Evil instructions of Li Hongzhi, the cult chieftain, have dismembered lots of families that used to lead a happy life, according to the investigations.

The family of Tian Jianguo is one of them. The mishap began in 1997, when Tian, who worked at a grain company in Nanyang, Henan Province, and his wife, Wang Peng, started practicing Falun Gong.

Shortly afterwards, they turned their only son, 15 year-old Tian Pei, into a practitioner. He then gradually lost interest in school and dropped out at last.

Despite the efforts of the school leaders and teachers to urge the young student to quit Falun Gong, the boy refused, continued with the practice, and even followed his father to participate in illegal gatherings in Beijing, the national capital.

Later, the couple began to hate each other, each accusing the other side for being unable to get to a "higher level" and reach the so-called "Nirvana" as required by "Master Li." It was just because of this, the couple divorced.

Tian's aged father was deeply hurt by all these mishaps brought about by the cult, and passed away in November 2000.

In their investigations, Xinhua reporters also found that many of the Falun Gong-related divorce cases were so simple that some people just believed that what they did was to follow the instructions of the cult leader who asks his adherents to give up "fame, interest and feeling" in order to go up to "higher levels."

In other cases, the cult is completely a murderer.

Liu Wenyong, a 15-year-old boy from Tianjin, north China, got a minor skin disease in early 1999, but it later developed into cancer due to his mother's insistence on treating him with Falun Gong and refusing to take him to hospital.

In a letter to his mother, the boy said it was Falun Gong to blame for his severe illness and hoped his mother could give up the cult. The mother cried when reading the letter and pledged not to believe in the cult any more.

The case study stresses that all these miserable stories indicate that Falun Gong has lured many families into misfortune and urged those who are still blindly holding on to the belief to wake up as soon as possible.

(People's Daily 04/06/2001)