A
LENGTHY report by the People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency
on Thursday reviewed the entire story of the illegal gathering
at Zhongnanhai by practitioners on April 25, and unveiled
Li Hongzhi's behind-the-scenes scheme.
On
April 25, more than 10,000 people systematically gathered
around Zhongnanhai, headquarters of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the State Council.
This
large-scale illegal gathering seriously disturbed the normal
work of the top organizations of the Party and the State,
disrupted social order in the capital Beijing, and was the
most serious political incident since the 1989 political
turmoil, and had an extremely bad impact at home and abroad.
The
whole truth now has come out: the chief figure who directly
plotted and controlled the incident was Li Hongzhi, the
ringleader of the cult.
Li,
who frequently gave media interviews abroad, however, lied
at the beginning when he said he knew nothing about the
April 25 illegal gathering, since he was en route from the
United States to Australia at that time.
Faced
with evidence of his stay in Beijing, Li had to correct
himself, saying that he was in Beijing changing flights
and did not leave the airport. When more evidence came out,
Li again corrected himself and said he had been in Beijing
for one day, but had "contacted nobody."
Li
Hongzhi's lies have been laid bare by the facts, one after
another. His crimes and schemes hidden behind these lies
are now exposed to the public.
Li
arrived in Beijing on April 22 from New York aboard US Northwest
Airlines Flight NW087, and identified himself as a business
person on his entry registration card. As a matter of fact,
Li engaged in no commercial activities in Beijing up to
the time he left for Hong Kong on Air China Flight CA109
on April 24. He actually stayed in Beijing for 44 hours,
not one day as he claimed.
Li's
return to Beijing was well planned. He notified Ji Liewu,
a key member of the Research Society of Falun Dafa, in advance.
As soon as Li returned to his Beijing residence in Chongwen
District, Ji came to report the circumstances about practitioners
besieging Tianjin Normal University.
Li's
eagerness to learn about the siege shows, that from the
very beginning, he wanted to plot an even larger incident
out of the Tianjin gathering.
A
magazine sponsored by Tianjin Normal University published
an article on Qigong written by He Zuoxiu, an academic at
the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in early April.
He
expounded his ideas on Qigong, questioning a piece of Falun
Gong propaganda which claimed that after practising Falun
Gong, an engineer was able to go into a working steel-smelting
furnace and see with his own eyes the chemical changes occurring
at the atomic and molecular level.
He
also told what happened to a student with whom he was working
at the CAS Institute of Theoretical Physics, to expose Falun
Gong's evils.
The
student had to be sent to a mental facility twice after
refusing to eat, drink, or sleep, or speak to anyone after
practising Falun Gong.
Leaders
of Falun Gong including Li Hongzhi saw the limited circulation
of the magazine in which He's article was published as an
opportunity to make trouble.
On
April 19, a massive number of Falun Gong practitioners burst
into Tianjin Normal University, staging a sit-in demonstration,
and completely disrupting the normal teaching and living
activities at the university.
In
May 1998, Beijing Television Station was besieged for several
days by more than 1,000 Falun Gong practitioners because
the station broadcast a programme unfavourable to Falun
Gong.
Li
Hongzhi, however, was not content with the turmoil he stirred
up, and considered his actions up to then to be not influential
enough. He even dismissed a leader of the Beijing branch,
a branch of the Research Society of Falun Dafa, for not
obeying his orders.
