Falun Gong is freely
practiced in more than 50 countries, but relentlessly persecuted in China.
The peaceful courage of
practitioners there has shocked their oppressors and moved the people of the
world.
While China continues to
block information about the persecution, FGM TV brings you the stories you may
not hear anywhere else.
Hello, and welcome to
the FGM TV weekly news review on December 3, 2002
I'm David Tompkins
In this week's update
from China…
The number of Falun Gong
practitioners verified to have died while in detention is 518. Reliable sources
inside China, however, put the actual death count in the thousands.
In the last 7 days, reports
of persecution have come in from 18 provinces and from the cities of Beijing,
and Chongqing.
318 people declared as
void all statements they had made under torture and at times when their minds
were not clear. They said they intend to continue to practice Falun Gong.
Our top story this week:
The 2002 Eastern United
States Experience Sharing Conference took place in Philadelphia on November 31st
and December 1st, and Teacher Li Gave a Lecture
And
some of our other stories:
Wang
Yuzhi, the practitioner rescued to Canada recently, describes the brutal
treatment she received at the Wanjia Labour Camp
Eight
Falun Gong practitioners are sentenced to long prison terms in Mishan City,
Heilongjiang Province
Amnesty
International appeals for Yoko Kaneko
Zhang
Cuiying holds an art show in Edmonton Canada
Two
practitioners spoke at the annual conference on Women and Peace was held in
Turin Italy
The
Second Irish Falun Dafa Experience Sharing Conference was held in Dublin
Scientists
discover human activities in Tibet 20,000 years ago, and finally,
A
practitioner from China tells how he overcame cirrosis of the liver through
practicing Falun Gong
On November 30, 2002, the
Eastern United States Falun Dafa Experience Sharing Conference was held at the
Pennsylvania Convention Center near Chinatown in Philadelphia.
Two thousand Falun Gong
practitioners from the Eastern United States and all over the world attended.
At a little after 2 pm,
Teacher Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, came to the conference site to
give a lecture.
Amidst thunderous applause
from the practitioners, Teacher Li opened his lecture with two lines from a
famous Tang dynasty poem:
"On either shore the
gibbons' chatter
sounded without pause
While my light boat skimmed
past
ten thousand somber crags."
He said, "After three
years of persecution, the evil has already exhausted its tricks, and Dafa
disciples have already become mature after going through the tests."
Teacher Li continued to
lecture for about 35 minutes.
More than a dozen
practitioners from Pennsylvania, Washington DC, and New Jersey, as well as
practitioners from Taiwan and Canada shared their experiences at the
conference.
Wang Yuzhi is the Chinese
woman who recently was rescued to Canada from the Middle East where Chinese
diplomats were using their influence to try to have her forcibly returned to
China, where she would face certain torture and possibly death.
She had been arrested three
times in China for clarifying the truth about Falun Gong.
The third time she was
nearly blinded by the abuse she suffered at the hands of officials at the
Wanjia Forced Labour Camp.
At a press conference in
Ottawa recently, she shared her experience in the labour camp.
She said: Practitioners are
tortured in many ways in Wanjia.
For example, practitioners
were hung up and whipped; stripped naked and shackled to an iron chair for long
periods of time, while being deprived of sleep and shocked with electric
batons. They are hung up with hands
shackled at the back of their bodies, for as long as several days, and female
practitioners are thrown in cells with violent male criminals, and so on.
Under such torture, many
people have been on the verge of death.
Most Falun Gong
practitioners refused to give up their belief.
She said, we went on hunger
strikes to protest the unlawful detention, and the torture.
The administrators used
force-feeding as a revenge tool to further torture practitioners.
She said, when I went on
hunger strike, the doctors used a steel clamp to pry my teeth open, then pushed
a rubber tube into my stomach to force-feed me.
It was as thick as a gas
tube.
My mouth was a pool of blood
and my body was covered in bruises after every force-feeding.
They would pour two big
bowls of cold water mixed with corn flour and said that it was for stretching
my stomach.
At least 8 Falun Gong practitioners
have been persecuted to death in Wanjia forced labour camp since the beginning
of this persecution.
She said the guards told
the practitioners that if they were beaten to death, it would be counted as
suicide and their bodies would be cremated immediately before informing their
families, so there would be no evidence.
In late October of 2002,
eight Falun Gong practitioners were illegally sentenced to prison terms,
ranging from 3 to 14 years, by the Mishan City Court of Heilongjiang Province.
Jiang Honglu, who was shot
by police during the Chinese Spring Festival and has been in jail ever since,
was sentenced to 14 years.
In order to concoct evidence
against him, the Mishan Police Department tried to force him to admit that he
had attacked the police while being chased and shot at.
The police beat him brutally
when he denied the charge.
Jiang passed out, and after
he regained consciousness, the police continued to coerce him.
However, they failed to
extort a confession from him regardless of the torture methods they used.
At present, many
practitioners are being held in the Mishan City Detention Center.
Many people have gone on
hunger strike to protest their illegal detention, and some have been sent to
the hospital for emergency treatment.
The detained practitioners
are under enormous pressure as the persecution has reached an extreme.
The police have even
ordered male criminals to strip female practitioners.
Major
media around the world reported recently on the appeal from Amnesty International
for Yoko Kaneko, the 37-year-old Japanese resident and practitioner of Falun
Gong, whose health is beginning to fail as a result of the abuse she is
suffering at the hands of Chinese authorities.
Yoko
Kaneko’s Chinese name is Lou Rong, and she has reportedly been hospitalized for
high blood pressure.
The
London-based group said in a statement, "According to reports, (Kaneko)
has bruising around her wrists and has lost a lot of weight, indicating that
she may have been tortured or ill-treated whilst in the labour camp."
She
was sentenced to 18 months in a labour camp in June for distributing
information about the persecution.
Amnesty
also said that Kaneko's elder sister, Luo Zhen was reportedly detained on
November 5 by police in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang for
publicizing her sister's case.
The
Edmonton Journal reported on December 3, 2002 on a display of Zhang Cuiying’s
paintings at the University of Alberta in Canada.
The
article described Mrs Zhang’s 8 month detention by Chinese authorities and the
torture, beatings, and humiliation she endured for practicing Falun Gong.
The
report said, “Zhang uses her rice paper paintings, and the poems in calligraphy
accompanying them, to express her faith and tell the world how Falun Gong
practitioners are treated in China.”
In
preparation for the exhibit, Edmonton practitioners spoke with the local public
and catholic high school boards about the opportunity for students to learn
more about Chinese History, Chinese Culture and Art.
As
a result, art teachers have brought their entire class for a painting
demonstration by Mrs. Zhang and the art show.
The
annual World Conference on Women and Peace was held from November 22-24, 2002
in Turin, Italy, and two Falun Gong practitioners were invited to speak.
It
was attended by nearly a thousand Italians, as well as representatives from
India, Canada, and Siberia.
The
day before the conference started, Italy's largest TV station, Rome National TV
station "1," presented a special morning program about Falun Gong and
the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China to an audience of about
three million.
Government
officials from the Turin and Piedmont provinces attended the opening ceremony
and gave speeches, voicing their concern about the persecution.
On
the second day, a practitioner from Sweden, who practices Traditional Chinese
Medicine, gave a comprehensive overview about Falun Gong to the audience with a
background discussion on Chinese traditions, culture, and medical knowledge.
His
speech was intertwined with demonstrations of the exercises, and he invited the
audience to learn the exercises right there.
Regardless
of whether they were young or old, whether they were doctors or just regular
townsfolk, they were all able to learn the exercises.
Afterwards,
an American practitioner exposed the brutal persecution of practitioners in
China.
She
pointed out that faced with three years of persecution by the Jiang regime,
tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners steadfastly observed the
universal principle of "Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance."
Before
the conference concluded the third day, the entire floor burst into applause
when the conference sponsor invited Falun Gong practitioners to demonstrate the
exercises one more time.
The second Irish Falun Dafa
Experience Sharing Conference was held on November 24, 2002, in Dublin,
Ireland.
Practitioners from Ireland,
England, France and Hong Kong attended the solemn and serene event.
Thirteen practitioners
shared their experiences in Falun Gong cultivation, including four English
practitioners who are participating in a continual appeal in front of the
Chinese Embassy in London, and an Irish practitioner who spoke about how being
in a wheelchair affects his cultivation and truth-clarifying activities.
The day before the
conference the practitioners held a parade that passed through the center of
Dublin.
Even though it rained
throughout the day, practitioners performed a beautiful traditional Chinese
dance during the parade.
It ended at the Foreign
Minister's Office, where practitioners handed a letter of appeal to the Irish
Foreign Minister, Mr. Brian Cowen T.D.
Site of Ancient Human
Activities 20,000 Years Ago Discovered in Tibet
In Deqing County, Duilong,
Tibet, a site of ancient human activities was discovered.
The discovery proved that
humans lived in the Tibet Plateau about 20,000 years ago, 10,500 years earlier
than previously known.
The 29th issue of the
American Journal of Geo-physics contains an article written by two professors
at the Hong Kong University entitled "The Division of History Analysis
from Hot Light Release of an Ancient Man's Handprint and Footprint Fossils
Found In Tibet," including a discussion of an ancient environment on the
Tibetan Plateau during the 4th Ice Age.
The article said that 85 km
from Deqing County, on a slope 4,200 meters high, 19 handprint and footprint
fossils were found in a calcified rock stratum.
Fire pit relics were also
discovered.
After a series of analyses
from samples of these prints, it was found that the prints were made about
20,000 years ago.
Before this discovery,
experts on the Changdu relics in Tibet believed that the Changdu site was
utilized 4,300 to 5,300 years ago and that between 16,000 and 24,000 years ago,
the Tibetan plateau was covered by glaciers, and that no humans could possibly
have lived there.
The scientific community
is now challenging this outdated theory.
A practitioner from Hebei Province reported recently on how his health was restored after beginning to practice Falun Gong.
He said, at the end of March
1998, when I was only 23 years old, I was diagnosed with hepatitis.
In November of that year, my
disease became worse and developed into hepatic ascites and hepatocirrhosis.
I felt all the time that I
was facing death.
I did not know the meaning
of life, but I did know clearly that no matter how much money I had, it could
not give me a healthy body, and that my relatives and friends, no matter how
well they treated me, could not change my miserable fate.
Just when my life had
reached its lowest point, a co-worker gave me a copy of the book Zhuan Falun.
I soon understood that the
purpose of life is to return to one's original and true self, and to assimilate
to the fundamental nature of the universe, "Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance."
I strived to be a good
person by strictly guiding myself with the criteria of
"Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance."
I tried my best to always
consider others first.
My body has undergone
tremendous changes.
For the past three years, I
have not taken any medicine nor had any injections to treat my illnesses; and
yet, I am healthier than ever.
Being a Falun Gong
practitioner, I feel that I am the most fortunate person in the world.
Thanks for watching
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