Protests underway as presidents arrive in the Coachella Valley

Supporters of Tibetan liberation and the spiritualmovement Falun Gong are holding protest rallies Friday and Saturday tocoincide with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting with President BarackObama in Rancho Mirage.

Hundreds of people are expected to attend rallies near Bob Hope andGerald Ford drives today and Saturday.

Supporters and practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual enlightenmentmovement whose adherents say they are persecuted by the Chinese government,also planned to gather this afternoon at El Cielo and East Ramon roads nearPalm Springs International Airport, where Obama will arrive.

Falun Gong advocates say then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin startedpersecuting and torturing 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in 1999. Hissuccessors, Hu Jintao and Xi, have allowed the persecution to continue,according to the U.S. Southwestern Falun Dafa Association.

Falun Gong supporters and practitioners demonstrated on Bob Hope Drivenear Sunnylands starting Thursday, and a large group had gathered by 9 thismorning. All wore yellow shirts with the movement’s tenets — truthfulness,compassion, forbearance — printed on the back, and did body poses called the”Five Exercises” behind the barricades.

One of the organizers, Vicky Jiang, said group members came from aroundCalifornia and Arizona, and some had suffered in China for practicing FalunGong.

She said the goal is to convince Xi and other leaders to stop thepersecution — which allegedly includes torture, organ harvesting and laborcamps — and hold those responsible accountable.

“We would like (Obama) to consider human rights in his conversationswith President Xi and put that on the table,” said Jiang, who came from SanFrancisco.

Dafang Wang, who also came from San Francisco, said she, her youngersister and older brother were detained and tortured by officials for practicingFalun Gong in China 12 years ago. Her sister was taken to a labor camp andtortured to death four months later; her brother is still in prison, she said.

“My younger sister was a very, very kind woman, she always wanted to bea good person but she was killed for her beliefs,” Wang said.

Wang said guards used electric batons to shock her at a Beijingdentention center; she eventually got out with the help of her husband and aguard sympathetic to Falun Gong. She reached the U.S. on a tourist visa, thenapplied for asylum.

“I want to appeal to Obama and Xi to end this persecution in China …there are many, many cases like my family, my brother and sister, happeningevery day,” she said.

Wen Chen, a biologist at Caltech in Pasadena, said many of the group’smembers have signed petitions and sent letters to Obama.

“We feel like it’s our responsibility to speak out,” she said.

Tibet activists are asking Obama “to take a stand for Tibet andpressure China to end their atrocities in Tibet,” according to Students for aFree Tibet, one of the Tibet rally organizers.

More than 100 Tibetans have turned to lighting themselves on fire toprotest China’s 60-year occupation of their country, according to New York-based Students for a Free Tibet. Another advocacy group, Free Tibet, says anestimated 1 million Tibetans have died as a result of Chinese occupationthrough imprisonment, torture and executions.

This morning, a group of Tibet activists put signs with slogans like”It’s time for President Obama to take a stand for Tibet” on the barricadeslining Bob Hope Drive on the way to Sunnylands, and some carried Tibetan flags.

One of the organizers, Tenzin Gyaltsen, said he arrived from SanFrancisco around 2 a.m. He said the group will hold a candlelight vigiltonight, and tomorrow someone will don a large head resembling Xi and “showhow world leaders have failed to support Tibet and stop the crackdown onTibet.”

Sean Tetler, who lives in Palm Desert, said his wife heard about theSunnylands summit on Facebook, and he decided to come support the Tibetactivists.

“I thought, if they’re out here, I want to be there,” said Tetler, whoworks with College of the Desert’s radio station and was involved in theOccupy protests in Palm Desert in 2011.

Vietnamese groups were also planning to protest in the desert during thesummit. The reason was unclear, although China and Vietnam have had acontentious past and have recently been in dispute over an area in the SouthChina Sea.