The regime’s web of control was breached in broad daylight right in the symbolic heart of Beijing on Nov. 20, 2001 by 36 practitioners of Falun Gong.
They quietly converged from Europe, Australia, and North America at a pre-arranged point, at 2:00 p.m. on a sunny Tuesday. They posed, chatting and laughing, as if for a class reunion photo. Then, on signal, most sat down and crossed their legs to meditate, while a few stood tall to hold up a large, golden banner reading “Truth Compassion Tolerance” in English and Chinese.
For a moment, the principles of Falun Gong were displayed openly, while behind them the Chinese words written on Tiananmen (the “Gate of Heavenly Peace”) formed a backdrop that has seldom been more accurate: “Long live all the peoples of the world united together.”
Twenty seconds later police vans surrounded them, and the world witnessed a microcosm of the persecution of Falun Gong in China: police dragging away peaceful people while tearing down the words “Truth, Compassion, Tolerance.”
“Such an act scared the Chinese authorities,” Chen Yonglin, a former diplomat at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate, said in an email. “[They feared] a massive assembly which would lead to the collapse of the communist government.”
The consequences of such peaceful actions had been dire for Chinese practitioners of Falun Gong: At least five had been beaten to death for doing the same thing that year.
By November 2001, more than 300 Chinese practitioners were confirmed to have been killed by the regime. The actual numbers tortured and killed for their belief today are still unknown, but are likely in the tens of thousands, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Before the persecution campaign began in July 1999, Chinese authorities estimated that between 70 and 100 million people practiced Falun Gong in China. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Committee on China cites foreign observers in reporting that as many as one-half of those in China’s labor camps are Falun Gong. This would be a number in the hundreds of thousands.
Message Delivered
Lemish said he was sitting in the Falun Gong meditation position with his eyes closed when the police swarmed over.
“I heard car doors slamming and the sound of boots on concrete running, more and more cars, and doors, and policemen yelling—there seemed to be a lot of commotion all around us,” he said. “But at that moment, I felt my heart was smiling. In spite of fears and hesitations and obstacles—we had done it.”
Canadian Zenon Dolynyckyj, reflecting on his decision to join the group, said, “There was something much larger than me, that went beyond me, my personal life, and the scope of one individual.”
Dolnyckyj had a second banner strapped to his leg in case the main banner didn’t make it to its place on the square. While the others were getting pushed, pulled, and dragged into the circle of police vans, he broke free, pulling the banner out and yelling “Falun Dafa Hao!” (“Falun Dafa is Good!”).
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Once at the police station the practitioners were put into a small room with police guarding them. Lemish was wearing only his socks on his feet, since his shoes were left on the Square after he removed them to sit beneath the banner.
He said the young policemen seemed torn. “I remember how one tall, skinny male policeman slammed his hand on the table in frustration, and said, ‘We know Falun Dafa is good!’ Others told us there was nothing they could do; this was national policy.”
The police started taking practitioners one by one to be interrogated. However, one woman ducked under a table in the police station and made a cell phone call to media in her home country—by doing so she assured the news of the protest would play on the international stage.
“Once it was clear that the event couldn’t be suppressed or misconstrued, they changed their behavior toward us—they were nice,” said Adam Leining, another American. He managed to take a photo of a few practitioners separated by bars from a policeman in the Tiananmen police station jail.
Impact Outside China
“It was apparent to everyone there that the persecution was an embarrassment, a mistake, and was a decision by the top that they had to go along with,” Leining said.
Chen said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would have been scared and embarrassed over the Westerners’ appearance on Tiananmen, the historic last bastion of appeal.
Immediately following the appeal, the Sydney Consul-General and other overseas consulates received explicit instructions to deny all visa applications from Falun Gong practitioners, Chen said.
A statement from the regime, saying the Western practitioners had broken the law and were now expelled, was also hastily written and distributed to Western media in Australia, said Chen.
The regime’s instructions also outlined an edict to collect “more personal information about individual Falun Gong practitioners and [conduct] more surveillance on them.”
An extensive Falun Gong practitioner blacklist was thus compiled.
Chen defected from his diplomatic post and the Communist Party in 2005. He has since revealed detailed information about the methods the CCP uses in its monitoring of Falun Gong overseas, including a network of 1,000 spies operating in Australia.
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Inside The Labor Camps
Crystal Chen was being brainwashed and tortured in Guangzhou Chapou Women’s Forced Labor Camp in November of 2001—more than 1400 miles from Tiananmen Square. She had been arrested for practicing Falun Gong and the authorities were attempting to force her to renounce her belief.
She learned about the group of Westerners appealing on Tiananmen after being forced by guards to read propaganda in state newspapers; they wrote of “foreign forces” and “an anti-Chinese group breaking the law.”
“I knew to read the opposite of the newspaper,” Chen said from her new home in the United States. “I was very encouraged. It gave me strength to endure the torture I was facing. I knew I wasn’t alone. ”
Li Heping was in the Shiliping Labor Camp of Zhejiang Province in 2001 but did not hear about the appeal until the following year when another practitioner relayed the news. “A policeman had told him, as a secret, that Falun Gong Westerners went to Tiananmen to ‘destroy China.’”
Li said he was relieved knowing there was support from the Western world, “although it meant we would have more pressure from the police and the CCP in the labor camp.”
Li was subjected to brainwashing, forced labor, and forced drug injections for nearly two years in the camp. He now lives in the U.S.
Canadian lawyer Clive Ansley was working in China during the initial years of the persecution of Falun Gong and witnessed the level of propaganda and vilification driven by the CCP against the group.
He said the appeal from Westerners in 2001 would have embarrassed and angered the Communist Party, “but little has had an impact on the regime’s behavior and the level of the persecution up to now.”
Ansley said he was skeptical that anything has made the Communist Party more humane in its persecution of Falun Gong.
“Everything I’ve been involved in personally in China, or observed, whether a contract or human rights being discussed, I am absolutely convinced there is no possibility [of change], whatsoever, without embarrassing them publicly.”
Long Flight Home
Lemish said being deported was a matter of being dragged onto the plane and into their seats. In the seat pocket was the China Daily, the official English newspaper of the Communist Party. “There was an article about us. It said we had all been treated well,” he said. “At this point I could barely open my jaw to speak, the guy across the aisle from me, from Canada, had a broken nose, and the guy from Australia’s hand was swollen and appeared to be broken.”
“The article also said we were organized by foreign forces to stir up trouble.”
Leining said it is difficult for Westerners to understand the depth of what the regime can do.
“We have no frame of reference,” he said. “We understand war and disease. But for a person to be attacked in such an irrational, inhumane way is beyond belief in Western society. The persecution of Falun Gong is nothing but a massive act of violence.”
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