FALUN DAFA INFORMATION CENTER - Contacts: Gail Rachlin 212-501-8080, Erping Zhang 917-679-6944, Feng Yuan 917-912-3301, or Levi Browde 914-720-0963. Email: [email protected], Website: http://faluninfo.net

Asian Wall Street Journal, HONG KONG (10/8/00)-- Two Falun Dafa members have filed suit with China's supreme court, alleging several senior Communist Party leaders are personally responsible for the 15-month crackdown against the spiritual group. The suit highlights a growing belief among Falun Dafa adherents that the government's ban is directly attributable to a handful of Chinese leaders centered around President Jiang Zemin, the head of the Communist Party. Although the suit stands little chance of being heard -- indeed, the men who filed the suit are said to be in jail -- it reflects a growing personalization of the conflict, which pits regular protesters in downtown Beijing against the party's formidable security apparatus...The suit was filed in late August but a copy of it was obtained only in the past few days. Friends of the jailed litigants say they smuggled a copy out of China after police pursued them for more than a month through several cities. They arrived in Hong Kong and then departed for another country...The suit says Mr. Jiang and two of his top lieutenants, Zeng Qinghong and Luo Gan, pushed for the ban during the spring and summer of 1999 because they had been humiliated by a protest in downtown Beijing that April...Mr. Zeng controls senior leadership appointments and Mr. Luo overseas security. Both are considered rising stars in the leadership and top candidates to replace Mr. Jiang upon his expected retirement in two years. Government officials said they hadn't seen the suit and declined to comment. The 22-page document points to specific meetings that the three leaders attended where they insisted that the police be especially severe -- thousands have been arrested and numerous killed during the 15-month crackdown...The suit also rebuts government charges used to justify the crackdown... The suit was filed by Wang Jie, 37, an editor with the Survey and Mapping Publishing House, and Hong Kong resident Zhu Keming [Chu O-ming in Cantonese], 43, an artist and businessman. The two are being held on th e outskirts of Beijing in the Fangshan Public Security Bureau Detention Center, according to people who have been held in the detention center and have seen them there.

MORE THAN 20 HONG KONG HOTELS REFUSE TO HOST FALUN GONG PRESS CONFERENCE

AP, HONG KONG (10/8/00) -- In a press conference on Monday, the Falun Gong group [in HK] called on the Hong Kong government to secure Chu's release. According to Falun Gong spokeswoman Hui Yee-han, Chu and Wang were arrested while they were at a friend's house in Beijing on September 7, after police entered the house by scaling the wall. Duoweinews.com (10/9/00), reported by the Central News Agency wire (excerpted and translated from the Chinese): The Falun Gong group in Hong Kong originally contacted 20 hotels to rent a space to hold this press conference regarding this law suit, and they were refused by all but one of them. That hotel agreed to rent them a space, but then called two hours before the event to cancel, saying 'the topic of the press conference is too sensitive.' The press conference was finally held at a private residence. [Editors' note: Falun Gong is currently still legal in Hong Kong under the official 'One Country, Two Systems' policy]

CHINESE LEADERS: COMMUNISM THREATENED BY MEDITATION, EXERCISE

Washington Post, BEIJING (10/9/00) -- China launched a scathing verbal attack Monday on the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, accusing it of trying to bring down the government and of colluding with the communist regime's opponents. The lengthy, acidly worded critique by the state-run Xinhua News Agency signaled the government's anger and frustration that its 14-month crackdown on Falun Gong and the arrests of thousands of adherents have failed to crush the group. Xinhua labeled Falun Gong "reactionary," a politically charged term used in China to tar the government's opponents...Falun Gong "openly opposes the party and government and has transformed completely from head to tail into a reactionary political organization with the goal of overthrowing the People's Republic of China and the socialist system," Xinhua said. Falun Gong adherents deny that the group has political ambitions, maintaining that their beliefs...promote health and morality. They have called for an end to China's crackdown and for legal recognition of the group as a school of "qigong," traditional Chinese health and meditation exercises from which Falun Gong is partly derived... Xinhua's attack, among the most vitriolic carried by the wholly state-run media in recent months, appeared to have been prompted by a dramatic protest by hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners on Tiananmen Square during China's Oct. 1 National Day celebrations.

SENIOR P.R.C. OFFICIALS MAKE A MOCKERY OF E.U. HUMAN RIGHTS FORUM

Bangkok Post, 10/2/00: ...Beijing has tried to coax foreign governments critical of its human rights practices to hold closed-door dialogues instead of censuring China at United Nations human rights meetings and other public, worldwide forums. In addition to the EU, China has had such dialogues with Australia, Britain and Canada among others. According to diplomats who attended Friday's dialogue [9/29/00], the Chinese listened attentively to the EU concerns-just as they have done at other closed-door meetings. They nodded in unison, admitted their faults and promised to look into the concerns. On Friday, according to EU diplomats, they again admitted their shortcomings but offered little when it came to addressing them. Current Chinese law allows police to send criminal suspects to labour camps for up to four years without trial. The US State Department reports that 230,000 people were being held last year in what China calls "re-education-through-labour camps". On Friday, the Chinese reportedly admitted that the system was wrong, that it had been abused, and that it should be reformed "in-depth". But China also made it clear that it does not mean to abolish the practice. Yesterday was China's National Day, a day when all Chinese marked the 51st anniversary of communist rule. Members of the Falungong movement, which says it is apolitical and purely a spiritual group, converged on Tiananmen Square to contribute to the occasion. But according to reports, police swooped on the group, using unnecessary violence to arrest about 1,000 and forcibly remove them from the square. Of the Falungong members who gathered yesterday, 80% were women, but this did not dampen the enthusiasm for violence shown by the police as they used truncheons, canes and steel-tipped boots to beat the Falungong members. And all this just two days after 15 senior officials had accepted, listened attentively and said they understood the concerns raised by the EU about human rights abuses in China.

NEWS FROM CHINA: PERSONAL ACCOUNTS OF OCT. 1 TIANANMEN PROTESTS

"In the early morning of Oct. 1, I arrived at a Tiananmen Square that was crowded with tourists and plainclothes and uniformed police. At about 8:30, one of the first Falun Dafa banners was raised and many practitioners immediately stepped forward. The police rushed towards them and started beating and kicking. "Police, stop beating them," I shouted, and got punched immediately. "Falun Dafa is good!" I shouted. A policeman rushed at me and pulled my clothes hard, tearing them. Another policeman punched a middle-aged woman in the face. She fell down with blood all over her face. Several policemen also beat a senior citizen until his face was covered in blood. "Why do the police beat people so cruelly?" one tourist shouted out...One big policeman held on to an old lady's ankles and dragged her on the ground more than 300 feet to a police vehicle. The people who saw this were shocked. The rough surface of the ground scraped the old lady's body badly. Many women, including one lady with an infant held to her chest, were dragged into police vehicles by the hair. Each time, clumps of hair would be pulled out. In spite of this brutal oppression, more and more Falun Gong practitioners bravely stepped out from the crowd. In the course of an hour, the ground of Tiananmen Square was wet with the blood of Falun Gong practitioners." --A practitioner in China

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT THE FALUN DAFA INFORMATION CENTER - Contacts: Gail Rachlin 212-501-8080, Erping Zhang 917-679-6944, Feng Yuan 917-912-3301, or Levi Browde 914-720-0963. Email: [email protected], Website: http://faluninfo.net