BEIJING, May 8 (Kyodo) - Falun Gong adherents in Beijing over the past few days distributed leaflets around the Chinese capital condemning Chinese President Jiang Zemin as the ''chief criminal'' behind a 20-month crackdown on the sect.
The pages, stuffed in private mailboxes and slipped under car windshield wipers, describe torture endured by detained followers and ''miraculous'' events associated with Falun Gong practice.
They appeared on the capital's streets as Jiang prepared to attend an economic conference in Hong Kong from Tuesday.
Much of the material was taken from Falun Gong's official Chinese Web site at www.minghui.ca, which has been increasingly difficult to access in recent months as China's Internet firewall monitors stepped up technologies to control which Web sites are available in China.
Falun Gong sites, like most major foreign news sites, have long been ''firewalled,'' but continued to be accessible via proxy servers to savvy Internet users. Beginning early this year, however, access even to obscure proxy sites began to be blocked, often within a few minutes of a successful connection.
The only sure way to access blocked sites is to make an international call to a foreign server -- making it prohibitively expensive for most Chinese browsers.
A series of leaflets containing material from the Minghui site were distributed in February but stopped appearing after Beijing police shut down a makeshift printshop and arrested 37 Falun Gong adherents for ''using a cult to obstruct justice'' March 1.
Those flyers also attacked Jiang and likened the government's crackdown on the sect to Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.
The more recent flyers say 190 practitioners have been killed in Chinese jails, many cases of which have been confirmed by human rights groups and foreign media.
China's strict media control prohibits coverage of any such police abuses, however, and carries only the message Falun Gong is an ''evil cult'' that destroys the lives of its followers.
Practitioners, meanwhile, have kept up an underground campaign to counter that image by staging regular protests in Beijing's landmark Tiananmen Square, installing stickers, leaving graffiti with messages such as ''Falun Gong is good'' and supplying content for clandestine Web sites and radio broadcasts that decry the crackdown.
Copyright 2001 The Kyodo News Service.