ATLANTA—David Xie carefully set up easels to display photographs on the wide, sloping lawn in front of Stone Mountain. The pictures showed people practicing Falun Gong exercises in China; standing with their arms gently curved, meditating cross legged on the ground, even forming Chinese characters by standing in groups of hundreds of people.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditation and spiritual practice that spread rapidly through China in the 1990’s.
Xie and others had come to celebrate World Falun Dafa Day. The group gathered on the sunny, warm Saturday. Xie smilingly handed flyers to passersby, ready to explain the practice. His calm demeanor belied the horrific treatment he experienced in his native China.
After the Chinese Communist Party started persecuting Falun Gong they launched a media blitz defaming the practice. Xia and fellow Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing worked to get the news out across the world. The printed and distributed information from overseas web sites—information that revealed what was happening in China.
He wrote, “Our job then was to tell people the truth about Falun Gong and the fact that Falun Gong and its practitioners were being persecuted by the government and some of them were dead under police custody. Our belief was that if all the people knew the truth then the persecution had to stop.”
He nearly died himself. On December 4, 2001, plainclothes police kidnapped him on a central street in Beijing. They beat him so severely that his flesh was black two days later. Until January 24, 2004, he was tortured, starved, threatened, and isolated. The purpose was to make him reveal the names and addresses of all the other Falun Gong practitioners who had downloaded and distributed what they called “truth materials.” It was also to make him renounce the spiritual practice, to sign a paper promising not to meditate or exercise again.
“The pain I suffered was simply excruciating and unspeakable,” he said in a statement. Yet he never gave up his fellows, and he never signed the renunciation papers. Through a translator, he said he was able to hold on because he knew that everything the Chinese Communist Party said was a lie. He said he knew from his own personal experience, that Falun Dafa is good. He said his faith was not an emotional feeling, but a rational understanding.
