Falun Gong 8 Year Vigil Continues

LONDON—Sitting on the pavement in meditation as the sun sinks behind the Chinese Embassy, Gao Yudong’s peaceful face is lit by the neon glow of street- lamps, the sweep of passing headlights, and the warm flicker of candles as she joins a silent vigil marking 11 years of persecution in China.

Watching the shadow of the Chinese Embassy lengthen across the statue that stands in the middle of Portland Place in London is hardly new to Gao.

Today, she is joined by 50 or so others, but normally Gao is alone in the darkness, once a week taking a night “shift” in the 24-hour protest that has faced the embassy for over eight years.

Gao practises Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation discipline whose soaring popular- ity in China in the late 1990s attracted the attention of the communist regime and the then-Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin. When government surveys revealed an estimated 100 million people practised Falun Gong, Jiang Zemin set into motion a campaign of persecution that saw Falun Gong practitioners rounded up in their tens of thousands on July 20th, 1999, as a “crackdown” began on a scale not seen since the Great Cultural Revolution.

Gao works full-time as a finance officer, but every week spends three to four evenings opposite the Chi- nese Embassy. Once or twice a week, she spends the night there, goes home, takes a shower, and then heads out to work. She has been doing this since the daily protest at the Embassy became a 24-hour vigil in June 2002. Gao says she’s used to it now.

“At the beginning it was hard for me, and at work I felt sleepy, but now I am OK. I am awake, I feel alert, and my mind is clear, but when I get home I have to go to bed early.”

At weekends, Gao says she spends some time arranging the shifts opposite the embassy to ensure a 24-hour presence.

“Every weekend I try to work out the rota for the embassy. If I find I can’t cover some shift, I send an e-mail to other practitioners and they voluntarily offer help to cover the rota. This is the way we organise our vigil protest.”
She says that those who regularly volunteer to keep the vigil going are from all walks of life: students, university lecturers, research fellows, housewives, retirees.

In addition to ongoing protests outside Chinese embassies in many cities around the world, those who practise the spiritual discipline outside of China have continually fought for an end to the persecution through parades, protests, and rallies on key dates.

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