China: beneath the lacquer, Caroline Moorehead

Tue, 25 Jun 2002 23:00:00 +0000

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Soon after reaching the UK in the summer of 2001, Q.G. met another Chinese girl like herself, seeking asylum from what she believed was inevitable arrest in her home town of Zhongqi, in China’s Sechuan province. The two girls shared a room and lived on whatever they could occasionally earn, illegally, by washing up in Chinese restaurants in London.

Both had applied for asylum, and been refused, and Q.G. was uncertain about what steps to take next. Then her friend decided to risk the return to China, leaving Q.G. alone and without funds. Soon afterwards, she was arrested for stealing bread from a Chinese restaurant, and found herself in Oakington Detention Centre. She has now been provided with a new solicitor and given leave to appeal.

Q.G. speaks no English. She is a tall young woman in her early twenties, and she speaks quickly and without hesitation about her experiences. After the death of her father in the late 1980s, she supported her mother by working in a clothes factory. The two women shared a small flat.

“My mother became a practitioner of the Falun Gong soon after it began in 1992. She practised the exercises regularly, saying she believed that they were good for her health and going to the park with many others to do them in the open air. One day she was arrested and imprisoned, and a few days later I was notified that she was dead. I asked to see her body, but when I went to the morgue I was only allowed a very quick glance. I became convinced that she had been beaten to death.” Q.G.’s mother was just 45.

How to treat ‘bad elements’

Falun Gong children in China

Falun Gong, which has its roots in ancient Chinese culture, teaches peace and wisdom through “truth, compassion and tolerance”. Neither a religion nor a cult, it has no headquarters and is practised largely as a series of exercises, performed in the open. There are no leaders and no money is involved, though much of the teaching comes from the words of a teacher called Li Hongzhi. Falun Gong appears to be totally without politics.

In 1996, the Chinese government officially denounced Falun Gong and banned all its literature. People who continued to carry on the exercises – which are regularly practised in parks, mainly by middle aged and elderly women – found themselves sacked from their jobs, and were forced to endure raids on their homes.

By 1998, official Chinese newspapers were printing increasingly hostile articles about the movement. The first arrests were countered by a vast peaceful protest in front of the government’s compound in Beijing. This was followed by a complete ban and a growing number of arrests. Practitioners attribute the hostility Falun Gong has attracted to the sheer number of its members, perhaps amounting to tens of millions of people, and to modern China’s suspicion of all spiritual groups, especially those independent of the government.

Since then, the persecution has intensified. Some 15,000 people are reported to have been sent to labour camps, with many more arrested briefly and released with warnings. But something about Falun Gong’s peaceful obduracy has also provoked more violent forms of oppression. At least 150 people are believed to have been tortured and beaten to death in custody, while 650 are known to have been sent to mental hospitals, in a return to the widespread psychiatric abuse of the Cultural Revolution. Falun Gong exponents have been detained in special police psychiatric hospitals called Ankang. A network of Ankang is being planned for each city in China with a population of over a million.

“After I protested to the police that I believed that my mother had been mistreated,” Q.G. explains, “I was taken in for questioning. They held me for two days, slapped me around, beat me. There were two men, and when they had stopped hitting me they ordered me to say nothing to anyone about my mother. But when I went home I couldn’t stop thinking about what might have happened to her. My neighbours told me that the police kept coming round, asking things about me.”

Q.G. was now living alone, in the flat she had shared with her mother. She has no brothers or sisters. She was warned that she was likely to lose her job unless she kept entirely silent. She was not, however, prepared to do so. She started writing accounts of what she believed had happened to her mother, and then sticking them up on the walls and boards of Zhongqi which, as in cities all over China, have acted as places of protest since the end of the Cultural Revolution.

“The police now warned me again. I was to stop making trouble, they said, or they would arrest me properly, and this time they wouldn’t let me out. I knew perfectly well that they meant it. I couldn’t see what I could do other than leave. My uncle found an agent and gave him money to take me out of China. I don’t really know where we went.

There were two other people with me, both Chinese. We travelled by train, on foot, in an aeroplane, in a lorry. The last part of the journey was by train, and I was told to ask for asylum the moment we reached the last station.

It was then that I discovered I was in the UK.”

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China: beneath the lacquer, Caroline Moorehead