On New Years Day afternoon, 2001, I went to Tiananmen Square with some fellow practitioners. In the square, I saw that just as a practitioner had opened a banner, seven or eight plainclothes policemen rushed at him, beat him up, then dragged him to a vehicle and threw him into it. Later, I was arrested and put into a police van, too.

A cop had tried to sell us a pocket version of Hong Ying (Grand Poem/translator) for RMB 500 Yuan RMB (an average monthly salary for a white-collar worker). He also forced a female practitioner to use the only RMB 50 Yuan left in her bag to buy a banner that they had just taken from our hands. If we had not given it up, they would have found and confiscated a recent article by Teacher Li Hongzhi that we carried, a far more precious item. The police had nothing but money on their minds.

At about 5 PM, we were taken to an alley behind Tiananmen police station. The male practitioners were kept outside a shed there, while the female practitioners stood under it. A middle-aged woman who looked like a journalist was present to interview someone and take video clips. As she passed by us, a fellow practitioner calmly told her, "It is all right if you want to talk to me, but no video taping, or I will not cooperate. I don't want to risk the chance that slanderous statements against Falun Dafa might be fabricated from it."

Together, we recited "Lunyu" and "Self-conscious in Heart". While reciting "Lunyu", I paid special attention to a young military policeman, who was standing in front of me, by staring at his eyes. At first, he could not bear to maintain eye contact with our righteous and noble gaze. As we kept reciting, and I saw that he soon burst into tears. People always seem to have a sensible side, an aspect of which has the potential for understanding. He probably cried after his sensible side realized that so many Dafa practitioners were willing to sacrifice family, business, and everything they had, in order to take a stand, and with their very lives, awaken the dormant compassion within people.. After awhile, the military policemen left, as did the policemen. But they stood by the gate and did not allow us to go to the restroom.

At 10 PM, two large buses transferred us to a detention center in Changping County, where all the Dafa practitioners were detained. Next morning, all the practitioners went on a hunger strike and began chanting things like "Falun Dafa is good," " Falun Dafa is the orthodox way," "Restore Falun Dafa's clean reputation," "Restore our teacher's clean reputation," "We refuse to eat dinner while imprisoned," "Let us go!" and "We want to go home". The sound was reverberating through the whole detention center.

At 9 AM, we were transferred to another police station in Tong Zhou City. I met an elderly female practitioner there, who was from Hunan Province. I saw that it was difficult for her to move because she had a stiff back. She couldn't sit down and could only stand still. She told me that she had been badly beaten by plainclothes policemen at Tiananmen Square. A cop had violently kicked her in the abdomen. She could barely stand the pain that ensued from just trying to move around. She had stayed awake all night in the cell and had not eaten anything for a whole day. At that moment, she said, she felt a Falun rotating warmly in the location of the injury. Suddenly, it seemed much better. She remarked that, had she not practiced Dafa, she would probably have lost her life at Tiananmen Square, because she was so elderly. But she said that she didn't harbor any hate for the plainclothes policeman who had beat her. She thought they were really to be pitied for ignoring Dafa, for beating the good people as if they were the bad ones, and because they had been knocking on the door of the same hell themselves.

A practitioner told me that the policeman who had interrogated him mentioned having a family of Dafa practitioners, all of whom were confined in a detention center, and that he had also been reading Zhuan Falun, and was gaining a deep understanding of Dafa. He knew we were good people but was under extreme pressure from the faction loyal to Jiang Zemin. So he had to choke back his emotion and maintain an attitude of passive resistance. I confirmed this from other policemen who had interrogated me.

Another practitioner had gone to Tiananmen Square to renew her monthly traffic card. When the policemen questioned her whether she was a practitioner of Falun Gong, she replied that she was on the way to renew her monthly traffic card. They arrested her too. The policemen in the station thought it was amusing but annoying, so they let her family take her home. Anyone passing through Tiananmen Square would be examined and questioned without any justifiable reason. The citizen's legal rights have been violated so badly, yet the communist authorities still claim their human rights record is the best in history.

Typically, the policemen would extort a confession by torture, using all kinds of methods. They coupled threats with promises to coax you to reveal your name and address. Once they had that information, they would let the local deputy's office in Beijing or the local police come to take you back. According to some practitioners' experience, when one gets sent back like this, they would be charged a fine of from RMB several thousand Yuan, up to as much as ten times that amount. Those heavy fines are ridiculously unaffordable for some families, even if they used their entire family fortune. Some people would be sent to labor camps and others would be sentenced to jail. If there were too many people who demonstrated publicly, the local administration chief and local policemen could be personally fired or laid off. The devious purpose behind these actions is to control the local people through manipulation, by pitting them against one another. For that reason, many practitioners refuse to give their names and addresses. The practitioners who refuse to tell their names would have a police mug shot taken, so that the local police stations may be able to identify them.

One practitioner realized the pictures should not be taken, and he asked the policeman who was going to take his picture, "Did we commit any crime by going to Tiananmen Square? What kind of crime is that?"

The policeman replied, "No".

"Since we didn't commit any crime, then we are not criminals. So why should we have our pictures taken like common criminals?"

The policeman had nothing to say, but he didn't take his picture. The cops were shaken by the practitioners' righteous and noble spirit of willingly risking their lives to protect the Fa. We were eventually released, one at a time.

01/07/2001