Despite the benign, positive nature of Falun Dafa, and despite the fact that the Chinese government once strongly supported it, Falun Dafa's popularity ultimately proved too much for a troubled Chinese Communist Party. In early 1999 an official report showed that over 70 million Chinese citizens, including members of the Communist Party, government officials, scholars, members of the military and police, practiced Falun Dafa. Falun Dafa became a concern for certain members of the Chinese government. The Party disliked the fact that the number of Falun Dafa practitioners exceeded the party's own membership. There were also self-interested politicians and scientists who sought to advance their careers by turning the government against Falun Dafa.

The central government started its criticism of Falun Gong on June 17, 1996. Guangming Daily, the official voice of the State Council, published an article criticizing Falun Gong as an anti-science and superstitious practice, and labeled its practitioners as stupid people.

On July 24, 1996, the Chinese News Publishing Office issued a "Notice to immediately confiscate five books including China Falun Gong" nationwide. Following that, other newspapers and magazines joined the campaign against Falun Gong.

Some official departments started investigating Falun Gong at the beginning of 1997. The Public Security Ministry deployed a nationwide investigation against Falun Gong using the excuse of illegal religious activities. Finding nothing to prosecute, related official departments then formed a team to monitor Falun Gong.

July 21, 1998, an official department issued a "Notice to conduct investigations into Falun Gong", insisting that Mr. Li was spreading an unorthodox cult and that Falun Gong key members were conducting criminal activities. The notice also ordered all local public security and political protection departments to investigate the internal activities of these people and to look for evidence of any crimes within Falun Gong. The public security departments had accused Falun Gong of criminal conduct without any evidence.

After this document was issued, many local branches of the Public Security Bureau (PSB) announced that Falun Gong activities were considered illegal assemblies. They dispersed group practices, confiscated the private property of practitioners, and detained, arrested, beat, and verbally abused Falun Gong practitioners. In some cases, practitioners were fined, and all Falun Dafa-related books were banned. Practitioners tried many times to appeal to the government through normal channels, but were not successful.

In Mainland China there is only one official voice, which has published articles that criticized, cursed, and slandered Falun Gong during the past three years. However, no articles defending Falun Gong were allowed to be published.

In April 1999, an article that viciously slandered Falun Gong was published in Science Magazine printed by Tianjin Education College. Some practitioners used the government-approved approach of appealing to the related organizations to correct the false accusations. On April 18, they went to Tianjin Education College and other related offices to report the true situation of Falun Gong.

It was totally unexpected when the Tianjin PSB showed up. They refused to communicate with practitioners appropriately. Instead, they sent people to beat some of the practitioners. On April 23, they started to disperse and detain people. Triggered by this, some practitioners gathered at the Office of Appeals in Tianjin City government just to appeal and present the facts. However, the appeal was not well received. On the contrary, about 40 more practitioners were arrested.

Thus, all channels for appealing and reporting the truth to the local government were blocked. Practitioners had to appeal to the level above the Tianjin City government, which is Beijing.

According to some witnesses, on the eve of April 24, some practitioners working in the public security department submitted their name cards to Zhongnanhai, asking for a chance to report the situation. There was no response. The next day, some 10,000 practitioners peacefully gathered outside Zhongnanhai. Most of them came from Tianjin and other cities outside of Beijing, some with luggage, some with meditation pads. The assembly "was apparently set off by an incident in Tianjin, where practitioners staged a protest last week after a local magazine ran an article maligning Buddhist Law [Falun Gong] and the police used force to drive away followers," reported the New York Times.

The entire event was peaceful and characterized by orderliness. "Unlike student protesters who noisily thronged the streets of Beijing with colorful banners and offensive slogans 10 year ago, Sunday's demonstrators drew no attention to themselves and attracted no notice until there were suddenly many thousand of them sitting quietly in one of the most politically sensitive locations in the nation," reported the New York Times.

A small group of practitioners were allowed to meet with high-level government officials. The practitioners asked for the release of innocent people, for a legitimate and free exercising environment, and to ease the pressure that had been put on Falun Gong practitioners for a long time. The gathering was orderly and lawful. After the meeting, practitioners cleaned up the street, picked up the litter and cigarette butts left by the onlookers and the police, and quietly went home.

Although it appeared that the Zhongnanhai incident had ended quietly, the catastrophe facing Falun Dafa practitioners was about to begin. Within the Central Committee of the Chinese government, the group that had always favored persecuting Falun Dafa found their justification from the Zhongnanhai incident. They started to deploy tactics designed to destroy Falun Dafa.

Although following this incident, the government publicly denied any intention of curtailing the practice, their words proved to be empty and deceptive. The announcement coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the government was determined not to have a repetition of history. However, this was really the beginning of the suppression of Falun Dafa, a suppression on a scale that is unprecedented in contemporary history.

On July 22, 1999, Falun Dafa was officially outlawed. Just as the Great Cultural Revolution had wrought havoc throughout China in the 1960's, the crackdown on Falun Dafa turned the country upside down.

Suddenly, an entire nation began to be torn at the seams by its own leaders.

In the middle of night all over China, authorities arrested hundreds of Falun Dafa contact people and ransacked their home. Millions of legally published Falun Dafa books and tapes were confiscated, shredded and burned. Tens of thousands of Falun Dafa practitioners were arrested and beaten. A massive smear campaign was launched to demonize Falun Dafa using made-up stories and fabricated facts. The government blocked all communication with the outside world, and all Falun Dafa Web sites. Telephones were tapped. E-mail was monitored and foreign reporters were not allowed to contact Falun Dafa practitioners.

According to New York Times, "the authorities have detained tens of thousands of people and are spewing a deafening barrage of anti-Falun Gong publicity each day." Just one week later the Chinese government issued an arrest warrant through Interpol for Mr. Li Hongzhi, a permanent resident of the United States. Interpol soon rejected Beijing's request, saying the approach had political motives.

The Chinese government launched a far-reaching campaign of misinformation about Falun Dafa. State-run media flooded the printing presses and airwaves with fabrications about Mr. Li Hongzhi and Falun Dafa in attempts to sway and mislead their readers and audiences. According to Danny Schechter, the Chinese government "launched a media war, deploying its state-owned newspapers, radio, and TV stations as if they were instruments in an official orchestra. National newscasts were lengthened by a half-hour to disseminate daily diatribes... In all of these accounts, Falun Gong's point of view was never published. The views of its supporters, defenders, and practitioners were, quite simply, missing from these government-sponsored accounts."

The crackdown escalated. The Chinese national legislature rushed to pass an anti-cult law to retroactively criminalize Falun Gong. "China's communist leaders often insist that theirs is, in fact, a system of laws," Washington Post reported. "In the past week, events have proven the leaders absolutely right. When they found themselves without the laws they needed to vigorously persecute a peaceful meditation society [Falun Gong], the Party simply ordered up some new laws. Now these will be applied - retroactively, of course - in show trials that could lead to execution for the group's leaders. This is what the regime calls 'smashing them rigorously in accordance with the law.'"

During the past 16 months, tens of thousands of practitioners have been arrested; well over 5,000 practitioners have been detained and sent to labor camps without trials; hundreds have been sentenced to prison terms of up to 18 years; many have been detained in mental hospitals and given toxic injections; and at least 142 practitioners have died due to maltreatment while in police custody.

What practitioners of Falun Dafa have undergone is unconscionable. Yet, in the face of extreme mistreatment and under unbearable pressure to renounce their beliefs, Falun Dafa practitioners endured peacefully and non-violently and kept appealing to the government.

These practitioners were ordinary citizens like us. Yet these practitioners were nevertheless extraordinary. They believed firmly that the principle, Truthfulness, Benevolence, and Forbearance, cannot be touched, weighed, or measured. Openly and nobly, they also showed the world how this principle is lived.