CHINA CRISIS NEWS BULLETIN #82áá 3/16/2001
Monitoring News of the Persecution of Falun Gong

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

Reuters (March 15, 2001) WASHINGTON -- Falun Gong won the Freedom House International Religious Award, as "defenders of religious rights", along with several other Chinese religious groups and independence movements. Freedom House, co-founded by Eleanor Roosevelt 60 years ago, says it is a non-partisan and non-profit organization Freedom House says the award is aimed at recognizing groups that have drawn world attention to "the severe persecution that Chinese, Tibetan and Uighur people are now forced to endure to follow their consciences." Jesse Helms, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the ceremony, attended by other congressmen, that the awards were timely given that the International Olympic committee is due to decide in July whether to let Beijing hold the 2008 games. "There can scarcely be a more timely subject than religious freedom in China. There is no religious freedom there, only religious persecution," he said. Falun Gong [practitioner], Zhang Erping, accepting the award on behalf of founder Li Hongzhi, read out a statement from Li criticizing China's crackdown on the group. "Numerous people have been able to attain good health (from the practice of Falun Gong) and along the way, it has helped people improve their moral standard. All of this has seriously threatened the wicked nature of the party," Li said. "This is the real reason why Falun Gong is persecuted in China. The goodness has challenged the evil's nature," he said in the written statement.

March 14, 2001 International Commentary, The Asian Wall Street Journal: On March 6, an explosion leveled a small primary school in the Chinese town of Fanglin, killing 38 children and four teachers. The surrounding county is a center of fireworks production, and many people who live in the town, including other pupils and parents, say that the children were forced to make fireworks in the classrooms...That's about all we know about this incident, and probably all we'll ever know. There will be no forensic investigation; the school has already been bulldozedThis emotive issue -- involving the state's inadequate funding for education and failure to protect children -- had to be hushed up, and the government mobilized all of its resources to that end. But the local newspapers and Internet news sites are much faster than the government these days. They reported details of the fireworks operation before the propaganda department could implement "news discipline" -- i.e. censorship. So a news blackout wasn't good enough. The Communist Party had to come up with an alternate story, to wit: A local oddball nicknamed "Psycho" entered the school with a bomb and blew it up, taking his own life along with those of the children Premier Zhu Rongji appeared before Hong Kong reporters last Thursday and claimed that the school had never been used as a fireworks factory On Monday the Foreign Ministry spokesman lashed out at the foreign and local media who had interviewed local witnesses by telephone and reported what they found, finding them guilty of violating "the professional ethics of journalism." The party is overconfident of its ultimate ability to stage-manage coverage of this event. It did score a big victory against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement in January when state media showed footage of five people seeming to be setting themselves on fire on Tiananmen Square. The propaganda machine claimed that they were Falun Gong members, and then showed interviews with bed-ridden hospital patients, supposedly the survivors, who professed belief in the movement. No outside reporters were allowed to meet with these survivors to corroborate the story. Nevertheless, the media campaign turned the tide of public opinion decisively against the Falun Gong "evil cult." So far the government's "psycho" story seems to be having some success, too. The authorities have produced a "wanted" poster of the alleged madman who blew up the school, even though he is supposedly dead

New York Times, March 9, 2001, BEIJING -- Last month, President Jiang Zemin summoned more than 2,000 top Communist Party officials to Beijing for an extraordinary, closed-door meeting...Seeking to counter rumors of high-level discord, the seven members of the Standing Committee of the party's Politburo -- the men who effectively rule the country -- stood up one by one to endorse the anti-Falun Gong campaign as an urgent necessity and to justify the 1989 crackdown, according to two officials who attended separate, detailed briefings on the meeting as part of the leadership's effort to spread the message through party ranks. The two said they spoke because they had misgivings about the leadership's strategy. "It is very rare to hold this kind of meeting now, and in Beijing," said one of the officials, noting that major issues of party policy and unity are normally dealt with during the leaders' summer retreat at the seaside resort of Beidaihe. "So you know this has to be very, very important to them." Jiang warned his audience that Western powers were trying to use the Falun Gong conflict and the memory of Tiananmen to divide the party as it nears pivotal changes in leadership over the next two years, the officials said. Although Jiang has pursued friendlier ties with the United States, he appears to harbor deep suspicions about U.S. motives -- or, at least, is not above using the ``American threat'' as a rallying cry to bolster his own position. At last month's conference, Jiang complained that some local leaders had been unenthusiastic about the drive to stamp out Falun Gong, allowing practitioners to go to Beijing, where they have held almost-daily silent protests in Tiananmen Square. Under guidance from a new office in Beijing, each province has set up a team to coordinate the anti-Falun Gong battle using a two-pronged strategy: arrests and ``re-education'' for leaders and recalcitrant members; and intense propaganda demonizing the group for everyone else. Jiang and other top leaders made it clear that they hope to crush the defiant Falun Gong movement altogether before the 16th Communist Party Congress, to be held in the fall of 2002, the official said.

Washington Post, March 9, 2001: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice got an earful from a group of three Chinese diplomats who came calling on her at the White House complex. The three diplomats, former Ambassadors Zhu Chizhen, Li Daoyu and Zhang Wentu, were expected to hold discussions with Miss Rice on a variety of U.S.-China topics: arms sales to Taiwan, China's human rights record and U.S. missile defense plans. Instead, one of the diplomats pulled out a prepared speech and harangued Miss Rice for some 20 minutes about the Chinese religious group Falun Gong, which China's communist government regards as its greatest internal threat. Behind the Chinese presentation is China's belief that the CIA is backing the group, a position rejected as ridiculous by U.S. officials. Falun Gong is a Chinese meditation, exercise and breathing group that is target No. 1 of the Beijing authorities. Miss Rice, we are told, was angered by the Chinese diplomats' tirade and quickly ended the meeting after the 20-minute reading. The ambassadors are part of a major propaganda campaign now under way by Beijing to influence the new Bush administration before it can get its national security team up and running.

BEIJING [Reuters, March 14, 2001]: A court in the northern city of Tianjin had jailed 13 members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement for up to six years for protesting and distributing [Falun Gong] pamphlets, a local newspaper said. The sentences reported in Tianjin's Jinwan Bao evening newspaper on Monday bring to 50 the number of Falun Gong members jailed this month in Beijing and Tianjin alone. The Tianjin verdicts included a six-year sentence on Cao Chengming, 53, for unfolding a banner at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in a protest with other adherents last October 1, China's National Day, the newspaper said. Cao, whose banner read "Falun Gong is not an evil cult", was convicted or "using a cult to obstruct the law", the newspaper said. Fellow protester Hao Nianxiang was jailed for four years. In a separate Tianjin case, Yang Cuilan, 42, was jailed for six years on the same charges for reproducing and disseminating Falun Gong fliers, audiotapes and video cassettes last October, the newspaper said.

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. Email: [email protected], Website: http://www.faluninfo.net/

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