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China Jails Sect Leaders

In One-Day Trial, Beijing Court Hands Down Long Sentences to 4 Falun Gong Organizers

Judges at Beijing's No. 1 Intermediate People's Court found the four guilty of organizing and using a cult to undermine laws, causing deaths and illegally obtaining and disseminating state secrets, state-run press organizations reported.

Li Chang and Wang Zhiwen were sentenced to 18 years and 16 years in prison, among the harshest sentences China has given to political or religious dissenters this decade. Ji Liewu and Yao Jie were sentenced to 12 years and seven years.

Their trial was the government's most significant prosecution since outlawing Falun Gong as a menace to the public and Communist Party rule five months ago. All four were party members with good jobs in government and business, a testament to the popularity of Falun Gong and the government's troubles in suppressing the group.

State-run television showed the three men and Ms. Yao, the only woman among the defendants, looking calm and displaying little of the remorse expected of defendants. Official press outlets said that the four had had lawyers and that family members had attended, although one relative said defendants had been allowed only one family member each.

''I'm extremely angry,'' said Mr. Wang's daughter, Wang Xiaodan. The government's ''inflexibility, its inability to recognize its mistakes, makes people furious,'' said Ms. Wang, who lives in the United States.

To ensure Falun Gong members did not stage any of the peaceful protests repeatedly held in defiance of the ban, the police cordoned off the courthouse with the shiny yellow tape used at crime scenes. Plainclothes and uniformed officers patrolled Tiananmen Square in larger-than-usual numbers.

''Controls are severe,'' said a Falun Gong member who was watching the courthouse from outside the cordon. ''Otherwise, a lot of people would have come out here.'' At least two women questioned by the police near the courthouse were led away. In Tiananmen Square, the police put about two dozen people into vans and drove them away.

Falun Gong mixes meditation exercises with ideas drawn from Buddhism, Taoism and Li Hongzhi, a former government grain clerk who founded the movement and now lives in New York. Said to promote health and morality, Falun Gong attracted as many as 70 million followers in China, according to one government estimate.

Chinese leaders contend that the group's unorthodox practices, especially a recommendation that followers forgo medical treatment, have led to the deaths of more than 1,400 people. They ordered the legislature to revise a law against cults to allow for harsher penalties against organizers.

As part of the crackdown against religious groups, the police in the central city of Nanyang last week sent six leaders of underground Protestant sects to labor camps for terms between one and three years, according to the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China, a group based in Hong Kong.

In the Beijing trial, judges ruled that the four defendants ''organized and used the Falun Gong evil cult organization to spread superstition and heresies and deceive people, causing deaths,'' the state-run Xinhua press agency said.

Mr. Li, 59, was a leading official in the computer bureau of the national police ministry; Mr. Wang, 50, was an engineer in a materials company under the Railways Ministry. Mr. Ji, 36, managed a Hong Kong subsidiary of a state nonferrous-metals company, and Ms. Yao, 40, headed the party committee of a large Beijing real-estate company.

The four ''set up 39 command posts, more than 1,900 training posts and more than 280,000 contact posts,'' Xinhua said. They ''plotted and directed'' 78 protests, including the surprise April 25 demonstration by more than 10,000 followers outside the Communist Party leaders' compound in Beijing.

They also stole 37 top-secret and otherwise classified state secrets and disseminated them or included them in protest letters, Xinhua said. Because of the secrets charges, part of the trial was held behind closed doors, it said.

Li Hongzhi and the four also held proselytizing sessions and printed group literature, illegally netting more than 451 million yuan ($54 million) in profit, Xinhua said.