Falun Gong

BEIJING -- Every second or third day, Wang, a 32-year-old Falun Gong practitioner, moves to a new safe house somewhere in this capital of 13 million, trying to stay one step ahead of the police. Since his arrest last fall for unfurling a pro-Falun Gong banner in Tiananmen Square, his life has steadily deteriorated. Last month, just before Chinese New Year, Wang lost his engineering job at a design firm because he wouldn't renounce the group. Local police called daily, insisting that he sign a statement pledging not to practice Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation discipline outlawed by the Chinese government.

BEIJING -- China's state-controlled media acknowledged for the first time yesterday the government's persistent difficulty in stamping out the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, even as fresh allegations emerged about police brutality toward its practitioners held in detention. Three jailed members of the movement have died as a result of beatings or hunger strikes in the past month, according to human rights groups and family members, bringing the total number of deaths to 15. The government has been mostly silent about Falun Gong in recent months, and the state media have never openly acknowledged the sporadic silent protests by small groups of its members on Tiananmen Square over the past nine months.

BEIJING -- The Year of the Dragon arrived amid violence on Tiananmen Square, but hundreds of millions of Chinese elsewhere greeted the new lunar year happily yesterday with fireworks and raucous celebrations. More than 50 Falun Gong members were kicked, beaten and detained during the first few minutes of the new year on the square in central Beijing as police broke up the biggest protest in months by the outlawed spiritual group. Trouble began shortly before midnight, when dozens of members of the sect emerged from a pedestrian tunnel that opens onto the square and sat down in protest.

BEIJING - Five members of the banned spiritual meditation group Falun Gong set themselves on fire yesterday in a suicide attempt at Tiananmen Square on the eve of Chinese New Year, according to Xinhua, China's government-run news service. A woman died, and four men were injured and taken to a hospital by police, said Xinhua, which blamed the act on "the heresy of Li Hongzhi, ringleader of the evil cult Falun Gong." Falun Gong members in Hong Kong denied that the group was behind the act, saying it ran counter to the lessons of compassion, tolerance and forbearance taught by Li, the group's exiled leader.

O'Malley will be the nation's most exciting new young mayor since Schmoke.Let's blame air crashes on terrorism, because that only happens to someone else. If the trouble is in the plane, more passengers are at risk.South Mountain will be preserved as a Civil War battlefield and scary witch place.China's Communist bosses cannot beat Falun Gong, so they might just as well join it.

WHAT'S WRONG with the following conversation? "I want freedom to dream." "You protest too much." "It's the truth." What's wrong is that it contains certain keywords -- freedom, protest, truth -- that China's Internet nannies are trying to block in transmissions via the nation's most widely used instant-messaging service. Hackers recently obtained a copy of the government filtering program covertly installed on Chinese users' computers when they sign up for the IM service; it also blocks keywords in e-mail and phone text messages from those computers.

THE MORE freedom China grants its people as consumers and economic creators, the more it fears what they may be thinking, saying or praying. It wants them to have access to the Internet, but to control what they find there. It wants them to create the new economy, not a new politics. It recognizes religion, which it wants them to reject. People need no longer chant the cliches of Communist propaganda, as long as they don't chant anything else. All this is behind the Chinese government's brusque collision with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, after she criticized China's suppression of Tibetan Buddhists, Christians and members of the Falun Gong exercise-meditation movement.

BEIJING - From criminal suspects beaten to death by police to labor rights activists forced to ingest drugs while held prisoner in mental hospitals, Chinese live in a society where torture is widespread and systematic, according to a human rights report released yesterday. In a detailed examination of the issue, the London-based group Amnesty International argues that torture is a common practice in China's sprawling bureaucracy and results in scores of deaths annually. According to the 58-page report, perpetrators include overzealous police officers, tax officials, workers in local family planning bureaus and private security guards.

ON THE Great Wall, China - China is the kind of country where you can camp on the Great Wall without a permit, but if you sit down in Tiananmen Square you might get a kick in the head. Earlier this summer I went strolling through the square with my college roommates, Dan and Dave, who were visiting from California. As we walked around the vast expanse of concrete, the nation's political epicenter, police descended on clumps of simply dressed Chinese. They were members of the banned spiritual meditation group, Falun Gong, quietly demonstrating against a government crackdown in which tens of thousands of their comrades have been detained.

IF ONLY to rub it in, China announced it is punishing 27 newspapers for violating press regulations last year. The alleged misdeeds ranged from invented stories to sensationalism to unauthorized supplements to -- so-called -- political errors. The punishments ranged up to permanent closure. That was not unexpected. The government said in November it would close some smaller papers, perhaps 200. China is a Communist dictatorship that has always managed the press. It had done so with a lighter hand lately, as personal tastes and freedoms have come into fashion.