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Bearing Witness to History: Experiences of Validating Dafa in Beijing

November 23, 2003 |  

11/16/2003

(Clearwisdom.net) In September1999, I went to Beijing to validate Dafa. I sat on the cement stairs of Tiananmen Square and began reciting Hong Yin in a very low voice. A person tapped me on the shoulder. When I looked up I saw a public security officer. He said, "You must be a Falun Gong practitioner," and then took me to the police station and detained me there. Lots of practitioners were in the police station. One of the practitioners, around thirty years old, was from Tianjin City. She styled her hair in two long braids and had a very healthy rosy skin color. She wore plain clothes, was not very good at talking and carried a baby boy less than a year old. The baby boy's body was strong and he had beautiful round eyes. In September, the weather in Beijing gets cold, but nonetheless this practitioner and her son wore very thin clothes. Through a conversation with her I had found out the following. When the persecution started, she knew practitioners needed to step out to validate Dafa, but her family is very poor. She did not have money to buy a train ticket and her child was very young, but her heart was very concerned for Dafa. Later on she received several hints from Teacher indicating that she would be able to arrive in Beijing within three days. Therefore, she was determined to bring her child with her even without having any money. So on the way to Beijing they picked up and ate discarded food in order to not starve. Sometimes they even had to try finding food from garbage cans and when the baby ran out of clothes to wear, she would look through garbage piles to find clothes for the baby. They slept wherever they could, and by the third day, they arrived in Beijing. When she got to this point of telling her story, everyone had tears in their eyes and everyone was holding the child in turns, saying that this child is extremely remarkable and magnificent. He was born in the Fa-rectification period to validate Dafa, and at such a very young age, what he and his mother did together was really brave and magnificent.

In November 2000, eight other practitioners and I went to Beijing to validate Dafa. At around 9 a.m. we arrived at Tiananmen Square. We saw uniformed and plainclothes police stationed everywhere, line after line of them armed with guns, even on Qianmen Street near the Square. When I arrived at the right front corner of the Heroes Memorial Monument, I saw a group of foreign tourists; I then stood at their side and unfurled a banner. The other practitioners standing next to me also unfurled their banners. My banner's message was written vertically and it read, "Greetings to Master" and "Dafa is good." It was a windy day and two people were needed to hold the banner. My son was standing next to me, and we both held this one banner. All at once the group of practitioners I was with opened six banners in total. At the moment I opened the banner, I felt like I was standing as tall as the heavens and the world was so calm, but very quickly many police, plain clothes police and soldiers came over, arrested us, and put us into a police vehicle. We were detained in the nearby police station, where there were already a lot of practitioners detained. There was a young, slim practitioner from Yunyang, Hubei province. His head was bleeding due to the beatings by the police from Tiananmen Square. There was another young lady who had come from the northern part of the country and had taken a train to Beijing. As soon as she had arrived in Beijing, she went directly to the square. As she walked to the center of the square, she very quickly took off her coat, exposing her shirt made of white cloth. Messages such as "Falun Dafa is good," "Falun Dafa is a righteous Fa," and "Justice needs to be served for Dafa and Teacher" could be seen on the front, back, and both sleeves on her shirt. Not long after she left, the police caught up with her, pushed her down to the ground and attempted to tear her shirt apart, but she was tightly protecting her shirt. Five to six policemen spent a considerable amount of time trying to tear her shirt apart, but only could manage to tear apart one of her sleeves. Then they a spent a lot more time and effort trying to tear apart the other sleeve. Finally, they managed to tear her shirt into pieces. At last they took her to the police station. Outside of the jail cell was a man around 40 years old, and I could tell that he was not a practitioner because he was smoking cigarettes. Later on, I asked him why he was arrested, and he told me it was because he had taken pictures of us holding the banners. The police took his camera away and interrogated him. They asked what his name was, and where he works and lives, and then destroyed the negatives of his film before letting him go.

The above are my personal experiences, as well as the things that I have witnessed in Beijing.