The following is the text of his speech:
An artist friend of mine designed a T-Shirt for 2009, a white background with four sets of numbers: 50, 30, 20 and 10
Why these four numbers?
50: 50 years ago, the Tibetan’s protest to the regime’s violence happened in 1959;
30: 30 years ago, the democratic wall movement in Beijing happened in 1979;
20: 20 years ago, the Tiananmen Square democratic student movement, and the massacre that later followed, happened in 1989;
10: Falun Gong practitioner’s group appeal in Beijing near the regime’s Zhongnanhai compound happened 10 years ago, on April 25, 1999.
As I recall, on April 25, 10 years ago, over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered near Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing to appeal to the State Council. The activity lasted for a whole day. The gathering happened just before the 10th anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre. At that time, the location was the most sensitive place in China, and Falun Gong drew worldwide attention immediately.
What surprised me most is that the regime claimed it knew nothing before the incident. And a lot of people suspected Falun Gong was a secrecy group based on that claim. But soon, I understood things were not that. A priest friend of mine told me that he was in Beijing just two days before April 25, 1999. He stayed in one of his friend’s places in Beijing, and he came to learn from this friend that Falun Gong practitioners wanted to appeal to the State Council. His friend was neither a Falun Gong practitioner, nor a regime official. From that I can see that the appeal was not kept secret beforehand.
As a lot of people know, during the mid 1990s, many conflicts broke out in China, and appeals were quite common. As such an appeal has no political agenda, their scales were limited also. The regime had got used to it and normally would not take special prevention.
Besides collecting information from media, I also got to know Falun Gong from my relatives and friends. Surprisingly, some of my primary schoolmates are Falun Gong practitioners, they are all kind people. One female schoolmate had been detained several times for spreading the Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party, however she persists once released.
My relative also told me a story of his neighbour, a grandmother, who is a retired elementary school principal. She was locked in a detention center for going to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. Most of the people locked in the detention center were thieves, prostitutes, and thugs, and the place was in chaos. However, not long after the grandmother was locked up did those thieves and prostitutes start to behave themselves, and her cell had been awarded as model cell.
Another thing that surprised me was when overseas democratic activists went to protest in front of the Chinese Consult in New York after former Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang passed away on January 17, 2005. At that time, the regime banned the memorial service voluntarily organized by mainland Chinese people. That was a very cold day, we quickly left the scene and wanted to get into a warm house after we delivered our speeches and yelled slogans. Just as I was going to leave, I saw six middle and old aged practitioners taking over the place and starting their meditation, a special way to protest. Two of them were also female.
I understand Falun Gong from their rallies also. The most impressive one was the protest during the UN summit, many groups being persecuted and opposing autocracy organized their rallies and marches during that period. It became a sea of protests outside the UN building in Manhattan. Conflicting scenes were not avoidable, New York City mobilized large numbers of police forces and even borrowed many police from other places to maintain the order. Among the protesting groups, Falun Gong had the largest population, longest troop, yet was the most tidy and most ordered. A police on duty even told journalists, “If all protests are like this, we would have nothing to do, and would have no need to come.”
In 10 years, the Chinese communist regime’s illegal, systematic, and extinctive suppression could not defeat Falun Gong, and Falun Gong’s peaceful resistance to fight for freedom of belief is heroic. It has become the largest human rights movement in the modern world. Falun Gong’s persistence on non-violent resistance is admirable. It has established an example of non-violent resistance for China and for the whole world.
Falun Gong is playing an important role in the current rights protection movement in China. And I believe Falun Gong will definitely offer great help in the process of moral rebuilding in China’s future.
Hu Ping is editor of Beijing Spring.
(Edited by The Epoch Times)
Read this article in Chinese.
