Agence France Presse: Falun Gong followers build 'Great Wall of Courage' to draw attention to cause

July 23, 2004 Friday

Hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners traveled to Washington for a rally Friday to raise awareness about their movement and protest repression in China, which outlawed the group in 1999.

Organizers had expected some 3,000 people to turn out to build a two-mile (three-kilometer) human "Great Wall of Courage" stretching from the National World War II Memorial to the Chinese embassy.

Sporting lemon-yellow T-shirts with blue letters reading "Falun Dafa is Good" and touting the group's central tenets of "Truthfulness, Benevolence, Forbearance," men, women and children stood along a wide avenue, while others sat on straw mats doing exercises, meditating or reading.

In front of the memorial, the practitioners stood shoulder to shoulder, holding banners in Chinese and English with slogans like "Stop Genocide in China!"

"Falun Gong practitioners are being tortured, brutalized and killed in China's slave labor camps and brainwashing centers. Genocide is happening right now in China," organizers said in a statement.

Lynn Yang drove from Windsor, Canada, to take part in the rally. Originally from China's Shangdong province, she said she started practicing Falun Gong in 2000 to alleviate debilitating joint pain.

With her eight-year-old son Yu Ming by her side, she said the demonstrators were hoping to draw attention to the "persecution" she said was being carried out against Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese government.

The group claims at least 1,600 Falun Gong followers have been killed, 20,000 sent to re-education camps and 100,000 jailed.

Al Whitted, an environmental educator from Hillsborough, North Carolina, who has been practicing Falun Gong for five and a half years, said former Chinese president Jiang Zemin felt "threatened or jealous of the popularity" of the movement, which combines meditation with Buddhist-inspired teachings.

He said people from some 30 different countries, including Japan and Australia, were on hand for Friday's event.

Organizers said the demonstration was carried out to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Chinese government's "persecution" of the group, beginning in July 1999, when China outlawed Falun Gong [...].