Ye Xiaowen, head of the delegation, said this was a return visit to the 1997 China visit of Canadian Christian delegation. Ye said the exchange was carried out successfully during the 6-day tour, apart from the disturbance and threat the delegation received from the Chinese cult Falungong that was abandoned across the country in 2001.

Ye said this in an ad-lib press conference the delegation arranged to reveal the troubles they got during the delegation's Canada tour of February 15-21.

"Falungong practitioners believe in god, so what you have done could not escape the eyes of god. One would pay for the misdeeds one conducted." Ye said with anger, "For the sake of your future life and soul, will your conscience trouble your mind?"

Fu Tieshan, chairman of Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, said Falungong was not a religion, compared with a real religion.

He said, a religion respects the truth and will usher its followers to the affection of life while Falungong was marked with the superstition and personality cult.

A real religion would accommodate the society and adopt a positive attitude towards it while Falungong antagonized the society and spoiled the normal life of its followers.

A real religion would deem those its own responsibility as to purify the minds of its practitioners and to depurate the society free from vice, while Falungong overrides the humanity and induces its practitioners to suicide and murder.

Head of China Christian Council Cao Shengjie said at the press conference that Falungong was an anti-human, anti-society and anti-science cult, which was totally inconsistent with the teachings of Christianity.

She also stressed the religious freedom of Chinese citizens by giving the concrete figures which shows Christians in China has developed from 700,000 in 1949 to 15 million now. She said the number grows at a speed faster than that of China's population.

(China Daily February 23, 2003)