On Thursday evenings commuters bustling to their trains in downtown Chicago are hailed by two sets of hawkers handing out free weekly newspapers. One paper’s the Reader; the other is the mysterious Epoch Times. Few of the Chinese-American vendors who cry “Free, free” speak any more English than that.
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That’s a quote from “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” a series of reports the Epoch Times published last fall that won it a national award from the Asian American Journalists Association. One of the reports focused on the persecution of Falun Gong in China. “At least 1,143 Falun Gong practitioners have died from persecution in the last five years,” it stated. “The brutal tortures…are many and varied. Beating, whipping, electric shock torture, freezing, tying with ropes, handcuffing and shackling for extended periods, burning with open flame, lit cigarettes or hot irons, being cuffed and hung up, being forced to stand or kneel down for a long time, being jabbed with bamboo sticks or metal wires, sexual abuse, and rape are just a handful of examples.”
Falun Gong is a spiritual movement–or, according to the Chinese government, a dangerous cult. It dates back to 1992, when Li Hongzhi–described in a 2001 Time article as a “former trumpet player and grain clerk”–combined elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Qigong. Li Hongzhi left the country in 1995 and now lives in the States, but he’d sown a whirlwind. The “traditional morality” he preached–of truth, compassion, and tolerance–resonated with millions of Chinese, and in a February 1999 article U.S. News & World Report stated that he’d amassed some 60 million followers, more than the Communist Party had. The government was uneasy, the article said, but leaning toward co-optation. But that April some 10,000 “practitioners” unhappy with the way Falun Gong was being portrayed in the state-controlled press stunned top government officials by materializing outside their compound in Beijing, meditating silently for 12 hours, then disappearing. The rattled government soon ordered mass arrests.
Gregory told the subcommittee about a 2001 incident in which thugs beat one practitioner demonstrating outside the Chinese consulate at Clark and Erie and threatened to kill another. “The Epoch Times laid out, for everyone to see, the details of the beating,” he said, including links between the attackers and the consulate. The next year similar links were cited in a federal lawsuit filed by about 50 Falun Gong practitioners across the country who accused the Chinese government of conspiring to harass them. The suit is pending.
Like any other burgeoning world power, China doesn’t let its influence lapse at its frontiers. CPJ reported that to protect its relationship with China the government of Malaysia was confiscating editions of the Epoch Times. In 2001 the Jamestown Foundation reported that China was buying into Chinese-language media in the U.S., offering free content, and leveraging advertising dollars–all to manipulate coverage. In 2002 the mayor of Santee, California, told the Washington Times he’d received a letter from the consul general in Los Angeles expressing “our hope that your city, by taking your citizens’ interest into consideration, will earnestly consider the request from the Chinese side that no recogni-tion and support in any form should be given to the Falun Gong cult organization.”
