Dear Reader,
On this day 25 years ago, the Chinese regime launched the persecution campaign against Falun Gong in China. To this day, vivid memories of those times remain fixed in my mind.
I remember sitting in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan. One of the Falun Gong volunteer coordinators had checked in the night before because she feared for her life. Death threats and apartment break-ins in Chinatown had shown that the Chinese regime’s attack on Falun Gong, which had just started the day before, would be global. So there we sat on the floor of a hotel room, about 20 Falun Gong practitioners from the New York City area, trying to figure out what to do. Calls were coming in from everywhere. ABC’s Nightline wanted to interview one of us. We huddled in the corner for a brief time discussing who to send and how to help explain to the American public the nightmare that was unfolding in China.
A few days later, I remember sitting under the baking sun in Washington DC. Several hundred Falun Gong practitioners had spontaneously traveled to the nation’s capital to ask the U.S. government for help, sitting in rows in front of Capitol Hill. A young man stood with a microphone, crying over what was happening to his family and friends in China. He was calling for everyone to start a hunger strike. He was angry. He was trembling… barely able to formulate his words.
Then, from a back row another man, slightly older, walked calmly to the front, and put his arm around the first man. I had never before seen that level of calm and compassion on display, especially given the circumstances. Everyone there had loved ones now at risk of being hauled away to a labor camp, tortured, or killed.
After a while, the older man reached out to gently to take the microphone and he began to speak. “This is not our way,” he said slowly, deliberately, pausing to choose his next words. “I suggest we just go tell people who we are… let them understand us and what is happening. Once people know the truth, they will help us.” With that, he slowly put the microphone down and with his arm still around the crying man, walked with him back into the lines of Falun Gong practitioners.
I had only been practicing Falun Gong for several months, but I remember thinking, “These people are quite remarkable.”
Little did any of us know that this would be the beginning of a persecution campaign that would decimate families and communities across China for the next quarter century. And yet throughout the horror that would ensue, the spirit captured by this calm man—“Just go tell people who we are… let them understand us”—would be the hallmark of Falun Gong’s response inside China and around the world.
This basic principle has guided Falun Gong practitioners in China in the face of the regime’s widespread violence and killing, and practitioners have not retaliated with violence or hatred. This basic principle has spawned a grassroots movement in China of tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners risking life and limb to inform fellow citizens about their plight, and the terror of the Chinese Communist Party more broadly. And it is this basic principle that guides us still today: a deeply held belief that all people have a goodness within them, and that if our story—the Falun Gong story—can reach them, that goodness will awaken and they will do the right thing.
On this tragic anniversary, we thank you for your ongoing attention, interest, and support. Together we can save lives. |