The State Department has decided to fund a group run mainly by practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhistlike sect long considered Enemy No. 1 by the Chinese government, to provide software to skirt Internet censorship across the globe.
State Department officials recently called the group, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, offering it $1.5 million, according to Shiyu Zhou, one of the founders. A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the offer.
The decision, which came as the United States and China have moved to improve ties after months of tension, may irritate Beijing just as a dialogue on human rights was to resume today for the first time in two years.
“GIFC is an organization run by elements of the Falun Gong cult, which is bent on vilifying the Chinese government with fabricated lies, undermining Chinese social stability and sabotaging China- U.S. relations,” said Wang Bao dong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington. “We’re strongly opposed to the U.S. government providing whatever assistance to such an anti-China organization.”
The decision to fund GIFC followed a three-year lobbying campaign by Washington insiders, congressional pressure and opposition from some human-rights advocates and Internet experts. It was also controversial within the Obama administration, sources said, despite the commitment of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Internet freedom.
Some officials worried that Beijing would view as a hostile act U.S. financial support for a group that China says has agitated for the overthrow of its government. Others were concerned that the move would get in the way of the Obama administration’s broader engagement with China.
GIFC was started in 2001 mostly by Chinese-born scientists living in the United States in response to a withering crackdown in China on Falun Gong. China launched the repression in 1999, and scores of practitioners are believed to have died at the hands of police and judicial authorities.
China considered the Falun Gong movement, which on one day in April 1999 mobilized 20,000 practitioners to surround Communist Party headquarters in Beijing, as the most serious threat to its one-party rule since the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
