(20 Feb 2001) Mandarin/Eng/Nat
XFA
Chinese communist authorities are trying to mobilise the country's youth against the banned Falun Gong, the latest effort in the 19-month crackdown on the movement.

Anti-Falun Gong materials are being sent to classrooms across the country where Chinese students must learn to denounce the spiritual movement as an evil cult.

The campaign against the movement intensified after Beijing City witnessed a series of incidents, including self-immolations by purported followers of the cult over the last few weeks.

Recently returned from their winter vacation, students at a Beijing primary school are this term learning the lesson that the "Falun Gong is an evil cult."

Leaflets with pictures of supposed Falun gong members torching themselves in protest on January 23 are posted on school bulletin boards.

Reinforcing the authorities depiction of Falun Gong's "evil cult" nature, alongside are pictures of the Aum Shinrikyou cult, deranged perpetrators of the poison gas attack on a Tokyo subway in 1995.

In classroom, students attend a Falun Gong denunciation session.

Armed with little books containing messages from the government against the banned sect, students first listen to their teacher explaining how Li Hongzhi, the group's leader, could be a threat to China's national security.

Now it is their turn to say what they think.

The students volunteer to come up with different criticisms, attacking the sect leader and its beliefs.

The Chinese propaganda machine is striving to turn the young against the banned spiritual movement.

SOUNDBITE: (Mandarin)
"Our responsibility is to manage the students. For their parents, we would the officials mean to control them. That is, if we learn of their suspicious behaviour, we will report their work unit through the governmental or high-level officials"
SUPER CAPTION: Zheng Xuan, Schoolteacher

SOUNDBITE: (Mandarin)
"The teacher told us that we should learn more about science and technology, to use those knowledges to empower ourselves, so we won't blindly follow the evil cults, like Falun Gong."
SUPER CAPTION: Xiao, Student

SOUNDBITE: (Mandarin)
"The teacher told us that Falun Gong is an evil cult. It is anti-humanity, anti-social, and anti-technology. And it is real."
SUPER CAPTION: Liang, Student

Beijing says to its people that Falun Gong is responsible for the grisly burning on Tiananmen square of a 12-year-old girl, who along with her mother and three others set themselves on fire on January 23.

Another suicide by a purported follower was reported last weekend.

TV viewers across China have watched a flood of grim images of burnt victims.

State media are seizing on such pictures to renew their condemnation of the religious group.

A series of campaigns have been launched to intensify their effort to weed out the sect.

Human right groups say more than a hundred Falun gong members have died in police custody, while thousands more have been sent to labour camps.

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