Bearing Witness to History: Group Exercise Practice on June 18th, 2000 in Daqing City, Heilongjiang Province

(Clearwisdom.net) I will never forget the scene of the group practice by Daqing practitioners on June 18^th, 2000. The group practice took place during a time when the Jiang regime was running rampant persecuting Falun Gong, and it proved once again that human beings cannot hope to destroy Dafa.

On the morning of June 18, 2000, I left home around 4:00AM for the plaza in front of the Daqing Petroleum Company. I arrived there at around 5:00AM, and already hundreds of practitioners had aligned themselves very neatly and were doing the exercises together. It was lightly raining, and those of us who came late quietly stood behind the other practitioners and joined the exercises.

Very shortly after, a couple of police vehicles brought several policemen, and they stood in front of us, watched our exercises and did not interfere with us yet. It rained harder and harder, and the sky became darker and darker.

After finishing the standing exercises, one female practitioner in the front row unfurled a banner that said "Falun Dafa Is Good." A group of police immediately rushed to take away the banner, but this practitioner held the banner very tightly and would not let go of it. At this point the police beat her severely, resulting in several broken bones. Another practitioner who came earlier told us that two other practitioners had opened up banners before this practitioner, but they had been taken away by the police already. We came over to protect our practitioners and the banners, and we took back the banner from the police while telling them that Falun Dafa was good, and that they cannot beat people. When I recall that moment, tears still stream from my eyes. The police were shocked by the practitioners' righteousness and backed off. At this point a couple of practitioners stepped out into the front row and opened up the banner again, and the rest of the practitioners had re-aligned themselves to continue to do the exercise.

The number of police was continuing to grow, and the police surrounded the practitioners. Some other plain-clothes police had approached the practitioners and were recording the scene with a camcorder. The police wanted to take action immediately, but we remained very calm. Because the police took away the stereo playing the exercise music, one elderly practitioner stood among the practitioners and gave the exercise instructions while everyone followed his voice to do the exercises neatly and calmly.

The police continued to surround us, but the number of practitioners continued to grow larger and larger, and the circle became bigger and bigger. Outside the circle, many of the practitioners' family members were present and they repeatedly asked their relatives to leave, but nobody left. Some family members forcefully dragged their relatives out of the circle, but they simply returned to the circle again. There were some kind-hearted police who asked the practitioners to leave, but nobody would leave. There were more than a thousand people in the plaza at that time.

In the center of the circle, practitioners started to recite Hongyin, Lunyu, and other excerpts from Teacher's works. The sound reverberated in the plaza, reaching up into the Heavens. It rained even harder, and everyone was soaked. At around 7:00AM, a police officer stood on the platform and said: "Do you all want to appeal for Falun Gong? Let's find a place to talk." Everyone believed him and around two hundred practitioners voluntarily went into police vehicles. The police took them to the auditorium of the local public security office. When they got there, the police officer had disappeared. The police took pictures and records of everyone there. In the end, almost all the practitioners were taken back by their local police stations and detained there. Most of them suffered brutal persecution and some of them were illegally sent to labor camps.

Thus ended the meeting between good and evil on June 18, 2000.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2003/12/9/62132.html

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