What Should We Do in the Face of the Persecution?

(Minghui.org) Recently a video went viral in China. The woman who posted the video on social media lives in the Hehua Street neighborhood in Liuyang City, Hunan Province. Her husband made a suggestion to the local branch of the Central Public Security Comprehensive Management Committee regarding pandemic control measures. The committee director became furious and led three assistants to the couple’s home on November 29, 2022. They beat the husband in front of his two young daughters. The girls were so terrified that they cried, but the director and his subordinates kept beating the man.

The man chose not to fight back. His wife, who was not home at the time of the beating, learned all the details from their home surveillance video. She became furious and posted the video online. To pacify the public anger, the local government disciplined the committee director and removed him from his position. His three subordinates were also fired.

The public felt that was not enough and is demanding to hold the director criminally responsible for breaking into a private home to beat that man.

This story made me think what we, Falun Dafa practitioners, should do in the face of the persecution. The communist regime has been persecuting Falun Dafa since July 1999. How we handle the situation of being persecuted will also determine the outcome.

After a local practitioner was sentenced, he was beaten by the inmates for not giving up Dafa. During his struggle to avoid getting hit, he banged into a guard by accident. He was accused of attacking the guard. He was treated even worse afterward.

No matter how hard he was beaten, he never filed complaints against the guards or the inmates for beating him. By the time he was released, he had become disabled as a result of the torture.

Compared to him, another practitioner handled the persecution quite differently. As she refused to wear the inmates’ uniform, the labor camp guards stole her clothes during her sleep. When she woke up in the morning, she had nothing to wear except her underwear.

Instead of compromising and wearing the inmate’s uniform, she attended the morning roll call in her underwear and told the crowd that she did so because the guards stole her clothes. The entire labor camp was in shock. The guards soon gave her clothes back and never persecuted her again during her remaining time at the notorious labor camp.

I noticed that after 23 years of persecution, evil is almost all cleared out, but we’ve become more and more silent ourselves in the face of the persecution.

During the “Zero-out” harassment campaign aimed to force every practitioner on the government’s blacklist to renounce their faith, a large number of our local practitioners were harassed or taken to the local detention center. But I rarely read any reports on Minghui.org about the details of the arrests and the names of practitioners being harassed. Only a dozen incidents were reported and with little information.

For example, two practitioners I’m very close with have been arrested many times before being taken to the detention center again during the zero-out campaign. They are still detained now. But I never saw any reports about them on Minghui.

With the extensive surveillance and facial recognition technology in China, I believe our names are all in the police’s system. I believe when practitioners stay silent after being persecuted, it’s not to protect their identities, but to avoid further retaliation by the police.

I have always reported my persecution to Minghui in time. Even when I was still in custody, I asked fellow practitioners who were released before me to help submit my information to Minghui. I didn’t know whether the exposure could stop the evil from persecuting me, but I knew this is what Master hopes to see from us.

Three days after one of my persecution reports was published by Minghui, our residential committee director called my daughter and asked about something not related to Falun Gong. I began to feel nervous and thought whether they saw the report.

Then Master’s Fa came to my mind.

“Then one day he seemed to suffer a stroke, unexpectedly. He fell down and couldn’t move, and had no sensation in his limbs. He was taken to a hospital for emergency medical care. But not long after, he was back on his feet. Had he really experienced a stroke, he never would have been back on his feet with control of his arms and legs again so quickly. Yet surprisingly, he blamed Falun Dafa for his mishap. It didn’t occur to him that people normally don’t recover from a stroke so quickly. He might have died right there in the street after the fall, had he not learned Falun Dafa, or he may have been paralyzed for the rest of his life, having had a real stroke.” (The Sixth Talk, Zhuan Falun)

I suddenly enlightened that I should keep a righteous mind and not pursue persecution myself.

I believe the reason that I wasn’t harassed in the “Zero-out” campaign was because my timely exposure of the persecution in the past. I feel that my dimension is crystal clear and I have a deeper understanding that Master is in charge of everything.

The woman mentioned in the beginning was brave enough to expose the beatings of her husband. As Falun Dafa disciples, what would happen to us and sentient beings in our world if we remain silent in the face of the persecution? If we could all bravely expose the persecution in time, maybe the situation will be different.

Above is my understanding at my limited level. I welcome fellow practitioners to point out anything inappropriate for me.

Editor’s note: This article only represents the author’s understanding in their current cultivation state meant for sharing among practitioners so that we can “Compare in studying, compare in cultivating.” (“Solid Cultivation,” Hong Yin)