Nonviolence in Theory and Practice

On Sep 25, I was in my Hotel in Beijing. Mr. Pang knocked at my door early in the morning. I introduced him to a missing person blog earlier on, and this time he came to Beijing for a visit petition. He was helpless and I couldn't give him much support. When we talked in the hotel lobby at 8:30 am, someone was monitoring us.

I gave the phone number of Liu Xiao-yuan, a human right lawyer to Mr. Pang hoping that Liu could give him more advice. However, within an hour, Mr. Pang was arrested.

Below is what he had written to me, an account of their petition experience in Beijing. I hope readers can help to spread the news on the Internet.
Parents failed to find their children and helplessly pay petition visit to higher authorities in Beijing

In recent year, there are countless number of children kidnap cases all over the country. Criminals are becoming more violent, organized, professional and international. In order to find our missing children, we traveled across the country and many of us are now in debts in addition to the tremendous emotional stress we have been suffering. Some of the parents have turned crazy and sick… Due to man-made factor (here, I don't want to attack our public security department), we have lost much time for saving our dear children. We could only file our case when our children found lost for 24 hours. Such regulation has provided the human traffickers time for their crime, reminding them to smuggle our children away within 24 hours. We have no choice but to seek help from higher authorities. Six months have passed and now it has been one year, parents are living in agony. Some parents were forced to give up due to all kinds of reason. In the process of searching for our children, parents with similar fate come together and share our bitter story. By chance, we came across an article about rescuing kidnapped children from Henan. We wonder how our Premier Wen got to know the case, and with his instruction, a 8 months hanging case was resolved within 8 days. The article gives us hope in seeking for our children. We believe that if Premier Wen knows about our situation, he can definitely help us to find our children. With this hope, we decided to visit Beijing together and hand in our petition to Premier Wen. In order to avoid having negative impact on our national image, we decided to petition on Sep 22, after the end of Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Displaying missing person poster at the Birdnest

In Sep 22, missing children parents from all over the country arrived at Beijing. We found a cheap hostel (a dungeon) to settle down. Some of them were sleeping in the Beijing railway station as they couldn't afford hostel spending. Later we decided to share the cost and let them stay in the hostel as well. We discussed and decided to display our missing person posters outside the Birdnest stadium. There were in total more than 40 parents coming from 10 provinces. On the day, all of us gathered outside the magnificent building which all Chinese people are so proud of. However, we didn't have the mood to take a good look of this Birdnest. We walked to the east gate where there were more people around and displayed our missing children posters on the spot. We wanted more people to know what happened to us and remind people to protect their children from traffickers. Many people felt sympathy with us, some even bought us water. Some parents became emotional and voiced their grievances to pedestrians. A university student approached us and wanted to help us to spread the news. An American reporter proposed to interview us, but we rejected the interview as we felt that this is a Chinese matter and should be dealt with by Chinese government. Moreover, we didn't want to internationalize the issue. We decided to collect our posters and seek help from Chinese media — CCTV.