The Epoch Times

Practitioners of the spritual group Falun Gong stage an anti-torture exhibition showing alleged abuses of its members in China at the hands of the government, at a park in Hong Kong December 10, 2004. The Falun Gong death toll in China has spiked sharply. (Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty Images)

Feb 07, 2005

On November 5th, 2004, Chen Aili was tortured to death by Chinese authorities in Hebei province, China. He had been in detention for four months because he refused to stop practicing the Falun Gong meditation practice, which the government had outlawed.

In September, 2001, his twin brother Chen Aizhong was also tortured to death in a forced labor camp for practicing Falun Gong. Their younger sister Chen Hongping, also a student of Falun Gong, died on March 5, 2003 in the Gaoyang Forced Labor Camp, Hebei Province. Their only remaining sibling, Shulan, is currently being detained in a forced labor camp in Beijing for practicing Falun Gong, and her daughter is orphaned in a nursery. The siblings' elderly mother was tortured close to death by police because she too refused to renounce her belief in the spiritual discipline.

Chen Aili's is only one among the 213 deaths of Falun Gong practitioners due to persecution that has been reported in just the last three months. The number of persecution deaths of Falun Gong practitioners has been rising sharply in recent months, but many of the deaths occurred years ago and until now have not been able to leak out of China's borders.

In July 1999, China's then-president decreed that "the Communist Party must defeat Falun Gong"--a spiritual practice which had reportedly become more popular than the Communist Party. It is widely believed that the president saw Falun Gong as a threat to his power or to the atheist ideology of the state.

Falun Gong advocates moral living through the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance and involves meditation and exercise. It grew in popularity in China since the early 1990s, spreading by word-of-mouth across the country and backed by millions of stories of improved health and peace of mind.

In the months following July 1999, the world first learned of the devastating human toll of China's ban on the meditation practice. Gruesome reports of state-sanctioned violence began to creep out of the country, as Chinese police had allegedly been told that "no measures were too excessive" to wipe out Falun Gong, and that deaths resulting from prolonged torture would be documented as suicide or deaths by natural causes.

One of the first stories to grab the world's attention was that of a 58-year-old grandmother named Chen Zixiu (no relation to Chen Aili). Ms. Chen began practicing Falun Gong before the persecution began, and experienced improved health and a more positive world view as a result. In 2001, The Wall Street Journal reported that she had been arrested and detained numerous times because she intended to travel to Beijing to ask the government to re-think its ban on Falun Gong. On the last occasion, she was beaten and shocked with cattle prods as prison guards attempted to force her into recanting her belief and to promise not to petition the government about Falun Gong anymore. She quietly refused. The guards made her run barefoot through the snow. She collapsed, and never regained consciousness.

When Ms. Chen's daughter went to see her mother's body for the last time, she saw her that mother's ear was swollen and blue. Her teeth were broken, and six-inch welts streaked across her back, reported the Wall Street Journal. Police told Ms. Chen's daughter that she died of a heart attack, and the body was cremated. When Ms. Chen's daughter alleged that police had beaten her mother to death, she too was sentenced to jail for "distorting facts and disturbing social order."

Since Ms. Chen's death, Beijing has continued to heighten control over information to keep news of the persecution from leaking to the outside world. Some Falun Gong adherents or their families who try to post information about the persecution they've witnessed on the internet have been charged with "leaking state secrets" and imprisoned.

In late 2001, then, when the recorded death toll of Falun Gong practitioners due to persecution was still under 400, sources inside the Chinese government reported that the actual number was as high as 1600.

As of February 1st, the recorded death toll has reached over 1320 and continues to rise. According to Chinese government sources, the death toll may now be closer to 7000.

Source http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-2-7/26316.html