(Minghui.org) Greetings, Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!
I started practicing Falun Dafa in 1997 in the hopes of curing my serious illness. I soon regained good health. After reading Zhuan Falun for the first time, I thought it would be wonderful if everyone could treat others kindly as said in the book. As my understanding of the Fa principles deepened, I enlightened to what cultivation and becoming a true Dafa disciple mean.
After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched the persecution against Falun Dafa in 1999, I kept Master’s teachings and the sacred mission of Dafa disciples in mind and actively participated in local activities to validate the Fa. We cooperated well as one body in exposing the evil and saving sentient beings.
I took on the task of documenting persecution cases in our local area soon after the persecution of Falun Dafa started. I often went to investigate what happened and verify the cases. I organized and revised local reports every day, with a very clear thought in mind: I will follow Master’s teachings, focus on how to accurately report and expose the persecution, and keep up with the progress of Fa-rectification.
I asked my fellow practitioners to help review each report and provide feedback. I used storytelling in reporting the cases to help people better understand and keep reading. We printed the reports out for distribution after they were published on Minghui.org, and the feedback was quite good.
Sometimes, family members of the persecuted practitioners refused to cooperate with us for fear of being implicated. When this happened, we would look within, examine our own cultivation state, and keep clarifying the truth to those family members to awaken their conscience and inspire their courage.
Some family members were quite angry with us at the beginning and complained heavily. We listened quietly, comforted them and expressed our understanding of and support. We asked if they needed any help in their daily lives. In the process, we took opportunities to clarify the truth. Our kindness and sincerity paid off and many of them began to work with us of their own accord in rescuing their loved ones.
In the spring of 2020, a male practitioner was unlawfully arrested while clarifying the truth in public. His case was submitted to the local procuratorate. When we met with his son, he said a lot of unpleasant things against his father.
We didn’t defend his father, but tried to look at the situation from his perspective and comfort him. At the same time, we tried to guide him based on the Fa principles. In the end, he changed his attitude, saying his father is a good man. He agreed to hire a defense lawyer for his father and wrote a letter to the prosecutor in charge of his father’s case, urging him to drop the case.
In the process of rescuing fellow practitioners, we also came across some family members who were very supportive and righteous. The police in our city have been arresting practitioners in order to extort money from them since 2011. Those who couldn’t afford to pay or refused to pay would be sent to forced labor camps or sentenced to prison.
Within a few years, nearly 100 practitioners in our city fell victim to such persecution. Each had 10,000 yuan or 20,000 yuan, even up to 200,000 yuan, extorted from them. Two local police chiefs extorted more than 2 million yuan in total from local practitioners.
In the winter of 2016, three local practitioners were arrested. Family members of two of them had tens of thousands of yuan extorted from them in exchange for the release of their loved ones.
The third practitioner refused to cooperate and rejected the financial persecution. One day, her daughter came to see me, telling me about her mother’s situation. She said that she also benefited from Dafa and wouldn’t give any money to the police to feed their greed. She said that the police asked for 80,000 yuan at the beginning, then reduced the amount to 40,000 yuan. When her family still refused to pay, the police indicated that 20,000 yuan would do. Still, she refused to cooperate.
The go-between sent by the police said to her, “You feel sad about your mother, but you just would not pay even 10,000 yuan for her release.”
She told me that it was not about money. She just didn’t want to pay the police to encourage their wrongdoing.
“You did the right thing,” I said to her, “We shouldn’t cooperate with them. We can write to the police chief and kindly point it out what they are doing is wrong.” She agreed.
She then started to tell me how she benefited from Dafa and I helped her draft the letter.
“I’m the only daughter of my mother, who was very worried about me when I suffered thyroid tumors. She went around, trying to find a cure for me, and in the end she became very sick due to exhaustion and anxiety herself.”
“My mother was very fortunate to attend Master’s lectures in Dalian City, Liaoning Province. When Master told the attendees to think of an illness that they or a family member had, my mother thought of my illness, and my tumors vanished.”
“I was in my teens and I have been in good health since. When I grew up, I got married and gave birth to a son. My family was very happy. My mother’s illness also disappeared through practicing Falun Dafa,” she continued.
At the end, she said, “I could have died long ago had it not been for Falun Dafa, and my mother would have long ago lost her only daughter. Think about it, how can my mother not be grateful and speak up for Dafa when it’s persecuted? I believe you are kindhearted and I trust you can resonate with what my mother did.”
What she said in the end was quite moving. She signed the letter and mailed it to the police chief.
Thanks to the protection of Master and the righteous thoughts of local practitioners, a few days later, her mother was released, without paying a penny to the police.
In the early years of the persecution, many fellow practitioners in our local area were actively involved in activities to validate the Fa, and we cooperated very well as one body.
Master said,
“Exposing the wicked policemen and bad persons and publicizing their evil deeds is extremely effective at shocking and restraining those irrational, wicked people. At the same time, by clarifying the facts to the people on a local level it most directly exposes, and generates public awareness of, the wicked persecution. It is also a great way to save the people who have been poisoned and deceived by the lies.” (“Comment on a Student’s Article,” The Essentials of Diligent Progress III)
A month after, at the beginning of 2004, we distributed the first batch of leaflets to expose five persecution cases in our local area.
Local people responded strongly. We heard people talk loudly about the cases in barbershops and grocery stores, expressing their indignation against the evilness of the persecution. Those who knew the practitioners expressed sympathy for them.
A relative of one of the perpetrators was shocked to read the leaflets and quite surprised to see the accuracy of the information it listed about his family. “Falun Gong is really capable! How did they manage to get all this information?!”
We have continued to distribute truth-clarification materials to residential communities one by one, as well as villages in surrounding rural areas. We customize the contents for each region so that people know the persecution is right around them. We always spent extra effort to verify the cases to ensure accuracy.
Before distributing truth-clarification materials in each neighborhood, we plan things out carefully. The coordinator personally checks out each building, the total number of households living there and their general information; practitioners working at the material production site then printed out the materials in time. After practitioners were assigned specific households to take care of, they went there to check things out first and sent forth righteous thoughts to clean the environment. Such meticulous planning and preparation guaranteed our safety to a large extent and eliminated possible interference.
In 2006, two years after the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party was published, we began door-to-door distribution of the publication in both urban areas and surrounding villages, to make sure that no household was left out. In those years, fellow practitioners at our material production site worked very hard.
Since 2012, we began to distribute laminated “Perpetrators’ ID Cards.” The front design was similar to an ordinary ID card, with the the perpetrator’s photo and personal particulars. On the back, it was a summary of how the perpetrator persecuted Dafa disciples.
In addition to the urban areas and surrounding counties and rural areas, we also distributed the cards in large quantities near government office buildings, especially around the compound housing the Municipal Public Security Bureau, detention centers, police stations, the procuratorate and the courts. As the cards were laminated, we would leave them outdoors or in other prominent locations.
The local 610 Office director who actively arrested practitioners and extorted money from them resigned after seeing his “Perpetrator ID” all over the place. “It’s useless arresting Falun Gong people. They will still practice after they are released,” he said to his acquaintances.
In the last couple of years, the head of the Domestic Security Office ordered the arrests of dozens of practitioners and many were sentenced to prison.
When he led his subordinates to ransack a practitioner’s house, the practitioner’s family member took a photo of him. We then made a “Perpetrator ID” of him and widely distributed it. Now he is much more restrained.
A few years ago, we also made a truth-clarification video about the persecution in our area. After it was published on Minghui.org, we made copies of the video on CDs or flash drives for distribution.
Some people said after watching the video that they now believe that organ harvesting of Falun Dafa practitioners is true, whereas in the past, they had much doubt about it.
When an elderly male practitioner was handing out the CDs in a market, he shouted to the crowds with no fear, “Come and take a look, and see how this military hospital makes money!”
In 2008, a district court in our area planned to sentence a few Dafa disciples. I read on Minghui.org that a well-known human rights lawyer in Beijing defended Falun Gong practitioners in Qingdao City, Shandong Province.
I had a discussion with local practitioners to see if we could hire a lawyer to defend our local practitioners as well, although very few practitioners hired defense lawyers back then. We all agreed that we should and talked with the lawyer in Beijing on the phone. The lawyer then established a team and found two more lawyers for the practitioners. The legal fees were generously donated by local practitioners. We shared with the lawyers and made it very clear that they enter pleas of not-guilty on behalf of the practitioners.
The lawyers spent a week on the trip, including the travel time and the time spent in our city. All their travel expenses, as well as their board and lodging expenses were included in the legal fees. Each of them earned less than 10,000 yuan (approximately 1,395 USD) for their service, and the Beijing lawyer who organized the team earned even less. We were very impressed with their righteousness and sense of justice.
The coordinating lawyer also invited a well-known law professor, as his involvement would attract more attention from the legal sector in China. That was the first time this professor defended Falun Dafa practitioners, and he was impressed by our kindness and purity. Since then, he began to defend practitioners across China, which had quite an impact.
The hearing lasted four days. The well-founded defense was powerful and everyone in the courtroom listened quietly. Even the bailiffs gave a thumb-ups.
The 610 Office director and an agent from the District Political and Legal Affairs Committee also came. Dozens of local Dafa practitioners and family members attended the hearing. Outside, many fellow practitioners came to send forth righteous thoughts. It was in the middle of summer and the sun was scorching hot.
A practitioner’s cousin (non-practitioner) brought a few of his friends to attend the hearings, too. He was in court for three days. “The lawyers’ defense was excellent, and very plausible. The judges were speechless, and the prosecutors dropped their heads because they knew that their accusations were groundless,” he told people he knew, “The CCP is evil and unreasonable, and they never follow even their own laws.”
After the hearing, some lawyers were interviewed by overseas media and they appealed to the international community, “We hope that international human rights organizations and media will pay attention to this group of people. There are a large number of them, but they have been deprived of the most basic human rights. Falun Gong practitioners have been mistreated for nine years (1999-2008) already, which is far too long.”
Towards the end of 2008, a fellow practitioner was tortured to death by the inmates instigated by the guards in the local prison. Upon hearing the news, almost all fellow practitioners in our city took action and exposed the persecution by distributing leaflets, putting up posters, mailing letters and making phones calls.
“Letters from Falun Gong are all over the place!” a prosecutor said with a surprise.
A few days after the practitioner’s death, we hung up many truth-clarification banners along the road leading to the prison. We also tied many white flowers to the pine trees on both sides of the road to express our condolences to the deceased practitioner, as well as their unyielding resistance to the persecution.
When two brothers of the deceased practitioner handled the relevant affairs, they were very cold to us at the beginning and were quite angry when talking with us. We kindly clarified the truth to them. At the same time, we tried our best to look after them, such as helping arrange their accommodation, accompanying them to the prison, and to the procuratorate to seek justice. We also paid for a lawyer from Beijing to request a third-party autopsy. In the end, the two brothers learned the truth and knew that their brother died as a result of the persecution.
The evening before they left, I let go of my fear, and together with a few other practitioners, we invited the two brothers to my place. I played a DVD of a Shen Yun show for them. From watching the performance, the two brothers completely understood the evilness of the persecution and the truth about Falun Gong.
We prepared a nice farewell dinner for them. They were deeply touched. The elder brother said emotionally, “I feel like we are family!”
Over the next ten years, the prison asked this family to cremate the body of the fellow practitioner many times, and they even sent someone to the fellow practitioner’s hometown and asked the local police to put pressure on the family, but all their efforts failed and were met with strong rejection.
Thanks to the cooperation of the local practitioners, the evil in the local prison was very much deterred. Since then, there has been no other Dafadisciple persecuted to death in the local prison, and the severity of persecution has lessened. Local practitioners in our city also sent forth righteous thoughts in close vicinity of the prison for many years.
One day in the spring of 2018, a fellow practitioner went to a large printshop and saw many display boards slandering Dafa in production. The practitioner rushed to my home to let me know, so we went to check it out.
We learned that the boards were ordered by the Political and Legal Affairs Committee. About a hundred or so display boards had already been completed. We clarified the truth to the printshop manager and employees, explaining to them that making such boards would poison the minds of the people, and that they should not do such things to make money. At the beginning, the owner refused to listen and insulted us, but we did not give up on him and kept calling him. In the end, he changed his attitude and quit the CCP.
We wrote a letter to the secretary of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee. We kindly explained to him from the perspective of traditional culture that good and evil would receive their due rewards, and those who slander Dafa would suffer retribution. At the same time, we notified all the practitioners in our city to send forth righteous thoughts. In the end, none of the display boards was ever used, and no one knows what happened to them.
Over the years, practitioners in our local area have stepped forward to validate the Fa one after another, and many locals understood the facts as a result. Once a fellow practitioner from out of town came to our local area and clarified the truth to people on the street. After he talked with a few people, he learned that they already knew the truth about Dafa and had already quit the CCP. The practitioner was very impressed.
Reflecting on our journey over the past 23 years, I felt overwhelmed with emotion and deeply grateful to Master, who has protected us all along with immense compassion.
We have experienced the honor and glory of validating the Fa, as well as obstacles from our own attachments and gaps between us. Along with the elevation of Dafa disciples as one body through cultivation, the gaps between fellow practitioners in our area have mostly disappeared.
We will continue to follow Master’s teachings, look inward, and be more diligent in cultivation. I will continue to work closely with fellow practitioners and do well in validating the Fa and saving more sentient beings.
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