New Practitioners Peacefully Appeal at Tiananmen Square

In May 2002, when I was planning to go to Beijing to peacefully appeal for a stop to the persecution of Falun Dafa, I met a 20-year-old young lady from a rural area. She had only recently began to practise Falun Dafa, but was determined to go to Beijing with me. She spent all her time studying the Fa [Falun Gong books] before we left. She was well aware of the danger of going to Beijing. But she didn't seem to think about it at all; she just studied the Fa calmly.

One practitioner suggested that we go to her relatives home on our way to Beijing because apparently there were many new practitioners there. She hoped that we would be able to share our experiences and improve as a group.

On May 11, we arrived at the village and met with the new practitioners. Although they were quite new, they were all very steadfast and quite a few of them expressed a desire to go to Beijing to appeal for Falun Dafa.

On May 12, the eight of them bought red and yellow fabric and made some falun Dafa banners. Each took one and left in the afternoon. They planned to arrive at Tiananmen Square on May 13, World Falun Dafa Day.

Because it is a very serious matter to go to appeal for Falun Dafa, we pretty much did our things independently. I went with the young lady and told her, "You are new and as soon as you finish unfurling the banner, go home right away and don't wait for me." Around noon, a few practitioners stood around to practise the exercises somewhere in the Square. When the police rushed over to them, the two of us unfurled our banner and shouted "Falun Dafa is good" and walked west and then east so that more people could see us. A few minutes later, the police snatched our banner. Then I heard "Falun Dafa is good" from behind us. It turned out that a few more practitioners had raised a banner with a yellow background and red characters. The police rushed frantically to take the banner down. I helped to keep the banner from being snatched away. One policeman was using a club to hit practitioners' hands that were holding the banner. Soon, a group of policemen surrounded all of us and pushed us into the police van.

It was then that I realised that the young lady had not left after all. She was smiling at me. I also saw two practitioners from the village. They refused to cooperate with the evil persecutors and talked about their experience in a relaxed manner.

I was sentenced to a forced labour camp and subsequently released for medical reasons after a few months. I ran into the young lady again. She was carrying a huge bag full of Falun Dafa truth-clarifying materials and CDs, and she was on her way to villages to distribute them. She went to several villages each day and has been doing so for quite a while.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2003/2/24/45169.html