Bearing Witness to History: Practitioners Appeal on Tiananmen Square January 1, 2001

By a practitioner in Beijing

(Clearwisdom.net) The evil persecution reached its peak in the year 2001. Yet it was also in that time that safeguarding the Fa on Tiananmen Square reached the summit! The appeal on Tiananmen Square on December 31, 2000 and January 1, 2001 was of the largest scale since the persecution began. Here I will just describe part of what happened on January 1, 2001.

At around 7:40 am on January 1, 2001, voices of practitioners shouting, "Falun Dafa is good," and images of practitioners holding up Dafa banners could already be seen and heard on Tiananmen Square. It was a sacred and solemn sight. They were closely followed by brutal beatings and arrests of practitioners by the police. Some practitioners, even while their faces were covered with blood from the ruthless beatings, still shouted loudly, "Falun Dafa is good." Others, while being cramped into a police vehicle, did not forget to clarify the facts loudly through the window. One police car after another, they made several trips back and forth. When the cars were insufficient to hold so many practitioners, the police called in big buses. One bus after the other, they sent practitioners to a detention center at the Changping area.

In the detention center, about twenty to thirty practitioners were held in each of the big rooms. In all directions, we were surrounded by walls and barbed wires fences. Although Dafa practitioners came together from different places, we helped each other just like reunited family members. We shared our understandings of the Fa and improved together. At that time, no one knew how to send forth righteous thoughts since we hadn't learned the Fa-rectification formulas yet. Nevertheless, practitioners still shouted loudly many times, "The Fa rectifies the cosmos, restore our Teacher's reputation, restore Dafa's reputation." We could see from the window several buses arriving with more practitioners. Through the barbed wires, practitioners that were locked up in the rooms all clapped for the practitioners in the vans. After seeing this, practitioners under the surveillance of the police greeted us with Heshi. At that very moment, we were one body. Everyone was moved by the touching scene.

Afterwards, practitioners wrote poems from Hongyin on the walls using the pens that they had brought, and then everyone recited them together. Some practitioners still had small banners with them, so we hung them around the room. Another practitioner took out a large banner over a meter long that read, "Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance." We hung it right in the middle of the barbed wire wall. Because there was nothing to lift us to that height, we stood on other practitioners' shoulders and palms. It was under their support that we slowly tied the banner to the wire! It was such a sacred and dignified moment. Practitioners who participated will never forget the righteous thoughts and actions that we manifested that day.

October 17, 2003

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.cc/mh/articles/2003/10/19/59042.html

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