Politics on parade

CHINESE NEW YEAR PARADES, scheduled for Saturday in downtown Los Angeles and in the San Gabriel Valley, should be an occasion to celebrate the richness of Chinese culture in this country. They should not be a chance for Beijing to decide who gets to participate.

Organizers of the two parades are not embracing a spirit of openness; instead, they are blocking involvement by followers of Falun Gong, an exotic spiritual discipline that is banned in China. By bowing to Beijing’s wishes, organizers in Los Angeles are staining their celebrations with controversy.

When asked, they say they fear Falun Gong followers are too political and may use the parades to distribute pamphlets about religious persecution in China. But it is an open secret in Chinese communities here that preserving business ties with China, and avoiding criticism from China’s consulate in Los Angeles, are the main concerns.

Contrary to Beijing’s line, eagerly repeated by diplomats at the consulate, Falun Gong is not dedicated to the overthrow of China’s communist government. Its followers embrace a blend of Buddhist and Taoist healing achieved through exercise and meditation. Given the chance, followers will talk about spinning a wheel inside one’s abdomen in order to find peace with the universe. They say that they have participated without incident in other parades in Southern California and would abide by rules not to pass out literature; in Saturday’s parades, they had hoped to operate lotus flower floats with drummers and dancers.

Falun Gong, one school of many in China’s broad field of traditional healing, is not for everyone. But it is not a political organization. It is a spiritual group that adopted a political stance in 1999, when it staged a protest around the Communist Party’s main leadership compound in Beijing. Until that time, tens of millions of Falun Gong followers practiced in public parks all over China. That one ill-advised act of defiance, akin to thumbing one’s nose at a Mafia don, prompted a crackdown brutal even by communist standards: more than a million people put in jail; more than 2,000 killed or tortured while in custody.

When a parade is set up privately, as are Chinese New Year parades in Los Angeles, organizers have the legal right to exclude whomever they please. But they also have a responsibility to give an honest explanation of their rules for participation. China’s ban on Falun Gong should not extend to these shores.