Taiwan: Press Conference Marks the Start of the "Rescue the Children Being Persecuted" Bike Trip

At 9:00 a.m. on August the 6th, 2004, the Taiwanese "Rescue the Children Being Persecuted" Bike Trip started off with a press conference in front of the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial. Professor Wu Hui-lin, director of the Chinese Human Rights Association and Mr. Liu Bing-hua, Secretary-General of the Taiwanese Association for Rescuing Falun Gong Practitioners Being Persecuted, were invited to the conference to call attention to children's human rights and to help stop the persecution of children who practice Falun Dafa in China, who face loss of school, parents and family. The Taiwanese youth and children's bike trip will last for fourteen days and the group is composed of students from the ages of 12 to 20. After the press conference, the bike trip started off from the Memorial with the destinations of Er-Rwang-Bee, Kenting, Pingtung.

Press Conference	Waist drum team	Youth bike trip team

A musical performance by young practitioners	The bike trip begins

	The bike trip arrives in Ilan

The purpose of the bike trip is to have more people know that children benefit from practising Falun Gong in terms of both mind and body, and to expose the Chinese dictator Jiang Zemin and his faction's persecution of Falun Gong and the insidious infusion of hatred towards Falun Gong into children in China. Many parents have been imprisoned for practising Falun Gong and their children are left without care. Many children were dismissed from school for practising Falun Gong and some were even tortured to death. The bike trip calls on kind-hearted people to help end the persecution and in general, to wish a good future for children worldwide. Similar activities have been held in Australia, the United States, Canada and Japan.

Professor Wu Hui-lin, director of the Chinese Human Rights Association, came to support the children involved in the bike trip saying that no one should live in terror. Countless children are being persecuted in China. He hoped that the conscience of more kind-hearted people will be aroused to help rescue children being persecuted, and to enable them to return to a safe, warm home.

Liu Bing-hua, Secretary-General of the Taiwanese Association for Rescuing Falun Gong Practitioners Being Persecuted, said that more than one thousand practitioners have been tortured to death since the 20th of July, 1999 and the persecution was not only happening in China. A woman named Cheng Shihong in Changhua, Taiwan had a five-year-old son. She returned to Shenzhen, Guangdong Province in China to visit her parents in October 2002 and has been imprisoned in a forced labour camp since then. Her son was left without being taken care of and the family was broken up. Another 12-year-old child went to Anhui, China with his mother to celebrate the Chinese New Year. They were rounded up by the police before entering customs and were detained for three days. The young boy suffered from intimidation.

Chang Jun-yu, a spokesperson from the Falun Dafa Association, said that inspiration for the activity came from the personal experience of a four-year-old girl named Fadu. When she was only six months of age, her father, Chen Chengying, was tortured to death in China for practising Falun Gong. Since then, her mother, Dai Zhizhen, has visited more than 30 countries with Fadu, to call for an end to the persecution, in order to stop similar tragedies from occurring.

At the site of the press conference, practitioners collected signatures calling for an end to the Jiang faction's persecution of Falun Dafa. A child named Chang Da-wei read a letter of appeal from a child in China, written on December 2, 2000. In the letter, the child wrote, "My parents were healthy and had a happy life after practising Falun Gong, but were imprisoned in a forced labour camp and suffered from tortures. I hope that kind-hearted people in the world will help in the release of my parents. I yearn for a happy and warm home." Mr. Chang Jun-yu made the comment that the letter was written four years ago and that the persecution has escalated since then. He hoped that everyone will pay attention to the persecution and help to end it.

After the press conference, the bike team started their trip under the stirring accompaniment of the waist-drum team.