Martor al unui sfert de secol de tactici represive: PCC nu este ceea ce pare

Well this was in 2001, so this was a long time ago. A lot of people understand this terminology CCP today and we learn a lot of the evils of the Chinese Communist Party. Back in 2001 the international community is trying to welcome China as a type of trading partner and so it was very hard for us to speak out on behalf of the people being tortured and killed in China and I felt deeply compelled to do so. The practice of Falun Gong is absolutely free and I got a lot of health benefits from it. My mother started practicing it. She got a lot of health benefits from it and to know that people inside China were not only stopped but the rest of the citizenry is lied to and being told something that can benefit their health and life for free is something that's nefarious or is harming society. A blatant lie. I felt compelled to help speak out for the people in China, not just for the Falun Gong practitioners but for the people inside China who were being lied to. We kind of joked a little bit, we quibbled about what it would be like to see a Chinese person in a white face. We started to look into it and investigate the possibility of if we could even get visas. Sure enough we did. One of our efforts to educate Chinese people is to be at tourist sites so that when they leave China they're actually able to interact with people who are allowed to get free information. Whether it be tourist sites or Chinatowns, we'll have various places where people can run into us, get flyers, ask us questions and talk to us about this. In Flushing, New York we had a booth where we were providing literature for people and we were being targeted by like mobs of people. It escalated to a physical confrontation where I was trying to put my body in the way of people, protect some people and getting hit myself. All I see is a bunch of people but you can tell when somebody is using effort. So you can see somebody trying to get angry, trying to get other people angry and you can see other people just kind of standing around watching. Later we found out that the Consul General in New York admitted in a telephone call, it was recorded and then printed I believe by your sister company Epoch Times, the entire transcript of the call where he even bragged about paying agents to go to that incident to help create the conflict here in New York. When the persecution of Falun Gong first started, I was in no way shape or form, not only not politically active, not politically aware. I was a very young man, I didn't understand the ways of the world or how anything worked and it was unfortunately I learned about the world through the persecution and advocating for people in China and interacting with media and government officials and learning about that. I felt that if as a people we couldn't defend truth, compassion and forbearance, where do we go from there? If each one of us is truly improving ourselves from the inside and that people were being lied to about something so good, it just shook me to the deepest core of my being. I'm reading about these stories of Minghui's parents and many others coming out of China and they're being faced with this question and aren't I being faced with the same question? And so it's very challenging to make a decision to venture into a totalitarian regime on principle and I was scared but I couldn't get away from the answers that were coming up inside me when I was asking myself these bigger questions. After wrestling with these decisions, I did make the decision to go but then entering the airport in Toronto to catch the flight, that reality started to visit me a lot more and I was very unsettled all the way up into the day before going. I was terrified and I got more terrified when you land in China and you're walking through the airport and there's these signs, if you possess a firearm, death penalty, if you possess drugs, death penalty and it's in English. They're telling me and there's nothing stopping them from putting that in my suitcase, right? You know, worse fabrications have happened that we've all seen over the past years and so it was hard but luckily I was able to meet up with my friend who I had decided to go with and he helped to keep my feet on the ground. I want to expand on that because I think we actually have a clip from when you were there and I guess your friend was the one recording how we got this footage. Let's play that clip and then you can tell us about that moment. So that was your friend recording? Yes. And I think there was a tiny little, we can hear you, that's you in the clip shouting in Chinese and then you're getting pushed towards those security vans. Bring us back to that moment. What was it like in Tiananmen, the Chinese police were closing in, you know? Well there was one part that you guys didn't show that I particularly deeply appreciate is when I actually ran out of the vans because in order to do that when I broke out the vans there was a policeman standing right there and I had to fake left and go right and totally undress the guy. I'm running as fast as I can and I was very athletic. I played hockey and so they were catching me but I couldn't open that banner there. It was in my pants like I had pulled it out but as I was running I was running too fast and was flopping and so I said well you came here you know to do this so I stopped running opened the banner and shouted and the second I stopped running I started shouting and then my face was rushing to the ground because they had just swung my and I was very lucky that I caught my face because it would have smashed into the pavement. They were on me very very quick but hollering out like that I'm screaming as loud as I can and I almost sound a little bit angry but inside my heart I feel like a child. I feel like I just got the greatest toy in the world and it's Christmas and I'm so happy because I see all the Chinese people's faces and they're hearing and seeing a white person saying Falun Dafa is good and for them to see that in other countries I'm wearing the flag of another country we all are that this is around the world that they're being lied to that for a moment they had to stop and say wait a second the Communist Party has lied to us in the past are they doing it again and to be able to to know that that we were able to I was able to shout that to them and see their faces it was I just had this unbelievable joy it's like these these days weeks and months of like pressure and fear it just kind of blew open and yeah I'll never forget it I'm a health and fitness coach I continually have to guide people through a lot of health and fitness challenges through their life every single day we don't we don't proselytize in Falun Gong it's not part of our teachings to convince people to practice Falun Gong I don't do that with my clients either but my own personal experience practicing it and raising children and just having the regular challenges of life to have something which is empowering my mind my body and soul simultaneously harmonizing them together giving me that strength to face the challenges of the day is extraordinarily rewarding and and for and for me existentially still after 20 years I still think about this larger for civilization yes it is good if we can protect a practice that promotes virtues in society so yeah that's my that's my message