Tel Aviv Remembers 12 Years of Suffering and Hope

TEL AVIV—11 year-old Qingqing doesn’t want to go to school anymore. It’s not that she doesn’t like to study, she does, but she is afraid. After a traumatic incident she experienced in school in 2008 her mother disappeared, and she has never seen her since.

Qingqing’s story was one of the many told during the Tel Aviv rally to mark 12 years of persecution against Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese regime.

One day in 2008, when Qingqing was nine, her teacher asked her to come with her to the office, where a few strangers waited. They asked her many questions about her mother, Hu Huifang, a teacher, who follows the spiritual practice of Falun Gong.

After the inquiry, those strangers asked Qingqing to sign her name and put her fingerprints on the notes they had taken, which she could not understand. She also couldn’t understand the terrifying consequences of what just happened.

Qing Qing’s mother took her to winter camp in Wuhan City, where a group of plainclothes officers arrested her mother while she was teaching a class. This was the last time Qing Qing saw her mother.

Only now does Qing Qing understand who those strangers were, and why they took notes so attentively. Those notes became so-called evidence that against Qing Qing mother during the trial.

This is one of the hundreds of maybe thousands of stories published in Clearwisdom.net, a websites that publishes information and testimonies about the persecution of Falun Gong in China.

While participants of the rally demonstrated the slow and meditative exercises of Falun Gong, others read one after another different stories about Falun Gong practitioners who were persecuted in China, based on testimonies published on the Falun Gong website Clearwisdom. Others of the about 80 participants held up banners calling for an end to the persecution, and some handed out leaflets and asked people to sign a petition to stop the persecution.

On the other side of the street, in the Chinese embassy building, the windows were closed, and the shutters shut. Once in a while a window would slightly open and a Chinese face would take a quick look, and disappear again in a while.

‘The largest nonviolent resistance in history’

"The largest and strongest dictatorship has gone against a group of good people", said Roy Bar Ilan, a spokesperson for the Israeli Falun Gong Information Center, "but what happened as a reaction was, to me, wonderful".

Bar Ilan told the Epoch Times that as a response to the persecution Falun Gong practitioners initiated a large scale nonviolent resistance to expose the persecution and stop it. "Hundreds of thousands in China are producing leaflets, information materials, DVDs, in their own homes or in underground material production sites.

"Around the world practitioners are holding various activities—they build websites, sophisticated tools to break through the Chinese internet blockade, books, movies, art exhibitions and so on—we see millions around the world taking this initiative and using many legal ways to reach the public and expose the persecution, in what can be called the largest nonviolent resistance of its kind in history", Bar Ilan says.

"Therefore, this anniversary is on one hand to remember those who were persecuted and the families that were torn apart, but on the other hand, it is a day of hope—it shows that even the strongest dictatorship in the world, with all of its means, can’t destroy something in the human spirit. When somebody really recognizes what’s good and sticks to it, this cannot be defeated".

"12 years after Jiang Zemin said that the [Falun Gong] will be eradicated in three months, the practice is thriving throughout the world", Bar Ilan says. "It means that humans and the human spirit have hope".