GEORGETOWN CHINA EXPERIENCE GU Student Protests Chinese Government By Rebecca Regan-Sachs Hoya Staff Writer

Brian Marple (COL ’05) arrived in China Feb. 11 for a protest against the government’s treatment of the spiritual movement Falun Gong. Four days later, he was deported from Beijing after spending a harrowing 23 hours in a Chinese detention facility.

Along with 52 other foreign protestors, Marple came to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demonstrate against the Chinese government’s two-year crackdown on the movement, which focuses on meditative exercises, combining elements of Buddhism, Taoism and the traditional Chinese practice of qigong.

The demonstration on Feb. 14 was the largest such event in China by overseas practitioners of Falun Gong. “I felt deep sorrow in my heart for the Chinese people and wanted to let them know the truth about Falun Gong,” Marple said, who says he has been practicing it for nearly two years. “Therefore, I decided to travel to Tiananmen Square to appeal to their kind nature.”

When he got there, Marple says, the square was already packed with uniformed and plainclothes policemen, who appeared to be expecting a large crowd. Along with the other protesters, Marple began walking through the square, holding up a banner and shouting “Falun Dafa Hao!” (Falun Gong is good!) Immediately, he said, he was grabbed by policemen.

“A pair of policemen grabbed me and shoved me into a police van,” Marple said. “There were five of us practitioners there, all singing a song called `Falun Dafa Hao’ as loudly and beautifully as we could.”

The police then put them in a “narrow corridor” in the police station, where the protesters continued to sing. A policeman slapped him in the face a few times, Marple said. Marple also tried to talk to the policemen in Chinese about Falun Gong, telling them how he felt it had improved his life and was one of the best aspects of Chinese culture.

“The police were shocked to hear a westerner speaking Chinese, and I sincerely hope that it really changed their mindsets about Falun Dafa,” Marple said.

After getting his photo taken with the other detainees at the police station, Marple said he was taken to a hotel that had been transformed into a detention center. “A big police thug . shoved me up the stairs,” Marple said. “When I and another practitioner nearby bean to sing the `Falun Dafa Hao’ song, the thug slapped me hard in the face multiple times. When a nearby elevator opened, he kicked me in the back, shoving me into the elevator with his foot. He hit me again in the face when I entered, slamming my head into the wall of the elevator.”

Marple was then questioned for five or six hours, he said, and was asked who he was, why he came and who had organized the trip. He spent the next 15 hours in a “lounge room” with some other protestors and said he tried to talk to the young Chinese guards accompanying them about Falun Gong and the government’s repression of the movement.

“I could see that they all changed a lot after we talked,” Marple said.

Soon after, Marple’s bags were retrieved, a flight out of China was arranged for him, and he was driven to the airport and put on the plane.

“As I walked up the steps to the plane I shouted `Falun Dafa Hao’ to all of the officials and airline personnel below,” Marple said. “The police thug that had hit me before was standing next to me and grappled my neck with his hand so I could barely breathe and could not shout anymore.”

Along with 23 other American protestors, Marple flew back to the United States after the historic protest that reached the pages of newspapers across the country. His experience was unpleasant, arple acknowledges, but at the same time, it was better than the often-brutal encounters many native Chinese practitioners of Falun Gong have had with the government. They are often held six months, a year or longer, he pointed out, enduring harsh physical and psychological treatment.

“All of us here are back safely, but so many Chinese are not,” Marple said. “So we continue to demand an immediate end to this persecution and will not stop condemning it until it stops for good.”