Falun Gong Practitioners Peacefully Protest All Night in Chicago Until Jiang's Departure

News from Chicago on October 23 -- After stopping over one day in Chicago, Jiang left the Ritz Carlton Hotel for Houston at around 8:20 am. During the layover, Jiang never left the hotel. Around the hotel, there were as many as one thousand Falun Gong practitioners peacefully protesting.

Last night (October 22), the Foreign Affairs Union in Chicago held an evening banquet for Jiang Zemin in the hotel which started at 6 p.m. The mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, who was invited, was temporarily absent. His wife hosted the banquet instead. It was reported that the mayor's office received the news that Falun Gong practitioners from many countries had jointly sued Jiang in the international court on the previous day.

Falun Gong practitioners from all over the world took turns continuing their peaceful appeal across from the main entrance of the hotel where Jiang stayed. According to the practitioners, about 500 Falun Gong practitioners stayed outside to practice and send forth righteous thoughts during the night. Around 5 to 6 a.m., suddenly, a strong wind began to rise and it started raining. It did not stop until afternoon, but the practitioners kept sitting quietly in the wind and rain in the park across from the hotel.
Jiang, who originally planned to leave at 7:30 a.m. in the morning, did not show up until 8:00 a.m. Many students who followed the orders to see him off impatiently waited in the rain, then left, which made their group seem scattered. The students complained. Around 8:20 a.m, Jiang finally left from the back door of the hotel. At that time, there were mainly practitioners wearing yellow sweaters and holding all kinds of banners around the hotel.

According to the voluntary coordinator of the sit-in appeal, Mr. Zhou, along two sides of the road from Ritz Carlton to the airport, there were several hundred banners, saying, "Falun Dafa is good," "Jiang: Stop persecuting Falun Gong," "Falun Dafa," "Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance" and others in Chinese and English. They were of all kinds of sizes, in bright colors. All these were arranged the previous evening by Falun Gong practitioners.
After Jiang's motorcade left the Ritz Carlton hotel, a computer expert, Miss Ye, who took a bus from Toronto, Canada and spent over 10 hours to get to Chicago, told the reporter: "The rain was very heavy a moment ago. I was soaked through ... we saw Jiang personally as he passed from close by a moment ago. Everyone shouted to him 'Falun Dafa is good'. ... ... Our several hundred people took buses together to come here and will rush to Houston."
When the reporter asked why Mr. Zhou didn't take shelter from the rain, Mr. Zhou amiably smiled: "I have been paying attention to whether Jiang comes out or not and do not notice the rain. I want to tell him to stop the persecution face to face when I see him."

Jiang directly instigated and escalated the persecution of Falun Gong in China. From July 20, 1999 China has followed the policy to "Totally defame the practitioners' reputations, deprive them of economic resources, and physically eliminate them" against millions of Falun Gong practitioners. In the last three years, tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been illegally detained, sentenced to forced labor, imprisoned and tortured. Some female practitioners have been raped and several thousand healthy practitioners have been detained in mental hospitals. According to Chinese government internal records, over 1,600 practitioners had been killed by the end of October 2001. By October 23, 2002, 505 death cases have been verified and reported outside of China.