SAN FRANCISCO—Falun Gong practitioners and supporters marched in a parade through downtown San Francisco on Sunday to demand an end to the 13-year-long persecution of their practice in China.
Several hundred participants marched from Japan Town through Union Square and ended at the popular Portsmouth Square in Chinatown. Practitioners from California, the United States, and various places around the world came to San Francisco for an experience-sharing conference held on Saturday, and many stayed to participate in the parade.
Falun Gong is a traditional Chinese spiritual discipline that gained immense popularity in China in the 1990s—by early 1999, an estimated one in twelve Chinese had taken up the practice. Falun Gong encompasses meditative exercises, and living according to moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
In 1999, Jiang Zemin, the then-head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), saw the practice and its 100 million adherents as a threat to his power. He began a campaign to eradicate it.
Many San Francisco residents and tourists looked on to see what Falun Gong is all about. Many took photos or filmed the various sections, including a marching band, practitioners demonstrating the Falun Gong exercises, and others holding up banners and signs.
Some practitioners in yellow costumes carried signs that read, “The World Needs Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance,” and “China’s New Era Begins When the CCP ends.”
Some passers-by who had not previously known much about the persecution of Falun Gong in China were shocked to learn that the Chinese regime has been harvesting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners—killing them—in order to make a profit.
“It’s horrendous. It’s sickening,” said Susie, a tourist who had stopped at a street corner in Chinatown. “It is about time that this ends.”
