Falun Gong Practitioner Involved in Changchun TV Broadcast Dies in Custody

A Falun Gong practitioner who tapped into China’s state-run TV died on May 1st. Liang Zhenxing had suffered persecution in various prison camps for the past nine years.

Liang’s family told the Falun Gong website “Clearwisdom”, that he looked emaciated, and had difficulty walking or talking a few weeks before he died.

The 46-year-old resident of Changchun was sentenced to 19 years in prison back in 2002. Liang was part of a group of Falun Gong practitioners who tapped into state-run TV stations on March 5th that year. They showed about 50 minutes of programmes—including this one: “Falun Dafa Around the World”—which showed that Falun Gong is widely practised, and that the Chinese regime was making up lies to justify its persecution of the group.

That broadcast prompted the communist regime to detain about 5,000 Falun Gong practitioners in the region. Several died in the weeks after the round up, and 15 people were sentenced to prison camps for up to 20 years.

According to the executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Centre, Levi Browde, the Chinese Communist Party has been using its monopoly of the media to vilify Falun Gong:

“There is no way to persecute 100 million people unless you have a large contingency of your own people to take part in that. How do you get Chinese people to persecute Chinese people? You’ve got to vilify the victim, you’ve got to make them seem sub-human, you’ve got to rile people up and give them a reason to do that… The tool to do that is the media; is to not allow Falun Gong to have a voice, and to vilify them over the airways.”

Browde says the broadcast showed the public the truth about Falun Gong and the persecution, over-riding the regime’s propaganda:

“When you’re in a country where you’re being told that this is a dangerous group, that this is a fringe group, that they are only here in China and the world is persecuting them, and suddenly to see that it is being practised all over the world, it really opens people’s eyes to the realities of what is happening.”

According to the Information Centre, Liang is at least the eighth person detained after the broadcasts who is known to have died from abuse in custody.