Bearing Witness To History: Falun Gong Banners Show Up All Over Tiananmen Square

(Clearwisdom.net)

In December 2000, Beijing's Tiananmen Square was tightly guarded with police personnel and patrol cars/vans. There were also many plainclothes police. They were intently watching the tourists who were coming and going. They frequently grabbed any tourist and questioned if he/she was a practitioner and would only let the person go if he/she cursed Falun Gong.

An elderly man raised a yellow banner and loudly called out, "Falun Dafa is good! Falun Dafa is a righteous Way!" All of a sudden, a group of policemen madly and frantically rushed over to the old man, pushed him to the ground and hit and kicked him. Then they threw the helpless old man into a police van. At that moment, a young mother with her child the age of 6 or 7 held up a similar banner with the words of "Falun Dafa is good" and also called out the same thing with all her might. Not far away a young man loudly voiced the same sentence. Then one after another, from the bottom of their hearts, Falun Gong practitioners loudly echoed to the sky from the Square with "Falun Dafa is good." Other tourists were touched by the practitioners' righteousness and shocked by the police's unreasonable and frantic beating and arrest of the innocent practitioners. Some tourists whispered amongst themselves, "Is this "the Peoples' Police"? It's too horrible and terrible..."

The so-called "public security's" Tiananmen Police Station, supposedly a place to punish criminals, was now used by the police to detain the innocent practitioners appealing for Falun Gong. The practitioners were first put behind bars in a big room. Then the police tried to divide and transfer them to other detention centers out of town but not one practitioner budged. The police got upset and hurried to get the batons out. At this time the younger male practitioners volunteered to stand in the front, while letting the elders, women, and children move towards the back of the room. The police, waving their batons walked towards the practitioners and began beating them anywhere and everywhere. All the practitioners shouted to the police not to beat people! But the unspeakable police brutality continued. One man who was hit by the batons started to bleed all over his body. The blood stained his shirt, yet his hands still tightly held onto the prison bars to protect the others behind him.

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