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.jpg "Falun Gong practitioners demonstrate their slow moving exercises outside the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday July 20th. The event marked 11 years of persecution against the group in China, which has seen thousands tortured to death. (Edward Stephen/Epoch Times)")
Watching the shadow of the Chinese Embassy lengthen across the statue that stands in the middle of Portland Place in London is hardly new to Gao.
Today, she is joined by 50 or so others, but normally Gao is alone in the darkness, once a week taking a night “shift” in the 24-hour protest that has faced the embassy for over eight years.
Gao practises Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation discipline whose soaring popular- ity in China in the late 1990s attracted the attention of the communist regime and the then-Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin. When government surveys revealed an estimated 100 million people practised Falun Gong, Jiang Zemin set into motion a campaign of persecution that saw Falun Gong practitioners rounded up in their tens of thousands on July 20th, 1999, as a “crackdown” began on a scale not seen since the Great Cultural Revolution.
Gao works full-time as a finance officer, but every week spends three to four evenings opposite the Chi- nese Embassy. Once or twice a week, she spends the night there, goes home, takes a shower, and then heads out to work. She has been doing this since the daily protest at the Embassy became a 24-hour vigil in June 2002. Gao says she’s used to it now.
“At the beginning it was hard for me, and at work I felt sleepy, but now I am OK. I am awake, I feel alert, and my mind is clear, but when I get home I have to go to bed early.”
At weekends, Gao says she spends some time arranging the shifts opposite the embassy to ensure a 24-hour presence.
“Every weekend I try to work out the rota for the embassy. If I find I can’t cover some shift, I send an e-mail to other practitioners and they voluntarily offer help to cover the rota. This is the way we organise our vigil protest.”
She says that those who regularly volunteer to keep the vigil going are from all walks of life: students, university lecturers, research fellows, housewives, retirees.
In addition to ongoing protests outside Chinese embassies in many cities around the world, those who practise the spiritual discipline outside of China have continually fought for an end to the persecution through parades, protests, and rallies on key dates.
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In addition to the candlelight embassy vigil, July 20th saw UK Falun Gong practitioners marking 11 years of perse- cution with various events, including an appeal outside Westminster to the new coalition government to speak out against the persecution. They hope the government will follow a precedent set by the US House of Congress, which passed Resolution 605 in March this year, calling for “an immediate end to the campaign to persecute, intimidate, imprison, and torture Falun Gong practitioners”.
The protest outside the Chinese Embassy might have a different target audience, but according to Gao, the message is the same. “All we want is to stop the persecution, stop the killing, stop the torture,” says Gao.
We don’t have any hatred towards them
Be it the embassy protest or the appeal by the Houses of Parliament, Falun Gong events nearly always have one common feature: demonstrations of the slow-moving exercises and meditation so characteristic of the practice.
Gao explains that as well as drawing attention from passers by, the peaceful look and feel of the exercises serves to dispel the propaganda of the Chinese regime that demonises Falun Gong.
“We understand that the people in the Embassy are all innocents, so we are here to give them a chance to see what Falun Gong people are like. From their windows they can see us every day doing the peaceful exercises. They have been forced to carry out the policy of persecution by the regime, so we treat them just like any other Chinese people.
“We don’t have any hatred towards them,” she says. “We only have the wish that they can understand.” This compassionate sentiment is in spite of the fact that some of those who regularly join the 24-hour protest have directly experienced persecution.
Gao says that one regular at the embassy protest was detained for several months in the notorious Masanjia labour camp, where she was tortured and force-fed after hunger-striking.
Another London resident who has experienced such torture is Annie Yang, who described her experience at a seminar in the Houses of Parliament, also held to mark 11 years of persecution.
“Every day I was forced to sit for over 18 hours, in a strict sitting posture: both legs and knees pressed tightly against each other; both hands rested over the knees, the back kept straight, and eyes open. After a week or two, many people’s bottoms started to rot. After endless days of both mental and physical persecution my eyesight became bad and my memory weak.
“My hair turned white and mentally I almost reached total collapse. Every day the only thing I thought about, when I was able to have a moment to think, was how to end my life,” she recalled.
The seminar was chaired by Cambridge MP Julian Huppert, who also tabled a parliamentary motion as follows:
“This House notes the 11th anniversary on July 20th, 2010 of the start of the persecution of Falun Gong in China; calls for the release from detention and imprisonment of all Falun Gong practitioners held for peaceful practise of their beliefs; recognises that the Chinese government divides people by class, politics, religion and economic backgrounds; and expresses its concern about this infringement of human rights.”
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Also speaking at the seminar in Parliament was Ethan Gutmann, an award-winning author on China, who is currently writing what he describes as the definitive record on the persecution of Falun Gong and who has investigated the issue of organ harvesting in China.
Mr Gutmann had several policy recommendations for the UK government: help fund efforts by the Global Internet Freedom Consortium to break through the Chinese censorship software; to end all organ tourism to China; to sanction an investigation into organ harvesting; to lead the EU in helping NTDTV – an independent Chinese TV station – resume its broadcasts into China via the Eutelsat satellite.
A statement by the UK Falun Gong Association Chairman Peter Jauhal also called for action from the UK government.
“On the surface it appears that the situation with China is getting better by the year,” said Mr Jauhal. “But for Falun Gong practitioners the opposite is true. The more time passes, the more people are being tortured to death. The more the world ignores the persecution, the more it persists. And the more governments around the world stay silent, the happier the Chinese Communist Party is. We appeal to the new coalition government to make its mark. Speak out for the tortured in China. Speak out for those who cannot.”
But while the Association points out that no British government has openly spoken out against the persecution in 11 years of appeals, protests, reports, and seminars, Gao believes the general public are becoming more and more aware.
She says she frequently runs into people who have heard about the persecution of Falun Gong through seeing the protest outside the Embassy.
“I have met people in other places, and they have said that they know about the persecution from passing by the embassy. I think the 10-year appeal has done a really good job.”
