Foreigners stand in for Falun Gong

The White House has praised China for helping US intelligence officials in Afghanistan, and China has been eager to show its cooperative side in the US-led war. Relations between the two countries have been warming markedly after a rocky period last spring when US and Chinese military aircraft collided off China's coast. Yet Bush briefly raised human and minority rights issues during the Shanghai economic summit in China last October: "Especially religious rights, and a warning [to China] not to use antiterrorism against minorities," Ms. Hamrin says, "despite the necessary urgent focus on countering terrorism."

On Monday, the New York-based Committee for the Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China issued a 141-page document that contains seven internal security documents urging a comprehensive and systematic crackdown on Falun Gong and underground Christian "home churches" where believers congregate independent of state oversight.

Most of the documents reiterated familiar and long-standing fears in China of "foreign powers" that "conspire" to cause ordinary Chinese to rebel against the state. A variety of "cults" are deemed to be a "crawling danger to domestic security and defense."

One transcript of a speech by Sun Jianxin, a vice director of public security in Anhui province, accused the Vatican of "waiting for any opportunity to intervene in the internal affairs of Catholic churches in our country."

China views the Falun Gong, whose exiled leader Li Hongzhi lives in New York, as a danger to state security. Falun Gong members, many of them blue collar workers, often say that their morning discipline of exercises, similar to the traditional "qi-gong," fill a spiritual void in their lives.

Two years ago, the sect was declared illegal. At that time, the grass-roots faith could muster hundreds of thousands of silent Chinese protesters at sites around China.

China shut down the Buddhist-inspired Falun Gong movement after a series of surprise protests at the posh Zhongnanhai neighborhood shocked Party officials who were concerned that any group could organize so effectively outside their purview.

Today, most Chinese Falun Gong have been arrested, marginalized, or driven deep underground in a campaign reportedly overseen by President Jiang Zemin himself. Falun Gong arrests have led to some 170 deaths in detention, say rights activists, and to the establishment of a series of special "re-education camps" around the country.

In the past year, Chinese authorities have also begun to train their sights on a plethora of small Christian fundamentalist and evangelical groups, many with ties to the US.

Yesterday, a Hong Kong businessman arrested for bringing bibles to a Pentecostal group called "The Shouters" in China's Fujian province, was released after the White House expressed interest in the case. But two of his colleagues remain in jail.

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