Media and New Religious Movements: The Case of Falun Gong

by Leeshai Lemish
A paper presented at The 2009 CESNUR Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 11-13, 2009

Introduction

“Which is the world’s largest group of prisoners of conscience – that is, peopled jailed for their beliefs or views?” Few educated media consumers in the West know the correct answer. It is Falun Gong adherents jailed in China; and it’s not even close.

Various calculations by human rights organizations, recently corroborated by a study conducted by Ethan Gutmann and I over the last two years, estimate that the number of Falun Gong practitioners currently jailed in China is at least as high as 200,000, possibly much higher. The number of Tibetan prisoners of conscience believed to be jailed, according to a Tibetan representative we interviewed in Taipei, is roughly 5,000. There is a growing, unknown number, of House Christians jailed in the People’s Republic, but they are still far behind the Falun Gong figures.

Why do so few people, including academics, know of this fact and what role have media played in shaping public perceptions of Falun Gong? These are some of the questions this paper sets out to investigate.

It turns out that one can be a regular reader of the New York Times, for instance, and never hear about Falun Gong. Others may be under the impression that the “crackdown on Falun Gong” was something that took place a decade ago, and is no longer an issue. And yet others may immediately think of Falun Gong as being some weird, wacky group, its victims of persecution perhaps not so worthy of our sympathy. All these perceptions are rooted in the media coverage patterns detailed below.

Debates

There has been an ongoing debate between religious elites and believers on the one hand, and religion journalists on the other about the fairness and accuracy with which religions are depicted in media. The former group claims that religions and their followers are regularly portrayed in negative terms, without the contextualization necessary for readers to understand the beliefs and behaviors discussed. The latter contend that coverage is only fair, balanced, and accurate.

A similar debate is taking place with regards to press coverage of Falun Gong. On the one hand, Falun Gong adherents and supporters claim Western media coverage has been unfair in it’s portrayal of the group and the persecution it faces – that media downplay documented atrocities, often belittle the group and its beliefs, and give too much credence to unsubstantiated claims emanating from Beijing. Journalists I have spoken to, on the other hand, claim that they are only being objective in allowing both parties to the conflict an equal opportunity to present their views, and that their coverage of Falun Gong is balanced and accurate.

Coverage of Falun Gong, therefore, is an important case study in the larger overall debate over how Western media report on religions, and new religious groups in particular. It is also an important case study because the stakes are so high, considering how many people’s lives are involved. Indeed, my research has found that Western press coverage often bears concrete consequences for the conditions of persecuted Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Falun Gong overview

Since Falun Gong is still a little-known and often misunderstood group, some background is necessary. This paper does not set out to describe in detail Falun Gong’s doctrine or history. A series of four short articles I wrote on the subject can be found with the New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/leeshai_lemish), all of Falun Gong’s teachings are posted on www.FalunDafa.org, and a detailed chronology of Falun Gong’s growth, and the reasons for the campaign against it can be found at www.FalunInfo.net. What follows, then, is an expeditious outline.

Falun Gong is a mind-body discipline introduced by Mr. Li Hongzhi in China in 1992. This introduction came at the tail end of what is known as China’s “qigong boom,” a proliferation during the 70s and 80s of qigong practices that, like tai chi, often involve energy circulation, meditation, and breathing exercises. At the boom’s peak, parks throughout China were brimming at dawn with some 200 million enthusiasts practicing various forms of qigong, often in large groups.

Falun Gong immediately differentiated itself from many other qigong forms by not including breathing exercises, being always free of charge, and, most significantly, placing primary emphasis on the spiritual cultivation of one’s character; the energy-based exercises are seen as secondary to one’s moral elevation.

In daily life, practicing Falun Gong means performing qigong-like exercises, often in the morning – in groups in the park or alone at home. It also means regular reading of Falun Gong’s main teaching – Zhuan Falun. These teachings guide practitioners to align one’s actions, speech, and thoughts with three key tenets – “Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance.” Practitioners strive to constantly “look inward” to find one’s spiritual shortcomings and hidden attachments, such as combativeness, fear, jealousy, and various desires.

In this sense one could argue that Falun Gong includes many ideas found in traditional Buddhist and Taoist practices. As one adherent explained it to me, a Falun Gong practitioner seeks to bring the same kind of sacred commitment to spiritual elevation that a monk or a nun has to daily life in the secular world, without departing from it to seclusion. That is, one uses the trials and tribulations of life (be it at work, school, or in the family) as opportunities for spiritual growth.

By 1998 and 1999, an estimated 70-100 million people practiced Falun Gong, mostly in China. An important point is that this was a Chinese government figure (see, for example: http://faluninfo.net/article/517/?cid=5). Falun Gong itself had no membership list and, while the estimate seemed roughly accurate, had no idea exactly how many practitioners there were, especially given that people had varying degrees of commitment to the practice. Although after launching the campaign against Falun Gong in 1999 the Chinese government changed its earlier figure to a much smaller one, there is little doubt that the number of dedicated Falun Gong practitioners in China the late 90s was in the tens of millions.

With the exception of two articles, Falun Gong’s growth and popularity were completely ignored by the Western press. When, in 1999, Falun Gong suddenly became the Chinese government’s public enemy number one, the Western press had no idea what was going on. As one journalist told my colleague Ethan Gutmann, “we’ve simply been caught with our pants down.”

The campaign to “exterminate” Falun Gong

In July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party launched a campaign to wipe out Falun Gong. Immediately, many Chinese, like the late famous writer Liu Binyan, compared the crusade’s scale and fury to the Cultural Revolution. Soon Falun Gong practitioners were labeled dangerous “cultists,” members of an “anti-society, anti-humanity, anti-science evil cult organization,” to be more precise. The campaign quickly gushed down to every level of society; orders were passed down via work units, schools, neighborhood and village committees – Falun Gong had to be immediately wiped out.

As the official state news agency Xinhua put it: “The whole country has formed a situation in which the ‘Falun Gong’ cult is being chased by all like rats running across the street [...] We must exterminate the cult, and the evil must be totally eradicated” (2003).

Early on, the campaign involved mass arrests and the stuffing of tens of thousands into large stadiums. Falun Gong adherents gathered to publicly remonstrate by meditating on Tiananmen Square.  They were, typically, instantly pounced on and beaten to the ground by plainclothes police, then dragged into police vans and jailed.

Hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong adherents have been through China’s “reform through-labor” camp system. A remnant of the Maoist era, the labor camp system in China is vast. Anyone can be picked off the street without an arrest warrant and administratively sentenced without trial to up to three years in a labor camp. At the end of the period, the individual can be released or sent to a temporary detention center and then almost immediately picked up and sent back to a labor camp again.

The arrests and torture have two primary aims: First, to stop protests and distribution of underground leaflets, emails, and other forms of spreading counter-narratives about Falun Gong that challenge the Party’s line and expose acts of persecution. The second goal is to “transform” the Falun Gong practitioner, a form of forced conversion – from Falun Gong adherent to something that approximates an abiding atheist.

The following excerpt from the Washington Post is one of the few investigative articles to provide such first-hand accounts. It represents a typical experience:

Ouyang was arrested again in April after going to Tiananmen Square to show his support for Falun Gong. This time, he said, police methodically reduced him to an “obedient thing” over 10 days of torture. At a police station in western Beijing, Ouyang was stripped and interrogated for five hours. “If I responded incorrectly, that is if I didn’t say, ‘Yes,’ they shocked me with the electric truncheon,” he said.

Then, he was transferred to a labor camp in Beijing’s western suburbs. There, the guards ordered him to stand facing a wall. If he moved, they shocked him. If he fell down from fatigue, they shocked him. Each morning, he had five minutes to eat and relieve himself. “If I didn’t make it, I went in my pants,” he said. “And they shocked me for that, too.” By the sixth day, Ouyang said, he couldn’t see straight from staring at plaster three inches from his face. His knees buckled, prompting more shocks and beatings. He gave in to the guards’ demands.

For the next three days, Ouyang denounced Li’s teachings, shouting into the wall. Officers continued to shock him about the body and he soiled himself regularly. Finally, on the 10th day, Ouyang’s repudiation of the group was deemed sufficiently sincere. He was taken before a group of Falun Gong inmates and rejected the group one more time as a video camera rolled. Ouyang left jail and entered the brainwashing classes. Twenty days later after debating Falun Gong for 16 hours a day, he “graduated.”

Interviews Gutmann and I conducted with refugees just out of China provide a range of harrowing accounts. Li Heping in London told us of how, when he refused to transform, he was injected with an unknown drug that sent him into eight days of hallucinations, during which he died one brutal death after another – eaten by a pool of poisonous snakes, crushed to death by huge beasts, burned alive… Lan Lihua in Bangkok told us of being stuffed in a gunnysack and driven secretly at night to a torture chamber in an isolated mountain cave, where electric truncheons were used on all body parts. Nearly each of the survivors we interviewed told of how the regime had broken their family – forced divorces, not being allowed to see dying parents, and separation from children.

In detention, if Falun Gong prisoners hunger strike in protest, they are force-fed saline solutions, urine, and sometimes corn porridge through a rubber tube inserted up into the nasal channel and then down into the esophagus. When carried out improperly, as is often the case in labor camps where criminal inmates and guards are part of administrating the forced-feeding, the pumped substance enters the lung and can kill the hunger striker.

According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, over 3,200 Falun Gong practitioners have been killed by the campaign, mostly from torture; the center estimates that, considering how difficult getting information out of China can be, a more accurate figure is at least ten times higher. Amnesty International and the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture have reported many cases as well.

A separate element of the campaign that, as we shall see in a moment, had a tremendous impact on Western media, was the propaganda blitz that accompanied it. Literally overnight, China’s media went into an anti-Falun Gong frenzy, with 300-400 articles attacking Falun Gong appearing in each of the main state-run papers over the first month of the campaign alone. Primetime saw television sets throughout the country replaying supposed exposés about the group; not a single divergent view could be found in Chinese media.

Finally, its worth noting that the campaign continues. In 2008, Falun Gong was a central target in pre-Olympic “cleanup” measures, and the Summer Games were used as an apparent excuse for locking up adherents long term. According to the Infocenter’s incomplete statistics, at least 8,000 Falun Gong practitioners were arrested in the months leading to the Olympics.

Why the campaign?

To many journalists both inside and outside China in 1999, this seemed like a sudden, bizarre campaign; the world’s largest communist state going after a group of meditators, many of them elderly. The campaign was already in full gear before journalists had a chance to provide an analysis of why it was taking place. Yet, this is an important question if we wish to understand the media coverage patterns below.

We can start by first ruling out two explanations. First, the decision to launch the campaign was not based on an investigative evaluation of the nature of Falun Gong and its practices. In fact, in 1998, when the campaign was still brewing, the Public Security Bureau conducted an investigation into Falun Gong aimed at compiling incriminating evidence that would justify banning the practice, but the investigation came up empty. Ironically, a separate study conducted at the same time found that as Chinese people were becoming healthier through their practice, Falun Gong reduced the burden on the Chinese health care system.

Nor was the campaign based in rule of law. As Bryan Edelman and James Richardson (2003) have argued: “The decisions concerning Falun Gong seem to have been made hastily and without acting within official guidelines.” Studies by Human Rights Watch and others have similarly concluded that the law was used ex-post facto to grant a veneer of legitimacy to an illegal campaign.

Analyses often attribute the campaign to a large gathering of Falun Gong practitioners at the political heart of Beijing on April 25, 1999. But this argument is missing the point. The April 25 protest, or “appeal” as Falun Gong practitioners generally prefer calling it, was by all accounts entirely peaceful. More significantly, it came after three years of increasing official oppression – including critique in state-run media, the banning of publication of Falun Gong books, and harassment of Falun Gong coordinators. Rather than a catalyst for persecution, I would argue the incident should be viewed as Falun Gong’s attempt to avoid the persecution that followed; an effort that Beijing then turned around and used an excuse to justify the campaign that came three months later.

The campaign cannot be de-contextualized from the Chinese Communist Party’s history of political and religious persecution. During its 60 years in power, the Party has repeatedly targeted various groups – from landlords to religious believers to academics to democracy activists. These campaigns have often involved public executions, torture, even cannibalism. Estimates of the total death toll resulting from the Party’s political campaigns in China range from 40 to 80 million people.

Second, in the late 90s the Party was suffering from a legitimacy crisis in the post-Tiananmen era and a deep lack of security in its power, so much so that a group of meditators appeared to be terrifying.

While the campaign’s origins are complex, I find that three factors, when combined, capture much of the explanation:

1. The numbers’ factor – Falun Gong just got too big too fast. At some point someone in the Party realized this was a large, independent group outside the Party’s direct control, and thus a threat. This was particularly the case once the number of practitioners equaled or surpassed the number of Party members (some were even members of both).

1. The perceived ideological threat factor – While five religions are recognized in China, their leadership is under the Party’s control and the groups are fairly obedient, having all experienced persecution in earlier campaigns. Falun Gong practitioners have their own ideological view of the world, one that is markedly different from the Party’s. Marxist materialism is key to the Party’s indoctrination system, and for the Party, material carrots and sticks are, in the post-Mao era, key to controlling the population. Along comes Falun Gong with a theist view of the world, one which believes that material gain in this world is not life’s ultimate goal, that bad deeds incur retribution, and that being virtuous ultimately receives greater rewards. Such a group, the Party realized, would not be easy to control. A group with conviction-based courage to take a principled stance at great personal risk, a group that cannot be bought off, was thus deemed a threat. If one were to be cynical about it, it could also be argued that while Falun Gong teaches truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, the Party for decades has relied on misinformation, violence, and “struggle” to maintain power.

1. The individual factor – Finally, one wonders what would have happened if, instead of Jiang Zemin, a different cadre would have headed the Communist Party at the time. It has been widely reported that Jiang, who came to power largely because of his support for the militant stance against the students in 1989, was personally “obsessed with,” even “jealous” of Falun Gong. He made the campaign a personal crusade and overruled other Party leaders, including his premier at the time, Zhu Rongji, who took an accommodating stance toward Falun Gong. By the time Hu Jintao’s leadership came to power, the campaign had already been under way for over three years, and the Party had too much at stake to back down.

How was all this reported in the Western press?

To study the ways in which this was covered in the Western press, I analyzed 1,852 articles on Falun Gong from 1999 to 2007 in seven English-language newspapers (NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, London Guardian, The Australian ) and three wire services (The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse). The articles were examined using basic media studies quantitative analysis techniques that identified key words, sources of news as they appeared in the headlines and opening sentences, and the number of articles over time. What follows are a few of the key findings.

Findings

(1) – Compassion fatigue: Coverage of Falun Gong has decreased as the torture and killing of adherents have increased.

This first graph shows the total number of news articles per half year about Falun Gong that appeared in the seven leading newspapers examined.

As we can see, while there was relatively strong interest in the story when it first emerged, Western press gradually began ignoring it as time went by. This was not, however, because the campaign had eased. On the contrary, the persecution was escalating as the press was turning away.

This graph shows, in blue, the number of Associated Pressarticles per year that mentioned Falun Gong at least once. In red, are the number of documented deaths of Falun Gong practitioners (according to www.faluninfo.net) as a result of the campaign. Similar patterns were found in each of the media studied.

As we can see, at the same time that the documented number of Falun Gong practitioners’ deaths from torture in custody increased, the number of articles in the Western press (in this case, in the Associated Press) rapidly decreased.

(2) - The CCP has been more influential than Falun Gong or human rights organizations in determining what gets reported and how it is framed.

This study asked: What were the sources of news that sparked articles about Falun Gong? To determine this, the sources as identified in the headline or lead sentence of an article were examined. If an article headline was: “Falun Gong Infocenter: Three more practitioners tortured to death,” the article would be categorized as having been sparked by Falun Gong. If it instead read: “Xinhua news says Falun Gong crushed,” the article would be identified as being sparked by the Chinese government.

The following graph shows the number of articles in which the Chinese government (CG), Falun Gong (FLG), and human rights organizations (HR), respectively, were each cited as the main source of information in the headlines or opening paragraphs of AFP and Reuters releases.

As we can see, an article about Falun Gong is more than twice as likely to be sparked by, and often framed around public statements or actions by the Chinese government, than by those of Falun Gong or human rights organzinations. This is not because Falun Gong failed to provide material for the media. The Infocenter has put out regular press releases since 1999, and I have attended press events organized by Falun Gong practitioners in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington to which not a single journalist showed up.

(3) – Western press has been adopting pejorative, loaded terms to describe Falun Gong, terms often rooted in Chinese state propaganda.

For example, in AFP and Reuters articles, the CCP’s “evil cult” label for Falun Gong appears in most pieces (78%). To the wires’ credit, the term is almost always attributed to the CCP, as in: “The Chinese government considers Falun Gong an evil cult.” This was not the case in other media outlets. Newspapers like the New York Times often dropped the “evil” and still referred to Falun Gong as a “cult,” this time directly using the journalist’s own voice. Such labels even appeared in headlines. Yet there was no discussion of why Falun Gong should be labeled as such, whether such a term was accurate, or what the source of this label was.

In fact, the term that the CCP uses in Chinese to discredit Falun Gong translates more accurately as “heterodox religion.” But, apparently with an eye toward influencing opinions in the West, in its English discourse on Falun Gong, the CCP chose the term “evil cult” instead, with all its negative connotations. The CCP has tried to compare Falun Gong to Aum Shinrikyo, the People’s Temple, the Branch Davidians, and other groups popularly identified in the West as destructive cults. If the unquestioning reproduction of this term by Western journalists is any indication, the label was one of the CCP’s most brilliant PR moves.

Journalists have told me that they aim to write “balanced” pieces about Falun Gong in which both sides get a fair chance to air their views. Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether such a goal is ethically or journalistically responsible when human rights atrocities are involved, I examined whether journalists were able to achieve such a balance. To do this, I studied how often each of the sides was given a chance to respond to the other side’s accusations. The study found that when journalists cite the CCP’s primary accusation – that adherents have died from refusing medicine or suicide (thus justifying the ban), Falun Gong gets to respond 17.9% of the time. When journalists cite Falun Gong’s main accusation – that adherents are being tortured to death, the CCP gets to respond 50.2% of the time. That is, journalists are nearly three times more likely to give the CCP a chance to defend itself.

It is also worth noting that the CCP’s claims about Falun Gong adherents posing danger to themselves have not been corroborated by any external source, and at least in several cases the claims appear quite dubious. The torture and killing claims, on the other hand, have been well-documented by multiple human rights organizations as well as annual State Department and United Nations reports. Journalists, however, almost never identify the CCP’s claim as not having been independently confirmed; but when citing claims that Falun Gong practitioners are being tortured, they regularly add the caveat that such claims are “alleged” and could not be verified.

Analysis – familiar patterns

At first glance, this study’s findings might appear quite shocking. Western media turned away from the story just as the human rights abuses were increasing, and continued to ignore the persecution even as torture and killing spiraled out of control. Moreover, the perpetrator, in this case the Chinese Communist Party, was most often the one dictating what gets reported, and also influenced the language with which the very group it is persecuting is described.

Yet from the perspective of media studies literature, these findings are not surprising. Studies have long shown that governmental sources are given much more credence than community-based groups, and that government actions or statements are considered more newsworthy. This study also corroborates previous findings concerning the difficulty media have in reporting human rights abuses and distant suffering, often manifesting as “compassion fatigue” and lack of contextualization (see, for example, a 2002 report by the International Council on Human Rights Policy).

For our purposes here, as a case study of how new religions are treated in the Western press, this study also corroborates previous findings. First, it supports the findings of Stuart A. Wright (1997) that “news stories on unpopular or marginal religions frequently are predicated on unsubstantiated allegations or government actions based on faulty or weak evidence.” This we saw in the Western press’ unqualified reproduction of the CCP’s various claims about Falun Gong aimed at justifying its campaign to wipe out the group.

The study further supports the findings of Harvey Hill, John Hickman, and Joel McLendon (2001) that “new religious movements are consistently described in pejorative language.” Thus the more esoteric practices of a long-established religion might be described in terms such as “traditionalist,” while those of a new group will be depicted, and in the case of Falun Gong sometimes directly labeled, as “weird,” “bizarre,” and  “wacky.”

The most notable example is the questionable use of the word “cult” to describe Falun Gong. Regardless of how scholars of religions may use the term (and in this case scholars of religions were not consulted and their opinions were rarely cited by journalists), there is little doubt that the term, as popularly used, carries very negative connotations. Yet is it accurate in this case?

Falun Gong is a large group with tens of millions of practitioners, people who hold ordinary jobs of all varieties, have families and maintain “normal” lives. There is no isolation from society and Falun Gong involves no financial or property commitment or restrictions. Perhaps most importantly, Falun Gong has no history of violence, even after a decade under persecution.

Both John Dart (1997) and Judith M. Buddenbaum (1998) have warned of the media’s casual use of this term, and its negative, often violent connotations. The labeling of Falun Gong originated with the CCP and Western media often swallowed the bait and, in effect, played the role of assisting the CCP in discrediting and marginalizing the group internationally, casting it with a label that, once affixed, is difficult to remove.

Specific factors

In Falun Gong’s case, several additional factors contributed to this phenomenon, and are worth considering briefly:

1. Unfamiliarity with Chinese traditions of self-cultivation systems. It is sufficiently challenging for Western journalists to grapple with the beliefs of new religious groups emerging from the Judeo-Christian traditions, but Falun Gong emerged from an unfamiliar Chinese tradition of self-cultivation. Few journalists knew much about qigong and its various practices and phenomena, even less were they familiar with Taoist hygiene disciplines, or Buddhist energy-transformation concepts. Within the context of these traditions, including practices like Tibetan Buddhism, Falun Gong’s doctrine and metaphysical descriptions are hardly eccentric.

1. CCP obstruction and access difficulty. One of the most concrete challenges for journalists working in China has been obstruction by the Communist Party’s security apparatuses. Journalist, like Rupert Wingfield-Hayes of the BBC, have been followed, detained, and even physically assaulted for pursuing the Falun Gong story. Journalists have no access to labor camps, jails, or detention centers except for rare guided tours to Potemkin camps. A conscientious journalist may further have serious qualms about meeting with Falun Gong practitioners in China, given the risk to the interviewees’ lives such meetings pose. There are too many examples of practitioners who were jailed, even tortured and killed, for speaking with foreign reporters or human rights workers.

1. Self-censorship. Media professionals are well aware that Falun Gong is one of the most taboo and sensitive subjects in China today. Journalists have told me they have a “black-out” policy of not touching Falun Gong news. Reporters and editors may choose to stay away from pursuing the Falun Gong story due to personal considerations, including losing access to government functions, being harassed, or having their visa revoked. At a corporate level, media conglomerates are seeking access to the Chinese market, wish to see their websites unblocked in the mainland and to develop cooperation projects. They know that one story about Falun Gong can have their magazines removed from Chinese newsstands (as in the case of Time) or they might be taken off the air (as happened to the BBC).

In spite of these difficulties, a handful of journalists – like Ian Johnson of the Wall Street Journal and Philip Pan of the Washington Post – have repeatedly shown that quality investigative reporting into the story is, if difficult, possible.

Conclusion

So what does all this mean? For Falun Gong, under circumstances of persecution, these media coverage patterns have real human costs. Labor camp survivors have told me they noticed a real correlation between the degree to which the persecution they faced was exposed overseas and the treatment they received. Some have described all of a sudden being treated better in detention, being transferred to a better cell and no longer being tortured. Only after they were released did they realize that the change took place at exactly the same time that their case was publicized abroad.

Perhaps a more concrete example is that of asylum seekers. Falun Gong refugees are seeking political asylum around the world. Yet several countries, like Canada, the U.K., and Australia have nearly deported practitioners back to China, saying they do not believe these people face serious risk of persecution. One can imagine that if immigration workers and judges have not seen any reports about the persecution of Falun Gong in years, they might easily imagine danger no longer exists. In several such cases, practitioners have indeed been repatriated; upon arrival in China, they were immediately sent to a labor camp to be tortured again.

For the Chinese Communist Party, their campaign has been a lesson in international PR. Unlike the Cultural Revolution era during the 60s and 70s, today’s CCP cares about its international image. During the period in which Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted in China, Party leaders have successfully sought access to international organizations like WTO and won trophies like the Olympics and red carpet treatment in foreign capitals. They care about hiding atrocities and wish to justify domestic policies to foreign audiences. Through the campaign against Falun Gong, Beijing has learned that foreign media can be manipulated.

For the general public, the lesson is that when it comes to new religious groups, not only can official government sources not be trusted, but we must be skeptical of mainstream media as well.

I am now in the process of preparing this study for publication, and would be interested in discussing these findings and hearing suggestions for further avenues of research. I can be reached at leeshail@fastmail.fm. Thank you.

http://www.cesnur.org/2009/slc_lemish.htm

GUEST COLUMN

A Chinese trek from Israel to California Center for the Arts

By Leeshai Lemish

ESCONDIDO, California–What’s an Israeli doing in a Chinese show? I’m asked this almost as often as I’m asked, when checking in at the airport alongside a hundred Chinese dancers and musicians – “Are you part of this group?”

The answer to the latter question is: “No, and yes.” No, I can’t dance – let alone perform the gravity-defying tumbling techniques of classical Chinese dance. I can’t sing. Nor can I respectably play an instrument – Chinese or otherwise. But yes, I am with the group.

Somehow I’ve been bestowed with the fortune of having a nightly free ticket to an amazing show while traveling around the world for now three years. My wonderful job is among the world’s best-kept secrets – I’m an emcee with Shen Yun Performing Arts.

An affable Chinese lady and I briefly introduce each of Shen Yun’s short dance and music numbers to the audience in English and Chinese. We might provide a bit of background for a lively ethnic dance in which tableware are used as props, explain a Chinese legend about the first woman on the moon, or introduce a Chinese instrument played on two strings. Then we leave the real work to the actual artists, who do their jobs exceptionally well.

And this week we are performing in one of my favorite cities – San Diego (well, Escondido, to be precise). Beyond the obvious reasons for loving the area, San Diego is special to me because I have three generations of family here and it’s where I briefly played semi-pro baseball after serving in the Israeli army.

A few questions inevitably come up. The answers are: No, I didn’t grow up in China; I’m not married to a Chinese woman, and I have no Chinese blood – although I do eat a lot of Chinese food, speak Chinese, and am fascinated by Chinese culture.

To clarify, this interest in China is not an interest in skyscrapers, GDP, Olympics, tainted milk, or labor camp China, as we now know it. It’s an interest in Chinese traditions with their extreme depth and diversity- 5,000 years of civilization, much of it continuously documented through a consistent script, and artistic heritage that has amazingly survived to this day.

I say “amazingly,” because much of these traditions have been lost under China’s current authoritarian regime. During the Cultural Revolution and other Chinese Communist Party campaigns, books, ancient artifacts, and temples were destroyed; traditions that had been transmitted from one generation to the next were cut off after thousands of years. Millions were killed.

Outside mainland China, much more of the traditions has survived. A typical example is how seemingly endless Chinese art masterpieces now on display in Taipei’s National Palace Museum are still around only because they were smuggled to Taiwan by the Nationalists who fled there 60 years ago.

Indeed, the New York-based Shen Yun’s mission of breathing life into nearly lost traditions is one of the things I find most inspiring to watch about this undertaking. This is what unites Shen Yun’s choreographers and composers, along with a shared spiritual commitment, and the courage to depict anything on stage. That’s why those of you who will come to the show will also see scenes of, for example, Falun Dafa practitioners resisting persecution – a contemporary issue – portrayed beautifully through dance and the narrative of ancient Chinese traditions.

During my time with Shen Yun, I continue to be impressed by the versatility and depth of classical Chinese dance. It is

its own comprehensive dance system, complete with its own set of systematized training, postures, and body rhythms that make it so unique. Many of the moves we’ve become used to seeing in gymnastics and acrobatics, in fact, actually originate from classical Chinese dance.Throw in hundreds of bright costumes, drums, a 3D-like projection, and a live orchestra that combines classical Western and Chinese instruments, and you start to get a feel for why, even as a non-Chinese, I enjoy this so much.

You could say my interest in China began in the Israeli army. As a rookie, I watched how one by one my seniors completed their mandatory terms and went trekking in India, Laos, and Cambodia. They returned for reserve duty with beards and long hair, and I was keen to hear my former officers tell stories of meditating on the Himalayan slopes.

This curiosity migrated from Yoga and India to China and its practices of tai chi, qigong, and Falun Dafa.

As a Pomona College freshman, I decided to take my writing in a new direction: the Chinese up-to-down to complement this left-to-right and the Hebrew right-to-left. In spite of the confusion, I fell in love with the Chinese language right away.

I was surprised to discover how supportive Chinese people generally are of others’ efforts to learn their language. A simple attempt at “ni hao” will get thumbs up from an elderly Chinese at an Asian supermarket, and a “xie xie” at the checkout counter will win a stream of endless compliments. We Israelis could learn a thing or two about encouraging those struggling with the equally challenging Hebrew.

As I wrapped up an Asian Studies degree at Pomona, a friend invited me to emcee a Chinese variety show in Los Angeles, and I later joined Shen Yun at its inception in 2006.
Nine years ago on a pitcher’s mound in Escondido I wouldn’t have imagined that the next time back I would be on stage. I’m discovering there’s a bit of chutzpah to how life’s journey unfolds.

Leeshai Lemish will be with Shen Yun Performing Arts at the California Center for the Arts Escondido tonight through Thursday.

The Olympics are over, but don’t look away from China just yet. The fates of thousands of ordinary Chinese arrested ahead of the Games hinge on what we do this autumn.

For people like my Chinese-American friend Si Yang, these roundups have struck too close to home. In April, Si called his parents in Hebei province only to discover that 20 officers had shown up and taken away his father and sister.

In May, his sister, a 36-year-old employee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was sentenced without trial to one-and-a-half years in a labour camp for being a Falun Gong practitioner. Her family has not been allowed to see her since.

Si’s sister is not alone. At least 8,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been detained since December. Several have already been tortured to death, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center. Some 5,000 Tibetans have been jailed since March, and countless others were swept up in the pre-Olympic “cleanup.”

The Chinese Communist Party is pulling a bait-and-switch — using pre-Olympic “security measures” to stifle dissenters in the long term.

How bad is it? We don’t fully know. We have no idea, for instance, exactly how many Chinese are in “re-education through labour” camps because it’s a state secret. Estimates range from 400,000 to four million detainees.

We know the largest group among them are practitioners of Falun Gong. They have been victims of statewide persecution since 1999, when their spiritual meditation discipline became too popular for the party’s liking. Last year the Beijing Female Labour Camp, for example, contained 700 Falun Gong practitioners and only 140 actual criminals. The party operates hundreds of similar camps, spanning every Chinese province.

Like the Ministry of Propaganda and committees that control the courts, these gulags are evidence that little has changed since the days of Mao. Police today can pick up any Chinese citizen and make them disappear into a labour camp. Victims have no domestic media to speak to; lawyers who fight for them are often jailed themselves.
And we know what happens in these camps. A colleague and I spent the last year collecting new testimonies from Falun Gong practitioners who survived Chinese detention.

Dai Ying now lives in Norway and is old enough to be my mother. In 2003, she was taking her afternoon nap at home when policemen barged in and took her away. She was sentenced to two years in San-Shui Labour Camp.

She was deprived of sleep for days. “After a long time, I was just muddleheaded and confused. Sometimes I didn’t even know where I was,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom unless I cursed at [Falun Gong founder] Master Li.”
Guards demanded Dai write a statement maligning Falun Gong and renouncing her beliefs. When she refused, they took her to the basement.

“There were a bunch of criminals pressing me down and policemen electrocuted me,” she said. “They shocked my face and I went blind in one eye. My head was so painful I couldn’t tolerate it. I just cried.” The purpose of all this is to “transform” the prisoners — ideally into Communist Party-loving atheists.

They are also turned into slaves, working 15-20 hours a day. In the cell where they sleep and defecate, they wrap disposable chopsticks for export. If chopsticks fall on the floor, they have to wrap them anyway.

Others perform hard labour outdoors. While digging rocks in Yunnan province, Wang Xiaohua’s shaven head was quickly scorched. “As soon as I touched the burnt area I was touching puss, and then when it dried it turned yellow. My whole head was burnt to the point of festering,” Wang told us. “But no one cared; if you die you just die.”

Worse yet, mounting evidence suggests these prisoners are candidates for involuntary donation of their kidneys, livers, hearts and cornea. For years we have heard that organs in China’s transplant industry come from executed prisoners. Now we know they also come from Falun Gong prisoners jailed for their beliefs.

So what will happen to the thousands of nameless Chinese arrested before the Games? Much of that depends on us. We were mostly silent when they were arrested. Now we have a chance to make up for it.

Party leaders are waiting to see what we do. They hope we are too preoccupied with elections and economic crises to worry about them. They hope we will self-censor for fear of losing access in China. They hope despondency with our own human rights failures will have us forever cleaning our own backyards, even as we hear the neighbour murdering his children.

But if heads of state, doctors, scholars, mayors, entrepreneurs and any of us who have collegial interaction with Chinese use every opportunity to raise the issue of shutting down China’s gulag system, we can make a difference. Party leaders fear international pressure and we need to sound it across the board. Thousands of lives depend on us.
National Post

Leeshai Lemish has been writing about Falun Gong since 2001 and is currently conducting research with Ethan Gutmann for an upcoming book about the persecution of the group and its resistance.

The Faith Column

Why is Falun Gong banned?

Leeshai Lemish looks at the history and causes of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against Falun Gong

The Faith Column

China’s other world

Posted by Leeshai Lemish – 20 August 2008 10:11

Leeshai Lemish tells of his and Ethan Gutmann’s journey into the persecution of Falun Gong

It was 2:00 am and we were sitting on the floor of a Bangkok slum. We had a flight to catch the next morning, but after interviewing Falun Gong refugees for a week we still couldn’t pull away from what they were telling us.

‘At first I thought it was just me. But then, one after another, more Falun Gong practitioners were brought into our cell’, Chen Jie said. ‘Their bellies, chest and backs were also covered with black bubbles from being shocked with cattle-prods’.

Chen and all our interviewees had close friends killed by Chinese police. They were the lucky survivors. I left with a sickening feeling – there’s no way I can ever do their stories justice.

For a year Ethan Gutmann (author of Losing the New China) and I have been travelling the world conducting interviews for his forthcoming book. We’ve received research grants from Earheart Foundation and Sweden’s Wallenberg family, and keep our budget low by sleeping on floors and eating instant noodles. But we’re too embarrassed to complain, considering the stories we hear morning to night.

Confess!

The practitioners we interviewed provided corresponding accounts of persecution they experienced. Here is what it looks like.

Detained for protesting, distributing leaflets, or even practising their faith at home, they are first stripped naked. They are then starved and denied sleep. You will not eat, sleep or go to the toilet, they are told, until you renounce Falun Gong.

Next, relatives are manipulated. Li Weixun told us how her mother was brought in to pressure her into writing a forced confession:

‘My mother said, “Just write it so we can go home, OK”? I chocked back tears.
“I’ll kneel before you”! I held her and said, “Mom, you know Falun Gong made me healthy and happy. What I did was perfectly legal – they’re the ones breaking the law”. My heart bled as I watched my mother leave.’

From the detention centre, where they are often beaten and hung in painful positions, practitioners are sent to ‘reform through labour’ camps. Some reports estimate that over half the camps’ total population are Falun Gong.

In these camps’ cells they work as slaves making products exported to the West. The cell reeks of faeces and urine. When the disposable chopsticks they are wrapping fall on the floor, Chen Ying told us in Paris, they are ordered to wrap them anyway, their fingernails stained with pus and blood.

No illusion

Some, like Li Heping from Hangzhou, were injected with unknown psychotropics. The shot sent the former Motorola technician into hallucinations in which he was surrounded by snakes, frozen, and burned alive, repeatedly dying countless times.

Those were illusions, but real and equally terrifying are reports that Falun Gong practitioners are being killed of their kidneys, livers, and hearts. Fifteen practitioners told us how they were pulled aside from other inmates and given bizarre physical exams – blood tests, torso X-rays, sonograms, urine samples and little else – apparently targeting their organ function. This added to existing evidence, including doctors’ admissions recorded on tape.

So are these horror stories real, or is it just these people’s word against Chinese government denials? The over 100 people we interviewed, and the torture scars some showed, left no ambiguities – this persecution is ongoing and nationwide.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. The arrests, torture, and deaths of Falun Gong adherents are regular features in annual reports by U.N. Special Rapporteurs and organisations like Amnesty International.

Accounts by former policeman Hao Fengjun, who defected to Sydney, corroborate details of beatings, electric baton shock, fabricated propaganda films, and a huge Falun Gong prison population. Other defectors say police act on internal orders coming all the way from the top.

Those who refuse to cooperate are severely punished. A Christian human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, investigated and corroborated Falun Gong’s persecution claims, only to be arrested and tortured himself.

Hidden nearby

The Chinese Communist Party, of course, has gone to great length to hide these atrocities and to buy international silence. That doesn’t make the persecution any less real for practitioners and their families.

Several of my overseas Chinese friends recently called China only to discover their parents had been arrested. Through pre-Olympics roundups over 8,000 practitioners have been detained, some sentenced to years in labour camps.

Blocks away from skyscrapers and Olympic venues in China’s other world are labour camps and prisons full of Falun Gong practitioners. Chinese media, of course, can report none of this.

Even Western journalists told me their newspapers have a blackout policy on Falun Gong. But the complicity of the West is an issue I’ll leave to my next, and final, entry.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-faith-column/2008/08/falun-gong-practitioners-china

The Faith Column

Falun Gong: defying the odds

Posted by Leeshai Lemish – 21 August 2008 10:01

Leeshai Lemish talks about Falun Gong’s resistance and the complicity of the West

‘Unworthy’ victims? Chinese suffering in Western media, by Leeshai Lemish

Down the Mekong: Why Leave China for Cambodia?

Leeshai Lemish
10/16/2004

Christian, a Falun Gong practitioner, and a Tibetan Buddhist are sitting in a restaurant. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it’s not funny to the three refugees who abandoned China in search for a persecution-free country and ended up in Cambodia. Take one young man, for example. When I met him in Cambodia for the first time, he looked like he would have a nervous breakdown if someone didn’t get him out to a safer place soon.

A successful businessman in China, he converted to Christianity and found values in the Bible that resonated with his longing for a less oppressive Chinese society. He joined a local “house church” that, being unsanctioned by the state, soon came under attack. Many of his friends were arrested and he fled through Vietnam to Cambodia. He says he still gets threatening calls from people linked to the Chinese Embassy.

Perhaps the most famous refugee among them is Ms. Zhang Xinyi, a Falun Gong practitioner who escaped from China to Cambodia, where she taught in a Chinese grade school. She soon found herself back in China, however, this time in a labor camp. Someone reported her to the embassy, which practically kidnapped her and sent her back.

And then there is a Chinese follower of Tibetan Buddhism who told me she received a phone call from someone who threatened, “We can eliminate you.” She claims she has been living in fear ever since, even in Cambodia. But some question her motivations and say she simply wants to find a way to get to America or Europe.

She is not the only Chinese who wants to get as far away from China as possible, nor is this a new phenomenon. A few decades ago Chinese swam to Hong Kong to get out of the mainland. Today, those who can afford to just get on a flight and stay wherever they are welcome.

Yet this begs a question: with so many people from around the world running to China, why are Chinese people running away?

International finance is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon: foreign investors are rushing into the Chinese coastal cities, while Chinese elites and tycoons are rushing to deposit their money in overseas banks. Capital flight easily outweighs foreign investment. Why would the locals, who should be the most in the know, hurry to get their money out of there?

A similar question might be raised in the domain of migration. If, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) says, China is really getting better and better, and the government guarantees all basic personal freedoms, why do so many Chinese want out? Though North Korean refugees hurrying south into China may jeopardize this balance, more people are fleeing from China than are hastening toward the mainland.

Some of them end up in Cambodia, which they perceive as only a temporary stop before – ideally – America. As one Chinese acquaintance in Cambodia said, 70% of the Chinese he knows curse America, but 95% desperately want to go there.

As a westerner in Cambodia, I was always being asked questions by the locals. Some of the most frequent ones were: where was I going, was I married, and did I need a motorbike ride. The Chinese asked me an entirely different set of questions: how much does it cost to go to America, would I be able to help them get a U.S. visa, and what does it take to become recognized as a refugee by the U.N.

In theory, Cambodia is a country that has signed the United Nations convention guaranteeing protection to refugees. In practice, and in obvious violation of the U.N treaty, however, the Cambodian government reportedly deports not only Falun Gong practitioners but also scores of Vietnamese refugees. Refugees in Cambodia hardly feel safe.

Chinese refugees find life in Cambodia bleak. On top of the typical predicament of trying to build a new life alone in a foreign country, they often find themselves alienated and in financial strife. Without proper papers, they cannot find a job. They may not have enough money to renew expired visas, and the embassy won’t renew their Chinese passports when those expire anyway. Moreover, many of the refugees are constantly looking over their shoulder. They hardly trust anyone, and are afraid of letting others get too close.

What this all boils down to is that these refugees again want out of the country. Thus the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), acting on behalf of the refugees whose cases seem most urgent, is left with the tough job of looking for third-country resettlement.

Particularly after September 11, fewer governments are willing to welcome refugees into their countries. During the Cold War, being an anti-communist Soviet refugee was virtually enough to receive asylum in democratic states. Today, however, Chinese who are fed up with the CCP are not as fortunate and feel largely ignored.

Some seem to believe they need to better their candidacy for that much coveted ticket of resettlement from Cambodia to a third country. Enter those refugees who tell self-contradictory stories that seem unlikely in the extreme. Enter those who claim (perhaps reasonably) that a fellow asylum seeker is a spy. Enter those pretending to be Falun Gong practitioners.

The phenomenon of Chinese immigrants pretending to practice Falun Gong has become quite popular in recent years. They see how genuine Falun Gong adherents receive protected status in their new countries, and they figure they can act the part; after all, how hard can it be to sit with your legs crossed? They learn the Falun Gong exercises, take a few pictures, and then it’s off to the UNHCR or immigration department. They do this not only in Cambodia but also in the United States.

What a bizarre scenario: a country’s president bans a group, so the country’s citizens pretend to be part of that group in order to permanently stay out of the country. And while the phenomenon may not necessarily represent a broad section, it’s part of a bigger picture.

Foreign businessmen are rushing in, but many Chinese want out. Add Uighurs, Tibetans, and some Mongolians to the list. Hong Kong residents reluctantly went back a few years ago and now seem to regret it, while Taiwanese pray the status quo will outlive the communist party. What is it that they all don’t like?

Leeshai Lemish has conducted research on the overseas Chinese population in Cambodia courtesy of a grant from the Freeman Foundation. This article is the second in his series “Down the Mekong.”

http://www.asianresearch.org/articles/2341.html

Southern Gamble: Mainland China Swarm to Cambodia for Illusive Money, Limited Freedom

Leeshai Lemish
10/9/2004

PHNOM PENH – Mr. Wang sits in a red plastic chair on the concrete patio in front of his empty restaurant. His cigarette smoke disappears in the clouds of motorcycle exhaust emanating from the street on a Phnom Penh morning, yet his voice, thick with a northeastern-Chinese accent, easily overcomes the calls of peddlers selling baguettes and coconuts. One or two Mainlanders from the neighborhood frequent his restaurant to buy a few steamed buns and keep Mr. Wang company. Their business is slow, too, so they pass their mornings at his place sitting by a metal table, reading a Chinese newspaper and sipping tea hotter than the Cambodian summer.

Mr. Wang’s story is typical: a failed business in China, hope for prosperity abroad, and a family left behind and rarely called.

Over the past half decade, thousands of middle-aged Chinese have migrated south to Cambodia, a poor, corruption-riddled country with an infantile democracy and a reluctantly developing economy.

At Home Abroad

Ethnic Chinese living in Cambodia, known as Sino-Khmer, have run the local economy for centuries. Traditionally, the Chinese have been the merchants and traders, while the local Khmer have been the rice growers and fishermen.

As a result, Sino-Khmer have generally been wealthier than the natives, and have come to dominate the capital. By the end of the French occupation half a century ago, Phnom Penh resembled a gigantic Chinatown, complete with Chinese newspapers, Chinese temples, Chinese schools, Chinese shops, and Chinese holidays.

The Chinese suffered tremendously under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, however, when they had to hide their Chinese identity and adopt native names. Partially inspired and funded by the Chinese Communist Party, the Khmer Rouge’s late 1970s genocide killed an estimated one of every four Cambodian residents.

Although Phnom Penh has not fully recovered its past glory, the Sino-Khmer who survived have once again risen to the top. Many of the richest and most powerful figures in Cambodia – including top ministers, the owner of the Intercontinental Hotel, and the Head of the Khmer-Chinese Association – are ethnic Chinese.

Cambodian Opportunity

Unlike past generations of migrants, who traditionally traveled from China’s southern provinces, Mr. Wang and many of the new immigrants come from China’s northeastern “rustbelt” region. There, privatization of state-run industries since 1998 has left millions unemployed and desperate.

So desperate, in fact, that they travel south to Cambodia, a country they immediately describe as backwards, filthy, and dangerous.

For skilled Chinese workers such as Mr. Ma, the gamble has paid off. He is employed by one of the dozens of garment factories located on the way to the Phnom Penh airport, just outside the city. Ma is one of approximately 20 Chinese, all supervisors, in a factory that employs over 2,000 young Cambodian women. His salary of $400 a month easily doubles what he would have made for the same work in Beijing, where he’s from.

Others have not yet cashed in. They say Cambodia is small and should develop quickly once it finally gets going. They wait patiently, hoping to make it big when the economy turns around.

“I don’t like to fail…so I won’t go back until I succeed here,” says Mr. Liu, owner of a small, struggling factory. “Almost all Chinese are like that,” he says. “They don’t want to lose face.”

If it’s Dangerous, They Still Come

Most of the recent immigrants knew that the Cambodian life would be less comfortable than life in a Chinese city. Living expenses are higher than in China, trash is everywhere, and apartments are dark and stuffy.

Moreover, they find Cambodia unsafe. Women do not leave their houses after dark, and rumors abound of Chinese being murdered and even beheaded over monetary conflicts.

Yet they continue to move to Cambodia.

“Chinese people have this characteristic,” says a restaurant owner. “Wherever it is dangerous they will go there,” adding, “as long as they can make money.”

Paid in Dollars

Many of the mainlanders complain that they were tricked into coming. The newcomers typically learn about Cambodia through a friend or relative who went back to China and told them about it.

According to Dr. Zhou, many will return to China after failing in Cambodia but, because they fear losing face, will lie to their friends back home. “Cambodia is great!” Dr. Zhou imitates. “You get paid in dollars there. You should definitely go check it out!”

Others are victims of organized scams. They are promised a job that will pay an enormous amount of money. They front a large sum to a go-between, who promises to arrange everything, and fly to Cambodia. When they arrive, they find no job and no money.

They often find help among their fellow overseas Chinese. One business owner in northern Cambodia describes himself as “the local Chinese consulate,” for the few mainlanders in his city all come to him for help whenever they have problems.

“The Chinese Embassy will help if there is a large group of people who got into trouble and they make a lot of noise,” says one informant. “As for what happens to an individual Chinese person, however, they could care less. They are too busy.”

Governments in Bed

On bustling Mao Tse-tung Blvd., behind a tall concrete wall and barb-wired fence, lies the Chinese Embassy. For a facility spanning four city blocks, it would take more than just the Cambodian Minister of Information – who says he has lunch and dinner with the embassy staff every day – to keep them busy.

The Chinese authorities have constructed a hospital, given occasional small amounts of money to the Chinese schools, and continue to provide medical care in Beijing to the Cambodian King Sihanouk. Moreover, it has almost single handedly sponsored Cambodia’s military.

Many locals, however, are skeptical about the Chinese government’s intentions. Some believe it is determined to position Cambodia on its side in a struggle for influence across Asia Pacific.

Others, such as Tom Fawthrop of the Phnom Penh Post, say the Chinese government “is piling up goodwill, aid and investment in a sustained bid to head off what they see as the unpalatable threat of a Khmer Rouge [Genocide] Tribunal,” which would implicate the Chinese Communist Party as well.

According to one informant, the Chinese government is highly involved in the Cambodian government’s internal affairs, going so far as to suggest what kind of parliamentary coalitions should be made and with whom.

Current Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen wrote in 1988 that “China is the root of all that is evil in Cambodia.” Yet today, the leaders of poor and small Cambodia feel that if they cannot face up to “the big fish,” they might as well align with it.

“The Cambodian government is in bed with the Chinese government,” says a Cambodian-based human rights worker who asked not to be identified. “They will do whatever the Chinese government tells them to. They don’t care.”

Little Refuge

The most famous example is that of a couple of Chinese school teachers who were abducted from their homes by the cooperative forces of the embassy and Cambodian police.

Mr. Li Guojun and Ms. Zhang Xinyi were adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice persecuted in China. They settled in Cambodia, one of only two Southeast Asian countries (the Philippines is the other) to have signed the United Nations’ convention guaranteeing protection to refugees.

With the assistance of a spy who doubles as a reporter for the Beijing-controlled Jian Hua Daily, the embassy learned about the couple in the summer of 2002. Several days later, Cambodian police arrested the two. Although they held official “person of concern” protection status cards from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the immigration bureau facilitated sending them back to China. The wife was subsequently locked in a Chinese labor camp.

Christian Chinese refugees residing in Cambodia have also reported being followed and receiving death threats from the Chinese Embassy.

One such refugee, Mr. Chen, conducted a one-man protest in front of the Chinese Embassy on the day of elections in Taiwan this past March. He held up a hand-made sign that read “Dark Evil China,” in Chinese and English. He was beaten by the embassy’s security staff, chased across the city, and knocked out with a blow to the head at the Russian Market. The next thing he knew he was in jail.

Chen was released three days later. His story was covered in Khmer-language newspapers, but none of the three Chinese papers dared to report it.

No Criticism

Topics such as protests against the Chinese government, Taiwanese pro-independence activities, Falun Gong, or the spread of HIV/AIDS in China are considered extremely sensitive and are rarely covered by the Chinese-language papers in Cambodia. According to one reporter, the papers avoid certain issues because they fear the Chinese Embassy.

“Politics is now being manipulated by the Chinese Embassy through economics,” the reporter says.

Censorship of the Chinese papers in Cambodia works as follows: the embassy pressures the Khmer-Chinese Association, which then pressures the congregations (smaller associations divided by Chinese dialect groups known as “hui guan”), which in turn pressure companies to stop advertising in that paper and run it out of business.

“If it’s injustice [that has taken place], than it’s injustice, and that’s how it should be [reported],” says the journalist. “But when it comes to the Chinese Embassy, the Chinese government or our local government, we cannot criticize them.”

Obedient Overseas

Chinese newspapers are not the only ones applying self-censorship.

“We don’t dare to talk about some things, things that have to do with politics,” says Ms. Zhang, a Chinese masseuse. “As Chinese people, there are some things we just can’t say.”

Thousands of miles away from home, she is afraid of others finding out. “As Chinese people, we have to do what our [Chinese] government tells us. We have to be obedient.”

One informant estimates that there are at least 30 Chinese spies operating in Phnom Penh, including a reporter as well as a heavy-set man who likes to hang out near the Chinese restaurant strip adjacent to the central market.

Those who left China after feeling oppressed, find having to still live in fear troubling.

Many of the recent migrants are in their fifties, the generation that was sent down to the countryside as teenagers during the Cultural Revolution and did not get a chance to finish school. A large number had seen their parents suffer humiliation, beatings, or worse at the hands of the Red Guards, and even experienced intense persecution themselves.

Freedom is in the Bank

Although they are still afraid to protest, speak or write freely in what is officially a democratic Cambodia, the majority of the new migrants say they do not care. They have the freedom to make money.

With Cambodian government restrictions on Chinese entrepreneurs nearly non-existent, they can open and close restaurants, shops, and even commercial hospitals, as they please.

The liberty Chinese appreciate comes in various forms. Many, both male and female, take advantage of being away from their spouses to find a partner for a simultaneous, unregistered, marriage life in Cambodia.

For some, the civil and political rights they do find in Phnom Penh are an improvement. Unlike most parts of China, in Cambodia they can watch television stations from Hong Kong and Taiwan, surf the Internet freely, and go to temples and churches of their choice.

“I’ll tell you, Cambodia is very good; better than China,” says Mr. Liu. “China has no human rights.”

As for Mr. Wang, he sits on his plastic chair, smoking another cigarette, waiting for a customer and waiting for change in Cambodia, or China.

Leeshai Lemish is conducting research on the overseas Chinese population in Cambodia courtesy of a grant from the Freeman Foundation.

http://www.asianresearch.org/articles/2342.html