NEW YORK, May 8 (Reuters) - Every Sunday, in a quiet corner of Central Park, about a dozen people of many nationalities practice the gentle, graceful movements and breathing exercises of the Falun Gong spiritual group.
Though they are thousands of miles away from China, which spawned the practice and now outlaws it, many say they, too, feel the intensity of the Chinese government's suppression.
"We simply ask (China's President) Jiang Zemin to change his heart," said Julia Stein, a preschool teacher from Orlando, Florida. "The government and policemen in China who are torturing ... I'm really questioning if they're human anymore. I just wish they could overcome their fear as I have."
Chinese authorities banned Falun Gong in July 1999, after 10,000 Chinese practitioners staged a sit-in in April in front of Beijing's Zhongnanhai leadership compound protesting against attacks by some of China's state-controlled newspapers.
Beijing has since cracked down on what it calls an "evil cult" that brainwashes followers and aims to overthrow the government.
Falun Gong officials say more than 190 members in China have died in police custody and thousands are in labor camps. China has acknowledged that a handful of practitioners have died in custody but says they committed suicide or died from natural causes.
Practitioners in New York and elsewhere say there is nothing sinister about the teachings of Li Hongzhi, the former government official from Changchun, in Jilin province, who preaches salvation from a corrupt world through meditation and the study of his texts based loosely on Taoism and Buddhism.
THREE TENENTS FOR LIVING
Li, who lives in secluded exile in New York, teaches three tenets for living: truthfulness, benevolence and forbearance. These rules have guided Stein, 26, and other practitioners, as they like to be called, to publish free newsletters, march in protest and travel around the world to lobby for their rights.
Falun Gong practitioners meet seven days a week at 13 different locations in New York. In the United States, it has groups in 36 states.
Stein, who grew up in Evansville, Indiana, said she came to Falun Gong when she decided to take control of her life. She said she used to smoke cigarettes and party all the time, had bad acne and had started to try alternative medicine when she "stumbled" upon Falun Gong just over a year ago.
"I was studying New Age stuff and creating my own self-pity party," said the now fresh-faced Stein, who traveled to Geneva in March to lobby on behalf of Falun Gong at the United Nations. She also flew to New York at her own expense for a Falun Gong parade in Chinatown on April 21.
Like many other practitioners, Stein believes Li helped change her life and has now chosen to help spread his teachings by selling his books for $13 to those who ask for them.
But no practitioner profits materially from Falun Gong, said Lupe Martinez, a Spanish-language interpreter in New York who says Falun Gong mysteriously discovered her more than three years ago.
Martinez, whose family left Mexico city for Chicago when she was a child, said she traveled to India, Nepal and Thailand after dropping out of college, looking for "the perfect guru." Years later, while working as massage therapist in Hawaii and elsewhere in the western United States, Martinez said she had a vision that presaged her introduction to Falun Gong.
'TRANCE ON THE MASSAGE TABLE"
"One of my clients went into a trance on the massage table and started to do the movements," she said, referring to the five sets of Falun Gong exercises she later learned were "designed to open up all the energy channels in your body."
"No one really fulfilled me and gave me all the answers I have until I found Master Li," Martinez said.
But talk of gurus, visions, trances, and energy channels have fed the Beijing-backed anti-Falun Gong propaganda machine outside of China. Beijing's leaders have requested that Li be extradited to China on criminal charges.
At the Falun Gong march in New York's Chinatown, about 100 hecklers backed by the United Chinese Association of New York trade group handed out flyers featuring graphic photos of disemboweled bodies alleged to be Falun Gong members gone mad.
Some shouted obscenities in English at the 500 Falun Gong paraders who walked silently in their trademark yellow T-shirts, while others screamed through megaphones in Chinese: "Where is Li Hongzhi now?" and "Save yourselves!"
Li has not been seen in public since a Falun Gong conference in Michigan last December and has not granted an interview since August 1999.
"That was a good day not to understand Chinese," Stein said of the parade hecklers.
Asked if she feels that Li Hongzhi should bear responsibility for the alleged deaths of practitioners in China, Stein said, "He has given us so much already. It's really up to the practitioners to rectify this situation."
22:09 05-07-01
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