U.S. Judge Won’t Deport Spiritual Leader to China

An immigration judge in Hawaii has ruled that the leader of one of China’s largest spiritual movements can remain in the United States indefinitely, the guru’s attorney said Thursday.

The judge stopped short of granting political asylum to Zhang Hongbao, founder of the Zhong Gong group, who had faced deportation to China. Zhang was being held at a detention center in the U.S. territory of Guam.

Judge Dayna Dias of the Executive Office for Immigration Review made her ruling based on the United Nations Convention Against Torture, fearing that Zhang might face maltreatment in China. Her decision granted him a “withholding of removal,” which allows him to live and work in the U.S. as a foreign national but stops short of giving him permanent resident status.

“The judge said Zhang qualified for asylum under the statutes, but she denied him asylum as a matter of discretion,” said Charles Kinnunen, Zhang’s lawyer, speaking by phone from Guam. Kinnunen said neither his client nor the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which had sought Zhang’s deportation for illegally entering the U.S., was satisfied with the verdict. Both sides plan to appeal.

Chinese officials are seeking the return of Zhang to his homeland to face rape charges.

By neither deporting Zhang nor giving him full asylum, the U.S. has struck an uneasy compromise. China can still claim that Washington is sheltering a suspected criminal, while Beijing’s critics can charge that U.S. officials have failed to fully protect a victim of religious persecution.

The State Department’s “Annual Report on International Religious Freedom,” released Sept. 5, cited Beijing’s treatment of Zhong Gong as an example of “governmental abuse of religious freedom.” The movement claims more than 30 million followers.

Since Beijing branded another group, Falun Gong, as an illegal cult last year, the fate of China’s numerous and largely apolitical groups practicing the ancient, yoga-like art of qigong has become a heavily politicized issue. Chinese officials fear that the groups could be a source of social unrest and political opposition.

“The 16th [Communist] Party Congress is coming up, and [China’s leaders] want to present a stable situation for that,” said He Zuoxiu, a critic of the groups and a physicist who wrote to officials warning them about Zhong Gong. “They won’t leave the problem of cults for the next generation of leaders to clean up.”

The 2002 party congress is expected to choose a successor to President Jiang Zemin, who is required by the constitution to step down the following year at the end of his second term.

The Zhong Gong and Falun Gong groups appear similar. Both are run by charismatic young men--now in the U.S.--who command millions of followers. Both claim powers of healing and clairvoyance, borrow Buddhist and Taoist imagery and profit from the sale of books, cassette tapes, meditation cushions and the like.

The two groups’ most striking differences lie in their strategies and the way that Beijing has dealt with them. While Falun Gong grew as a loosely structured social organization, Zhong Gong evolved into a diversified corporate entity with its own security forces and internal auditors.

According to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, authorities have already shut down more than 3,000 legally registered Zhong Gong subsidiaries nationwide, throwing 100,000 employees out of work. The subsidiaries included tourist agencies, health spas, schools and trading companies.

Falun Gong followers have offered themselves up for arrest in peaceful protests, and their leaders have appeared on national television recanting their faith. But Zhong Gong has so far avoided public demonstrations and mass arrests.

Beijing has yet to publicly label Zhong Gong a “heretical cult” that should be banned, and the state media have kept silent about the case, in contrast to the official propaganda blitz against Falun Gong. Chinese officials claim that they want to prosecute Zhang for allegedly committing rape, not for leading a cult.

Observers say both Zhong Gong and Chinese police have preferred to wage their struggles against each other covertly.

Chinese agents have “largely managed to infiltrate Falun Gong, but they’ve been unable to obtain crucial information about Zhong Gong’s organization and membership” from informants, said Frank Lu, head of the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

Zhang founded Zhong Gong--shorthand for China Life Cultivation and Wisdom Enhancement Skill--in 1987. By 1990, Chinese officials claim, police were investigating rape charges against Zhang, who is accused of assaulting at least three followers.

Zhang went underground, slipped out of the country in 1994 and surfaced in Guam last January. However, Beijing police did not issue an arrest warrant for him until June.