NEW YORK—Twenty-four years ago, thousands of Chinese citizens gathered outside of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) headquarters in the heart of Beijing.
They were Falun Gong practitioners, and they were there to peacefully call on the communist regime to end the harassment and suppression of their peers by local authorities. Less than three months later, the regime would start an all-out persecution campaign against the spiritual practice.
On April 23, in the Flushing neighborhood of New York, about 4,000 people took part in a march to remember the historic appeal at Zhongnanhai on April 25, 1999, and to call for an end to the CCP’s ongoing persecution of Falun Gong.
One participant was Elsie He, a New York resident in her 40s. She was one of those who gathered in Beijing 24 years before.
A Peaceful Demonstration
For He, then a college freshman, Sunday would have normally been a day of reading, studying for classes, or doing meditation.However, on that cloudy day in 1999, donning her usual outfit of a light cotton jacket, long dark pants, and sneakers, the student hopped on a bicycle with three friends and set off early in the morning. Their destination was Zhongnanhai.
It was about 7 or 8 a.m., normally too early for He to venture out of the dorms on an off day, and few pedestrians were on the street. That was, until she reached Fuyou Street, which led up to the compound. There were throngs of people, and still more were streaming in. They talked softly, forming a long line on the sidewalk and carefully avoiding stepping into the road or blocking traffic. Most people stood quietly. Some were seated to meditate or read. A few passed around plastic bags to collect trash.
Carrying a small canvas backpack containing “Zhuan Falun,” the practice’s main book of teachings, and a sesame flatbread as her meal for the day, He didn’t leave until dark, when word got around that then-Premier Zhu Rongji had met with Falun Gong delegates and assured them of his support.
‘I Know You Guys Didn’t Do Anything Wrong’
Featuring the core principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, along with meditative exercises, Falun Gong was wildly popular during the 1990s. By some estimates, 1 in 13 among China’s population of 1.3 billion had picked up the practice by 1999. That year, the atheist CCP would mark the group as the latest enemy of the state.In the months and years leading up to the persecution, Falun Gong adherents had felt growing restrictions to their freedoms. Days before the appeal at Zhongnanhai, authorities beat and arrested dozens of Falun Gong practitioners in the megacity Tianjin, telling other adherents to petition in Beijing if they wanted the detainees to be freed. State-owned television stations and newspapers had run content vilifying the faith.
“Because we follow truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, we try to treat everyone with kindness, including the government,” He said.
“We thought that the arrests in Tianjin and all that biased coverage were because they didn’t really understand us. We wanted to give them a window to understand us, to show them everything. That was the group of people we were.”
She said she believes that the kindness and trust they demonstrated that day have remained unchanged—even after the practitioners became victims of a ferocious persecution campaign.
“It’s the CCP that chose to make enemies with truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance,“ He said. ”They pushed such a group of people to the opposite side.”
What He experienced during the persecution was typical of what families underwent all over the country. At one point in about 2001, three members of her family—He, her college-age brother, and her mother, who was a university professor—were simultaneously detained at the respective colleges where they studied or worked.
The immense mental strain turned her father’s hair white overnight.
Every day, instead of going to class, He would report to the office of her school’s Party secretary. The Party official even instructed a classmate to befriend her in an effort to secretly gather intelligence about the practice, which He didn’t know until years later.
“Falun Gong never has any secrets. How we exercise and study, everything about everyone, [the CCP officials] know it through and through, but they still wanted to use such tactics. It was as though they wanted to concoct some charges against us,” she said.
But He said she considered herself lucky, given the number of top students in elite Chinese schools such as Tsinghua University and Peking University who had lost their lives or became mentally ill because of the persecution.
In late 2012, after finding their home ransacked following a police raid that led to another arrest for He’s mother, her father suddenly suffered a stroke and never regained consciousness. Her father died about seven weeks later, on Christmas Day.
He recalled that when she implored the police to release her mother, a policeman told her: “I know you guys didn’t do anything wrong, but we can get money for arresting Falun Gong. My son is getting married, and I need to get some money for him. One Falun Gong practitioner arrested is 4,000 yuan [roughly $640 at the time] for me.”
“They are selling their souls for money and exchanging lives with money,” He said. “They could abandon their conscience for that little bit of money.”
‘A Milestone Event’
The day was again cloudy as He recounted her story in New York, where she now lives, ahead of a gathering to mark the 24th anniversary of the Zhongnanhai appeal, which Beijing would later depict in its propaganda as a “siege,” in a bid to justify the persecution.But “despite what the CCP would have you believe as a materialist atheist state,” the persecution campaign is really a “spiritual battle against the wickedness and the forces of evil,” according to China analyst James Gorrie.
“People find strength in something that can’t be quenched by a bullet or a prison sentence,” Gorrie, author of “The China Crisis” and a contributor to The Epoch Times, told the publication’s sister media outlet NTD. “And that’s why China fears it. That’s why they rightfully fear it. Illegitimate regimes fear everything.”
Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association and a contributor to The Epoch Times, said he found the resistance from Falun Gong inspiring.
“One of the hallmarks of the whole Falun Gong philosophy,” he told NTD, “[is] elevating the spirit of the individual to a sense of nobility, patience, and perseverance.
“This is going to be very hard for any organization like the Communist Party of China to ever suppress.”
China watchers and the Falun Gong community should “memorialize and celebrate” the April 25 appeal as “something iconic,” Gorrie suggested.
“It’s worth writing the saga of that protest in such a way that it is seen as a milestone event in Chinese history, one which will spell the start of the decline of the Communist Party of China,” he said.
Choice for the West
Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) called on the world to act against the nearly 24-year-long persecution, which he said violates “the most basic of all human rights.”“We have an obligation to speak out on behalf of those whose voices have been silenced for far too long, for if we stay silent in the face of these transgressions, we do so at the peril of civil society,” he told The Epoch Times.
Like Bilirakis, speakers at the April 23 event in Flushing urged the free world to take a clearer stand.
“People used to say that onlookers’ ‘selective blindness’ is in part why the evil can get their way,” Zhao Ruoxi, a former journalist from Tianjin who witnessed the arrests that led to the April 25 appeal, said in a speech at a rally following the April 23 parade.
“Maybe some people think ... ‘I haven’t persecuted Falun Gong, and therefore I’m not responsible.’ But your silence and not doing anything is condoning such abuses to happen. It’s a key reason that the persecution can go on unfettered to this day.”
Even after adherents have found refuge in the United States, they still fear for the safety of their loved ones in communist China.
In the face of the regime’s ongoing abuses, everyone needs to make a choice, He said.
“Will you choose to speak up or choose indifference?” she asked.
