The Days When Lin Chengtao and I Worked Together

My heart was heavy when I heard that Lin Chengtao had been kidnapped and taken to Beijing Tuanhe Labour Camp, where he had suffered a mental breakdown from the torture. Here, I would like to talk about my impressions of Lin Chengtao.

1. Meeting Lin Chengtao

Lin Chengtao and I were colleagues. I came to know him when I began practicing Falun Dafa in 1996. Chengtao was very nice person who tried to always consider others first. All who had difficulties at work liked to ask him for help. His supervisor trusted him to do his job with little or no supervision. The laboratory that Chengtao was working at was one of the nation's key laboratories and the projects that he undertook or participated in were among the nations most important. He needed to report the experiments' progress, therefore he was very busy and often had to work day and night. Chengtao was a veteran Falun Dafa practitioner and new practitioners liked to talk with him. Chengtao was always involved in Dafa. He often talked with me while eating his meals and then went back to the lab to do his experiments. Just like this, he did work for Dafa and his own work very well. This was why his supervisor scored him 120 on a 100-point-scale.

2. Lin Chengtao and "The Effects of Falun Gong on Healing and Fitness – A Survey among Practitioners from Beijing"

Before the fall of 1998, the state sent a notice that it would manage the practice of Qigong and all Qigong organizations needed to re-register and re-apply. Some practitioners suggested that Falun Gong should also apply in order to gain a legal cultivation environment. Chengtao, together with another practitioner and I, went to the National Physical Education Commission and inquired about the registration process. We were told that the application should include a health survey of no fewer than 30 people. Therefore, we decided to a survey the effects of Falun Gong on healing and fitness.

Li Fujun, an associate professor at Henan Medical University, was doing his Ph.D. research at Union Medical Hospital in Beijing. He designed a draft of the survey form. Considering that some people were not well educated in the survey population, Chengtao eventually finalized the form after changing it several times so that it became easy to fill out and also fit the medical statistics specification.

One of the requirements in medical statistics is a high degree of randomness in the population sampled. The larger the sample size, the higher the degree of randomness. Therefore we decided that our survey population would be above a thousand people. We distributed the forms to all the practice sites we knew and asked the assistants at the sites to make copies and distribute to practitioners. Unexpectedly, the forms started to come back in only three days later and we quickly collected more than 1000 forms.

There were many Falun Gong practitioners in China and the news spread fast. Many assistants in other practice sites also asked to have the forms. Therefore we decided to increase our survey population and distribute the forms widely. Usually, it took several months to conduct a large-scale medical survey with more than 1000 participants. At first we felt it would be impossible to do a survey in such a short period of time. However, Chengtao thought that Falun Dafa is extraordinary and we could certainly accomplish it within the time limit. Chengtao volunteered to take responsibility for coordinating and overseeing the project. The practitioners actively participated and put Dafa as a priority.

Everyone did his best. Some practitioners rented the computer facilities; many practitioners who were good at typing came to enter the data into the computers. Some assistants had to run back and forth several times a day to find surveyed practitioners to correct mistakes in the forms, etc. We finally collected more than 15,000 forms.

During the data entry, we found that many practitioners reported in the survey that they had several illnesses before practicing Falun Gong and became disease free after practicing. Some even felt their bodies became light after only a few days of practice. Some practitioners just did not know how to express their gratitude and wrote in detail about the benefits that they had obtained and gave their thanks on the forms. This all came from practitioners' hearts. Practitioners involved in processing the forms took the job very seriously. We worked during the day and processed the survey at night. We had very little sleep. Chengtao did not sleep for several days.

After the data was entered into the computer, we processed the data. In the more than 15,000 forms, some had omissions or incorrect information. We had to disqualify those that had missing information after the assistants tried but failed to get complete information, and finally obtained 12,731 valid forms. Chengtao asked Zhao Ming, a computer engineer who worked in Ziguang Company of Tsinghua University, to do the data analysis. Zhao Ming worked from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. the next morning and felt fine after he had double-checked the results. Chengtao asked him whether he could analyse the data again by another method. Zhao Ming then did it again and reached the same conclusion. We had finished all the data processing work.

Next, we started to write the survey report. Among the authors, Li Fujun was a Ph.D. and so was Pu Riyang, other practitioners had Masters Degrees or bachelor degrees. Li Fujun and Chengtao wrote the report and other authors made revisions. After the draft was finished, we asked some physician practitioners from other institutions to check the report again. In the end, "The Effects of Falun Gong on Healing and Fitness - A Survey among Practitioners from Beijing" (also known as "A Report of Ten Thousand Cases") was born. The whole process took less than two weeks. Only Dafa could create such miracles with such great changes in so many practitioners' bodies and minds.

After July 1999, Dafa was persecuted in China. Overnight, the good was said to be bad and the righteous was slandered as evil. This survey report could not escape. CCTV found some so-called experts to try to discredit the survey. Meantime, the government also pressured Union University. Some leaders from our university came to talk with Chengtao and me. When they found out the reason for the survey and the process, they felt that we did well and met all the requirements for medical scientific research. They actually felt strange about the request from "above." When CCTV came to ask me to discredit the report, our university leaders stepped forward and rejected this unreasonable request. For the past two years, the CCTV has fabricated many lies about Falun Gong, such as the "1400 cases" (so-called deaths from Falun Gong), and found some mentally ill patients and murders to slander Dafa. However, this survey could never be discredited. The survey showed a 99.1% success rate among the 12,731 participants but the Chinese government tried to discredit the survey with the "1400 cases".

3. Lin Chengtao and "Falun Dafa is Beyond the Scope of Modern Science"

Although "A Report of Ten Thousand Cases" has demonstrated to the world the extraordinariness of Falun Dafa in staying healthy and completely free of diseases, our purpose was twofold. We wanted to tell people that the real reason why Falun Dafa could heal illnesses is because of the corresponding bodies' changes brought by the upgrading of Xinxing [the nature of the mind or the heart, moral character]. It could only be achieved by raising one's moral standards. Therefore, we worked together again. Chengtao was the busiest. He spent all his spare time in field investigation where he had to find practitioners who were surveyed to verify the information. Sometimes, in order to confirm certain information, he had to go back four more times. All of the material was truthful. Every page was soaked with the sweat of Chengtao and other practitioners. I remembered that Chengtao rode an old bike with a broken down brake because he didn't have time to repair it. One time he almost got into an accident with a car but fortunately nothing happened. During this process, since we all had different understandings about Dafa and different thoughts regarding issues along with our own individual notions, we often disagreed. Chengtao always insisted that we must take the righteous path, give up individual things, and put Dafa as priority to do this work well. This way, we finished "Falun Dafa is Beyond the Scope of Modern Science".

4. Things Happen Later

In July 1999, Jiang's regime started to persecute Falun Dafa in China. Chengtao did not have his own home at that time and was living in the university's dormitory. In mid October, he invited some practitioners to see his daughter in my office and was illegally detained for 20 days for "illegal gathering." He and some other practitioners from Union University were sent to a brainwashing session.

In the brainwashing session, they brought in some professors and specialists from our university to talk with us. They wanted to turn us around using science, medicine, molecular biology, philosophy, history, qigong, etc. No matter how they tried we were able to discuss with them from the point of view of Dafa. We talked about whatever they talked about. Chengtao and another practitioner had profound knowledge and were quick. Sometimes they were able to silence the professors but more often they transformed the serious atmosphere into a relaxed one and told the professors some truth about Dafa. One day, a political professor commented, "Your knowledge is really profound. Where did you obtain so much truth?" We told her that it came from Dafa. She said, "Your teacher is really a great person who could make so many intellectuals believe him." We told her that the truth that our Teacher talked about was not ordinary. It is the Law of the universe. I saw in her a sense of respect.

Afterwards, we were deprived of our teaching and research privileges. Chengtao's housing quota was also cancelled. (The state-owned scientific research work units still assign the housing.) Chengtao found the persecution of Dafa to be unfair both from the Fa and everyday society's regulations. He fought for his rights but failed. Later, Chengtao was arrested again for clarifying the truth. He was released after he went on a hunger strike and had to be resuscitated in the hospital. Because the police and the university wanted to send him to another brainwashing session, Chengtao took the opportunity to escape and left his home with his child. Finally, the police caught him and sent him to Beijing Tuanhe Labour Camp and tortured him until he became unbalanced.

An outstanding scientist was tortured like this just for persisting in the belief of the truth of the universe.

Post Script: Current Status of some practitioners who participated in "A Report of Ten Thousand Cases"

Li Fujun left Union Hospital in 1999 to Henan. He was illegally sentenced to two years for appealing for Falun Gong and participating in "A Report of Ten Thousand Cases." His current situation is unknown.

Pu Riyang persisted in cultivation and was dismissed from his postdoctoral fellowship by Union Hospital and sent back to his hometown. He chose to become homeless to avoid further persecution after being arrested several times. No word has been heard from him since.

Source:
http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2002/6/16/23174.html

Chinese version available at:
http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2002/6/5/31300.html