UK: Falun Dafa Parade at the End of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

The press conference was attended by Edinburgh’s press who have recently shown a lot of interest in Falun Dafa after practitioners won first prize in the community section of the Queen’s Jubilee Cavalcade Celebrations. They took many photos of the beautiful costumes and banners as well as annotating the conference speeches. The speakers included John Dee, Vice Chairman of the European Friends of Falun Gong, who exposed the ridiculous nature of the recent Hong Kong trial of sixteen innocent Dafa practitioners, and Lord Thurlow, who gave a very moving speech on the immoral and ruthless nature of the Jiang regime’s persecution.

The final speaker was Christina Jing Ha, an Edinburgh Falun Dafa practitioner who has suffered persecution at the hands of the Chinese regime whilst living in Scotland. She told how she has been refused visa and passport applications by the Chinese consulate, preventing her from visiting her parents or leaving Scotland at all. She also talked about her computer being flooded by over 3000 emails in one day after the Chinese authorities found her address on a Falun Gong website, disabling her computer until she could afford to have it fixed. Christina recently visited the Chinese Consulate with a BBC television camera team, filming a documentary about persecution happening in the UK, to apply for her passport again. Due to being scared of their persecution being exposed on national television, the consulate staff called the police. The officers that arrived recognised Christina due to her frequent appeals outside of the Chinese consulate and were very happy to see her. They wished her good luck and told her she was doing the right thing before leaving the embarrassed consulate staff. This showed how practitioners building a good relationship with the police through their dignified and thoughtful behaviour can have brilliant effects.

After the press conference, the parade began through the busy centre of Edinburgh. Many people expressed excitement and even amazement when they saw the beautiful female practitioners dressed in both traditional Chinese costumes and Tang Dynasty dresses. They ran to the street to take pictures of the fan dancing and lotus flower dancing. The bright sunshine reflected off of the banners containing the Falun Emblem and words such as “The World Needs Truthfulness, Compassion, Forearance”. Almost everyone accepted Falun Dafa flyers and many Chinese people stood dumbfounded at the beautiful procession that passed them. The smiling policemen who accompanied the practitioners created a stark contrast to the violent and inhuman officers who torture and kill Dafa practitioners in China.

One car driver wanted to know what the parade was about but there were no practitioners nearby. The policeman who was close to her car began to tell her about Falun Dafa and she seemed touched by the happiness of the policeman who was with the practitioners. The media continued to follow the parade until its end and took many more photos of the beautiful dancing and costumes. The UK practitioners in the parade were joined by others from countries including Ireland, Ukraine, Germany and Austria. Both the participants and the audience enjoyed the event and many people talked to practitioners about the beautiful procession and the peaceful nature of the Falun Gong exercises.