Anne's Story: I Grew to Realize Falun Gong, Tiananmen Massacres Were Real

Editor's Note: Read Anne's first blog post .

In 1997, I would perhaps laugh at the suggestion that I would become a dissendent when I began to try a meditation practice called Falun Gong. That year I just arrived in the United States from China for graduate school. One day I got mad at some American friend when he mentioned to me the "Tiananmen Square Massacre." I told him, "It was because your government is anti-China and your media are lying." Whatever I knew about Tiananmen till then was from the Chinese government’s controlled media, or the textbooks which were also censored and controlled.

I vividly remember a picture on the state-run TV: the burnt bodies of army soldiers. The TV anchor said the army was there to protect the citizens, and the rebellious students killed the soldiers and set them on fire. When I took the high school and college entrance exams, there were questions related to Tiananmen. I ended up going to the best schools in my area and, of course, I knew the "right” answers (which were the only answers I knew anyway).

My American friend tried to convince me what really happened and who was lying. He did not really succeed till two years later, after the persecution of Falun Gong started. That was the first time in my life that I saw with my own eyes that a government can kill innocent people, and then turn around and lie to everybody else.

I am from Shandong province. Falun Gong was very popular in my hometown at that time, as a traditional type of qigong practice. It is a Buddha school spiritual practice with five sets of gentle meditation exercises. After the persecution began, the Chinese state-run TV/radio/newspaper started day-in and day-out campaigns, fabricating stories to demonize Falun Gong. A friend of mine was tortured to death in a labor camp not far away from my parent's home, simply because he refused to sign a paper from the government saying that he would stop practicing Falun Gong. He was only 33, and left behind his wife and daughter. Yet, when I called up friends in my hometown regarding his death, virtually no one would dare discuss this topic as a result of the ferocious Cultural Revolution style propaganda campaign. Some were even surprised to learn that people outside of China could still practice Falun Gong freely.

Only by then, it finally began to occur to me that my American friend could be right about what really happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989. I suddenly realized that it must have been the same tactic used back then.