Interview: A Western Practitioner's Appeal in China

The decision to go to Beijing in January 2002 with the intention of appealing for Falun Gong was one which Falun Gong practitioner Earl made with little thought. Talking with a Clearharmony reporter in his West London home, the forty year-old TV cameraman describes how he was inspired by a previous appeal of thirty-five western Falun Gong practitioners a few months earlier. “Another practitioner phoned me up one day, and said, “You know those other westerners who went to Tiananmen Square to appeal, what did you think of that? What do you think about going and doing the same thing?” I said, almost straight away, “Yes, let’s do it, let’s go.” So that was it really. I bought some plane tickets online. Then some more people from across Europe were going to come too. The intention was to stand and appeal on Tiananmen Square.”

In their appeal in October, the now famous party of thirty-five westerners had successfully held up a large banner on Tiananmen Square, which read, “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance.” Tiananmen Square has been a place where tens of thousands of Chinese Falun Gong practitioners have gone since the beginning of the persecution to make constitutional and legal appeals. For their efforts, they are often arrested, beaten and detained, or sent to labour camps where they endure unimaginable torture and suffering. For those Westerners who have found courage to go and appeal in the last few years, the risks are comparatively less, and they have not suffered more than being beaten up and a few days detention at most. But for Chinese people who go to appeal, as well as arrest and severe beatings, they risk much more. They risk joining the tens of thousands of practitioners who face the daily torture and beatings in labour camps and detention centres where they are held for years. They also face the very real possibility that they may lose their lives in a campaign of genocide which already has 960 documented death cases.

In the case of Earl’s group, they never even made it to Tiananmen Square. After a couple of days sight-seeing in the capital, police came knocking at their hotel-room door. The arrival of Beijing police in their hotel room was a surprise. Although they had expected to encounter the police when they carried out their intended appeal, they had not expected them to come and take them from their hotel room. Despite the unexpected presence of the policemen in the hotel room, Earl describes feeling little fear, “There was a slight apprehension, but that was about the size of it. They said, “Are you Falun Gong?” We didn’t really answer that at first, just avoided it, until one of us said “Yes, actually, we are Falun Gong practitioners.” I didn’t feel angry, I didn’t feel anything. I just felt curious as to what was coming up. We were just kind of living from one moment to the next without knowing what was going to happen.”

The Beijing police refused to contact the British Embassy, instead saying that the Brits were not being arrested and that therefore this was unnecessary. However, they were detained and then taken out to several waiting vans. As they were taken out on the street, being transferred to the vans, the group took their chance to appeal to the public and began to call out, in Chinese, “Falun Dafa Hao” (“Falun Gong is good”) to the people around them. Earl points out that although these were the only Chinese words he knew, it conveyed what he wanted to say. “Firstly, at that point anyone listening would know that we were western Falun Gong practitioners, secondly they would know we were being arrested, and thirdly they could hear the message that Falun Gong is a good thing.”

The journey took a long time, taking them to some unknown location in Beijing. During the journey, their captors largely just ignored them, telling them to be quiet. On arrival at their location, their luggage was searched; they were searched, and put through metal detectors and other security measures. “Like airport security, but times ten!” according to Earl. Considering the peaceful nature of Falun Gong, there was absolutely no need for such measures; Earl felt this was simply a tactic to intimidate them - “It’s quite obvious so it doesn’t really affect you.”

“Then they wanted to divide us up, but we didn’t want that. We had gone as a group of four and didn’t want to be split up. But we went our separate ways. I think different people had a different experience. For me it was just constant questioning the whole night long. They seemed to take it in turns. One person would question for an hour, and then go off, and then another, then the first would return. Just a constant barrage of the same questions. Questions like "Who sent you?" "Who organised this?" "Who are your contacts in China?" They found it difficult to believe that we had gone of our own accord and that we had paid for our own trips from our own hard-earned money because we wanted to let the Chinese people know the truth.

This experience is consistent with the general nature of the persecution, which has at its core a massive campaign of slander against Falun Gong. Falun Gong has been tainted in China as a political faction which is opposed to the Communist Party. This has enabled the instigators of the persecution to turn the Chinese Communist Party against Falun Gong and to instigate hatred of Falun Gong amongst the Chinese people, who hold the concept of the nation and the government as one thing.

Earl’s impression is that they held this apparent perception of Falun Gong because they had been told to slant it in this way - “They wanted to give it this angle: “Oh look at these people, they’ve been told to come over here and disrupt our country, they’ve been sent by these people, this organisation…” - so they had something to point at, to try and make it a political issue. But it isn’t! It’s a human rights thing and it's a matter of the persecution of human goodness and morality!”

Through his conversations with them, Earl felt that many of the policemen were really themselves victims of the smear campaign against Falun Gong and knew little about its real nature and the enormously positive role Falun Gong played in Chinese society before the persecution. The reaction of a more senior policeman surprised Earl when he showed him some pictures, taken before the persecution, of stadiums filled with thousands of people practising the Falun Gong exercises in China. “He looked at one of these pictures and said, “Where is this?” I was thinking – “Hang on a minute, what do you mean, where is this? This is taken in China. I don’t get it. We’ve got pictures of people practising in China, and you’re asking me where it is?” I remember him trying to keep these pictures. Another policeman wanted to throw them away, and he kept trying to keep them, so he could have a look at them.”

To Earl, at the time in his late thirties, the majority of the policemen, who were about twenty years old, seemed like children. “For the most part, I don’t think they had a clue, they were just carrying out their orders.” The practitioners who were detained in Beijing felt it was really a shame that these Chinese people had been so blatantly deceived by Jiang Zemin and his regime.

Earl was kept up all night with the questioning, but surprisingly felt little fatigue. “I didn’t feel tired at all. Not a bit. I felt completely refreshed, and I felt strong the whole night. I remember in the morning one of the officers who had left at about 1am or something, returned at about 8am - and he looked terrible! His hair was all over the place, his eyes were all blood-shot, and he was really grumpy! I said to him, quite ordinarily in a chirpy way, “Morning! Did you sleep well?”, and he said, “No I didn’t sleep well. No I didn’t!” One of the younger policemen asked me, “How come you are so vigorous?” I said “I think it’s because I practise Falun Gong.” There was a silence. It was a bit of a special moment.”

The group were deported later that day. Although they were not able to achieve their intended effect of raising awareness amongst the Chinese people, on their return to England, their ordeal was reported by both local and national media. So ironically, although they never made their appeal in China, they were able to raise awareness of the persecution and appeal to many more people at home in the UK.

Reflecting on his time in Beijing before their illegal arrest, Earl describes how he found the Chinese people to be warm and friendly. “We couldn’t speak or read Chinese. But, wherever we were, within a couple of seconds, someone who spoke English would jump up and say, “How can I help you? What do you need? What can I do for you?”, offer you some dumplings or a taste of their food. They were charming. I felt so sad that so many Chinese peole are suffering in the perssecution of Falun Gong practitioners” Knowing that it had been embraced by a hundred million people and how hundreds would have practised together in the mornings in most parks before the persecution, Falun Gong was conspicuous by its absence... “Because it was within the time of the persecution, there was no sign of Falun Gong. It felt like they were just trying to completely eradicate it, so there was no memory of it. But in fact I think it is deeply engrained in the Chinese psyche now.”