Chinese Embassy- Falun Gong Protest

Sue is a professional pavement sitter.

At 79 years of age she has spent part of every week for the last eight years sitting on a pavement outside the Chinese embassy.

She unrolls a little mat and together with a few friends sits in meditative silence. It is a quiet, persistent protest against the cruelties of the Chinese government especially as wrought on those who practice a meditation known as Falun Gong or Falun Dafa.



Sue - an Anglicisation of her Chinese name - said the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners inside China had risen hugely in the run-up to the Olympics.

'The Olympics is too terrible. Everywhere is the policemen,' she said in her broken English. 'They don't like us. Over several months they arrest us... just because of the Olympics.'

She is not against the Games themselves. 'The Olympic Games is good because the idea is good. But China are changing the original idea because of who controls it, just like in 1936 in Germany. Hitler do the same thing.

'They (China) promise to change human rights but it (the abuse) is more serious, more worse,' she said.

She is handing out a newspaper, Falun Gong Today, which publishes horrific articles documenting evidence about the harvesting of donor organs from living prisoners, and imprisonment, torture and abuse of people.

In one article it says that the president of Beijing's Olympic Organizing Committee, Liu Qi, was found liable for torture by the District Court in San Francisco in 2004.

Under a legal system that allows victims of torture to bring their cases to a US court, Liu was sued by two Chinese nationals, two Swedes, one French woman and a dual US/Israeli citizen, according to a report by the Center for Investigative Reporting,

The court held Liu liable for 'torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and arbitrary detention.' This despite the fact that Liu made no response and the Bush administration urged the court to dismiss the case, said the report.

Nearly all of the group with Sue are over 60 years of age, with one man aged 80 years and another of 85 years. This is because, said Sue, younger people are at work.

They were sitting almost beneath the balcony where the protester with Students for a Free Tibet had fallen controversially last week after rappelling down the wall. They used to sit across the road, but after three years the residents there, although friendly, had had enough of listening to the meditation music and having to negotiate their way round the group into their homes.

So the police found them some spots alongside the embassy, a move that was strenuously opposed by embassy officials. 'But this is America!' said Sue.

They also have a poster site in China Town.

She was once asked by a passer by if they were paid for sitting there. The offense of the question rankles as strongly now as it did then.

'I am very sad to think just money on their mind! Our friends in China suffer so much we have the responsibility to come out to stop the persecution,' she said.

Pics show Sue, top lt in brown jacket; front entrance of Chinese embassy; Shao, who has protested for six years

Chinese Doctor Persecuted in China

It was fitting for Shu Min Shin to stand in the shadow of the bronze statue of Victory in Union Square on Saturday, for she has sculptured herself into the history books for a victorious stand in China against human rights abuses.

Persecuted for her refusal to stop practicing Falun Dafa meditation, she finally fled to Thailand where she became the first person there to be granted asylum as a Falun Dafa practitioner. Today she lives in San Francisco and on Saturday was in Union Square participating in World Falun Dafa Day. (see previous blog)

Three times Min Shin - Shu is her surname - who is a medical doctor, was kidnapped by Chinese police. Her crime was to refuse to sign an official letter promising that she would no longer engage in Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong as it is also known, meditation. A promise not simply to stop meditating in public places, for followers often gather in small groups in parks or squares, but also in the privacy of her own home.

Min Shin, who was first a doctor of Internal Medicine and then a psychiatrist who also taught her subject, told her story through a translator. She was in the square for the World Falun Dafa Day that sought to publicise the meditation and raise support against the terrible abuses of it's followers by the Chinese Communist Party: abuses that include imprisonment, torture, killing and the harvesting of organs for transplant from people while they still alive.

Her real troubles began on New Year's Eve of the Chinese New Year in January 2000. Chinese officials, expecting a high number of Falun Dafa protesters in Tiananmen Square to mark the New Year, had planned an ambush. But very few people attended. Followers had been in the habit of silently unfurling banners in Tiananmen Square ever since the government had begun a crackdown in the previous year. Faced that night though, with a near-empty square, officials turned instead to people's homes. Min Shin was one of the unlucky ones.

A group of police hammered on her door. She refused to open, so they broke down two doors. Min Shin then locked herself in her bedroom and shouted through the door that she was willing to risk her life to defend her rights and the rights of others for freedom to practise Falun Dafa. She also warned them that they would be held responsible if anything happened to her. So for seven days and nights, in freezing temperatures and with snow falling, police surrounded her home and broke every window. It was so cold, she said, that even the flowers in the house died.

Over the next few months, she was followed every time she left her house and her phone calls and letters were monitored. Once she was kidnapped when she just stepped out of her home. But the last kidnapping was the worst for, physically weak, she almost died. She believes that the only reason she was released was because her son was already in America and had anything worse happened to her, the news would have been published in the USA.

However, in August of that year, she managed to escape to Thailand and gain political asylum. Helped by US congressmen, with a delay caused by events of 9/11, she was able to settle in San Francisco where her son was living and still lives today. Her face lights up with delight at the memory of that precious date of her arrival in the city: June 25, 2003.

However, there is a cost to her exile. Separated from her remaining family in China, she has limited contact with them and has only a sketchy knowledge of how they are. She is afraid to communicate too much in case it provokes reprisals from Chinese officials. What she does know is that her father - her parents are elderly and in their eighties - has had a heart attack caused by the stress of everything. Also, because of her, her sisters' children are not allowed to leave China for travel or education.

Due to the language barrier here in America and her age, Min Shin is in her sixties, she has not worked again as a doctor. But is active, as she was on Saturday, in supporting campaigns to free her people from the terrible human rights abuses that they continue to endure in China, with particular urgency to do so before the Beijing Olympics.

***Since interviewing Min Shin, the catastrophic earthquake has occurred in China but I have not been able to contact her to ask if any of her family are affected. I'm sure when Min Shin or others known to her read this, a comment on this would be appreciated by other readers. Thank you, Liz.

Pics show Shu Min Shin in Union Square, and one of the paintings on exhibition there depicting torture in China

World Falun Dafa Day

Union Square on Saturday was once again the focus for exposing human rights abuses in China.

It was the World Falun Dafa Day celebration for practitioners of the meditation - also known as Falun Gong - that is banned in China. A day to explain the tenets of the meditation, whose key words are 'Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance.' A day to appeal to the world to help stop China's persecutions, torture and murderous harvesting of organs for transplant from Falun Dafa followers. The horror of the organ removal is that 41,000 people have been killed in the last six years. Many of those had their organs extracted while they were still alive, people in Union Square heard.

Kip, a Chinese American living north of San Francisco, repeated a quote when he said, 'It's a new kind of evil on this planet. They (China) are good at dangling the economic carrot. We've forgotten about 1936.'

With a countdown to the Beijing Olympics in mind, petitions were in the square for people to register a protest. Around the square were pictures and posters of torture victims, and an exhibition of paintings that reflected both Falun Dafa practice and persecution from the Chinese government. There was also a programme of short speeches, dancing displays, music, singing and a demonstration of the Falun Dafa exercises.

China, explained one of the speakers, was against anything spiritual and Christians incurred some of the same problems as Falun Dafa followers. But the government stepped in to eradicate Falun Dafa because of it's rapid growth. Although it only started in public in 1992, by late 1998 it had attracted between 70 and 100 million practitioners. Opposition began in 1996, said the speaker, by government officials who specialise in propoganda: they create a problem in order to be seen solving it. But 10,000 petitioners took action in Beijing in 1999 and so the real crackdown started. Since then people have continued to stage peaceful protests in Tiananmen Square and so are arrested, imprisoned, tortured and have their organs harvested.

Another speaker was a medical doctor who spoke about the benefits of Falun Gong that he had experienced himself and seen in others, including stress reduction, health improvements and freedom from addictions. He went on to talk about the abuse of harvesting organs. Whilst he described organ donation as 'noble,' he expressed repugnance both at the practice of forcefully removing organs and the fact that it is being carried out by fellow doctors working for the Chinese government. Tests for tissue and blood types are carried out on thousands of prisoners in the labour camps, he said.

However, he also conveyed a small piece of more optimistic news that only last week the UN had confirmed that due to political action fewer people are travelling to China to purchase organs. 'So we ask for your help to stop the persecution and torture before the Olympics begin,' he said.

After the speeches and stage performances, watched by a small and ever-changing crowd of people winding across the square, the musicians, dancers and protesters formed a colourful parade and wound their way around Chinatown and back again.

An interview with a doctor persecuted in China as a Falun Dafa practitioner and who now lives in San Francisco will be posted later.

For further info on the campaign and news updates see www.faluninfo.net

Click for pics. Click to enlarge.