Overland Park resident David Snape spoke at a press conference Sunday about his arrest near China's Tianamen Square last Thursday.
David Snape didn't stop the advance of a tank column a la the solitary young man who won the world's admiration during the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy students in China's Tiananmen Square. In fact, the 33-year-old Overland Park man was apprehended just shy of entering the square, where he had expected to unfurl a banner - and be beaten - last Thursday as part of a protest against China's persecution of Falun Gong followers there. Snape wasn't beaten, as were some of the Western Falun Gong protesters who did manage to make it into the square. Nevertheless, Snape's fellow Falun Gong practioners in the Kansas City area believe he acted with extreme courage.
"When a practitioner decides to go over (and protest), we're very supportive, but we hold our breath until we hear they're on an airplane coming home," Cat Rooney of Lawrence said following a press conference Sunday at Mill Creek Park in Kansas City, Mo.
Dozens of practioners meet each weekend at that Country Club Plaza park to practice the Tai Chi-like exercises prescribed by the spiritual practice known as Falun Gong. But on Sunday, the focus was on Snape and 25-year-old Sara Effner of Columbia, Mo., who talked about their 20 hours in detention and their reasons for joining nearly 70 other Western Falun Gong supporters in Beijing.
"In November 2001, the first group of Western practitioners went to protest," said Snape, one of a growing number of non-Oriental Falun Gong practioners. "When I saw that happen, I knew in my heart I also should have been there to stand up and tell the world what was happening to the practitioners in China."
At least 10,000 Chinese Falun Gong practitioners continue to languish in Chinese labor camps and detention centers, according to Amnesty International, and at least 1,600 have died in custody since the Chinese government outlawed the practice three years ago.
To protest the torture, rape, drugging and imprisonment of the Chinese practitioners, about 40 Westerners dashed into Tiananmen Square at about 2 p.m. Beijing time Thursday and unfurled banners proclaiming the goodness of "Falun Dafa," which is another name for Falun Gong, and bearing the three universal principles - "truthfulness, compassion and forbearance" - at the heart of the practice. Those protestors were quickly tackled by Chinese police, dragged to nearby vans and hauled into custody.
Another 15 supporters were arrested in their hotel rooms on the night before the protests, which had become known to police despite being secretly planned via encrypted e-mails, Snape said. The remainder of the protesters, like Snape and Effner, were arrested en route to Tiananmen Square.
The quick release and deportation of the Western detainees was attributed to intervention by Congressmen, including U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Kansas, and President George Bush's pending visit to Beijing. But Snape said there had been no assurances prior to the protest that the practitioners would return home safely.
"I carefully considered all possibilities before doing this," he said. "I took several months to come to the final decision, and I was very conscious that I could possibly be killed or worse. Still, I made a decision to put my self-interests aside and go there to do something to help the people suffering in China."
Prior to 1999, Snape said, he knew nothing about Falun Gong. But on his last day with the Cerner Corp. in North Kansas City that year, a co-worker gave him a flier about it.
"I thought, 'Gee, this sounds a lot like Buddhism,'" said Snape, who now works for Sprint. "I wasn't real interested in that, but I took the flier home for some reason and put it on my refrigerator, and after five or six months I found it again."
At that point, Snape decided to check out Falun Gong on the Internet. That led him to two books by Li Hongzhi, who introduced the ancient concepts of Falun Gong to the Chinese masses in 1992. And those books, "Zhuan Falun" and "Falun Gong," changed Snape's life, he said.
"I began to recognize that Falun Dafa spelled out answers to questions I'd had ever since I was a child," he said. One of those lingering questions, he said, had been a big one: What's the meaning of life?
"My understanding now is that the purpose of being a human being is to return to who you originally were," he said. "It's like maybe in a higher realm, so to speak, you've done some things wrong, and your punishment is to come here and be a human being. But that's just my understanding; people should read the books to get their own understanding."
While Falun Gong does not call for worshipping a God, Snape added, he personally believes in a creator and that "the goal is to ascend to heaven, just like in Christianity or Buddhism."
Some people practice Falun Gong while maintaining previous religious beliefs, Snape said. But he gave up Christianity after he became a Falun Gong practitioner.
Because Falun Gong is a peaceful, nonpolitical practice, aimed solely at cultivating mind and body, Snape finds it hard to understand why Chinese President Jiang Zemin is so threatened by it.
But Ron Gluckman, an American journalist who has visited China many times, said the country's past helps explain why present leaders are reluctant to allow a spiritual movement to sweep the masses.
"One only has to go back to the Taiping Rebellion in the 19th century, when an aspiring Chinese civil servant decided, following a series of visions, that he was the brother of Jesus," Gluckman said. "Gathering adherents, he soon mustered an army that took Nanjing and marched on Shanghai. An astonishing 20 million Chinese were estimated to have died in that civil war.
"Many can easily draw parallels to Falun Gong, which was founded by Li Hongzhi, a former government grain clerk who now lives in New York. The group claims 70 to 100 million adherents worldwide."
In 1992, when the practice was introduced, Chinese officials supported it, Snape said, "because they recognized people were becoming healthier and they were saving health-care dollars."
But by 1999, he said, the government was estimating that the number of Chinese Falun Gong practitioners had exceeded the 60 million members of China's communist party.
Since Falun Gong was declared illegal in July of that year, Snape said, the state-controlled media in China have demonized the practice by televising self-immolations in Tiananmen Square, claiming the victims were Falun Gong practitioners, and otherwise portraying the practice as a murderous and suicide-bent doomsday cult.
Actually, the only horrors associated with Falun Gong are those being perpetrated on Zemin's orders, Snape said, and exposing that fact to the Chinese masses was one of the aims of last week's protest.
With a banner hidden in one of his socks, Snape made it through a police checkpoint en route to fulfilling that goal in Tiananmen Square Thursday. He was chased down in an underground passage near the square after police frisked his traveling companion, Effner, and found a concealed surveillance camera.
While in captivity, however, Snape and Effner were able to boost awareness among police officers and translators. When one translator was told of how a Chinese practitioner and her 8 month old son were tortured to death in November 2000, Snape said, "she became very upset and left; they had to bring in somebody else."
During the 20 hours they were detained, Snape added, the Westerners were denied water, contact with the outside world and knowledge of whether or not they might share some of their Chinese counterparts' grim fates.
"If I'm able to go through that," Snape said, "then I hope other people in the community can at least write a letter to their congressmen or senators or stand up in some other way to tell Jiang Zemin that this evil persecution should end."