Whenever We Cooperate with Each Other as a Whole, We Will Have a Great Impact (Part I)

By a Falun Gong practitioner in Heilongjiang Province, China

(Clearwisdom.net) It has been almost six years since Jiang Zemin started to openly persecute Falun Gong practitioners on July 20, 1999. During the past five years, we have met so many demonic tribulations. In China, we no longer have any open, safe environment for Falun Gong practitioners to study the Fa or practice the exercises in groups. Consequently, we no longer have a lot of opportunities to exchange our understandings on the Fa and our cultivation experiences. Without a group cultivation environment, many of us have become very complacent with our own cultivation practice. We failed to recognize the fact that the old forces have arranged and created many obstacles to form barriers between practitioners. Teacher's Fa-rectification has progressed to the final stage. We should have become active in having group Fa study on the regular basis and holding local cultivation experience sharing conferences a long time ago.

Next please allow me to share a few things we have done in our area where we cooperated with each other to reveal the local crimes against Falun Gong practitioners and where we cooperated with each other to rescue our fellow practitioners. Please kindly point out anything inappropriate.

Three large factories are the life of our local economy. Consequently, the majority of the local population resides in one area. Most people are the family members of factory workers. There is a 610 Office in the factory I work for. Around the New Year of 2004, Chairman Liu of this 610 Office sent his staff members to Falun Gong practitioners' homes, and threatened to fire them from their jobs or suspend their salaries if they should refuse to renounce Falun Gong by writing the Three Statements. Many fellow practitioners working in the same factory gave in to their threats and renounced Falun Gong in writing. One day Liu led his staff members again to a Falun Gong practitioner's home and tried to force him to renounce Falun Gong. Despite the tremendous level of pressure, he did not give in or write the Three Statements. Later when we learned about the harassment, we called on him and encouraged him to reinforce his righteous thoughts. It was when Teacher published his comment on an article titled, "Expose the Evil Happening Locally to the Local People." Teacher's comment was a great inspiration to us. Several fellow practitioners and I started to discuss how we would expose to the local people the local crimes against Falun Gong practitioners, starting with Chairman Liu from the 610 Office in our factory.

First, we asked for the help of fellow practitioners who were more familiar with Liu's crimes against Falun Gong practitioners. After they compiled the raw materials, together we started writing a truth-clarification article that revealed Liu's crimes and sent it to Minghui.org. Next, we had fellow practitioners give this article to Liu's superiors and workers at the factory, along with a letter advising Liu to stop his foolishness and an article titled, "A Letter to the Local People."

Our purpose was to kindly advise Liu to stop persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, instead of pushing him to the opposite side. We hoped to use the power of compassion to dissolve all the evil elements that had been manipulating him. If Liu should insist on continuing his crimes, we would send these truth-clarification materials to him directly.

After we passed out these materials to Liu's superiors and factory workers, Liu continued to persecute local practitioners. Therefore, we started to widely distribute in our area the article exposing his crimes in detail after we got the edited version back from the editor of Minghui.org. Soon Liu stopped harassing Falun Gong practitioners at their homes. In fact, he avoided eye contact when he ran into Falun Gong practitioners on the street. Our action effectively exposed Liu's evil crimes and helped many local residents understand the truth about Falun Gong and the persecution against Falun Gong practitioners.

About half a year later, one day Liu suddenly tried to arrest a Falun Gong practitioner who was working at his sales booth on the street. His family members were also at the scene. Because of his family members' righteous thoughts and actions, Liu failed to make the arrest as he had planned. On the following day, we learned of Liu's attempt. We immediately relayed the news to Minghui.org and mailed Liu our new truth-clarification article revealing his new crimes. Meanwhile, we searched inward for any attachment that might have caused Liu to continue his crimes. First, we had become off guard and had developed an attachment to zealotry after we successfully exposed and stopped Liu's crimes. Second, many fellow practitioners were not thinking of saving him when they distributed the truth-clarification materials revealing Liu's crimes. Fellow practitioners who had been subjected to his threats in the past held a personal grudge against him. Now that we have found our attachments, Liu stopped his crimes and disappeared. To this day, he has not tried to harass any Falun Gong practitioners. However, we have learned a valuable lesson from our past mistakes, so we send truth-clarification materials to him in the mail every once in a while.

A fellow practitioner was arrested in 2002 and illegally sentenced to three years in a forced labor camp. Although he had already lost the ability to walk after being subjected to horrible torture at the detention center, the police insisted on sending him to the forced labor camp. They had a policeman carry this practitioner on his back to transfer him to the forced labor camp, but the labor camp refused to take him because he did not pass the health examination. Eventually the forced labor camp took him in anyway because a Section Head in our city's Second Detention Center bribed the authorities at the camp. After being kept in the forced labor camp's intensive torture unit, he was transferred to the camp's hospital. Since the day he was transferred to the forced labor camp, I repeatedly asked the head of the camp to grant him medical bail. At the time I didn't have any concept of working with fellow practitioners as a group to rescue him. Instead, I repeatedly visited the head of the camp on my own to ask for medical bail. At the end of 2003, he was transferred from the hospital back to the fifth squadron of the forced labor camp. Mr. Zhao, the Captain of the fifth squadron, immediately started to torture him. He tortured him with forced feeding of highly concentrated salt-water. (This causes intense abdominal pain. Many practitioners have died from this because of the resulting dehydration.) In addition, although he could not walk, the Captain had two men drag him around the courtyard until the heels of his new shoes were torn.

Later he went on a hunger strike as a non-violent means to protest the persecution. On the 15^th day of his hunger strike, I had the opportunity to meet him briefly. While no one was paying attention, he recited one of Teacher's poems to me.

"A Great Enlightened Being does not fear hardship
Having forged an adamantine will
And with no attachment to living or dying
He walks his path of Fa-rectification openly and nobly"

("Righteous Thoughts and Righteous Actions" from Hongyin II)

I nodded my head firmly at him. After returning from the forced labor camp, I discussed his situation with several fellow practitioners. All of them suggested that we expose the persecution against him on Minghui.org in order to rescue him from the forced labor camp.

On New Year's Eve of 2004, he was on the brink of death, so the forced labor camp sent him to the city's Second Hospital for emergency treatment. I stayed with him at the hospital for two days. During the two days, I witnessed fellow practitioners outside of China repeatedly calling the policemen watching him at the hospital and clarifying the truth about Falun Gong to them. Because of fellow practitioner's continuous calls and his deteriorating health, the forced labor camp finally agreed to put him on medical bail.

We thought this was it, so we started to expect his release. We waited for several months, but the forced labor camp still did not release him. On April 27, a fellow practitioner incarcerated with him in the same cell was released and told us the situation. While he was at the hospital, the forced labor camp temporarily gave in to the tremendous level of pressure from fellow practitioners inside and outside of China who kept writing and calling them. They lied to him about putting him on medical bail so that we would stop calling them. After going on a hunger strike for 100 days, he had started eating again, but he had lost all of his memory and had become completely paralyzed. He had to completely rely on other people's care. It was imperative that we rescue him from the camp right away.

We sat down and discussed what went wrong and analyzed why we failed to rescue him several months ago. First of all, I failed to regard this issue from the Fa. I was sentimentally attached to this fellow practitioner. I carried human thoughts when I tried to rescue him and failed to regard the rescue action from the Fa. Second, we had placed too much hope on everyday people, and we were strongly attached to the mentality of waiting and dependence. Third, we failed to have more fellow practitioners involved in the rescue action, and we failed to form one body of practitioners.

After we developed a better understanding of the rescue action from the Fa, we started our rescue action again. First, we collected the telephone numbers of the forced labor bureau on the provincial and city levels, their addresses, and the names of the management. Next, we exposed their information on Minghui.org. Then we mailed them truth-clarification materials and wrote them letters to kindly advise them to stop persecuting our fellow practitioner. A practitioner and I went to the forced labor camp and demanded his immediate release. We had asked other practitioners in advance to send forth righteous thoughts for us to reinforce our field of righteous thoughts.

When we met Mr. Zhao, the captain of the fifth squadron, he was very angry. He pointed at a pile of letters on the desk and shouted, "Look at these letters! You Falun Gong practitioners wrote me and accused me of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners! When did I ever persecute Falun Gong practitioners?!" I replied in a peaceful voice, "I don't wish to see you persecuting Falun Gong practitioners either. I am thinking of your own good when I advise you to stop persecuting Falun Gong practitioners." The two of us cooperated with each other while we clarified the truth to him. Finally Zhao said, "You may leave now. I will try to put him on medical bail."

The first step of our rescue action was a success. Three days later Zhao called and said he would ask a forensic medical doctor to evaluate the practitioner's health. Soon the doctor gave his evaluation. "He is not ill," he said. "He is not qualified for medical bail." We did not feel frustrated, nor did we give up. We went to the province and the city's forced labor bureaus to clarify the truth to them and to demand his release. We clarified the truth to every staff member we had the opportunity to meet at the bureaus. We manifested our righteous thoughts and righteous actions. Everyone at the bureaus told me, "You still need to talk to the forced labor camp authorities. If they send us the application for his medical bail, we will surely approve it." We repeatedly negotiated with the labor camp authorities. Eventually they agreed to have another health evaluation, but the forensic doctor still said he was not ill.

We calmed down and carefully reviewed what we had done. What had we done wrong? A fellow practitioner said, "Perhaps the practitioner we are trying to rescue has lost his righteous thoughts?" Another fellow practitioner disagreed. He said, "Regardless of the mentality of the imprisoned practitioner, we must never allow the evil to persecute him. We should try to rescue him unconditionally. Since we are rescuing him, it all depends on our hearts." Most importantly, we must rectify our goal. So far we have settled on the goal of getting him out on medical bail. That is an everyday person's solution. We are innocent and none of us should be imprisoned for practicing Falun Gong. We should not be satisfied with a medical bail. We should ask for his unconditional release instead.

At the end of August, we heard a rumor that he had passed away in the forced labor camp. All of us were shocked, but at the same time we found the rumor to be unbelievable. We sent forth righteous thoughts to deny all of the old forces' arrangements. We tried to find out his current situation through many different channels of information, and we quickly found that it was just a smokescreen. He was secretly transferred to another place. The news urged us to expedite our rescue action.

On September 14, 2004, the forced labor camp told us to pick him up. After four-and-a- half months of joint rescue action, we finally rescued him out of the camp and saved him from eight months of imprisonment. He did well. Although he lost his memory, he did not renounce Falun Gong during the illegal imprisonment.

After we successfully rescued him, we did not let down our guard. Instead, we kept sending forth righteous thoughts for him and will continue until he fully recovers. We have read many cases published on Minghui.org where many fellow practitioners died after they were released from forced labor camps. Consequently, we realized that we shouldn't consider the matter finished after he was released. We should try to help him advance quickly in the Fa. We should encourage him to study the Fa more and to increase the frequency of his sending forth righteous thoughts. This fellow practitioner is still on the road to recovery.

(To be continued...)

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2005/4/6/98493.html

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