On the evening of April 24 more than two decades ago, Shao Changyong, a Falun Gong practitioner, went to his daily gathering with fellow adherents as usual.
His group had about 10 members, and one woman offered her home in Beijing as a meeting place. They usually read from a book on Falun Gong, a spiritual practice involving meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Shao still remembers that evening.
“Let’s not study the book tonight. I have some news,” their host said, he recalled.
She told the group about the idea of going to Zhongnanhai, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) headquarters in the heart of Beijing, to demand the release of dozens of fellow practitioners who had been detained in the megacity Tianjin.
In the months and years leading up to April 24, 1999, Falun Gong adherents had faced growing restrictions on their freedoms. For about a week, adherents had peacefully protested a slanderous article published by Tianjin University’s School of Education. The city responded by dispatching anti-riot forces on April 24 and arresting more than 40 practitioners.
Before the Tianjin incident, state-owned television and newspapers had run content vilifying the faith, which by 1999 had an estimated 70 million to 100 million adherents in China.
Tianjin, about 85 miles from Beijing, is another city directly governed by central authorities. So, the natural next step was to bring the matter to the CCP’s central bodies in the capital.
Shao said his first reaction was to speak to the CCP central committee to call for the Tianjin practitioners’ release.
But once he returned home and began to prepare to petition the next day, the pressure started building.
Shao, who was 28 at the time, was an armed police officer who taught calculus at the Beijing Command Academy of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), the CCP’s paramilitary wing. He knew the armed police force was supposed to be loyal to the Party, and visiting Zhongnanhai as a petitioner could mean losing his job.
As a career military member and a graduate of the Engineering University of the People’s Armed Police, losing his job would mean the end of his career and his family’s livelihood.
Shao had a vague thought in his mind that the next day would be a turning point in his life. He thought that the consequences of his choice to petition could occur as early as the next workday: He might be pressed to the floor as soon as he returned to his job at the academy.
Setting aside the fear, he took a taxi to Zhongnanhai and arrived nearby around 5 a.m. on April 25.
When he crossed the street to get to his destination, a policeman was there to persuade Falun Gong practitioners not to continue. Shao said police knew what was happening, as some practitioners were already outside Zhongnanhai.
The officer told people that they were “making a serious mistake.” When several responded that China’s constitution guaranteed freedom of belief, they were scoffed at.
“What is law?” the officer said, as Shao recalled. “I’m the law.”
Shao knew the officer was telling the truth. From his professional knowledge, he could see plainclothes police officers among the crowd. Some even looked familiar to him.
At about 7 a.m., he went into a nearby alleyway for breakfast. When he finished eating, he heard a commotion among the crowd. His first reaction was, “Could this be a repeat of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre?”
After all, Tiananmen Square, where college students asking for greater freedoms were massacred by the CCP military a decade earlier, was only about a 10-minute drive away.
Instead, he saw then-Premier Zhu Rongji greeting Falun Gong practitioners.
Shao recalled that a practitioner standing next to him was from northeastern China. That man said his only pursuit was to be able to freely practice his belief; he didn’t mind a meager life.
Being surrounded by fellow adherents calmed Shao. More than 10,000 lined up outside the compound that day. The atmosphere, he recalled, was surprisingly tranquil. His mind became clear as the fear dissipated.
Later in the day, Zhu met a group of Falun Gong delegates and assured them of his support. The crowd of Falun Gong practitioners then dispersed. Shao got home at about 8 p.m. He had to work the next day.
Unlike what he'd imagined, Shao wasn’t pressed to the floor when he returned to work the following Monday. Instead, the academy collected the names of officers who practiced Falun Gong and who had joined the April 25 appeal. Then, several days later, the academy organized an all-hands meeting for a lecture by a professor of philosophy, who told them that the CCP central committee had decided to label Falun Gong as a heretical organization.
Three months later, the CCP launched a nationwide campaign to eradicate the practice, overnight on July 20, 1999.
The persecution continues to this day.
The View From America
He Bin, a software engineer and a Falun Gong practitioner, was a 31-year-old graduate student at the University of Maryland, majoring in telecommunications at the time of the 1999 appeal.Back then, there was no email list or website to find out about Falun Gong-related news; He learned about the appeal during a weekly gathering with fellow practitioners, when they usually read the main text of the practice, “Zhuan Falun.”
He remembered that all were relieved that the petition was resolved peacefully.
When the CCP launched its persecution three months later, he was taken by surprise. Like other adherents, he then began his journey of “truth clarification”—a term used by Falun Gong practitioners that means dispelling falsehoods about the practice disseminated by the CCP’s propaganda machine.
Clarifying the truth to Chinese people hasn’t been easy throughout the years, he said, because money is valued much more than freedom in modern Chinese society.
But after COVID-19 hit, especially this year, he noticed that his efforts had appeared to become easier, since recent events had triggered an awakening in China.
Speaking at a rally outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington this week, He recalled that back in 1999, petitioners of various backgrounds would go to Beijing to appeal over monetary issues such as lost retirement benefits, land disputes, or being forced to leave their homes.
“However, the appeal of Falun Gong practitioners was for freedom of belief. It’s for people’s spiritual needs—a taboo in Chinese society,“ he said. “Doing that required even more courage.”
In a society ruled by the CCP, any petitions are usually met with retaliation. Considering the severe consequences, people would only resort to petitioning the CCP when they had hit rock bottom and had nothing to lose. In a society where generations were brought up under communist education, people who put their comfortable lives at risk by seeking freedom could easily be considered lunatics.
However, that changed with the pandemic, and because of the CCP’s draconian lockdown policies that saw hundreds of millions of citizens sealed inside their homes, on and off, for almost two years.
Then, in November 2022, a fire in a high-rise building in the capital of China’s western Xinjiang region, where some residents had lived under lockdown for more than 100 days, took the lives of about a dozen residents.
That became the spark that ignited nationwide protests.
It was a bold display of defiance by the general populace not seen since the Tiananmen protests three decades earlier.
Through his friends and family in China, He learned about the devastating effects of the CCP’s draconian lockdowns: China had truly become a society devoid of freedoms. In addition to the absence of freedom of speech and belief, which had always been the case in communist China, people were now no longer able to live their normal lives or move freely.
For He, the CCP’s heightened repression of the populace during the pandemic retroactively underscored the importance of the appeal in 1999.
He hails the 10,000 adherents who went to Zhongnanhai as pioneers who stood up for what they believed in.
“Not many could take that step to go for a national-level petition for freedom of belief,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that many Falun Gong practitioners he knew in China decided not to go.
“It was a ‘no-brainer’ for those who went there, but it was not so straightforward for many others. Doing that in China takes tremendous courage and faith.
“The petition seemed to have failed because nationwide persecution was launched months later, but we tried.
“Falun Gong practitioners took the step when there was an opportunity for a fundamental direction change for Chinese society.”
Unfortunately, the CCP chose persecution.
‘A Highlight of My Life’
Between 1999 and 2015, Shao lost his job and marriage, and suffered for two years in a labor camp as a result of the persecution. He managed to escape from China and arrive in the United States in 2015.He doesn’t regret joining the 1999 appeal.
“It is a highlight of my life,” Shao told The Epoch Times. “I’m honored to have joined the event. April 25, 1999, is a day I’m most proud of myself.”
The April 25 appeal was “unprecedented” because “it was the first-ever peaceful action taken by Chinese civilians from all walks of life to seek freedom of expression, association, and conscience—these are rights articulated in China’s constitution,” said Zhang Erping, a spokesperson for Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa.
“Decades later, in the face of the CCP’s brutal persecution, Falun Dafa practitioners are still appealing in a peaceful manner for these rights,” he told The Epoch Times.
“The courageous action is now widely supported and praised by many Chinese people because they are now recognizing that [the April 25 demonstration] actually defended the basic human right of every Chinese citizen and, above all, defended the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance—the fundamental values of humanity.”
“I think it is something that China watchers and the Falun Gong community itself need to memorialize and celebrate ... to reduce, if you like, the message of that to something iconic,” he said.
“Every society that succeeds has a saga of its society, a saga of heroism, of resistance, of nobility. And this canon should be one of the great symbols which permeates the Chinese people at home and abroad and should also inspire supporters of the Chinese people in their resistance.
“I think to do that, 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.”
