(Minghui.org) In 2015 and again in 2018, over 12 practitioners in my city were arrested. Practitioners in the surrounding area were also involved.
On two occasions, several thousand truth-clarification journals, more than a thousand DVD/CDs, and hundreds of self-adhesive posters were confiscated from a large material production site. And hundreds of Dafa materials were taken away from smaller production sites.
Before 2015, I talked to a practitioner who was later illegally sentenced. She asked me if I needed DVDs to copy the Shen Yun shows. Somewhat upset, she told me that her local coordinator had purchased tens of thousands of DVDs at one time, could not find a place to put them, and ended up storing them all at her place.
I asked her why they didn’t purchase goods multiple times to supply the different sites. She explained that, in her area, most of the practitioners were the only ones in their households who practiced Falun Gong. Some family members did not know the facts about Falun Gong, so their relationships were strained.
In that case, it was not easy to find a family member who supported the cultivator, let alone would allow him or her to produce Dafa materials at home. Some husband and wife practitioners would find an excuse not to set up a Dafa material production site in their home due to fear. But many practitioners did need the materials, and this woman felt obliged to make them available.
I asked her if they had a single line-of-contact. She sighed and said that they did at first, but as time passed, most practitioners found out where she lived and knew that it was convenient to go get materials at her place. She gave materials to whoever showed up. She later learned that some elderly practitioners had told each other on the phone that they could go to her home to get the materials they needed.
Someone who read the police records about the 13 practitioners who were arrested and sentenced in 2015 said, “Your practitioners disclosed everything they knew in the detention center. One of them said things about another lady, and the other lady said things about a third person. Some even talked about things that happened long ago, acting worse than the average prisoner.”
I remembered that one practitioner had told me that she was held for two days, but she did not tell the police anything. Another practitioner was arrested two days later. The authorities used the little bit of information they’d obtained through phone-monitoring to tell her, “So and so has said everything about you and her. You'd better tell us all.” The latter arrested practitioner believed them and thought that the first arrested practitioner had reported her, so she cooperated unwittingly.
When they were both released, the latter practitioner was angry, complaining that the other one had betrayed her. The first arrested practitioner explained what had happened so the other one knew that she had been deceived by the police.
In early 2018, I spoke with a major coordinator in my city who was later persecuted. I told him that too many people knew where the main truth-clarification material production site was, and they did not operate it safely. I suggested that they relocate the site or, even better, to disperse its functions to other areas.
The coordinator said that would be difficult to do, but he would pay more attention from then on. I regret that I did not take the time to communicate more effectively with him, because 17 practitioners were arrested later that year.
The Chinese Communist Party authorities used the same tactics in these large-scale arrests in both 2015 and 2018. For six months they tracked, monitored, and photographed certain practitioners. They also arranged for around-the-clock surveillance. Then they arrested all the practitioners on the same day and at the same time.
When I was ready to submit this article, another practitioner in the same area where the arrests took place in 2015 told me that some practitioners were still bringing their mobile phones to Fa-study and the production site.
A mobile phone is a listening device. We need to seriously pay attention to the safety of our material sites, cooperate with fellow practitioners, and cultivate our speech!