Andrey Krushinsky: 35 foreign protesters in China and a little Chinese girl

The «civilized community» arranged an uproar on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. A group of 35 people, which all came to China on travel visas from Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Canada, France, Israel, Ireland, USA, Switzerland and Sweden unfolded their slogans and started yelling the mottoes of the banned Falun Gong fanatical sect.

Falun Gong means “the Practice of the Wheel of the Dharma.” Wheel of the Dharma is a Buddhism notion. The rituals of the movement are basically respiratory exercises. The founder of this sect is Li Hongzhi. As the Chinese press found out, this man changed his birth date to make it coincide with Buddha’s biography. But there is nothing funny here for the Chinese authorities.

Just within the period of two years, after the sect had been officially outlawed, the Chinese media found and exposed a mass of the information about the tragic fates of Falun Gong’s members. Someone went mad, someone fell ill, others committed suicide. The West is rather positive towards the sect: Falun Gong has links beyond China, it is powerful due to the number of its members. One of Reuters correspondents even came out with the number – 100 million, although Beijing acknowledged only two million members.

The “prophet” of the movement, is under 50 now has a secondary education. He served in the army, and founded this sect in 1992 together with the research company Falun Dafa. He earned millions of dollars travelling all over the world with lectures, selling the propaganda materials of his cult. The major thing he achieved – he organized 39 training centres all over China, 1900 training points and over 28 thousand grounds for group exercises.

The Chinese authorities believed the activity of the sect posed the real threat to the social stability in the country and this conclusion was true. The founder of the movement left for the USA before the real controversy began in his motherland. This shows what kind of person he is, but on the other hand, there are millions of people in China, who enjoy respiratory exercises. The sect members say, they stands against the attributes of the western life, which is stubbornly intruding in China’s life. It has a military structure in its organization: its commanders are enabled to arrange “actions” immediately, closely coordinating with the western mass media. They know psychological methods how to subordinate the members of the sect and drive them into ecstasy.

A tragic incident happened on the same Tiananmen Square on January 23 of the current year, when a group of Falun Gong sect members burnt themselves. A grown-up man was saved by the police, but he was still yelling and glorifying Falun Gong, while a little 12-year-old girl, who was involved in the “action” by her mother was yelling to save her.

That girl was then hospitalized with burns all over her skin and there she narrated after a while that her mother told her the fire would not do her bad: “The mother said it would just come though my body and I would be in paradise.” The doctors asked her what paradise looked like. She answered it was made of gold and the road of paradise was golden as well. The girl did everything her mother told her to do: drank some petrol, spilled the rest on herself and lit the fire. She died soon after in the hospital.

The relation between two maniacs – the Japanese Asahara and the Chinese Li Hongzhi can be easily perceived. But Asahara had aversion against the USA – that is why the “civilized” society rejected him. Li Hongzhi was violent about the Red Cross, that is why both houses of the American congress passed a special resolution in November of 1999 in the solidarity with Falun Gong.

That little girl fell victim of “big politics.” The recent demonstration of foreigners on the square of the Chinese capital took place at the same place, where that little girl was screaming to save her, burning all over – just 10 months ago. 35 foreigners were expelled to Sweden.

Andrey Krushinsky PRAVDA.Ru Beijing

Reuters photo: A Falun Gong follower studies behind a see-through banner during a protest in Hong Kong November 21, 2001