Values Virtues

30 JULY 25 – AUGUst 7, 2014 Epoch timEs

Falun Gong practitioners continue to show kindness and unshaken will in the face of brutal persecutionBy Epoch Times Staff

Imagine if your parents were arrested and interrogated because you were exercising in a park. Imagine if your relatives were fired from their jobs because you believed in being a good person. Imagine if you, yourself, were abducted, imprisoned, and tortured because of your beliefs.

For practitioners of Falun Gong in China, many of them have experienced at least one of the above scenarios. Many have fled their country, with stories of escape fit for Hollywood. And many have come to other countries including Singapore, looking for a way to make their stories heard.

You’ve probably seen these prac-titioners before. They typically organise vigils or other aware-ness-raising activities on historic dates like the recent July 20—the day the persecution became offi-cial policy. Their goal: to remind the world about the human rights abuses in China, and ask the in-ternational community to help demand the persecution end.

Personal StoriesJane Dai, a Falun Gong prac-

titioner from China, went to the United States with her daughter in 2007. Her husband was abducted by Chinese authorities in 2001 for practising Falun Gong. He was tortured to death in prison that same year.

“Millions of practitioners have been persecuted for 15 years,” Dai said. “My family is just one of them.”

“My daughter is 14 now,” she said. “The last time she saw her father was when she was nine months old.”

Another Falun Gong practition-er is Crystal Chen. She is 42, but can easily pass for 30. In her home in Guangzhou, China, she was abducted by police for practising Falun Gong and spent three years in a re-education through labour camp.

While in the labour camp, Chen was regularly tortured. One day the guards nearly tortured her to death. They sent her to a hospital outside the camp, and from there she was able to escape. She fled to Thailand where she became a refugee under the United Nations. She was resettled in the United States in 2009.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning article, journalist Ian Johnson gave a vivid account of such torture. Chen Zixiu, a retired factory worker, was shocked by labour camp guards with cattle prods. She was then ordered to “run barefoot in the snow. Two days of torture had left her legs bruised and her short black hair matted with pus and blood...She crawled outside, vomited, and collapse. She never regained consciousness”. Chen died on 21 February 2000.

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Commemorating Fifteen Years of Courage

A young woman at a candlelight vigil to remember the thou-sands of Falun Gong practitioners that were persecuted to death in China. Events like these tell one story—of unshaken will amid suf-fering, and of remaining kind and calmly telling the world the truth.