Beijing -- China's already shrill campaign to discredit the Falun Gong spiritual group got louder yesterday, with the strongest accusations yet that the group is colluding with Western forces seeking to vilify and destroy the nation.
"Western anti-Chinese forces have spared no effort to engage in ideological infiltration to achieve their goal of overturning our socialist system and subverting our state," said a front-page essay in the Liberation Army Daily, the military's official mouthpiece.
"How closely this chimes with Li Hongzhi's political ambitions!" the article said, referring to the founder and theorist of Falun Gong, who lives in exile in New York.
The essay also compared Li to a notorious traitor who became a puppet for Japanese invaders in the last century.
"Any scum who betrays the interests of the state and people," the article concluded, referring to Li, "will ultimately never escape a despicable end of disgrace and ruin and 10,000 years of infamy."
Another article, in yesterday's Legal Daily, dredged up epithets from the Cultural Revolution, calling sect members "running dogs of foreign anti- Chinese forces."
Ever since it banned Falun Gong in July 1999 as an "evil cult," the government has kept up its attacks against a group that had drawn millions to meditative exercises that are said to harness cosmic forces for one's well- being.
Trying to capitalize on public shock over the attempted self-immolation of seven apparent believers on Jan. 23, which left one woman dead and four others,
including a 12-year-old girl, severely burned, the authorities have now shifted their campaign into overdrive.
In a typical news report yesterday, 18 former believers who were described as government workers were quoted as saying that their eyes were opened to Li's perfidy by months of "re-education," apparently in labor camps.
Nearly every organized body in the country has been required to hold meetings and issue statements against the group.
Many people were repulsed by the attempted suicides and accept the government's assertion that they were Falun Gong protesters, despite denials by group leaders abroad.
But some intellectuals, including a few Communist Party officials, are complaining that the heavy-handed propaganda blitz -- which recalls Maoist campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s -- may discredit the party itself and harm China's interests abroad.