Lloyd Evans joins the dissident movement in a ritual exercise near the Chinese Embassy. He is unsettled to find himself understanding why China’s rulers get so paranoid about them
Bong. Up go our hands. Bong. Down come our hands. Bong. We bend our knees. Bong. We crouch down slowly. Bong. We sweep our hands around our feet. Bong. We pass our hands behind our shoulder blades. Bong. We straighten up. Bong. We make hollow fists. Bong. We release the energy. Bong. Up go our hands again. Bong. And down come our hands. And so on. It was a sunny morning in Regent’s Park and I’d joined a circle of Falun Gong practitioners as we indulged in a spot of communal aerobics. The chimes came from a small loudspeaker on the grass which relayed plinkety-plonk music and instructions in Chinese. Falun Gong was founded in China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, an amateur trumpeter and former stud-farm worker. Falun means ‘law wheel’ and Gong means ‘work’ or ‘practice’, and the movement encourages cultivation of both mind and body. It grew rapidly and within a few years its devotees outnumbered the Chinese Communist Party. Following a 24-hour mass demonstration in Tiananmen Square in April 1999, Falun Gong was outlawed by President Jiang Zemin and denounced as an ‘evil cult’. Since then its followers have been harassed, arrested, mistreated and, according to their website, sent to forced labour camps. So those plastic bricks you buy for your kids may well have been manufactured by a convict whose only crime was to meditate.
There are suggestions that Beijing is using the Olympics as a pretext to intensify its campaign. According to Amnesty International a secret order was issued last February by the then public security minister Zhou Yongkang.
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