Media Reports
Australia won’t say in public that Chinese citizens are regularly beaten to death by police or that more than 100,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been sent to forced labour camps since 1999, of whom well over 1600 have died of torture or abuse.
SOME days, looking past the new gleaming apartment blocks and ritzy shopping malls, China looks like a mountain of human misery.
AUSTRALIA’S relations with China are being strained by a Sydney Falun Gong practitioner who is suing former president Jiang Zemin for personal damages in the NSW Supreme Court after being locked up four times in China.
For the second time in three months, Falun Gong practitioners have filed a lawsuit against a high-ranking Chinese official visiting Africa. Gansu Province Party Secretary Su Rong was served on November 4 while visiting the southern African nation of Zambia, where he was ordered to stay pending a court appearance.
Su Rong is the second high-ranking Chinese official to be sued in Africa and the first official to be forced to remain in a foreign country.
DIT (Durban Institute of Technology) has backed a Chinese student’s right to teach Falun Gong (exercises), a practice based on ancient teachings and similar to tai-chi which is banned in China, after the Chinese consul in Durban asked the institution to stop her.
Several Blacktown residents are helping a court action against the Chinese Government for attempted assassination of a Falun Gong practitioner.
A lawyer representing the group says the suit is part of a world wide case against the former President, who is accused of encouraging the persecution of Falun Gong.
An international fight against persecution has gained support from the people of Macarthur. A petition calling for the Federal Government to protect the safety and basic rights of Australian Falun Dafa practitioners has been signed by 2000 residents.
A small nameplate beside the high, burnished metal gates announces the building inside as “Guangzhou City Law School”. But this grimy industrial area on the outskirts of China’s great southern commercial metropolis is an unlikely place for an academic institution.
According to the award-winning Melbourne-based writer Ouyang Yu, whose brother Ming died last year from ill-treatment during detention for his Falun Gong activities, the persecution has attracted little interest in human rights circles in Australia. “Over here you meet up with a wall of utter coldness, a wall of ice,” he said in a telephone interview. “They say other cases are more important.”
