The Wall Street Journal, by Ian Johnson

A Deadly Exercise: Practicing Falun Gong Was a Right, Ms. Chen Said, to Her Last Day

Cellmates Recall the Screams Of the Chinese Retiree Before She Died in Jail

'No Measures Too Excessive'

By Ian Johnson

"My mother was never anyone who believed in superstitious things," said Ms. Zhang, who doesn't practice Falun Gong herself. "Frankly, she had a bad temper because she felt she was getting old and had sacrificed so much to raise us alone. When she joined Falun Gong her temper improved a lot and she became a better person. We really supported her."

WEIFANG, China -- The day before Chen Zixiu died, her captors again demanded that she renounce her faith in Falun Dafa. Barely conscious after repeated jolts from a cattle prod, the 58-year-old stubbornly shook her head.

Enraged, the local officials ordered Ms. Chen to run barefoot in the snow. Two days of torture had left her legs bruised and her short black hair matted with pus and blood, said cellmates and other prisoners who witnessed the incident. She crawled outside, vomited and collapsed. She never regained consciousness, and died on Feb. 21.

A year ago, few outside of China had heard of Falun Dafa and its regimen of practices, known as Falun Gong, which include breathing exercises, meditation and readings from the moralistic, and sometimes unusual, works of group founder Li Hongzhi.

Although popular among millions of Chinese, Falun Gong didn't jump to international prominence until April 25 last year, when 10,000 of its believers converged on Beijing, surrounding the government's leadership compound in the Forbidden City and demanding an end to state press reports that portrayed them as a superstitious cult. The crowd cut an odd sight: Mostly middle-age, working-class people, they simply meditated quietly for the better part of a day before leaving the center of town to return to their homes across the country.

But to a government that doesn't much tolerate open challenges to its power, the protest was an unforgivable provocation. The government arrested hundreds of Falun Gong organizers and discovered that some were officials in the central government, the police and even the military. Worried that a cancerous religion was infecting its atheist state, Beijing declared Falun Gong an "evil cult" last July and formally banned it.

Confronted with the full weight of China's security apparatus, Falun Gong should have died a quick death. But unlike the dissidents who occasionally challenge the Communist Party, Falun Gong activists haven't been stopped, despite mass arrests, beatings and even killings. Instead, a hard core continues to protest, with several dozen arrested every day in downtown Beijing when they try to unfurl banners calling for their group's legalization. A year on, Falun Gong faithful have mustered what is arguably the most sustained challenge to authority in 50 years of Communist rule.

Ms. Chen's tale is one of extremes. On one end is the Communist Party, which is so determined to break Falun Gong that it has resorted to public-security measures on a scale not seen since 1989, when an antigovernment movement led by students was crushed in Tiananmen Square. The government's victory in this fight, should it come, may well be Pyrrhic; its heavy-handed approach has disillusioned millions of ordinary people, such as Ms. Chen's daughter, who were apolitical until last year's events. It has also damaged China's international standing just as it needs foreign help on an array of pressing economic issues.

On the other end are people such as Ms. Chen, who in their simple, and perhaps naive, way are at the forefront of a slow trend to demand the freedoms guaranteed by China's laws and constitution. While many Falun Gong practitioners have compromised -- by practicing secretly at home, for example -- thousands have insisted openly on their right to freedom of belief and assembly. "We're good people," Ms. Chen's friends recall her telling officials from the Weifang city government who interrogated her in her barren concrete cell two days before she died. "Why shouldn't we practice what we want?"

The story of Ms. Chen's last days is reconstructed from interviews with family, friends and prisoners, as well as two accounts written by cellmates and smuggled out of jail in recent weeks. Originals of these accounts were examined and shown to the authors' friends and relatives, who verified the documents as having been written by their loved ones.

Allegations of mistreatment also are backed by more than two dozen separate interviews with Falun Gong adherents in other cities, who independently said they too were beaten with clubs and electric batons, chained to bars and made to disavow their faith.

Local officials rejected efforts to interview them for this story, while Beijing's official position on all allegations of prison abuse is that no Falun Gong practitioner has been mistreated in custody. It says 35,000 adherents came to Beijing but were sent back safely, with only three dying accidentally when they tried to escape. International human-rights groups say it is likely that at least seven more deaths like Ms. Chen's occurred through mistreatment in prison.

"All she had to do was say she renounced Falun Gong and they would have let her go," said Zhang Xueling, Ms. Chen's 32-year-old daughter. "But she refused."

Three years ago, Ms. Chen hardly imagined that she would be risking her life by practicing Falun Gong . She was 55 and had taken early retirement from a state-run truck-repair garage where she had worked for 30 years making auto parts. One day while out walking in the neighborhood near her family's one-story brick bungalow, Ms. Chen noticed some practitioners of Falun Gong. A widow for 20 years whose children were grown, Ms. Chen had little to do during the day, so she started attending the exercise sessions regularly.

"My mother was never anyone who believed in superstitious things," said Ms. Zhang, who doesn't practice Falun Gong herself. "Frankly, she had a bad temper because she felt she was getting old and had sacrificed so much to raise us alone. When she joined Falun Gong her temper improved a lot and she became a better person. We really supported her."

Over the next two years, Ms. Chen became an enthusiastic participant, rising at 4:30 a.m. to exercise for 90 minutes in a small dirt lot with half a dozen other practitioners. After a day running errands for her children and grandchildren, Ms. Chen spent evenings reading the works of Mr. Li, the group's founder, and discussing his ideas with fellow members. Those beliefs incorporate traditional morality -- do good works, speak honestly, never be evasive -- as well as some idiosyncratic notions, such as the existence of extraterrestrial life and separate-but-equal heavens for people of different races.

Gradually, Falun Gong gained adherents in her neighborhood, Xu Family Hamlet, which is located in an industrial suburb of Weifang, a city of 1.3 million in eastern China's Shandong province. The hamlet is a dusty maze of poplar-lined dirt roads and bungalows surrounded by crumbling brown brick walls -- a typical village being swallowed up by its urban neighbor. By last year, her local group had doubled in size to a dozen regular members -- hardly a giant organization, but a regular presence in the community.

For Ms. Chen, China's decision to ban Falun Gong last July came out of the blue. She hadn't noticed the articles and television shows that had attacked the group, and she paid little attention a year ago when members surrounded the Communist Party's leadership compound in Beijing. The day the government ban was announced "was the bitterest of her life," said her daughter, Ms. Zhang. "She couldn't accept that they were criticizing Falun Gong and calling it an evil cult."

Although barely literate and never before interested in politics, Ms. Chen resisted the ban. She invited group members to practice at her home and refused to deny her affiliation with the group or her love for Mr. Li, whom she respectfully called "Master Li."

Then, last November, several top organizers of Falun Gong were given long prison sentences. Shocked, Ms. Chen joined thousands of fellow practitioners by traveling to Beijing with the vague idea of protesting against the government. Since the ban in July, many had gone to Tiananmen Square and sat cross-legged with their arms stretched in an arc over their heads -- the classic starting pose for Falun Gong exercises.

Ms. Chen never made it that far. On Dec. 4, the day after she arrived in Beijing, she was walking through the Temple of Heaven park when a plain-clothes security agent asked if she was a member. She answered truthfully and was arrested, her daughter said.

She was taken to the Weifang municipal government's Beijing representative office, a sort of lobbying bureau-cum-dormitory that scores of Chinese cities and provinces have set up in the capital to house local officials visiting Beijing.

The next day, Ms. Zhang and three local officials made the seven-hour drive to Beijing to pick up Ms. Chen, a humiliation for the officials, who were criticized for not keeping better control of their people. Ms. Zhang paid the equivalent of a $60 fine -- a month's wages -- and returned home with her mother, who complained that police had confiscated the $75 in cash she had brought with her.

As punishment, officials from the Chengguan Street Committee (street committees are the lowest level in China's system of government) confined Ms. Chen to their offices, just 200 yards from her home. She stayed there for two weeks, in a form of "administrative detention" that the state can impose almost indefinitely. Ms. Zhang had to pay another $45 for her mother's room and board.

On Jan. 3, Ms. Chen celebrated her 58th birthday. Despite being under day-and-night observation, she was in great spirits, Ms. Zhang said. "She knew she was right. All she wanted was to make the government not make a criminal out of her because she knew she wasn't a criminal."

Then, on Chinese New Year, which this year fell on Feb. 4, hundreds of Falun Gong protesters were arrested and beaten in Beijing. (Though no longer under surveillance, Ms. Chen wasn't a protester.) Officials in the capital were stunned by the outbreak. On Feb. 16, the local district chief came to see Ms. Chen and told her that Beijing wanted to make sure no other Falun Gong adherents went to Beijing, especially since China's annual session of parliament was due to begin in a few days. He asked Ms. Chen to promise she wouldn't leave home.

"My mother told them very clearly that she wouldn't guarantee that she wouldn't go anywhere. She said she had the right to go where she pleased," Ms. Zhang said. The officials left in a huff.

Two days later, Ms. Zhang came home to find half a dozen officials in her living room. They said her mother had been spotted outside by a special squad of informants who roamed the neighborhood looking for Falun Gong participants who dared to leave home.

Ms. Chen was taken into custody and never seen by her daughter again. She was held for a day in the Chengguan Street Committee offices, but then during the night she managed to escape -- exactly how isn't clear, officials told Ms. Zhang. Ms. Chen was arrested the next day, Feb. 17, heading for the train station, apparently hoping to go to Beijing to plead her case before the Petitions and Appeals Office, a last resort for people who feel they have been wronged.

This time, officials from the local district Communist Party office sent Ms. Chen to a small, unofficial prison run by the street committee, described to practitioners as the Falun Gong Education Study Class.

People who have been held there describe it as more of a torture chamber. The building is two stories with a yard in the middle. In the corner of the yard is a squat one-story building with two rooms. This is where beatings took place, according to four detainees who described the building in separate accounts.

While Ms. Chen was transferred to the detention center, officials called Ms. Zhang and said her mother would be released if she would pay a $241 fine. Ms. Zhang was fed up with the government's "fines" and, she said, her mother's insistence on standing up for her rights. She told the officials that their fines were illegal and that she would complain to the local procurator's office if they didn't release her mother. She rejected another call on Feb.18 and again threatened legal action, though she didn't follow through.

Meanwhile, Ms. Chen spent a night in the jail, listening to screams emanating from the squat building, according to two of her cellmates. Before she was led in, she was allowed another phone call. She called her daughter later on the 18th and asked her to bring the money. Irritated by the troubles brought on by her mother's uncompromising attitude, Ms. Zhang argued with her. Give in and come home, the daughter pleaded. Her mother quietly refused.

Ms. Chen's ordeal began that night. Wrote an adherent who was in the next room of the squat building: "We heard her screaming. Our hearts were tortured and our spirits almost collapsed." Officials from the Chengguan Street Committee used plastic truncheons on her calves, feet and lower back, as well as a cattle prod on her head and neck, according to witnesses. They shouted at her repeatedly to give up Falun Gong and to curse Mr. Li, according to her cellmates. Each time, Ms. Chen refused.

The next day, the 19th, Ms. Zhang got another call. Bring the money, she was told. Ms. Zhang hesitated. Her mother came on the line. Her voice, usually so strong and confident, was soft and pained. She pleaded with her daughter to bring the money. The caller came back on the phone. Bring the money, she said.

Ms. Zhang got a sick feeling and rushed over with the money and some clothes. But the building was surrounded by agents who wouldn't let her see her mother. Suspicious that this was a ruse to get more money from her -- and that her mother wasn't really in the building at all -- she returned home. An hour later, a practitioner came to see Ms. Zhang. Falun Gong adherents were being beaten in the center, she was told.

Ms. Zhang raced back with her brother, carrying fruit as a small bribe for the police. She was refused entrance and her money was refused as well. She noticed an old woman in a room and shouted up to her: "Is my mother being beaten?" The old woman waved her hand to signify "no," although Ms. Zhang wondered whether she might have been trying to wave her away from the prison, fearing she, too, would be arrested. Ms. Zhang and her brother went home for a fitful, sleepless night.

That night, Ms. Chen was taken back into the room. After again refusing to give up Falun Gong, she was beaten and jolted with the stun stick, according to two prisoners who heard the incident and one who caught glimpses of it through a door. Her cellmates heard her curse the officials, saying the central government would punish them once they were exposed. But in an answer that Falun Gong adherents say they heard repeatedly in different parts of the country, the Weifang officials told Ms. Chen that they had been told by the central government that "no measures are too excessive" to wipe out Falun Gong. The beatings continued and would stop only when Ms. Chen changed her thinking, according to two prisoners who say they overheard the incident.

Two hours after she went in, Ms. Chen was pushed back into her cell on the second story of the main building, an unheated room with only a sheet of steel for a bed. Her three cellmates tended to her wounds, but she fell into a delirium. One of the cellmates remembers her moaning "mommy, mommy."

The next morning, the 20th, she was ordered out to jog. "I saw from the window that she crawled out with difficulty," wrote a cellmate in a letter smuggled out by her husband. Ms. Chen collapsed and was dragged back into the cell.

"I was a medical major. When I saw her dying, I suggested moving her into another [heated] room," the cellmate wrote in her letter. Instead, local government officials gave her "sanqi," herbal pills for light internal bleeding. "But she couldn't swallow and spat them out." Cellmates implored the officials to send Ms. Chen to a hospital, but the officials -- who often criticize Falun Gong practitioners for forgoing modern medical treatment in favor of a superstitious belief in their exercises -- refused, her cellmates said. Eventually they brought in a doctor, who pronounced her healthy.

But, wrote the cellmate: "She wasn't conscious and didn't talk, and only spat dark-colored sticky liquid. We guessed it was blood. Only the next morning did they confirm that she's dying." An employee of the local Public Security Bureau, Liu Guangming, "tried her pulse and his face froze." Ms. Chen was dead.

That evening, officials went over to Ms. Zhang's house and said her mother was ill, according to Ms. Zhang and her brother. The two piled into a car and were driven to a hotel about a mile from the detention center. The hotel was surrounded by police. The local party secretary told them Ms. Chen had died of a heart attack, but they wouldn't allow them to see her body. After hours of arguing, the officials finally said they could see the body, but only the next day, and insisted they spend the night in the heavily guarded hotel. The siblings refused and finally were allowed to go home.

On the 22nd, Ms. Zhang and her brother were taken to the local hospital, which was also ringed by police. Their mother, they recalled, was laid out on a table in traditional mourning garb: a simple blue cotton tunic over pants. In a bag tossed in the corner of the room, Ms. Zhang said she spotted her mother's torn and bloodied clothes, the underwear badly soiled. Her calves were black. Six-inch welts streaked along her back. Her teeth were broken. Her ear was swollen and blue. Ms. Zhang fainted, and her brother, weeping, caught her.

That day, the hospital issued a report on Ms. Chen. It said the cause of death was natural. The hospital declines to comment on the matter. Ms. Zhang said she challenged officials about the clothing she had seen, but they told her her mother had become incontinent after the heart attack and that was why her clothes were soiled.

Ms. Zhang and her brother tried filing a lawsuit, but no lawyer would accept the case. Meantime, her mother's body lay in refrigeration, until the threatened litigation was resolved.

Then, on March 17, Ms. Zhang received a letter from the hospital saying the body would be cremated that day. Ms. Zhang called the hospital to try to prevent it, but she said officials didn't give her a clear answer and said they would have to call her back. They didn't. Ms. Zhang never saw her mother's body again.

© 2000, Dow Jones & Company

A Battle of Wills On Anniversary Of First Crackdown

By Ian Johnson

BEIJING -- It's 9 a.m., and Mei Yulan looks distinctly down at heel, having spent the third night in a row walking the chilly April streets of China's capital, waiting for today to arrive.

When it does, the 44-year-old farmer knows what she will do. Like scores of fellow adherents of Falun Dafa, Ms. Mei will head to Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing and proclaim the innocence of her sect in hopes the government will legalize the group. Before she gets to utter a word, she expects to be arrested and whisked away to face days, months or years of incarceration or hard labor.

Indeed, early Tuesday, police had established a tight cordon around the square and were asking people coming out of subways and off buses if they were Falun Dafa adherents. At least a dozen were detained by 8 a.m.

It is a fate more than 30,000 have faced over the past year as the group, which practices a form of meditation and exercises, has intensified its struggle with Beijing to gain legitimacy. China, however, shows no sign of bending, insisting that Falun Dafa believers are being duped by an "evil cult" that has cheated members of money and whose emphasis on prayer over science has led to thousands of deaths due to lack of medical care.

The battle was joined exactly a year ago, when roughly 10,000 Falun Dafa practitioners surrounded the downtown leadership compound of the Communist Party, demanding an end to what they said was biased coverage of their group in the state media. Local television stations and newspapers had been criticizing the group as "superstitious" -- a word in communist parlance indicating the group soon would be banned.

Last year's protest hastened its fate. Shocked by the well-organized demonstration, the government arrested top Falun Dafa leaders, banned the group in July and then promulgated a law barring cults. Yet each step has only caused more protests, which have been met by increasingly harsh police treatment. Human-rights groups say it is likely more than a dozen believers have died of police brutality in prison, while thousands of others like Ms. Mei have been beaten or tortured, many with clubs and electric batons.

To an outsider, Ms. Mei's willingness to face almost certain rearrest seems like zealotry. No one compels her or her fellow believers to go downtown; indeed, many Falun Dafa adherents appear able to continue to practice their faith at home.

The mother of two girls sees it differently. She regards it as her duty to proclaim the group's innocence and, through a steady battle of wills, to force the government to change its mind. While she might not put it in such words, she behaves like a martyr for her new religion, relying on faith to justify her actions. "All 11 members of my family have been arrested," she says, recounting her story in a taxi being driven by a Falun Dafa believer.

"We're ready for any sacrifice."

Sitting beside her is her 75-year-old mother-in-law, who explains in her thick native Henan accent how she, too, was beaten in police custody two weeks ago. Local authorities, the women say, were trying to make them renounce their belief so they wouldn't travel to Beijing for the anniversary. One official whacked away at both women's calves with a plastic truncheon, they say, and they roll up their thick blue cotton trousers to show dark-blue and black bruises.

Authorities say the claims of police abuse are an effort to smear the government, but the accounts are detailed and often corroborated by Falun Dafa members in other cities, who tell of similar efforts by officials to torture believers into submission.

"When I was arrested two weeks ago," Ms. Mei says, "police pulled my head back with my hair and asked me to give up Falun Gong," as the practice is also called. "I said no, and then they told me to sit cross-legged. Then they trod on my feet until I screamed in pain."

After 10 days, Ms. Mei was released when she promised not to go to Beijing. She left the next day and was initially put up in the homes of local Falun Dafa believers. As the anniversary approached, many of these benefactors were detained -- her most recent host was picked up while Ms. Mei was out buying vegetables in the market. She spied police cars ringing the apartment building and fled, leaving her belongings behind. Since then, she has wandered the city and slept outside, wary of the police who scour Beijing for vagrant Falun Dafa believers.

In addition to exercises and meditation, Falun Dafa's practices include readings from the moralistic, and sometimes controversial, works of group founder Li Hongzhi. The group says it is apolitical; China's leaders see its protests as a threat.

Residents here say the police have targeted city dwellers first, hoping to make it difficult for outsiders like Ms. Mei to survive in Beijing. Zhang Yuxiang, a 36-year-old unemployed accountant, was last arrested Feb. 4 when she tried to go to Tiananmen Square on the eve of the Chinese New Year. Like many local residents, she was taken to the Chaoyang District Jail, where she says she was locked into Room 602 for a week of increasingly humiliating treatment.

First, she says, she was slapped and beaten several times. Then, when none of the 15 Falun Dafa believers in her cell repented, she was singled out as the cell's ringleader because she happened to be standing in front of the cell when a warden came by to see the recalcitrant prisoners.

Two other prisoners, interviewed separately, confirm her story: After the warden left, a female prison guard ordered Ms. Zhang to give up Falun Dafa. When she refused, the guard ordered her to strip and kneel naked before her on the concrete floor. The guard poured bucket after bucket of water on Ms. Zhang, each time ordering her to give up Falun Dafa. But each of the five times, Ms. Zhang refused, even as she started shaking from the cold in the poorly heated cell.

© 2000, Dow Jones & Company

By Ian Johnson

BEIJING -- Called to account by the United Nations for allegedly torturing Falun Gong practitioner Chen Zixiu to death, China has denied all wrongdoing in the case and justified the arrest of Ms. Chen's daughter.

In a statement delivered Friday to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, which monitors an international convention that China and 119 other countries have signed outlawing torture, China said the 58-year-old woman died Feb. 21 of a heart attack. The statement said she was sent back home on Feb. 17 after she tried to leave her hometown of Weifang for Beijing to protest the government's banning of Falun Gong as a cult.

"Chen had never been held in custody in a detention house, nor [sic] she had been beaten, subjected to corporal punishment," according to the statement delivered before the U.N. panel in Geneva, where China's compliance with the treaty is up for regular review.

That answer, however, appears to contradict an earlier statement regarding Ms. Chen. In it, China implied that Ms. Chen spent the period from Feb. 17 to Feb. 21 in a re-education center run by a "street committee" -- technically not a "detention center" but still a government office. The earlier statement said that after Ms. Chen was stopped on her way to Beijing, she was given "helpful education from the street committee."

On Feb. 21, Ms. Chen was sent to the hospital because she felt uncomfortable and died despite rescue attempts.

Ms. Chen's case was detailed on page one of the April 20 edition of The Wall Street Journal, which drew on written and oral accounts provided by cellmates, family and friends, who said she died on Feb. 21 after spending four days at a re-education center where she was beaten for refusing to give up her belief in Falun Gong.

China banned Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, for being a dangerous cult that controls people's minds and forces them to spend money on its books and tapes. Adherents, however, say they spend little money on the group and simply learn breathing exercises and the moralistic teachings of founder Li Hongzhi.

During the past year, tens of thousands of Falun Gong adherents have come to Beijing to demand the government lift its ban. Most have been detained and released after being sent home, but repeat protesters have been detained without charge or trial for weeks and hundreds sent to prison.

Human rights groups believe about a dozen, including Ms. Chen, were beaten to death by zealous police officers.

In its statement Friday, China also said it was justified for detaining without trial Ms. Chen's daughter, Zhang Xueling, because she "distorted the fact of her mother's death and spread the rumors, disturbing social order." The local Public Security Bureau in Weifang picked up Ms. Zhang on April 17 and released her on May 1, China's statement said. In a telephone interview, Ms. Zhang confirmed her release last week, saying she hadn't been mistreated by police during her stay. "I'm fine, but I have not changed my views on my mother's death," she said.

The U.N. committee will meet again tomorrow to release its findings on Ms. Chen's case and other issues brought up during the two-day hearing last week. The review, which all signatories have to undertake at staggered intervals every four years, rarely brings up specific cases such as Ms. Chen's. Committee members, however, felt Ms. Chen's case so strongly violated international practice that they took the unusual step of asking China for an explanation on her case, according to nongovernmental organizations that advise committee members.

The 10-member committee was established to monitor the 1987 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The committee falls under the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, who reports directly to the U.N. secretary-general. Signatory countries are obliged to eradicate torture and take specific measures suggested by the committee.

Although the committee's recommendations aren't binding, they help focus international pressure on China, which is trying to improve its international image. China's state-run press has carried reports on the hearings, reporting that the U.N. has commended the country for fulfilling its obligations under the treaty.

During its two previous sessions before the committee, in 1996 and 1992,China was criticized for not training police officers well enough and tolerating their use of force to obtain dubious confessions and crack down on minority discontent, especially in Tibet.

© 2000, Dow Jones & Company

By Ian Johnson

BEIJING -- A United Nations committee issued a report yesterday that finds China at fault for an array of practices that contribute to torture.

The five-page report by the UN Committee Against Torture concluded a regular session monitoring China's compliance with an international treaty that outlaws torture. The panel said that while China has made progress in some areas of legal reform, it continues to condone practices that can lead directly to police abuse.

The carefully worded document came after hearings last week at which committee members grilled China on its record of police brutality. The committee, which usually looks at systemic problems leading to torture, such as lack of police training, took the unusual step of bringing up a specific case -- that of Chen Zixiu, who was reportedly beaten to death in an unofficial police cell earlier this year. Her case was the subject of a page one Wall Street Journal article last month.

Chinese delegates rebutted the charges before the committee that Ms. Chen had died in police custody, saying she had died of a heart attack.

Although yesterday's final report did not bring up Ms. Chen's case, it noted that "reforms are not implemented uniformly and equally in all parts of China," a reference to the excessive zeal sometimes used by police officers in forcing confessions from prisoners.

Ms. Chen reportedly died after government employees beat her for refusing to renounce her belief in Falun Dafa, an exercise and meditation regime that the government has banned as a dangerous cult that fleeces naive participants and practices mind control.

The panel also recommended that prisoners have a right to a lawyer. They must now ask for permission to see one, and many Falun Dafa detainees say they have been refused.

One of the strongest recommendations is that China "consider abolishing,in accordance with relevant international standards, all forms of administrative detention," a form of imprisonment that doesn't require filing of charges, legal hearings or trials, and can be extended almost indefinitely. Ms. Chen's daughter was held for 15 days in such detention for "disturbing social order" by publicizing her view that her mother died of torture.

The committee noted some progress made in the nation's legal system, such as an assurance from China that the torture treaty is legally binding on its law-enforcement and judicial organs. It also said China had tried to introduce fair trials for prisoners being considered for "re-education through labor," one of the harshest punishments in China.

Although the UN has no direct way to enforce the treaty, the periodic monitoring holds China to unusual scrutiny.

© 2000, Dow Jones & Company

In China, the Survival Of Falun Dafa Rests On Beepers and Faith

An Ad Hoc Network Keeps Followers a Step Ahead Of a Fierce Crackdown

Mr. Li's Helpful Bike Ride

By Ian Johnson

"You can usually tell if the people are genuine," he says, hopping on his bike and heading back down the road in the stifling heat. "They make references to things that the police wouldn't know about and have this earnest air about them."

BEIJING -- On a hazy July morning, Li Guoqiang starts out on his bike toward Tiananmen Square.

It's two weeks before the July 22 anniversary of the government's ban on the Falun Dafa movement, which authorities consider an evil religious cult.Mr. Li knows that scores of out-of-town adherents will descend on Beijing to protest against the crackdown, and he plans to extend help to any who ask for it. He takes it upon himself this day to scout out the sprawling square so that he can provide information on the likely police presence there,especially plainclothes officers.

"This is my own idea," Mr. Li says as he sets out on a two-hour ride that will be punctuated by pager messages from members of Falun Dafa's nationwide network of activists requesting help. "Everyone decides for themselves how to be of most use. This is something I can do."

As the campaign against Falun Dafa enters its second year, many wonder how the group has withstood the government's security onslaught. The crackdown has involved a deployment of uniformed and undercover security agents not seen since the massacre of antigovernment protesters near Tiananmen Square 11 years ago.

Yet Falun Dafa is staying a step ahead, thanks to a well-functioning ad hoc network that depends on informal links among adherents using pagers and pay phones. One of those links is Mr. Li, an unemployed accountant whose efforts to keep Falun Dafa alive have earned him the affectionate nickname of Brother Li among adherents.

Falun Dafa maintains that it isn't a religion but an organization that promotes good health through breathing exercises called Falun Gong and good morals. The moral precepts come from founder Li Hongzhi, who lives in the U.S. and isn't related to Brother Li.

Authorities accuse the group of being a tightly organized movement that uses a "second echelon" of organizers like Brother Li to keep the group alive. Claiming that Falun Dafa's advocacy of exercise over medicine led to 1,500 deaths, the government has tried to smash this structure by rounding up all of the group's known leaders in China and thousands of other members. Had Falun Dafa been one of the dissident groups that occasionally spring up to promote democracy, the display of force would have been more than enough to crush it.

But Falun Dafa is more complex than authorities in Beijing imagine. Made up of very loose cells linked by interchangeable volunteers, it has demonstrated a remarkable ability to inspire ordinary followers to give up their jobs and their freedom to fill in for arrested leaders and followers.

During the past year, Brother Li and others also have learned how to cope with the Communist Party's security apparatus. Experience has taught them to shun cellular phones and e-mail as too easily monitored. Two decades of change in China mean that they also can take advantage of housing that is outside the party's authority, tap private, unregistered cabbies who take orders from no one, and exploit the general confusion of a country where the party can no longer control everything.

As Tiananmen Square comes in sight, Brother Li's beeper goes off. It's a message to call a pay phone in Beijing. Brother Li angles his one-speed black bike over to the curb and stops in front of a bank of pay phones as a wave of cyclists rushes past. All the phones are occupied.

Experience quells the temptation to turn on his cell phone. Not only can conversations be monitored, but the phones are dangerous even when they are only switched on. That's because security agents can figure out which transmitter the phone is getting its signal from. In a city like Beijing, where a high density of mobile phones means transmitters are located every few blocks,police could trace Brother Li and follow him through town.

A few weeks earlier, one of Brother Li's associates was almost nabbed when he used a mobile phone to set up a meeting. A novice to the group's security measures, he arrived at the rendezvous point to find the area crawling with suspicious people. Although he jumped into a cab and left, the two followers he was supposed to meet were detained.

Finally, a public phone is free and Brother Li calls. From the receiver comes an excited voice -- a Falun Dafa practitioner from northeastern China who has traveled to the capital to find someone to help her send an e-mail to the outside world. Identifying herself only as Ms. Chen, she alleges that a teenage Falun Dafa believer died when she tried to escape police by leaping from a train. Like many Falun Dafa newcomers to the city, Ms. Chen has heard of Brother Li through a friend of a friend. Brother Li has no idea who she is, but after talking to her for a while, he figures she isn't a police plant. He agrees to meet later in the day.

"You can usually tell if the people are genuine," he says, hopping on his bike and heading back down the road in the stifling heat. "They make references to things that the police wouldn't know about and have this earnest air about them."

Ms. Chen, who spent the previous night outside in a park, is desperate for accommodations. Practitioners used to stay with Brother Li, but his three-room apartment in Beijing's eastern district is sometimes watched by security agents. Like most people who have continued to practice Falun Dafa during the year since the crackdown, Ms. Chen was fired from her job and has little money. Most followers can survive in costly Beijing only through the generosity of fellow practitioners.

Fortunately for Brother Li, housing in China is no longer strictly controlled by the party. Just a few years ago, all housing was allocated by government-controlled "work units," and busybody cleaning ladies sat in elevators, noting who came and went. Now, housing is starting to be sold commercially, people are moving around, and no one is exactly sure who lives where. A fellow Falun Dafa adherent who worked for a textile company has an extra apartment and Brother Li is fairly certain Ms. Chen can stay there without anyone's noticing.

As he pedals across the north end of Tiananmen Square, Brother Li is hard to distinguish from the thousands of other cyclists. Wearing a striped short-sleeve shirt and black polyester pants, he cuts a trim figure, his face often breaking out into a broad, easy smile. But then his eyes, usually languid and distant, suddenly light up. "There and there," he says, making mental notes. "The police are all along the entrances to the pedestrian underpasses."

A day after his reconnaissance trip, Brother Li is cycling past Workers Stadium in Beijing in search of a pay phone that he hasn't used. He worries that if he regularly calls from the same public phones near home, undercover police, who occasionally follow him, will notice and start bugging those as well.

His beeper goes off and he pulls over to make a call. It's an adherent from Guangdong province in the south who had been in Beijing helping people from her region survive in the distant capital, with its incomprehensible dialect and tight security. The woman debated going to Tiananmen Square to protest -- an act that always winds up with arrest and detention without charge. In the end, she decided she was needed more in Guangdong, where she can function as a link to the capital.

Before the crackdown, Falun Dafa had a more elaborate organizational structure. It had "general assistance centers," usually in each province, and "assistance centers" in cities. It also had "assistants" who helped teach the slow-motion exercises, sold cassettes and books and reserved space in public parks where adherents met to exercise. The old structure was quickly broken by the Public Security Bureau. Moles inside the group gave security agents lists of assistants, who were quickly rounded up and jailed, with some given sentences of as long as 15 years.

The new structure, which depends on ordinary followers keeping in touch with one another, is much more resilient. If the woman in Guangdong gets arrested, as she has on several occasions, Brother Li has alternative contacts down south to call. Likewise, if he is arrested, believers can reach other Beijing activists -- phone lists are widely shared and passed on to trusted followers.

Most of the contact between regions is to exchange basic intelligence --where police are active and who is out of jail and can be reached. Members also exchange stories of police abuse and protests to bolster their spirits. At a meeting with Brother Li before heading back, the woman from Guangdong, a 32-year-old unemployed English teacher with a pale face and a tiny voice, explains herself: "Many followers need to be reminded that others are protesting. This will give them courage."

Now she's calling to say she has made it back safely and to ask for any news. Brother Li relates that demonstrations have been going on daily, even if on some days only a few make it to Tiananmen Square. He's using a pay phone in a kiosk, and with the vendor listening to his end of the conversation, he doesn't speak too explicitly. "We've still got a lot of friends visiting town. We're still very active," Brother Li says. "Let everyone know we're fine in Beijing."

He hangs up and continues on. He's now passing through the capital's bar district, a narrow street lined with pubs called Durty Nellie's and Nashville and, at night, with prostitutes and revelers. In his mind, the risks he takes are worthwhile because his faith stands in direct contrast to this moral decay. He feels he is part of an effort to restore standards that decades of Communist attacks on people's beliefs have destroyed.

Not too long ago, Mr. Li gave little thought to such spiritual matters, striving for the promotions and business trips abroad that define success in modern China. He worked as an accountant at a textile mill, got married and had a son, who is now 12. Then he heard about Falun Dafa early last year, and he began to practice, at first out of curiosity but then with increasing fervor.

Last October, Brother Li was suddenly forced to decide how much Falun Dafa meant to him. Worried about pressure from its government masters, managers at his state-owned mill told him that he should stop practicing. The decision, he says, was easy: He quit, and since then has occupied his time with odd jobs and with helping the movement survive.

Now living on a monthly $40 stipend from the local welfare office, he says he reminds himself of the famous Chinese aphorism: "The great hermit lives in the city." Accordingly, he has stripped his life down to the simplest of clothes and only one luxury: a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses against the burning summer sun. Pagers are cheap here, and so are phone calls. He bought his cell phone, which he rarely uses now, when he had a job. With his wife's salary as a clerk in a factory, the Li family just makes ends meet.

"We live in a bad world, one that needs good people who believe in doing good deeds," Brother Li says quietly, embarrassed at having to explain his beliefs. "Life is a test to see if you can be a good person."

He is interrupted again by his pager. It's another follower from Guangdong province who needs a fellow believer picked up at the airport. Brother Li quickly calls a Falun Dafa member who drives an unregistered cab – one of the thousands of such private taxis that have sprung up in recent years. The cabbie agrees to take the airport passenger without charging; another small task done.

Arrest is always on Brother Li's mind. To minimize risk, he follows a few basic rules. Meetings with adherents last just a few minutes. Calls are clipped and ambiguous. Information is exchanged only in person. Pagers are changed as often as he can afford -- he has had three in the past four months --because if the police discover his account number, they can find out what calls are on his account.

But lying is considered morally wrong, so members rarely deny adhering to Falun Dafa. Many are arrested when police simply ask them their affiliation. It isn't unusual, for example, for practitioners who have spent their last penny traveling to Beijing to protest to be thwarted just a few feet away from Tiananmen Square by a police officer's simple question: "Are you a member of Falun Dafa?"

After finding a few pay phones and noting their location for future use, Mr. Li heads home. The temperature is over 100 degrees, and even Mr. Li, usually so cool and calm, starts sweating.

For two days now, he has been agonizing over whether he should go to Tiananmen Square to protest. In some ways, a key weapon that Falun Dafa practitioners have in their battle against the Public Security Bureau is the randomness of their actions. While protests increase in intensity around certain anniversaries, protesters go to the square almost daily, driven by the dictates of their conscience. Now, Brother Li's conscience tells him to go to the square. "I feel it is my duty to let the government know it's wrong," he says. "But if I stay out of prison, I might be of more use."

As he weighs his options, the one thing he doesn't consider is his timing -- but his will turn out to be impeccable. In two days, he will go to Tiananmen, sit cross-legged in the Falun Dafa meditating position and be thrown in jail. It will be early enough in the month so the judges won't yet be handing down the heavy sentences that some will get for protesting directly on the July 22 anniversary. But he will stay in long enough – 15 days -- to witness Beijing's prisons bulge with thousands of anniversary protesters. His wife will go on a hunger strike. He will see a fellow prisoner beaten unconscious. In late July, he will be released.

But now, as he dismounts to catch his breath, all he knows is that it's his turn to test his faith. It is late afternoon and cicadas drown out everything but Brother Li's voice. "You know my decision," he says. "I'll call you when I get out."

© 2000, Dow Jones & Company

A Grieving Daughter Traces a Tortuous Path Seeking Justice in China

Alone and Against All Odds, Ms. Zhang Tried to Prove Police Killed Her Mother

An Inheritance of the Spiritual

By Ian Johnson

BEIJING -- Her six-year-old son in tow, Zhang Xueling trudges through the heavy heat of an early summer morning toward the Chinese government's Petitions and Appeals Office. Memory, as much as the heat, weighs on her.

Four months earlier, her mother, Chen Zixiu, "wanted to come here and protest that Falun Dafa was good," Ms. Zhang says. "But she died trying, so now I'm here on her behalf."

Ms. Chen had hoped to convince the government that it had unjustly banned Falun Dafa, a spiritual movement that the 58-year-old had joined a few years ago. The trip ended in her arrest, torture and death, documented in an April article in this newspaper. In May, the United Nations Committee Against Torture took up the matter and later criticized China for failing to rein in police abuses. Then, in September, the U.S. State Department cited Ms. Chen's death as a prime example of China's human-rights abuses. Officials at all levels of the Chinese government have refused to comment on Ms. Chen's death.

But on this hot June morning, all that Ms. Chen's 32-year-old daughter wants is her mother's death certificate.

In China, when someone dies, police normally issue a death certificate to the family, upon request. The police officers who witnesses say killed Ms. Zhang's mother on Feb. 21 insist that she died of a heart attack in a hospital. Ms. Zhang hopes that by issuing the death certificate, police will be forced to admit that her mother died in their custody. That, in theory, should trigger an internal investigation and, she hopes, bring her mother's killers to justice.

But Ms. Zhang is beginning to learn how hard it is not only to obtain justice, but merely to seek it, in a country where the most powerful organization, the Communist Party, is above the law. Ms. Zhang hurries toward the Petition and Appeals Office, passing groups of people who, like her, are availing themselves of their right to petition for redress of wrongs at the hands of government. It's a tradition that goes back centuries, and that the party has maintained as a social safety valve. One bedraggled peasant crouches over a sheaf of paper, moving his pen in the air, trying to remember how to write the word "expropriate." His clan has been trying for 14 years to recover land that they say was taken illegally by officials.

The building's entrance is in an alley and watched carefully by a dozen plainclothes police with shifty stares and mobile phones. Security agents at the entrance to the alley ask approaching petitioners if they are Falun Dafa adherents. They turn back those who say they are. Ms. Zhang, though, can truthfully say that she isn't an adherent and that her problem is a simple case of police abuse. She is let in.

Two hours later she comes out, shaking her head. "They said it's a criminal case and should be handled by the Public Security Bureau," she says, walking along a garbage-filled canal. "That's my next stop," she adds, and then disappears into a subway station.

A short, stout woman with a round face, bobbed hair and direct eyes, Ms.Zhang was once the sort of person who floated easily through reform-era China. She worked as a clerk at a department store in Weifang, her prosperous hometown of 1.3 million people in eastern China's Shandong province, and took accounting classes in her spare time. She married, had a son and went back to work as a bookkeeper. Later, after neighbors praised her skill in arranging a few marriages, she took advantage of the growing freedom in China to work as a matchmaker -- a profession that the Communist Party forbade during the first 30 years of its rule but that has reappeared over the past two decades of reform.

Then, three years ago, her mother, a retired factory worker, joined Falun Dafa, a fast-growing spiritual movement that derives loosely from Taosim and Buddhism and promises salvation and supernatural powers to its followers. For more than an hour each morning, Ms. Chen practiced the group's regimen of slow-motion calisthenics -- called Falun Gong – which are designed, in accordance with traditional Chinese medicine, to channel energy through the body.

Ms. Zhang was initially supportive of her mother. But she sided with the government when, perceiving a political threat in Falun Dafa, Beijing in July of last year banned the movement. She reiterated to her mother the government's reasoning: Founder Li Hongzhi, who now lives in exile in the U.S., was untrustworthy because, the government said, he had changed his birthdate to match that of the Buddha. She also worried about government reports that 1,500 adherents had died because they had rejected modern medicine in favor of exercise.

But as the crackdown became more brutal late last year, with police detaining thousands of adherents, Ms. Zhang began for the first time in her life to question the government. Beijing claimed that Mr. Li enriched himself on the backs of his followers, but the Falun Dafa adherents Ms. Zhang knew had spent no more than a few dollars on books or instructional videos. Far from being suicidal or superstitious fanatics, her mother's Falun Dafa circle was made up of well-balanced people who didn't reject modern medicine.

She kept these doubts to herself -- until Feb. 21. A few months earlier,in December, Ms. Chen had traveled to Beijing to protest against its ban on the group. She was arrested and sent home. When she tried to go to Beijing again in February, police imprisoned her without charge. Officials demanded that she recant her faith. She refused, was beaten unconscious and, on Feb.21, died, according to prison inmates and family members.

Local officials told Ms. Zhang that her mother had died of a heart attack. The day after Ms. Chen's death, Ms. Zhang and her brother were allowed to see the body, bruised and battered and laid out in traditional mourning garb in a local hospital. The hospital issued a report that day saying Ms. Chen died of natural causes. The hospital won't comment further.

Ms. Zhang and her brother couldn't find a lawyer who would take their case. Then, on March 17, Ms. Zhang received a letter from the hospital saying the body, held in refrigeration as the threat of litigation loomed, would be cremated that day. Ms. Zhang never saw her mother's body again.

Ms. Zhang couldn't let her mother's death go at that. "I felt that something wasn't right, and that they were hiding something," she says.

She sent letters to the State Council, the highest body of civilian power in China, and to local media, asking for copies of her mother's death certificate. Both groups ignored her. The police didn't; Ms. Zhang calculates that by late April, when she was finally sentenced to 15 days in prison for "distorting facts and disturbing social order," she had been interrogated by police for 107 hours in numerous sessions over several weeks.

The detention was a turning point. "I was thrown in with common criminals and could finally see the injustice that my mother had suffered," Ms. Zhang says. "I decided to learn everything I could and challenge the authorities using their own language."

Upon her release, she stopped working as a matchmaker to devote herself full time to pressing her mother's case. She bought handbooks on the law and learned how to make official requests for documents and how to appeal refusals. Her husband, a carpenter, supported her throughout.

The work brought Ms. Zhang into close contact with Falun Dafa adherents,whose underground network came in handy when she took her appeal up through the hierarchy of the bureaucracy. Disciples view Ms. Zhang's mother as a martyr -- one of more than 50 people the organization says have died in the past year in the government crackdown -- and local adherents were happy to put up Ms. Zhang in their homes. They also told her where to find the appeals offices, which the government keeps unmarked and unlisted in the phone directory.

"Only they could really understand the frustrations I had and the hurdles I had to face everyday," she says.

Her efforts centered on the death certificate. Officials said the cremation took place on March 17. Immediately afterward, she had applied for a death certificate from police and from the crematorium, but had been rebuffed.She now decided to go through more formal channels, filing written requests for the certificate.

She spent most of May shuttling between offices of the Public Security Bureau in her hometown. Officials at the district office told her that they couldn't release the death certificate and that she should appeal to the higher-level bureau that controls the municipality. That bureau referred her back to the district office, arguing that the lower-level office had to furnish a copy of records before the higher-level office could act. Back at the district office, Ms. Zhang was told the higher-level office didn't need the records because senior officials had been present when the corpse was inspected and were already familiar with the situation. (Officials at all levels refused to be interviewed for this article.)

Frustrated, Ms. Zhang decided in early June to bypass the squabbling officials in Weifang by appealing to officials in the provincial capital, Jinan. Her goal now was to push the provincial procurator's office, which acts like a prosecutor's office in the U.S., to file criminal charges against the Public Security Bureau for failing to release the death certificate.

But the procurator's office, which works closely with security forces, told her to file a civil lawsuit. When she approached lawyers, however, they told her the Ministry of Justice had issued a directive to all lawyers advising them not to accept cases related to Falun Dafa. Stymied again, she headed for Beijing and the Petitions and Appeals Office.

So on that hot June day, Ms. Zhang emerges from the subway and heads to the Public Security Bureau, as the Petitions and Appeals Office had advised.It's the morning of June 19, and she arrives to find that visiting hours are already over. The adrenaline that has kept her going the past few days slowly ebbs. Her son scampers away, hoping his mother will follow.

Ms. Zhang takes a deep breath and determines to visit one more place before giving up. Beijing is dotted with several lesser petitions offices that belong to various minor ministries. Maybe just one of them, she figures, can help. Nearby is the petition office of the All-China Women's Federation, a government-run organization that is supposed to look after the interests of China's 650 million women. She doubts that it has much power, but grabs her son by the hand and heads over.

After losing her way in the maze of alleys that make up Beijing's old city, she finally finds the unmarked office. A woman looks up from behind her desk and asks Ms. Zhang to explain her case. The woman listens carefully to Ms. Zhang, nodding her head and sighing. Then she pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and speaks carefully: "Rule of law is still rudimentary right now. This case will be hard to solve, but you have to go back to the Public Security Bureau."

The answer is blunt, but it is the first civil reply Ms. Zhang has received from the dozens of bureaucrats she has approached. Her courage builds. She gathers her son and heads out into the heat, vowing to return to the Public Security Bureau in the afternoon.

At 2 p.m. she walks up once again to the unmarked door. Her son, who cries at the sight of uniformed police, has fallen asleep. Ms. Zhang carries him slung over her shoulder as she enters.

An hour later, she emerges, her face beaming. She carries a letter sealed by the Public Security Bureau that she suspects contains orders for the local security bureaus to give her the death certificate. She shakes her head in amazement. "I don't know," she says, letting her son down gently to the ground as he wakes up. "Maybe I can finally get an answer."

Back in Weifang two days later, she is at the local office of the Public Security Bureau. When an official there opens the letter, she glimpses the brief order: "Handle this case in writing" -- in other words, give a written response. Ms. Zhang is ecstatic.

But then, days pass without reply. She returns again and again to the local bureau until finally someone in the office tells her that police won't issue the death certificate. She isn't sure if this is because the body actually wasn't ever cremated -- the crematorium might have feared being charged with destroying evidence -- or simply because the police are ignoring the written orders from Beijing. In any case, her joy gives way to resignation as she begins to realize that she probably never will lay eyes on her mother's death certificate.

The experience has changed her: Where she once agreed with the government that the maintenance of order is paramount, she now supports civil disobedience for a just cause. She begins to write down her thoughts. The process of petitioning "enabled me to meet people being treated unfairly and to listen to the ridiculous things that happened to them," Ms. Zhang writes in an unpublished essay. "Apart from Falun Gong practitioners, who are taken away by the public security, less than 10% of those [other] petitioners expect to have their problem settled. Most petitioners only get a chance to exchange their complaints with each other and end up with empty pockets.''

By late August, she still hasn't received a response from the local security bureau. She heads back to Beijing, hoping at least to have her 15-day detention expunged from her records. She remembers that while in jail, the only people who were decent to her were Falun Dafa prisoners. In recent weeks, she has started to learn about the group's teachings and to practice Falun Gong herself.

"I used to be a materialist and believed that everything in life could be gained from hard work," she says, heading back from a fruitless trip to the Supreme Court to the house of a fellow believer. "But Falun Dafa makes more sense. At its root are three principles: truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. If we adhere to these, isn't that a deeper meaning to life?"

Ms. Zhang has exhausted all legal channels, and figures that even clearing her record will be impossible. Increasingly, she takes solace in her beliefs, and turns her attention to her son, a reminder of the grandmother who was so fond of him.

He starts school in September, and Ms. Zhang worries about the government textbooks that he will start reading, with their heavy emphasis on patriotism and nationalism. She has decided to start teaching him the principles of Falun Dafa. "I teach him that when someone hits him, it's the person who hit him who is wrong," she says. "His grandmother had this belief. I have it now, and so will he.''

© 2000, Dow Jones & Company

By Ian Johnson

HONG KONG -- 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 on President and Communist Party head Jiang Zemin. 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.

Since late September, for example, Falun Dafa's main overseas Web site (http://clearwisdom.net/) has started carrying articles blaming Mr. Jiang for the crackdown and chronicling what it described as a well-laid plan to stigmatize and ultimately ban the group. Such articles were widely disseminated in China, helping to galvanize protests last week in Beijing that resulted in more than 1,000 Falun Dafa practitioners being arrested.

The suit was filed in late August, but a copy of it was only obtained within the past few days. Friends of the litigants smuggled a copy out of China after police pursued them for more than a month through several cities, they say. They arrived in Hong Kong and then departed for another country.

The suit specifies that two of Mr. Jiang's 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. More than 10,000 Falun Dafa adherents peacefully surrounded the leadership compound, called Zhongnanhai, demanding an end to what they said was slanted reporting of their organization in the government-controlled media.

Mr. Zeng controls senior leadership appointments and Mr. Luo oversees security. Both are considered rising stars in the leadership and top candidates to succeed Mr. Jiang when he retires, as expected, in two years.

Government officials said they hadn't seen the suit and had no comment.

The 22-page document points to specific meetings that the three leaders attended in which it says they insisted that the crackdown be especially severe -- thousands have been arrested and numerous people killed by police brutality. Although Mr. Jiang is sometimes seen as a moderate among China's leaders, the banned spiritual group says the 74-year-old leader has taken a personal interest in stamping out the group. "He [Jiang] was very dissatisfied with how the Zhongnanhai incident was handled and felt his legacy was threatened," the suit says in its introduction.

The suit was filed by Wang Jie, 37, an editor with the Survey and Mapping Publishing House, and Hong Kong resident Zhu Keming, 43, an artist and businessman. The two are being held on the 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.

By Ian Johnson

BEIJING -- The United Nations, which has just concluded an agreement designed to improve human rights in China, recently sponsored an international conference that Beijing used to justify its brutal crackdown on the spiritual movement Falun Dafa.

The International Symposium on Cults, held Nov. 9 and 10 in Beijing, was co-sponsored by the China International Friendship Association and the U.N. Development Program, whose representative here, Kerstin Leitner, delivered the opening address. China's state-run media gave the meeting prominent coverage, saying it showed that other countries supported the crackdown on organizations such as Falun Dafa, popularly known as Falun Gong.

China outlawed Falun Dafa last year, saying it advocated exercise over medicine and unhealthy fealty to founder Li Hongzhi, a native Chinese who now lives in the U.S. Most countries and international organizations, including several U.N. bodies, have condemned the crackdown as suppression of religious freedom. Scores of practitioners have died from police mistreatment, thousands have been sent to labor camps and tens of thousands have been detained without charge. Now, a Hong Kong group says, two more Falun Dafa members have died in Chinese custody and an adherent who sued President Jiang Zemin is missing.

On Monday, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, signed an agreement to help Beijing protect individual rights through training of law-enforcement officers, judges and other legal officials. The UNDP's Beijing office, which sponsored the cult conference, will implement the agreement.

Ms. Robinson said it was "extremely appropriate" that Ms. Leitner's office sponsored the conference because it would help China understand how other countries deal with organizations similar to Falun Dafa. Ms. Leitner also staunchly defended the conference, which she said was proposed by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan when he visited Beijing a year ago. While she said she objected to its name, which in Chinese translates as a symposium on "evil cults," she said the goal was to open Chinese officials' eyes to softer ways of dealing with cults.

In her speech, Ms. Leitner said China had traditionally been threatened by "quasireligious movements" that "threatened the established order" at times of social change. Now, however, such groups work internationally and need a coordinated response from the world community, she said. She said China's actions on Falun Dafa are "an issue of good governance" -- implying that action was needed, but it could have been handled better.

© 2000, Dow Jones & Company

A Blind Eye: China's Rigid Policies On Religion Helped Falun Dafa for Years

Then a Buddhist, an Atheist And Group's Own Tactics Sparked the Crackdown

A Bureau Called Office 610

By Ian Johnson

BEIJING -- Chen Xingqiao would seem to be a natural ally for the Chinese government as it struggles to crush the spiritual group Falun Dafa.

The 43-year-old Buddhist, who works in a small temple in Beijing's leafy western district, was one of the earliest critics of the group. He argued in 1996 -- three years before Falun Dafa was outlawed -- that it was an illegally registered religious organization and therefore should be banned. But even now, with China desperate for allies in its 18-month battle against Falun Dafa, Mr. Chen's views have never been aired in public. Government censors proscribe local media from running interviews with him; his 1998 book on the group has never been distributed to bookstores.

The reason: Mr. Chen has a more nuanced view of Falun Dafa than the authorities -- one that doesn't jibe with their black-or-white approach. The government has lurched from one extreme to another as it tries to come to terms with the new religion, which is widely known as Falun Gong and advocates a combination of moral precepts and physical exercise. First, it muzzled critics such as Mr. Chen, hoping Falun Dafa would disappear if it wasn't discussed. Then, after Falun Dafa members mistakenly interpreted this as a sign of official support, the government hit the group with a campaign of vitriol and violence. Tens of thousands have been arrested and scores tortured to death.

"I thought Falun Dafa was bad, but that it had to be understood as part of this religious hunger that people have," says Mr. Chen, who edits a Buddhist magazine. "But the bureaucrats can't understand what motivates most people."

At the root of these problems is a government out of step with an increasingly complex and diverse country. Set up five decades ago to run a totalitarian dictatorship, China's government has learned over the past two decades how to reform its economy -- witness China's pending entry into the World Trade Organization -- and has largely stopped meddling in people's private lives.

But fearful of losing power, leaders have stunted the development of independent organizations -- religions, trade unions, business groups, a free press and charities -- that anchor truly stable societies. Trade groups still must register with government-run chambers of commerce, restricting their ability to speak out on behalf of members. Newspapers, magazines and television stations remain under tight government supervision, and Internet sites have been told that they must bear the consequences of what they publish.

Even micro-credit programs to alleviate rural poverty must be run through government agencies, which have put China decades behind other developing countries in establishing this widely recognized method of helping the poor. As China hurtles forward, driven by ever-faster economic and social change, its rulers still rely on two simplistic ways to deal with social change: neglect or suppression.

A close look at the events leading up to the crackdown on Falun Dafa shows how some people worked hard for a more moderate outcome. Many, like Mr. Chen, didn't like Falun Dafa, but they recognized it as part of a bigger problem that needed to be addressed. Others shared the argument of He Zuoxiu, a prominent senior physicist who felt that confrontation and hard-nosed debate would check Falun Dafa's rapid growth by revealing the group's penchant for bullying its critics. Only the government, ossified after decades in power, refused to address the social upheaval that was fueling Falun Dafa's rise, or to ease the rigid policies that were setting the group on a collision course with the Communist Party.

At first, Falun Dafa was untouched by Chinese officialdom because of a loosening of state control under way since the late 1970s. After Mao Tse-tung's death in 1976 ended his last, catastrophic decade in power, the Communist Party tried to win back popular support by reforming the economy. It also permitted a partial rebirth of religion, which the officially atheist party tightly controlled with elaborate rules and regulations. But, weakened by years of internal power struggles, the party was forced to turn a blind eye to a wide swath of gray-area activities, including folk religions.

One was Falun Dafa. Like similar movements through the centuries, Falun Dafa was headed by a man claiming superhuman powers and demanding a return to traditional morals -- "popular fundamentalism," as some scholars call it. It also drew on qigong, an exercise technique that involves controlled breathing, meditation and slow-motion calisthenics. And like many of the new spiritual movements flooding the country at this time, it originated in China's far north, a rust belt of shuttered factories and long unemployment lines.

Mr. Chen first came across Falun Dafa in 1994, when he still lived in Harbin, a northern city only a day's drive from the Russian border. A friend took him to hear Falun Dafa's founder, Li Hongzhi, speak. Mr. Chen, a committed Buddhist, didn't like what he heard. Part of the speech, he says, denigrated Buddhism, while the rest was laced with claims of prescience. "I figured he was one of those typical northeastern Chinese supermen and forgot about him," says Mr. Chen, a wiry man with a quick wit and a broad smile.

But during the next two years, Mr. Chen found it increasingly hard to ignore Falun Dafa. Thanks to fervent proselytizing, the group became the most popular of the new religions that were offering a moral compass in a turbulent age. Almost every park in Harbin featured a Falun Dafa exercise spot. Corner bookstands were lined with the group's books and videotapes. Many Buddhists were even returning their statues and sutras, or scriptures, to temples, saying they weren't as powerful as Mr. Li's main text, "Turning the Dharma Wheel."

Even in the tool factory where Mr. Chen worked as an administrator before taking his editing job, Falun Dafa slowly became unavoidable. Believers practiced for an hour every morning in the front yard of the plant and met for discussion groups in the evening. Curious, Mr. Chen picked up a copy of Mr. Li's book and spent several months studying it. His conclusion: Falun Dafa was a heretical offshoot of Buddhism that misappropriated traditional religious terms such as "Dharma Wheel" to give it legitimacy. He wrote a 20,000-word essay called "Revealing the Original Face of Falun Gong -- a New Kind of Folk Religion" and gave it to his local Buddhist association.

But Mr. Chen's analysis was too penetrating and his remedy too radical for China's rigid officialdom. The country's religious bureaucracy recognizes only five religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism and Taoism. To check their growth, the government bans proselytizing outside places of worship. But Mr. Chen noted that organizations such as Falun Dafa, which had officially registered with the government as an exercise group, labored under no such restrictions.

Mr. Chen's solution: unshackle established religions so they could compete on equal terms. If Falun Dafa could hold meetings in sports stadiums and recruit passersby in the park, why not allow Buddhists to do the same? The response from officials, though, was predictable: They ignored his proposals. "They were just interested in keeping everything quiet," Mr. Chen says.

Open discussion of Falun Dafa would also expose the central paradox in official policy. Acknowledging Falun Dafa as a religion would mean officials would either have to allow a new religion to register, or ban it. Registering a new religion is impossible in China -- it hasn't happened in five decades of Communist rule -- while banning it would be an admission that the government had allowed a religion to flourish for years in the guise of an exercise group.

Mr. Chen's frustrations came to a head later in 1996, when the Harbin city government convened a meeting called "Socialism and Buddhism." As a senior lay member of the city's Buddhist community, Mr. Chen attended and brought up Falun Dafa for discussion.

The issue died after just a few minutes' debate. Representatives from the police said they could act only when a disturbance occurred, while officials from the religious bureau said they are allowed to oversee activities only inside established places of worship, according to people present at the meeting. "It fell through the cracks, so the government simply ignored it and hoped it would go away," says an official at the Harbin public-security office who attended the 1996 meeting. Adds Mr. Chen: "It was a new religion, but no one knew what to do about it because new religions are illegal. Therefore it didn't exist."

Mr. Chen decided that if the bureaucracy wouldn't act, he would prod it by publishing his essay, which the local Buddhist association had forwarded to its national headquarters. He turned to its head, Zhao Puchu, a rare figure who managed to remain respected in religious circles while maintaining the trust of party officials.

Mr. Zhao liked the essay and sent it to China's leading party newspaper, People's Daily. The paper initially wanted to publish a condensed version in its elite "Internal Reference" edition, which is read by the country's top leaders. But after asking Mr. Chen for permission to run such a version, a senior editor killed it.

"Several things prevented us from running it," says an editor at the newspaper. "Foremost was that he talked too frankly about religion. We just can't do that."

Mr. Zhao then ordered that the tract be published in early 1997 in "Religious Trends," an internal publication of the Buddhist association. After a further year of effort, he got the essay printed by a publishing house run by the party's religious-affairs office.

These were victories, but small ones. Reflecting government suspicion of religion, "Religious Trends" was allowed to be distributed only to members of the Buddhist association, so its impact was negligible. The book was deemed too sensitive to distribute to bookstores. Instead, interested readers had to contact the publishing house in Beijing and pick it up in person.

One person who did take note of Mr. Chen's book was He Zuoxiu. A rumpled, energetic 73-year-old, Mr. He is one of China's most famous physicists and for years has made it his personal crusade to popularize science and combat what he sees as his countrymen's predilection for superstition. He had come across Falun Dafa in 1996 but dismissed its scriptures as humbug.

Two years later, however, Mr. He realized he had been mistaken to write it off so lightly. By then, Falun Dafa had exploded in popularity, spreading from the far north to China's big cities. It had in effect become China's unofficial sixth religion, boasting tens of millions of adherents -- some estimates ran as high as 100 million in this nation of more than 1.3 billion.

One believer was a student in Mr. He's research institute, who in the spring of 1998 was committed to a mental institution for obsessively practicing Falun Dafa. The young man refused to eat or drink and would only meditate. Mr. He heard from a friend about Mr. Chen's book, read it and decided Falun Dafa was a cult.

Unlike Mr. Chen, who saw in Falun Dafa's rise proof that the country needed more religious freedom, Mr. He believed it was another quasi-religious group that needed to be put in its place. An old-school Marxist, Mr. He believes in science, not religion, and today remains one of a small number of members still active in the China Atheists Association. So in May, when Beijing Television came to film a report on Mr. He's institute, he grabbed the opportunity to criticize Falun Dafa, attacking it as "responsible for sending a young man to the hospital."

The day after the show aired on May 11, 1998, Mr. He realized he was in for a fight. That morning, half a dozen adherents showed up at his house and sat in his living room for three hours, arguing with him. "I showed them that I'd read their book and all the parts that I thought were nonsense," he said. "It was a bit unpleasant having all these people coming to your home, but in the end we just agreed that we didn't agree and they left."

Mr. He promptly called the station and found out that a few Falun Dafa adherents were outside the station with pickets. Fresh from his experience with the argumentative students, Mr. He urged Beijing Television not to buckle. "The idea that they could protest outside a major organization of the party was unimaginable," he says

But, as Mr. Chen had learned two years earlier, Mr. He soon discovered that officials were bent on the path of least resistance. By early June, the number of protesters outside Beijing TV had grown to 2,000 – all peaceful and orderly but shocking to authorities in Beijing, which hadn't seen a significant demonstration since the student protests in Tiananmen Square a decade earlier. With the ninth anniversary of those demonstrations rapidly approaching -- still a sensitive time on China's political calendar -- leaders ordered the television station to end the Falun Dafa protest at any cost.

The station quickly complied. To show goodwill, it handed out 2,000 boxed lunches and promised to air a sympathetic portrayal of the group. The next day, the show ran as promised, the protests dispersed and quiet returned to the Chinese capital.

Mr. He was incensed at the acquiescence. He did more research and found out that the party had regularly yielded to Falun Dafa protesters. Several media outlets -- estimates range as high as 14 -- had been besieged by Falun Dafa adherents angry at reports casting doubt on its claim to foster good health through exercise. In almost every case, the media had backed down, printing or airing apologies to Falun Dafa.

Most, Mr. He learned, were simply taking their cue from the China Press and Publication Administration, which controls content in China's media. The office had a "three nots" policy on groups such as Falun Dafa: media should not be for it, should not be against it and should not label it good or bad -- part of the agency's general policy of avoiding anything controversial. Newspapers had been following this rule since 1996 when Enlightenment Daily, the main newspaper aimed at cultural circles, published a book review critical of Mr. Li's work and became the first media organization to be besieged by angry adherents who demanded -- and received -- a retraction.

To the stability-minded mandarins who run the country, this seemed like sound policy, one that the Beijing Television protests bore out. Opening up a messy debate about Falun Dafa would have sparked more protests and allowed people such as Mr. Chen to call for religious freedom. Few considered the lesson that Falun Dafa was learning: that demonstrations were acceptable.

Mr. He decided to force the party to change its policy -- and unlike Mr. Chen, he had more ways to make society take notice of Falun Dafa. As a famous academic researcher and government loyalist, he was a member of a top-level consultative committee that advises the Communist Party on policy. Although largely powerless, the committee provided Mr. He with some cover to step up his criticism of Falun Dafa.

He started by sending a letter to President Jiang Zemin, warning him that a new religion with tens of millions of followers was spreading across China. The letter, which he titled "Reckless Falun Gong ," was written by Mr. He and five fellow members of the committee. There was no reply.

Refusing to be discouraged, Mr. He began writing articles for any publication that would accept his work. Most followed the party's three-nots campaign, but a few regional journals, unaware of the central government's policy, were happy to run articles by the famous scientist. "The bigger papers . . . were afraid they'd have to apologize," Mr. He says. "So I had to publish in these small newspapers and magazines."

While Mr. He plugged away, Falun Dafa enjoyed a banner year in 1998. Though its founder, Mr. Li, had emigrated to the U.S., he returned often to coordinate activities and stayed in close contact with practitioners through a tightly knit organization. Critics such as Mr. He continued their pinprick attacks, but the party's do-nothing policies coupled with Falun Dafa's militancy had marginalized them.

"The government was mostly supportive of us," says Zhang Erping, a Falun Dafa spokesman who lives in New York. "Many top leaders seemed to support us."

This impression was understandable but wrong. Most of China's leaders didn't accept or agree with Falun Dafa; their crude governing apparatus had simply kept them in the dark. That was about to change, not because leaders had become wiser, but because Falun Dafa was to make a tactical mistake.

As 1998 wound down, Mr. He decided to write a short commentary for a small student magazine called Science and Technology Knowledge for Youth. The article, "Why Young People Shouldn't Practice Qigong," was one of his typical blasts at all forms of qigong, which he said was more suitable to older, less-active people. Halfway through the article, he mentioned Falun Dafa and then, in a key phrase that angered the group, referred to Mr. Li in a mildly derisive term as its toutou, or "boss."

The response came quickly. The day after the magazine was printed, protesters arrived at its offices on the campus of Tianjin Normal University, located about 100 miles east of Beijing. From April 20 to 23, as many as 6,000 occupied the university, demanding a retraction. "The publishers called me," Mr. He says, reaching over to touch his green plastic rotary phone. "And asked me what was going on. I told them that as a science publication, they had better not print a retraction."

The magazine stood firm. Angry Falun Dafa members then made their fateful decision to seek help from the very top echelons of the party. It was a turn of events that even Mr. He couldn't have foreseen. He had hoped his magazine articles would attract the leaders' attention; instead, his articles had provoked Falun Dafa into doing this for him. On April 25, 1999, an estimated 10,000 members peacefully surrounded the central government's leadership compound in downtown Beijing and asked that Falun Dafa be legitimized as a normal part of society.

It was a colossal miscalculation -- and a shock to the leadership. Frantic officials called Mr. He, demanding material on Falun Dafa. He couriered over a packet of stuff, including Mr. Chen's book.

Shortly after the demonstration, President Jiang Zemin issued an open letter to all senior leaders, calling Falun Dafa a threat to the party's authority. In the letter -- which was also read in party cell meetings, so everyone got the message -- Mr. Jiang chastized the government's security apparatus for allowing the protest to take place. "We called for 'stability above all,' but our stability has fallen through," Mr. Jiang wrote. "Our leaders must wake up."

Soon, the creaky government bureaucracy that had ignored and unwittingly encouraged Falun Dafa for years finally started to formulate a response to the group. But there was to be no public discussion on religious freedom, as Mr. Chen wanted, nor the sort of robust, no-gloves debate favored by Mr. He.

Instead, the party took the only action it knew. It set up a bureau called Office 610 -- named for the date, June 10, when it was formed – whose job was to mobilize the country's pliant social organizations. Under orders from the Public Security Bureau, churches, temples, mosques, newspapers, media, courts and police all quickly lined up behind the government's simple plan: to crush Falun Dafa. Within days, the first arrests were made.

As a staunch communist, Mr. He loyally backed the government's actions and so was interviewed widely in the government press. But he often referred people to Mr. Chen, the first person to recognize Falun Dafa as worthy of serious attention and study. Finally, Mr. Chen thought, he would have a chance to air his views.

Newspapers and television stations dutifully showed up at Mr. Chen's temple in Beijing. Each time, Mr. Chen would make his case and wait for something to appear in print or on air. Each time, nothing appeared.

"I criticized Falun Gong, but I also talked about the need for religion. Yet all the government wanted to do was fight it," says Mr. Chen, staring hard at the cover of his book. "Religion is a good resource. People need it. But the party is still completely ignorant of it."

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