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The people lining the streets included scientists, university professors, computer engineers, musicians, military officials, workers, retirees, and farmers from Beijing and nearby cities. They complained that the local police were harassing them for their practice of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that includes Qigong exercises and living according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
The practitioners demanded freedom of belief and assembly so that they could meet together to study, discuss, and practice the Falun Gong exercises. They peacefully dispersed after then-Premier Zhu Rongji orally agreed to their demands.
The newly crowned head of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, had a different idea. He speculated that some “political master mind” and “anti-China Western forces” had orchestrated the protest. He ordered the “eradication” of the practice and utilized every means possible to “transform” the 100 million Chinese who practiced Falun Gong.
Arbitrary detention, brainwashing techniques, mind-altering drugs, rape, and the harvesting of practitioners’ organs for transplantation were used. The Falun Dafa Information Center can confirm the deaths of over 3,000 practitioners but estimates the deaths due to torture and abuse number in the tens of thousands. In addition, tens of thousands of practitioners have likely been murdered through organ harvesting. Millions have been tortured.
Jiang thought the practice would be eliminated in three months. Eleven years later, with little support from the international community, the Chinese people who practice Falun Gong have never stopped seeking freedom of belief.
The practitioners in China work on a daily basis to tell the Chinese people and state and Party officials what Falun Gong is, that it is persecuted, and that the persecution is evil and a gross violation of practitioners’ human rights.
For the past six years, after the CCP refused to end the persecution of Falun Gong, practitioners have worked to convince the Chinese people to withdraw from the CCP or the organizations associated with it. To date, over 89 million Chinese in China and around the world have done so.
China has never before seen a group successfully resist the CCP and never before seen a peaceful campaign of civil disobedience such as that staged by Falun Gong practitioners.
Their example has awakened in the Chinese people the desire to defend their rights. A “rights defense movement” has appeared that has no individual leader but only a conviction shared among the population that they will no longer accept oppression.
The Chinese people hungry for freedom today are not seeking money or power. They simply want a life free of communist dictatorship.
Michael Young is a Chinese-American writer based in Washington, D.C., who writes on China and the Sino-U.S. relationship.
