5/8/2001
MACAO - Practitioners of Falun Gong in this former Portuguese colony don't suffer the interrogations, labor camps, and alleged police torture that befall adherents in mainland China. But that doesn't mean that authorities aren't straining to monitor their every move.
Since 1988, Lam Iat-ming, 53, has been a practitioner of the spiritual discipline, which is banned in mainland China but is still legal here and in Hong Kong. He said its [...] exercises cured him of a host of ailments, from gallstones to rheumatism. But since Macao came under Chinese control in December 1999, police have shadowed him regularly, he said, and he remembers with a chuckle a call he said he received on his cellphone one night.
''Where are you, Mr. Lam?'' pleaded the man on the phone, who Lam said is a Macao plainclothes officer. ''We've lost you, and we're under big pressure to keep an eye on you people before [Chinese president] Jiang Zemin comes to town. Please tell us where you are. When Jiang Zemin comes to visit, Chinese police will be our boss, so don't blame us.''
In another candid moment, he said, one of his regular plainclothes detail told him: ''I know you are a good person, but behind me there are people watching me watch you, and behind them are more people, layer after layer. If I lose track of you, I will be scolded like a dog.''
It may sound too comical to be menacing, but Macao's Falun Gong adherents say their rights are being violated by round-the-clock surveillance, nuisance identity checks, and unprovoked detentions during sensitive periods, like Jiang's visit five months ago to mark the anniversary of Macao's return to Chinese rule.
Just 130 miles away, in the freewheeling financial center of Hong Kong, Falun Gong followers and human rights activists worry that their freedoms could be targeted next. China's promise to let the former colonies of Hong Kong and Macao govern themselves and retain Western-style civil rights for at least 50 years is being put to the test whenever events could embarrass or provoke Beijing's leaders, as could happen today when President Jiang steps off the plane to address a VIP global business conference.
Local officials under pressure to shield the Chinese president from Falun Gong followers protesting repression on the mainland prevented at least 70 overseas Falun Gong adherents from entering the territory, said a spokeswoman for the [group].
Police clamped the tightest security net on Hong Kong in recent memory, with 1,000 more officers deployed than for the 1997 ceremony marking the end of British rule. Police said they wanted to prevent violent antiglobalization protests like those in Seattle, Quebec, and Melbourne, even though authorities admitted that activists said they would skip Hong Kong because they don't have local networks to host them.
Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand, and senior executives from Microsoft, AOL Time-Warner, and Yahoo! are among the 700 guests expected at the three-day conference sponsored by Fortune magazine.
Local authorities deny having a blacklist of Falun Gong members or letting China dictate security or the treatment of the group, which said it had 2 million adherents on the mainland before the ban. [...]
China's vice minister for security reportedly entered Hong Kong secretly last week to oversee security. Officials say that certain individuals were denied entry for security reasons, but not for Falun Gong membership.
''If there's no blacklist, how can they know the names of 70 people? We don't write Falun Dafa on our foreheads, and we don't wear yellow T-shirts on airplanes,'' said Sophie Xiao, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong's 500 known Falun Gong followers, referring to the formal name of the group and the signature color they wear while exercising.
Among those thwarted last night when he tried to come to Hong Kong for meditation exercises and peaceful protests was Chan Kam-sio, 37, a Macao office clerk who was turned away at the border.
Earlier yesterday, at a Chinese restaurant at the Macao ferry terminal, Chan and several of Macao's 15 other avowed practitioners recounted how they began practicing the exercises to improve their health, but said it soon filled a spiritual need by teaching them ''truth, compassion, and forbearance.''
Chan said she has been followed regularly since October 1999, when she was held overnight in Beijing and sent home after unfurling a banner in Tiananmen Square and shouting, ''Falun Dafa is good.''
The worst incident came on Dec. 19 that year, the night before President Jiang was due in Macao, when four officers came to her home and arrested her and her husband, son, and daughter, who do not practice Falun Gong, on suspicion of having forged identity cards. Her family members were released at 1 a.m., but Chan said she was kept till late the next afternoon, though she was never charged with any crime. Five other Falun Gong families were similarly raided and detained that night.
Since then, they said, they have been followed nearly every day, often by the same plainclothes officers. A local newspaper reporter who recently accompanied the group confirmed that they were tailed by several men who reappeared wherever they went. After the reporter questioned Macao authorities, who denied monitoring the group, surveillance has dropped off or become much more subtle, they said.
Yesterday, there was only one man on a motorcycle who seemed to briefly monitor the small group's exercises in a park in full view of a border crossing to the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai. The practitioners are aware that it would be a mere three-minute walk for mainland authorities to cross the border to detain them.
''I know I am lucky to be here where I am safer,'' said Tse Lai-sim, 52, who was detained by police three times for several days each when she lived in mainland China, before being expelled.
''But I still feel that here they violate my rights and the idea of `One country, two systems,''' Tse said, referring to the promise that Macao and Hong Kong could retain their capitalist systems and civil rights.
Falun Gong followers have never been detained in Hong Kong, nor has there been blatant surveillance, but members believe their phones are tapped, that ''mainland agents'' sit in on their public meetings, and that the police ''security wing'' is monitoring them.
They hope the mainland crackdown that seems to have seeped over the border in a less virulent form to Macao will not spread to Hong Kong.
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Category: Persecution Outside China
