It was ten years ago that Sun Changzhen went to Beijing to appeal for the meditation practice that restored her health and brought her inner peace in her troubled life.
Ms. Sun now lives in Toronto, but she clearly remembers that day when, on April 25, 1999, about 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered at the State Appeals Office in Beijing to peacefully appeal for their constitutional right to practise their belief.
After three years of increasing restrictions by the communist authorities, reports of harassment were increasing. That was when Falun Gong practitioners decided they needed to make an appeal to the authorities to explain that Falun Gong was beneficial for Chinese society.
Ms. Sun had arrived in Beijing just a month earlier to visit her daughter. “The first thing I did was to ask my daughter to help me find the practice site at the nearby park,” she said.
At that time, almost all the parks in China had practice sites where tens to hundreds of practitioners did the Falun Gong exercises together every morning. They also did daily study of the teachings of Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, which centre on the principles of “Truth, Compassion, Forbearance.”
According to government estimates, in the seven years following its introduction to the public in 1992, 70 to 100 million people were practising Falun Gong in China, drawn by its benefits of physical and mental health.
This popularity was not overlooked by the one-party communist state, even as government bodies initially supported and bestowed awards on the practice and its founder, Li Hongzhi.
In 1996 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began using its state-run media to vilify the practice. It also banned Falun Gong books from further publication.
