Leeshai Lemish ‘05 looked tired as he sat down to talk to The Student Life last week. He spoke as if he’s told his story to a lot of other people.

It goes like this: On November 20, he and the thirty-four other casually dressed westerners wandered into Tiananmen square in Bejing, just like myriad tourists who tour one of China’s most famous landmarks each day. One of them quietly began a countdown: "Ten… Nine… Eight…." When it got to zero, Leeshai took off his shoes, crossed his legs, and began to meditate, all according to plan.

Thirty-five Americans and Europeans meditating peacefully in front of a bright yellow banner which read "TRUTH COMPASSION TOLERANCE" in both English and Chinese would be a peculiar sight in any city. But in Beijing it’s more than that.

Within two minutes, Leeshai heard the sirens and footsteps of approaching police. He tried not to pay any attention, and along with some of the other protestors, began to chant a phrase in Chinese which roughly translates to "There is no evil," until he could only hear the sound of his own voice.

When the police came to him, he went limp, trying to resist being carried away to the waiting vans for as long as possible.

This is how, while the rest of Pomona was preparing to leave for Thanksgiving, Lemish was in custody in China, being interrogated an, allegedly beaten. This is why he and the thirty-four other protesters got the attention of the international press, and why there was a small but real chance that no one at Pomona would see Lemish again anytime soon.

Lemish is a practitioner of Falun Gong, a Chinese mind-body practice that an outsider might characterize as a cross between Buddhism and Tai Chi. According to the Falun Gong’s own estimates, it has one hundred million devotees around the world. Seventy million of which are in mainland China, which considers the practice to be a politically subversive "cult." In China, belonging to a cult is punishable by prison time or worse, and a trial is not guaranteed. Consequently it is a loose organization and exact numbers are hard to come by. Often, practitioners keep their involvement hidden from neighbors and friends.

Falun Gong was officially labeled a cult in 1999, after ten thousand Falun Gong demonstrators shocked Beijing and the ruling communist party with a mass protest on the April 25. The sect’s rapid growth and dubious allegiance to the government were seen as a threat. Overnight, the atmosphere went from a tense standoff to brutal governmental repression.

"There used to be government officials who practiced Falun Gong," Lemish said. Officially, this is not the case anymore.

The crackdown, according to Amnesty International and other human rights groups, has been brutal. Varying accounts report the deaths from anywhere from around one hundred to three hundred and nineteen practitioners in police custody since April, 1999. Rumors of torture, sexual assault, and forced overdoses of drugs in state mental hospitals abound.

The Chinese government disputes these reports. In the past few years, it has done its best to downplay its troubling record on human rights and has largely succeeded. In the United States, the debate over linking human rights and China’s Most Favored Nation status, which peaked during the early Clinton years, is dead. In the wake of September 11, few major powers have either the time or inclination to pick a fight with China over domestic rights issues.

Though human rights may no longer be linked to trade in the United States, as it arguably once was, it is still a touchy subject.

At events like China’s impending entrance to the World Trade Organization, there is something of an international "don’t ask, don’t tell policy" on the issue: China would prefer to avoid talking about human rights questions, and the US and Europe would rather look the other way. International incidents, however, such as the detention and alleged beating of thirty-five nonviolent western protesters, are awkward for all nations involved.

One might well ask how a Pomona freshman helped to cause an incident of this sort. He is, to state the obvious, an unusual freshman at the age of twenty-three. Three of those years were spent serving in the Israeli Army to gain dual citizenship, and another spent playing semi pro baseball for the San Diego Stars.

It was baseball that first got him interested in meditation.

"I began to visualize plays before the game and then they happened just as I’d imagined them. I began to wonder what else I could do with my mind, besides play," he said.

Though he spent years learning about Zen Buddhism and Tai Chi, his introduction into Falun Gong was surprisingly recent. He first became aware of it only a year and a half ago and has been seriously practicing for ten months.

"[Falun Gong] is about letting go of your attachments and bad habits," he believes, and claims that he has grown rapidly since. "You can see the changes in yourself on almost a daily basis sometimes. Things that would have bothered you a few weeks ago don’t get to you any more."

As he became committed to studying Falun Gong, Lemish began to protest Chinese repression of the movement.

At first, his activities were decidedly local. He passed out flyers and spoke at city council meetings. As time passed, his plans got bigger.

Near the end of the summer he organized a demonstration in San Francisco, in which Falun Gong practitioners meditated one hour for each Chinese practitioner who has died in government custody. The event took twelve days, longer than planned because eight more practitioners died during the course of the demonstration.

When that protest ended, Lemish drove all night to get to the first day of freshman orientation at Pomona. Now he teaches others the basic principles of Falun Gong on Marston Quad every Friday at four p.m.

Despite his activity in the US, he felt like he owed something to Chinese Falun Gong practicioners who couldn’t speak out. "It was my duty as a practitioner to help them," he told TSL.

In early November, he decided that he wanted to go to China. Coincidentally, a friend told him about the group planning to protest in Tiananmen only a few days later. He purchased the plane ticket and told his family, girlfriend and a few others of his plans.

According to Lemish’s account, when all the protesters had been rounded up and locked inside police vans, they were taken to a Beijing detention center. They were placed within a single holding cell, where they began meditating.

When a guard came to take a French woman for questioning, the protesters formed a circle around her, fearing for her safety if she was separated from the rest of the group. They demanded that the guard permit others to accompany her.

Instead, the guard just took Lemish, according to him.

He was brought to an interrogation room, where a man screamed at Leeshai in Chinese, demanding to know why he broke Chinese Law. When Lemish, a first semester Chinese student, responded that he only spoke a few phrases, the man slapped him across the face. When Lemish said he didn’t understand, the man kicked him between the legs.

The man interrogating Lemish knew some English. He asked Lemish about the planning of the demonstration. There wasn’t much for Lemish to say, as it was his own decision to come. At the end of the questioning, the man took Lemish’s passport.

"Get on the floor," he said, according to Lemish. "I am really going to beat you now."

Lemish went over this part of the story quickly. He sounded disinterested as he spoke of getting beaten up in custody, going over the facts perfunctorily as if he’s just giving me what he thinks I want to hear.

In a way, he’s right. It’s not hard to make a good story about a freshman getting beaten up by a Chinese policeman in an interrogation room.

Things this ugly don’t often happen to college kids, and so when they do, they make the papers. Looking at the news headlines in the days following the incident, you’d think that the only reason the protesters went to Beijing was because they wanted to get beat up and tell people about it.

For Leeshai, this wasn’t the case. He’s heard a lot of horror stories about people in the custody of Chinese police, and they’re all better than his are. The only thing that made the thirty-five protesters special is that they were all white citizens of western countries. Had they not been, they wouldn’t have been in the news, and they almost certainly wouldn’t have been released from prison after only a day.

Lemish is aware of this. Many of the 319 people that Leeshai and the other protesters claim have died for their spiritual beliefs were arrested for far less.

"There were several ways that the protests could [have turned] out," Lemish said when asked if he had been afraid of going. "One was that I was going to sit down and fifteen minutes later I’d be on a plane out of China. Another was that I’d be killed. But that wasn’t really the point. The point was to protest the persecution, and whatever happened after that, I was prepared to deal with."

News coverage is vital to a protest and Lemish was excited when he said that he wouldn’t be surprised if "hundreds of millions of people" had heard of the protesters. As he sat in Tiananmen Square meditating, "I think I had a big smile on… I realized what a privilege it was to be there, the place where so many people have died for their rights," he said.

According to Lemish, shortly before they were deported, the protesters noticed their confiscated banner lying in a box next to one of the guards.

"I was really firm about that banner," Lemish said. "It was so pure and righteous I had to get it back." While the guards talked among themselves, Lemish began to collect trash. He filled two empty boxes, and then walked over to the guards and took a third box to fill– this time, the box with the banner in it. "I could feel all the other protesters willing me on," Leeshai said. The guards didn’t notice, and the banner appeared prominently at the protesters’ first press conference.

At the airport, Lemish says the protesters made one final scene. In the crowded lobby, they began to cycle through the slow, deliberate, and instantly recognizable motions of their meditation exercises. Their guards were mortified.

"They didn’t try to stop us though," Lemish said. "Everyone in the airport just stopped talking and stared at us. You could have heard a pin drop".

With Lemish back in California and media interest waning, it’s hard to quantify what lasting effects the protest achieved. Next to other current events, a handful of westerners arrested in Beijing might seem fairly insignificant. All the same, Lemish sees progress.

"I don’t think the repression will even last another five years," he said. "I’m not going to stand silent while the repression goes on, but it’s time for other people to step forward." He is sure that he is right, and sure that the protesters will eventually win.

When Lemish was lifted into a police van, he says he had a moment alone with the driver. "I put my hand on his shoulder and said to him in Chinese, ‘Why are you doing this? You know Falun Gong is good.’" According to Lemish, the policeman hung his head and nodded.

This is what Leeshai Lemish says he’s up against. He believes that everyone, both in and outside of China, would demand an end to Chinese persecution if only they knew what was going on. In his mind, hearing of the repression will compel others to act.

The protest was supposed to show China and the rest of the world that people care enough about China’s repression to suffer a bit of it themselves. At a time when the world is too busy with other things to pay much attention to the repression of a Chinese meditative practice, the arrest of thirty-five westerners in Tiananmen Square may have been the only way to make that point heard.