Information Centre
October 6, 2002 was early spring in Melbourne, Australia. Though the chilly wind of winter didn’t’ want to give up, the morning sunshine was already warm and pleasant.
Falun Dafa practitioner Zhao Dongmei, female, was a former employee of the Housing Reform Office in Linfen District, Shanxi Province. She went to Beijing to appeal in the middle of December 2000, and was illegally arrested and brought back to the Linfen City Detention Centre. She went on a hunger strike to protest the persecution, and was brutally force-fed by male prisoners, resulting in her death on December 27, 2000.
MEMBERS of meditation group Falun Gong claim they have suffered religious discrimination after being denied a stall at this year’s Chinese New Year festival in Melbourne.
According to reliable sources, Cai Mi has been tortured to the verge of death in prison. Her body is nothing but skin and bones. Her family can barely recognize her extremely distorted figure when they visit her.
Gao Shuying’s parents-in-law are over 80 years old. Her mother-in-law is paralytic. Her two children are still in high school. They all need her to look after them. In addition, her husband Xin Baodong has been persecuted many times for steadfastly practicing Falun Dafa.
An official admitted, “We have received various kinds of information from China.” When the practitioners asked whether it included the “blacklist,” the Icelandic officials did not deny it.
Jane Zhizhen Dai, a practitioner of the Chinese meditation art Falun Gong, addresses students and the press Friday on the West Mall with her daughter Fadu.
The block on Google was an international scandal because it demonstrated so clearly the threat to international internet commerce of the Chinese government’s attempts to censor the internet for political purposes. At the same time, this method of blocking Google violated international protocols for the use of the internet.
Try typing “Falun Gong” into your Internet search engine in China and you will not get far. What is now known as the “Great Firewall of China” comes into action and you get a notice saying: “This page cannot be displayed.”
On Tuesday, October 8, 2002, at 12:00 — 2:00 p.m. in Washington, DC, a diverse coalition of non-governmental human rights, religious freedom, and women’s organizations, labour unions, and student groups will hold a rally to focus attention on human rights atrocities in China and to protest Chinese Communist leader Jiang Zemin’s upcoming visit to the United States in October.
