Image via WikipediaChina suppresses dissident groups such as the Falun Gong...
BEIJING (AP) - Dissidents organizing a democratic party, Protestants flocking to private homes to worship and millions belonging to a mystical meditation group - all have become targets in China's summer clampdown.
The communist government, rarely tolerant of groups operating beyond its control, has ratcheted up the intensity of its campaign this time to sweep away potential challenges ahead of the 50th anniversary of the communist victory on Oct. 1.
Most visible - and seemingly bizarre - has been an intense, nearly six-week campaign to pull millions of people away from their belief in Falun Gong, a blend of meditation, slow-motion exercises and ideas from Buddhism and Taoism said by devotees to improve health and morality.
While diatribes against the group saturated state airwaves and Communist Party officials pressured practitioners to renounce the group, police and courts quietly put away second-tier leaders of the China Democracy Party. In one week, four of them received prison sentences as long as 13 years.
Emboldened by their success, security forces have turned to Christian groups not sanctioned by the government. Police arrested at least 30 leaders of underground Protestant church groups this week, the second raid this month in central Henan province, rights groups reported.
Local authorities have used the same tactics against the church groups applied to Falun Gong - ransacking homes for evidence and detentions, a report by New York-based Human Rights in China quoted David Zhang, an underground church movement advocate, as saying.
"The leadership's greatest fear is organized opposition," said one government scholar called upon by the party's Propaganda Department in recent weeks to research and publicly criticize Falun Gong. He added that the group represented the most organized threat "because so many high-level officials practiced Falun Gong."
Before the crackdown began, one government estimate placed the number of Falun Gong practitioners at 70 million, more than the Communist Party. Human Rights in China said four of the Protestant leaders arrested this week represent church groups with more than 20 million members.
The government forbids Christian worship outside churches under state control.
Since there has been scant international or domestic criticism of the campaign against Falun Gong, officials felt free to act against the church leaders, Human Rights in China quoted Zhang as saying. Zhang, who lives in the United States, has had his normally broad contacts with leaders of the house churches almost entirely cut off since the arrests.
When asked about the arrests of the Protestant leaders, a spokesman for the local Tanghe county police, who identified himself as Mr. Niu, said, "Let me tell you, don't get involved in this matter."
China's news media denounce Falun Gong as a cult opposing science and the government. Falun Gong provoked the leadership's ire by staging a silent protest by 10,000 supporters outside communist headquarters in Beijing. Its spokesmen in the United States say it is neither religious nor political.
Despite the tense atmosphere, the government was now rushing to bring the campaign against Falun Gong to a close, said the government scholar, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said charges would soon be brought against ringleaders and, in absentia, Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong's founder who now lives in the United States.
By ending the biggest witch hunt of opponents since the suppression of the democracy movement in 1989, the government wants to make sure nothing detracts from touting national achievements during 50th anniversary celebrations.
Chinese leaders also want to clear the decks to focus on a forceful response to Taiwan, an island claimed by China, the scholar said. Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui took what Beijing regards as a dangerous move toward outright statehood last month by declaring the island has "state-to-state" relations with China.
A sample of the displays of devotion to party likely to be a big part of the anniversary can already be seen in reports on the massive deprogramming of Falun Gong members.
A professor of Chinese medicine, Wang Dequn, praised the "concern" of the party and government for people like him who had practiced Falun Gong.
"Now my thinking is being transformed step by step, and I have determined to make the party and government satisfied," the state-run Xinhua News Agency quoted him as saying.
Acknowledgements: Associated Press
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