{"id":59,"date":"2010-01-20T06:03:32","date_gmt":"2010-01-20T06:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/?p=59"},"modified":"2010-01-20T06:03:32","modified_gmt":"2010-01-20T06:03:32","slug":"59","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/2010\/01\/20\/59\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"New<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

The Faith Column<\/a><\/h1>\n

China\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s other world<\/h1>\n

Posted by Leeshai Lemish<\/a> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 20 August 2008 10:11<\/p>\n

Leeshai Lemish tells of his and Ethan Gutmann\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s journey into the persecution of Falun Gong<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t pull away from what they were telling us.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcAt first I thought it was just me. But then, one after another, more Falun Gong practitioners were brought into our cell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, Chen Jie said. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcTheir bellies, chest and backs were also covered with black bubbles from being shocked with cattle-prods\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n

Chen and all our interviewees had close friends killed by Chinese police. They were the lucky survivors. I left with a sickening feeling \u00e2\u20ac\u201c there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no way I can ever do their stories justice.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve received research grants from Earheart Foundation and Sweden\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Wallenberg family, and keep our budget low by sleeping on floors and eating instant noodles. But we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re too embarrassed to complain, considering the stories we hear morning to night.<\/p>\n

Confess!<\/strong><\/p>\n

The practitioners we interviewed provided corresponding accounts of persecution they experienced. Here is what it looks like.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcMy mother said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Just write it so we can go home, OK\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? I chocked back tears.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll kneel before you\u00e2\u20ac\u009d! I held her and said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mom, you know Falun Gong made me healthy and happy. What I did was perfectly legal \u00e2\u20ac\u201c they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re the ones breaking the law\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. My heart bled as I watched my mother leave.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em><\/p>\n

From the detention centre, where they are often beaten and hung in painful positions, practitioners are sent to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcreform through labour\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 camps. Some reports estimate that over half the camps\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 total population are Falun Gong.<\/p>\n

In these camps\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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.<\/p>\n

No illusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c blood tests, torso X-rays, sonograms, urine samples and little else \u00e2\u20ac\u201c apparently targeting their organ function. This added to existing evidence, including doctors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 admissions recorded on tape.<\/p>\n

So are these horror stories real, or is it just these people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s word against Chinese government denials? The over 100 people we interviewed, and the torture scars some showed, left no ambiguities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c this persecution is ongoing and nationwide.<\/p>\n

But you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Those who refuse to cooperate are severely punished. A Christian human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, investigated and corroborated Falun Gong\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s persecution claims, only to be arrested and tortured himself.<\/p>\n

Hidden nearby<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Chinese Communist Party, of course, has gone to great length to hide these atrocities and to buy international silence. That doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make the persecution any less real for practitioners and their families.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Blocks away from skyscrapers and Olympic venues in China\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s other world are labour camps and prisons full of Falun Gong practitioners. Chinese media, of course, can report none of this.<\/p>\n

Even Western journalists told me their newspapers have a blackout policy on Falun Gong. But the complicity of the West is an issue I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll leave to my next, and final, entry.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/blogs\/the-faith-column\/2008\/08\/falun-gong-practitioners-china<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Faith Column China\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s other world Posted by Leeshai Lemish \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 20 August 2008 10:11 Leeshai Lemish tells of his and Ethan Gutmann\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leeshailemish.com\/on-shen-yun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}