SAN FRANCISCO—The practitioners of Falun Gong in San Francisco held a demonstration and press conference on the steps of City Hall on Thursday. Their message: 13 years of hate crimes directed against them in the city by the bay have to stop.
The practitioners were spurred into action by a violent incident around midday this past Sunday.
At the corner of Grant and Washington streets in Chinatown, a group of four or five practitioners gathered to give out fliers and hold up a placard that tells about what Falun Gong is and how it is persecuted in China. According to practitioners present at the scene, the following scenario played out.
At this same street corner, a Chinese man wearing a red t-shirt stood on a stool behind the practitioners. Standing above them on his stool, he loudly cursed Falun Gong and shouted out slogans that support the Chinese regime.
Zhang said the incident in Chinatown this past Sunday is part of a pattern of incidents aimed at silencing practitioners. She said the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco is behind the attacks and the abuse and pointed to similar incidents in other U.S. cities.
One of the incidents Zhang mentioned involved attacks on Falun Gong practitioners in Chinatown in Flushing, New York, that began in May 2008 and lasted for months. In that case, the Chinese Consul General Peng Keyu was caught on a taped phone call boasting about how he had personally encouraged the attacks.
A former Chinese consular official has confirmed Zhang’s allegations that Chinese Consulate staff work to silence Falun Gong practitioners outside of China.
In testimony before the U.S. Congress Mr. Chen Yonglin, the former consul for political affairs for the People’s Republic of China Consulate in Sydney, Australia, spoke of a “war” against Falun Gong that was “one of the main tasks of the Chinese missions overseas.”
“The Falun Gong policy of the central CCP for the overseas missions,” Chen testified, “is ‘To fight eyeball to eyeball, to attack voluntarily and aggressively.’”
On the Steps of City Hall
Outside the City Hall on Thursday the practitioners held a press conference. Speaking at the conference were Derek Wang and Ms. Wang. Both have suffered from the persecution of Falun Gong in China.
Derek Wang recounted how he started practicing Falun Gong in 1997 when he was 10 years old. After the persecution started in July 1999, his mother was detained for practicing Falun Gong, tortured to the brink of death, and then released to her home. Derek continues to worry for her safety back in China.
Ms. Wang’s sister was killed while in custody, and when Ms. Wang inspected the corpse, she found her sister’s arms bound tightly with bloody tape, her left arm severely swollen, and her lower body naked. Rape and sexual assault are a widespread form of torture used against female Falun Gong practitioners in China.
Ms. Wang’s brother has been detained for more than 10 years because of his practice of Falun Gong and suffered severe torture.
“Those men who attacked us on Sunday, they don’t want the people of Chinatown to hear what Ms. Wang and Derek have to say,” Zhang said. “They interfered in order to keep people from hearing what is going on in China.”
Immediately following the press conference, Falun Gong practitioners, including Derek Wang and Ms. Wang, paid visits to the offices of Mayor Edwin M. Lee, City Supervisor David Chiu, and District Attorney George Gascón. They offered to explain what Falun Gong is about, and asked the officials to support freedom of expression and belief, free from foreign interference, in San Francisco.
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