Article from German Newspaper Bruchsaler Rundschau: “My friends are being persecuted.”

They promote values such as Truthfulness, Kindness and Tolerance, but in China they have been haunted since 1999. They are followers of the Buddha School-based Falun Gong cultivation system. It is said that more than seventy million Chinese citizens regularly practise the five fluid exercises that are supposed to bring body and mind in harmony with the universe. Those seventy million constitute a larger number than the members of the Communist Party in the Middle Kingdom. That is probably the reason why the former head of state, Jiang Zemin, put Falun Gong on a blacklist in China and ordered the persecution of the followers. Until 1999, these people who live an unassuming and peaceful lifestyle, were a non-political group. But since the onset of the persecution by the state, resistance has grown.

Jing Wang said “Three of my friends were sent to forced labour camps, simply because they practised Falun Gong.” The thirty year old Chinese woman has lived in Germany for the past seven years. She studies German and Italian in Germersheim and lives with her husband in Bruchsal. The married couple have practised the yoga-like exercises for the past five years. Ms. Wang’s friends and many other incarcerated Falun Gong practitioners have to endure psychological terror, brainwashing, gross physical and psychological abuse, mistreatment and torture. One of those, once a successful young scientist, is now a broken man who does not even recognise his family anymore. Approximately 700 of those mistreated people did not survive the torture and have died, states one of the Falun Gong information publications. Falun Gong has followers in more than fifty nations around the globe.

“We want to raise public awareness of this gruesome persecution,” said Jing Wang. She and other Falun Gong followers are collecting signatures and send postcards with appeal messages to politicians and all kinds of organisations, and not without success! Her friend Xiong Wei, a young mother, had been incarcerated in a Re-education-Through-Labour camp for two years. She was released a few days ago. Foreign Minister Mr. Joschka Fischer had intervened on behalf of the young mother who was also a student in Germany.

“China haunts Christians as well - Catholics, Protestants in their ‘underground churches’
and also Tibetans,” stressed the young Chinese woman. Aside from those, more than ten other meditation systems have been outlawed.

The Falun Gong followers are planning an event to raise awareness on January 30th 2004 in Bruchsal. They will have a booth in the pedestrian Mall.