have asked colleges and other units to raise their guard in the run-up to the 11th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen crackdown. The authorities have warned there are signs elements including pro-democracy activists, the banned China Democracy Party and the Falun Gong may cause trouble on the sensitive day. A Beijing source said yesterday the Ministry of Education had relayed a message to universities requesting them to prevent activities such as large gatherings of professors and students. The authorities indicated unnamed "black hands" in colleges were attacking the leadership and spreading bourgeois-liberal values under the pretext of fighting for more welfare for staff and students. " Not noted by authorities is that Falun Gong began its practice three years after the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square, and remains non-political and a non-participant in all political commemorations.á
ANOTHER PRACTITIONER DEATH UNDER INVESTIGATION (FALUN DAFA WEB SITES)á
LAN-ZHOU: At around 2:50 AM of May 24, the police secretly took the corpse of Ms. Yao Bao-rong to the Hua-lin-shan Crematorium of Lan-zhou City and had it cremated in a rush, without informing her family members.á
#19: HUNGER-STRIKING FALUNGONG PRACTITIONER KILLED BY FORCE-FEEDINGá
BEIJING, May 26, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) A hunger-striking member of the banned Falungong spiritual group died in Chinese police detention after she was fatally injured during force-feeding. The death of 44-year-old Mei Yulan at a Beijing hospital was confirmed by police and hospital staff who admitted she had died after a hunger strike, but declined to elaborate on the exact circumstances of her death. Mei's death brings to 19 the number of Falungong members who have died in police detention since the movement was banned in July last year, according to a toll by the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. A Falungong member, asking to remain anonymous, said Mei was arrested on May 13th in the Chaoyang district of Beijing while she was doing breathing exercises popular with the movement. He said Mei began a hunger strike the next day, and that when police tried to force-feed her on May 17th the feeding tube was wrongly inserted causing serious injuries. The source said Mei immediately lapsed into a coma and was taken on May 18th to Minghang hospital where she never regained consciousness and died on Tuesday, May 23rd.á
FALUN GONG ADHERENT FROM MISSOURI DETAINED IN CHINAá
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) -(May 25) A University of Missouri graduate who returned to her native China earlier this month is being detained there because of her involvement with the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, her husband says. Sue Jiang left for China on May 10 and within days was detained, said her husband Cuirong Ren, a graduate student and research assistant at Missouri. Jiang had planned to meet with Chinese practitioners of Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, to get a deeper understanding of the meditation she and her family learned in Missouri. She was then supposed to visit her parents. But her husband believes she was arrested after practicing the exercise in public, possibly in Tiananmen Square on May 13 as part of a celebration of the first Falun Dafa Day.á
NANJING PRACTITIONERS TELL OF MALTREATMENT BY GOVERNMENTá
NANJING - by Jon Sawyer (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 25, 2000) Police officials in Nanjing deny allegations that practitioners of the exercise and meditation group known as Falun Gong have been detained, beaten and involuntarily committed to mental institutions. The city's journalists say there's no story. Even sophisticated, Western-oriented professors here dismiss the controversy over Falun Gong. They say Western critics are making far too much about a bunch of laughably misdirected people at the far margins of Chinese society.á
But if all that's true, what about the eight individuals who risked jail to meet with a Post-Dispatch reporter and give detailed accounts of how they had been arrested and detained, sometimes for weeks, just for protesting the government's decision last summer to ban an exercise practice that up until then millions of Chinese had been peacefully pursuing in public parks?á
And what about Li An Nin, the retired manager for an investment company, locked in a closed ward at the Nanjing Mental Hospital? The individuals who met with a reporter in a working-class apartment gave harrowing accounts of what the government's crackdown against Falun Gong had meant for them:á
A 55-year-old driver said he had been dismissed from his job and made a common laborer instead, at a 60 percent reduction in pay. A 24-year-old factory worker said police stood passively by while common criminals beat another woman practitioner who was sharing her cell.á
A 34-year-old worker at a Nanjing refinery said she had been arrested after joining a Beijing protest in December and was held at the Nanjing police station for two months. She was then committed involuntarily to the Nanjing Mental Hospital and held for three weeks more.á
The woman's husband protested the incarceration and was presented with a classic Catch-22. Police officials told him that his wife would be permitted to leave the mental hospital early - but only if he signed papers affirming that in his opinion she was insane. He refused.á
AS US SENATE PREPARES TO CONSIDER US CHINA BILL, DEBATE STILL RAGES ON POTENTIAL IMPACT; PRESIDENT OF FREEDOM HOUSE RAISES HUMAN RIGHTS CONCERNSá
WASHINGTON: (Washington Post) Adrian Karatnycky, President of Freedom House: Tuesday, May 30: "The House has voted, and trade relations with China will soon be normalized. But the great debate between advocates of open economic relations and proponents of punitive sanctions avoided the fundamental question: How can we bring about democratic change in the People's Republic of China? In the end, both sides exaggerated the effect of their positions on China's internal conduct. It is clear that the threat of sanctions has little bearing on how the Chinese Communists deal with dissent. Equally, it is clear that increased trade flows and China's economic expansion have not improved human rights practices. Indeed, this year human rights deteriorated significantly as thousands of Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and dissenters met with brutal repression, even torture and death. Proponents of normalized trade with China may be right in arguing that rising economic fortunes promote personal choice and build a middle class that is the bedrock of stable democracy. But economic growth also solidifies entrenched political tyrannies. And while the middle class is a key factor in democratic stability, it is workers and the young who are the bearers of change in dictatorship. This is the lesson of democratic transition ranging from Poland to South Africa, Chile to the Philippines..."á
US FALUN DAFA INFORMATION CENTER Contacts: Gail Rachlin 212-501-8080, Erping Zhang 917-679-6944, Feng Yuan 917-734-6913, or Levi Browde 914-720-0963.