Falun Gong practitioners participate in a parade to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the April 25th peaceful appeal in Beijing, in Flushing, N.Y., on April 23, 2022. (Zhang Jingyi/The Epoch Times)
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NEW YORK—Fears of police harassment and arrests have plagued 23-year-old Zhang Minghui ever since she turned one, the year Chinese police officers beat her father with wooden planks until his feet swelled up and turned a dark purple color, and burned his arm with a lighter.
When she was not yet two years old, police locked her and her grandfather in an unofficial detention facility for a week. Provided with no food or drinks, they had lived on whatever morsels secreted in by a kind-hearted friend of her grandfather.
The detention in that dark room with only 2 small windows made up part of the fragmented memories of her childhood. When she was little, she had wondered whether it was all a bad dream.
If only it was. Three months after she fled China for America in 2019, police again arrested her father and later sentenced him to four years in prison. Zhang’s 11-member family, like millions of Chinese households, were targeted by authorities for nothing other than being adherents of the spiritual belief Falun Gong, and striving to live by its three principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Falun Gong practitioner Zhang Zhao in an undated photo, who was sentenced to four years in prison in 2019. (Courtesy of Zhang Minghui)
Zhang was among 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners who participated in a parade in New York City’s Flushing district on April 23, marking 23 years since a historic appeal by adherents in Beijing on April 25, 1999.
The appeal was the largest peaceful protest in modern China since the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square. And like the 1989 protests, it would precede a ferocious clampdown at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, a regime that brooks no dissent.
Hostility
Falun Gong was wildly popular in China in the 1990s. By word of mouth, it drew a following of 70 million to 100 million over its health benefits and moral teachings. Zhang’s parents had met at a Falun Gong event during this period, and later got married. Chinese officials for years openly celebrated the practice’s health benefits.
Those were the years that Zhang never experienced before the atheist regime made an abrupt U-turn.
In April 1999, in its first act of open hostility toward the faith group, officials in the northern Chinese city Tianjin deployed police to beat and arrest dozens of adherents.
The city’s authorities told the adherents they had to petition China’s capital Beijing to get the detainees released. As the word spread, over 10,000 practitioners from around the country eventually made their way to Beijing.
While Zhang was a mere infant at the time, others at remembrance events in Flushing and elsewhere were old enough to remember the appeal they had participated in more than two decades ago.
Standing Up for What’s Right
Fan Minghua, a 62-year-old living in Virginia, was one of them.
In 1999, Fan was a merchant from Tianjin in her late 30s. Her participation in the April 25 appeal would have shocked the cut-throat businesswoman she was just a few years earlier.
In her hometown Yangcun township, Fan was once known to be a “smart” person. She had sold everything from clothing to fish and coal, and made money off conning her neighbors. She lied about the length of the pants she sold, manipulated the scale to make her products appear heavier, and diluted sesame oil, a staple in Chinese cooking, with the cheaper vegetable oil to profit from the difference.
“I thought nothing about morals at the time. Money was king,” Fan, who participated in a similar remembrance event in Washington on April 23, told The Epoch Times.
Reading the books of Falun Gong in 1997, she said, brought about a “night and day shift” in her mindset. She stopped all her unscrupulous schemes after learning what it meant to be truly a good person. Sometimes, she gave away her products for free to customers who were struggling financially.
Falun Gong practitioner Fan Minghua participate in an event to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the April 25th peaceful appeal in Beijing, in Washington, on April 23, 2022. (Lynn Lin/The Epoch Times)
Standing on Fuyou Street near the Zhongnanhai compound, the Chinese Communist Party’s headquarters in Beijing, Fan felt immensely proud of herself for being able to stand up for the values she believed in.
Her feeling was shared by Li Huilai, a Beijing local who was only a few years older. Li had slipped away from her house early that morning when her husband and son were still deep asleep. Like Fan, Li was driven to take a stand.
“If they can arrest people in Tianjin today, they can do the same to us tomorrow,” Li, a 66-year-old New York City resident who participated in the Flushing parade, told The Epoch Times.
A Peaceful Appeal
On the tree-lined street, adherents quietly formed rows stretching for over a mile, some doing the practice’s meditative exercises or reading Falun Gong books they brought. Others, like Fan, picked up plastic bottles and other trash from the ground. Many recalled seeing cars slowly passing through the street, and people with cameras filming from the inside.
Fan recalled practitioners standing on the sidewalk and leaving ample room for pedestrians to the curb. The quietness of Falun Gong practitioners formed a stark contrast to the blaring police cars on the street. According to Fan, not a single practitioner made noise or behaved disorderly. “It was magnificent.”
Falun Gong practitioners gathered around Zhongnanhai to silently, peacefully appeal for fair treatment on April 25, 1999. (Courtesy of Minghui.org)
By evening, all those who came for the appeal had left after learning that the detained Tianjin practitioners had regained freedom and being assured of their right to practice freely without fear.
During events held at Tiananmen Square a few blocks away, flocks of janitors would normally be employed to clean up several tons of trash at the site, Li said. But after a day of demonstration by 10,000 people, not even cigarette butts from the police were seen on the ground, she added.
Passing by a policeman who was recording from a camera, Li called his attention to this observation. “Please take a look, where do you find such good people like this?” The police said not a word.
State Terror
Beijing’s assurances to the appealing practitioners turned out to be the calm preceding a storm.
On July 20 of the same year, a bloody suppression would descend and ring terror across China. Li was fired from her company a few months later for going to Beijing to appeal against the persecution. Her husband was so fearful of state retaliation that he announced his intention to divorce her in a local newspaper, although he later withdrew the divorce application.
Fan, who was a volunteer organizer at a Falun Gong exercise site in her area, found herself a key target of the persecution from the outset.
In the wee hours of July 20, police barged into her house after scaling the walls and arrested her. At the detention center, police forced her to watch propaganda videos and sign a renunciation document severing ties with her faith.
Decades earlier, Fan had been shaken by the home ransacking experience when she was still a child during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, when the communist red guards—young zealots who violently enforced the radical doctrines of communist leader Mao Zedong—took away all her family’s valuables, including the door. Traumatized by such experiences of state-sponsored terror, Fan ended up caving in to the police.
She would never forget the moment she was coerced to renounce her faith. “It felt like my entire body became paralyzed.”
Zhang Minghui and her mother while her father was in detention, in Shandong Province, China, in 2000. (Courtesy of Zhang Minghui)
One Family’s Toll
It was under such an atmosphere that Zhang grew up.
Ten out of 11 members of Zhang’s family practice Falun Gong, and they have lost count of the arrests, house raids, and police harassment suffered over the past two decades.
The very day the persecution campaign was unleashed, Zhang’s grandmother Wang Zhen was taken away by police in a van in Weifang, in the central part of eastern China’s Shandong province, and detained for roughly two weeks.
Wang Zhen meditates in an undated photo. (Courtesy of Zhang Minghui)
The same day, Zhang’s father was in Beijing making an appeal for Falun Gong. He was subjected to a brutal beating at the hands of police officers, who punched, kicked, and used wooden clubs and planks to assault him. The beatings left him bloodied with blisters on his head, and bruises all over his body, according to a 2017 account his wife submitted to Minghui, a U.S.-based clearinghouse that collects first-hand information on the persecution from China.
While detained, her father’s feet ended up swelling so much that he couldn’t fit into his shoes. Festers appeared in his arms where the police burned him with a lighter. It would be more than two months before the swelling disappeared.
During their family reunion in the 2000 Chinese New Year, Zhang’s parents and grandparents would undergo another round of arrest, one of many that would happen to them over the following two decades. As a result, Zhang was largely looked after by her aunt.
That month of grueling torture caused Zhang’s father to lose half of his weight—from more than 200 pounds to about 100. He was handed a three-year jail term shortly after.
The long-running persecution reduced the Zhangs from a well-to-do family to one struggling to keep going. Each time the police visited, they took away all the cash and assets they could, including two vehicles with a collective value of 50,000 yuan ($7,622), about four times the dispensable annual income for Shandong residents at the time.
Falun Gong practitioners gather to support the withdrawal of 390 million people from the Chinese Communist Party and its associate groups, in Brooklyn, New York, on Feb. 27, 2022. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)
Persistence
Zhang, before coming to the United States, had hoped to reunite with her family here and begin a college degree in fine arts, but the arrest and jailing of her father in 2019 cut that dream short.
“We have no desire to live an extravagant life, but even to live a most basic life is now difficult,” she told The Epoch Times.
Authorities haven’t allowed family visits to the prison since COVID-19 broke out. The relatives haven’t been able to make video calls to Zhang’s father since December and know little about how he is doing.
Despite being safe and free in America, Zhang is gripped by worry for her family in China. The psychological pressure, she said, almost feels “no different than being in a prison.”
But looking back, Zhang believes her family’s 22 years of persistence has been worth it. “I wouldn’t have been born if not because of Dafa,” she said, referring to another name for Falun Gong, Falun Dafa.
The question of whether to persist in their faith is a question many adherents in China have faced.
Li, who has a slight limp due to a fall from the fourth floor of a building while fleeing from police, was repeatedly asked by her former coworkers, neighborhood committee officers, interrogators, and officials from her company to go through the formalities of renouncing her faith.
Falun Gong practitioner Li Huilai participates in a parade to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the April 25th peaceful appeal in Beijing, in Flushing, N.Y., on April 23, 2022. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)
“You can have everything, your salary, your job; nothing will be affected if you just practice secretly at home,” they argued.
While the proposition at times seemed alluring to Li, she had resolved to stick with her convictions. Even while detained for her beliefs, one thought stayed with her.
“Someone has to stand up for justice,” she said.
Terri Wu contributed to this report.