There are now around 10 Confucius Institutes hosted in universities and other academic institutions across Canada. But as for working in these non-profit language and cultural schools, it seems those who practice Falun Gong need not apply

A stipulation published on the main Confucius Institute (CI) website , which is controversially funded and controlled by the Chinese communist regime, states that overseas volunteer Chinese teachers must have “no record of participation in Falun Gong,” The Epoch Times has learned.

As two dozen anxious Chinese travelers began their maiden voyage across the Taiwan Strait, their tour guide called an impromptu meeting in the airport departure lounge

He warned them about littering, spitting, flooding hotel bathroom floors — and the local cuisine. “Our Taiwanese brothers do not like salt, oil and MSG the way we do,” the guide, Guo Xin, said with a sigh.

Then his voice grew serious, the way a coach might caution his team about the impending face-off with a deceptively courteous opponent. Do not talk about politics with the locals, he warned, say only positive things about Taiwan and China, and by all means avoid practitioners of Falun Gong, the spiritual group whose adherents roam freely on Taiwan but are regularly jailed on the mainland. “They will definitely try to talk to you,” he said. “When that happens, get away as fast as you can.”

And thus began the heavily chaperoned visit to Taiwan, the disputed island territory where Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist army fled in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao’s Communist rebels.

While Taiwan is praised for respecting religious rights, the government of China is singled out for harassment of Tibetan Buddhists, house church Christians and Uighur Muslims.

“This report upholds the standard of the individual freedom of conscience and belief against political tyranny, cultural pressure and the all-too-common human fear of those who are different than ourselves,” said Congressman Chris Smith, a prominent human rights leader and original cosponsor of the International Religious Freedom Act.

“In China, the religious freedoms of Muslims, Catholics, Protestants and Falun Gong practitioners are systematically repressed with relative impunity despite the rise of China on the world stage and the high priority of US-Sino relations in American foreign policy,” he added.

The Ottawa-headquartered Falun Dafa Association of Canada was not.

Association spokesperson Lucy Zhou issued a  news release on Thursday detailing the influence her organization believes the Chinese Government has exerted domestically for the purpose of encouraging local politicans to thwart the Falun Gong’s efforts to participate in Canadian life.

“As victims of the Chinese Communist regime’s influence in Canada, Falun Gong practitioners’ experience in the past 11 years corroborates the general comments of [Fadden]…”

Citing one high profile example, Zhou recalled efforts made by former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan, who had visited China, to invoke a city bylaw back in 2005 to try to shut down their vigil with display boards, set up nine years ago at the Chinese Consulate on Granville Street. Such use of that bylaw has since been ruled unconstitutional by the B.C. Court of Appeal.

She says the Chinese have tried to interfere with the holding of ‘Falun Dafa Days’ in cities throughout Canada.  And, Zhou believes, in 2009 the Chinese attempted to have Montreal city councillor Marcel Tremblay block the Falun Dafa’s Tian Guo marching band’s performance in the Montreal Caribbean Festival.

The news release goes on to state that “these examples show us a serious cause for alarm for all Canadian citizens that our cherished democratic values, freedom and principles of Canada can be eroded and sacrified by foreign influence.”

Fadden was strongly criticized at the time of his remarks for tarring all politicians with one brush when he made his vague accusation. But if he has helped flush out instances of interference such as the ones Zhou has detailed, Fadden in fact has done Canadians a service.

Some St. Louisans who grew up in China are expressing their anguish over an exhibit of Chinese bodies — preserved in plastic — opening this weekend at the Galleria.

Peng Su, a local spokeswoman for the Falun Gong meditation movement,  fears some of the bodies may have been political prisoners.

“As Falun Gong members, we have been persecuted in China severely,” Su said, “and we know how horrible China’s human rights record is, so we have a big concern who those bodies are.”

Those bodies — ten in all — dissected, dipped in plastic and displayed under track lights — are of unknown origin .   Bowing to pressure form the Missouri Attorney General, the show’s promoter, Premier Exhibitions, agreed to put up a disclaimer, admitting the bodies came from the Chinese Bureau of Police.

Defending the exhibit,  Premiere’s Dr. Roy Glover, says he believes strongly that none of the dead were political prisoners.

“Since I didn’t go to China and I didn’t personally receive the bodies, nor did anybody from Premier Exhibitions go to China to receive the bodies, we cannot one-hundred percent guarantee that to the public,” Glover said, “Do we believe that they are executed prisoners?  No.  Do we have confidence in our partner?  Yes.  Do we have affidavits from our partner?  Yes.”

“We do know that they come out of prisons,” Koster said, “that they are unclaimed bodies in the country of China.   But there is no way to either verify or disprove the allegation that they are political prisoners

In the end,  Koster and Premier Exhibitions agreed to post a disclaimer on the wall, which will greet customers who attend.

“Premier cannot independently verify the complete provenance of the human remains in this exhibition.  They were obtained from a plastination facility in China, which received them from medical and research universities in China.  These universities received the remains from medical examiner authorities in the Chinese Bureau of Police.   The specimens are unclaimed by the next of kin and there is no written documentation that any of the persons consented to the plastination and/or exhibition of their bodies.”

But Liu and the dozen officers who crowded into his dark Beijing apartment knew the reason. He was hours from releasing Charter 08, the China democracy movement’s most comprehensive call yet for peaceful reform. The document would be viewed by the ruling Communist Party as a direct challenge to its 60-year monopoly on political power.

Liu was sentenced last Christmas Day to 11 years in prison for subversion. The 54-year old literary critic is now a favorite to win the Nobel Peace Prize — in what would be a major embarrassment to the Chinese government.

The three mainland officials being indicted are Guangdong provincial governor Huang Huahua, acting Shaanxi provincial governor Zhao Yongzheng, and director of State Administration for Religious Affairs Wang Zuoan.

Hong Kong lawmaker Yiu-chung Leung, said the cases are “big strikes” against Beijing’s dictatorial rule. “It [the Chinese regime] needs to understand: other governments are concerned! The persecution of dissenters and religious groups should be stopped,” he said.

After being served letters of indictment during their Taiwan trips earlier this month, both Zhao and Wang cut their visits short and made low-profile exits.

Leung said he hoped these cases in Taiwan would set examples for other nations to follow suit, to carry out the international human rights obligations they are signatory to.

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China’s Propaganda King Influences Irish Media During State Visit

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing “one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known”.

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. “It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century…. It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot’s genocide multiplied 20 times over,” he said.

Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.

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Under Chinese law, organ trafficking is not a crime per se; thus, traffickers were convicted for “illegal business operation”. So far, the authorities have tolerated the practice or even used death row prisoners’ organs for transplant.

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing convicted seven people on human trafficking charges, imposing sentences ranging from two years to seven years eight months. Human organ trafficking is a major problem in China, a practice that includes a price list according to organs. People from around the world come to the mainland for transplants.

The problem is so widespread that organs are offered on the internet, price included. Every year, thousands come from abroad for a transplant in China.

Human rights groups have accused Chinese authorities of allowing trafficking of organs taken from prisoners, for instance, members of Falun Gong. Some go so far as to charge Beijing of keeping thousands of death row prisoners alive until their organs are needed.