West German Media Report: Chinese Workers in Germany threatened - they don't have freedom to accept information

The newspaper reported that whatever activities are banned in China, are not allowed in Dortmund either. In the past week, nearly a thousand Chinese workers were working on the smelting furnace/equipment’s in the Westfalen Smelter of Dortmund. However, they were under the so-called “protection” of their Chinese company supervisors and they were not allowed to accept any information.

A Chinese Falun Gong practitioner was studying in Dortmund. She attempted to provide her fellow Chinese people with some newspapers and information. She successfully passed one hundred Chinese newspapers to the workers twice before she was kicked out of the smelter. This particular edition of the Chinese newspapers contained some articles on Falun Gong.

At one exit of the smelter, a supervisor threatened the workers: “Accepting any information / CDs on Falun Gong is strictly forbidden, anyone who does this will be punished severely.” This Falun Gong practitioner stated however, that although the workers were threatened with “being sent back to China” as the punishment, many still accepted the newspaper when no one was looking.

The newspaper article said that the reason Falun Gong was banned in China was because it promoted “superstitious activities”. However, no serious scholars/experts outside China would come to such a conclusion. On 3 March 2002, the Foreign Minister of Germany Joschka Fischer at the U.N. Human Rights Convention called on the Chinese government (Jiang Zemin) to stop the persecution of Falun Gong.