Recently installed as head of the government's new Office for the Prevention and Handling of Cults (ie, the Falun Gong), Mr Liu said inmates at the camps have adequate recourse to administrative appeals, and officials anyway treat these inmates as "teachers treat their students, doctors treat their patients, and parents teach their children".
Police have also been busy watching railway and bus stations, checking up on hotels and harassing foreign reporters who try to contact members of the sect.Writers for the state-run newspapers, meanwhile, have been searching for new ways to vilify the Falun Gong and its founder, Li Hongzhi, who now lives in New York.
Mr Sima now says the relentless media attack has served only to elevate the profile and standing of the Falun Gong's leader whom he delights in calling a "liar" and the "dregs of humanity"—while making the government appear nervous and scared.But the government may have cause to be nervous.
While police arrested the quietly defiant practitioners who streamed into Beijing's Tiananmen Square to demonstrate, legislators met at a special session inside the nearby Great Hall of the People on October 30th to pass an anti-cult law under which to prosecute them.The new law singles out the Falun Gong as the largest and most harmful of numerous Chinese cults.
The authorities banned all the group's activities and publications, attacked Mr Li as a charlatan, and required any of his followers who were also members of the Communist Party to cut their ties with the Falun Gong.Mr Li has claimed 70m followers in China (compared with a mere 60m for the Communist Party).
The Falun Gong is clearly filling a spiritual need that Communist ideology long ago stopped meeting.
Facing what they see as a similar threat from the quasi-Buddhist Falun Gong sect, today's Chinese leaders are responding in similar fashion.In the past two weeks the government has dramatically intensified what was already a harsh crackdown against the group's many followers.
Indeed, in the build-up to the IOC vote, China applied unremitting pressure on the outlawed Falun Gong sect, and launched a crackdown on newspapers deemed to be straying from the party line.
Worse still, says the government, the Falun Gong has deceived people into thinking they can cure disease with meditation alone, and more than 1,400 have died as a result.Liberally mixing elements of Buddhism and Taoism with traditional martial arts and meditative breathing techniques, Mr Li's teachings are certainly out of the mainstream.
Further, many of the group's followers are middle-aged, laid off and poorly educated, and thus open to the idea that the Falun Gong might give them some of the medical help that the state system is increasingly unable to provide.
All they want is to improve themselves physically, morally and spiritually, and they say that "Master Li" has shown them how to do it with his preaching of "truth, forbearance and benevolence".They accuse the government of having twisted the truth about the Falun Gong all along.
