Het Parool (Dutch newspaper): Falun Gong exercises take grandmother (85) to prison

Monday September 30 2002

Amsterdam – Practitioners say they do not form an organisation or political movement. Neither is it a religion. It’s free and it makes you feel better. What practitioners of Falun Gong stand for are three fundamental values: truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. What can be wrong about that? asks Wang Xianghe to herself at the Dam, where a demonstration was being held last Sunday. “We want to become good people. Happier and more healthy.”

Adherents of Falun Gong in China are persecuted. The regime sees Falun Gong as a threat, even if it’s only because there are more practitioners than the fifty million Chinese communist party members. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the Dutch government too, condemned the imprisonment and persecution of the practitioners.

The brother of Wang Xianghe is being held in a Chinese prison as well. “He was being hung by his thumbs a whole night long in a temperature of minus 3° Celcius. My 85 year old mother had been arrested when she visited China because she did her practice there. More than 300.000 practitioners are in prison, 7.000 have been killed.”

Last week 15 adherents of the forbidden spiritual movement in the Northern Chinese city Changchun were sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison, the official Chinese press agency reported. The convicted people broke into the Chinese cable network last March, which caused programs top be seen in two cities in which a stance was taken against the ban of the movement and wherein the policy of the regime was criticized.

Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is a combination of physical exercises and meditation. Besides physical fitness - to be achieved through 5 simple exercises - Falun Gong has the goal of attaining wisdom and enlightenment.

Falun Gong has become immensely popular since its introduction in 1992 by ‘Master Li Hongzhi’. But in the summer of 1999 it was forbidden, though among the leadership there were also many practitioners. Books were burned, exercises disrupted. Murderers and criminals were said to have committed their crimes in name of Falun Dafa. Practitioners were portrayed as conspirators.

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Doing Falun Gong every day for one and a half hour makes you a completely different person. “Some people want to jog or ride a bike. We want Falun Gong.” Xianghe has been living in Holland for 16 years. Her brother told her about Falun Gong. “I had heart and stomach problems. Now I haven’t used medicine for over 5 years.” Her sister adds “I had asthma, I hardly got off the couch. Now I feel good.”

Holland already knows hundreds of practitioners says Xianghe who gives lessons. Free, because all activities are free. “It’s about health and compassion.”