(Clearwisdom.net)

Li Zhongmin

Li Zhongmin was a 31-year-old resident of No. 64 Lijiatun, Tangtun Village, Wanjialing Town, Wafangdian City, Dalian City, Liaoning Province. He used to be an employee of a foreign enterprise in the Dalian Development District. He was very tall and strong, had a pure, trustworthy look, was very calm and open-minded, and he was very warm and meticulous when taking care of others. Fellow practitioners liked to call him 'big tall guy," or "tall Li."

Before July 20, 1999, Zhongmin was a volunteer assistant of the (former Xishan) Dalian Development District group practice site. For the convenience of group Fa-study, he and two other fellow practitioners rented a large apartment together. He was very kind towards others. After he began cultivation, he lived according to the Fa-principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance. Once, when the District labor Union organized a "Give Our Love" drive to benefit farmers in a mountain area, Zhongmin donated 800 Yuan, his salary, which caused a big stir in his district.

After the persecution began in 1999, Li Zhongmin was arrested and imprisoned several times. In the morning of December 28, 2002, under Master's benevolent protection, Zhongmin calmly walked past five sentry points and left the Dalian Forced Labor Camp, which had imprisoned him for four and a half months.

Later, we heard that the forced labor camp had contacted the Dalian Public Security Bureau, and they spent eight days on a citywide manhunt. They sent people to the homes of his friends and family, and even to Beijing to look for him. But at that point, Zhongmin was already studying the Fa and sharing experiences with fellow practitioners.

After leaving the forced labor camp, Zhongmin continued doing Dafa work. This enraged and scared the evil at the same time. They arrested him several times, he was able to escape each time.

The public security bureau understood that Li Zhongmin was a steadfast, active Dafa disciple. In order to arrest him, the branch police station transferred more than 180 policemen to the Zhongshan District Police Station of Dalian. They spent more than 40 days before there they arrested him and several other practitioners at around 11:00 AM on January 11, 2002. A fellow practitioner recalls that a dense fog covered the Dalian area, with virtually no visibility. The Dalian Public Security Bureau, the Jinzhou District Public Security Bureau, the Wafangdian Public Security Bureau, and the Pulandian Public Security Bureau all claimed credit for his arrest.

After being arrested this time, Lin Zhongmin was locked up in the seventh cell of the Dalian Yaojia Detention Center. He was fitted with handcuffs and heavy foot shackles, and tortured severely. Later on, he was secretly sentenced to 15 years in prison and sent to the Shenyang City Dabei Prison, where he was also tortured badly.

After he was arrested, Li Zhongmin refused to cooperate with any of the police's demands and protested with hunger strikes for over a year. He had been strong and healthy before he was arrested, but he was reduced to a skeletal state due to the torture he suffered. At the end of it, Li Zhongmin, looked like a 60-year old man despite his actual age of only 31.

Li Zhongmin subjected to constant torture until his death on March 4, 2003. When he died, an eyewitness saw numerous severe injuries on his body, with bloodstains at back of his head and a big area of bruises on his inner thighs. There were many red marks on his back, and his eye sockets were deeply sunken.

At the time, Zhongmin's brother, Li Zhongke, also a Falun Gong practitioner, was being held and abused in the Dalian Forced Labor Camp. Hearing of Li Zhongmin's death, his maternal grandmother passed away as a result of extreme sorrow.

The "big tall guy" is gone. Our fellow practitioner is gone... The fellow practitioners who knew him all shed tears upon hearing the tragic news. A fellow practitioner wrote in a Minghui article commemorating Zhongmin: "Prior to July 2000, I lived with Li Zhongmin on three different occasions. Zhongmin contributed a lot to Fa promotion activities and highly disciplined himself in his personal cultivation. He set a very high standard for himself in cultivation and could endure a great deal of hardship. We used to join group practices together. During the sitting meditation, many people often could not endure the leg pain and put their legs down. Zhongmin always persevered until the end with a smile on his face. I once asked Zhongmin why he smiled during the sitting meditation. He replied, 'That was when I experienced the most intense pain in my legs. Some practitioners look very strained when they experience leg pain. I don't think that should be the image of Dafa practitioners, and I don't think Dafa practitioners should respond to pain with a painful facial expression either. I want to face hardship with a smile.'"

Following the broadcast of the staged "Tiananmen Immolation", a large number of people in Mainland China were deceived by it. In order to expose the lies effectively and save sentient beings, Zhongmin again devoted himself to explaining the facts to the public regarding the persecution of Falun Dafa.

In May of 2001, he was followed by policemen from the Development District Public Security Office on Harbin Road while delivering Dafa materials to fellow practitioners. He was then arrested and taken to a Public Security Office. The policemen used various cruel ways to torture and shock him with an electric baton. They smashed his toes with a dumbbell to force him to reveal the source of his truth-clarifying materials, but he bore the pain and did not cry out once. Three to four policemen took turns beating him, and sat down to rest when they became exhausted. Despite all this, Zhongmin explained the facts to them with patience.

Zhongmin's name had been on the wanted list since he left the forced labor camp in late December of 2000. He held a hunger strike to protest, sent forth righteous thoughts and asked for Master's help. The next morning, he miraculously moved his hands that were handcuffed from behind to in front of him. He jumped from the 3rd floor and made a safe escape while his hands were handcuffed. A fellow practitioner recalls, "When I first saw him, my heart was shaken and I almost burst into tears. Nevertheless, he smiled and said humorously: "Don't be scared, it's me!" His dark red shirt and trousers were torn in several places, and there were many injuries and bruises all over his body. An indentation resulting from the violent beatings was visible on his forehead and there were dark bruises on his face. The right side of his face was severely swollen, which made it difficult for him to open his eyes. His lips were cut from being bitten too hard. More than a week passed before the bruises slowly began to fade. He soon started to clarify the truth when his body recovered. He would not quit even when fellow practitioners urged him to rest.

In late June of 2001, a villager who believed the propaganda and didn't understand the true situation of Falun Dafa reported the new material site in Siping Town of Pulandian City to the authorities. The new machines and equipment that had been installed were destroyed, and Li Zhongmin was arrested again. When he saw the policemen coming, Zhongmin ran to the mountains. The policemen ran after him and fired four to five shots, leaving the villagers in a panic. He was unable to escape and was taken back to Pulandian Public Security Brigade. Once again, Zhongmin opened the handcuffs with his righteous thoughts and jumped from the 3rd floor. He again joined the great current of the Fa-rectification.

In Zhongmin's mind, the word "fear" did not exist. Whenever he saw something that harmed Dafa, he simply would not tolerate it. The last time he returned to Beijing in 2001, when he saw some slanderous words against Dafa posted on a bus, he immediately removed it while the passengers looked on. There were people in the bus who were deceived by the regime's lies. They were angry and said that they would send him to a Public Security Office. Zhongmin explained with patience the facts about Dafa and told them how Dafa was being persecuted. He told them about how the injuries on his body came from. The driver, who understood the truth, intervened and settled the matter.

Zhongmin always thought about all those fellow practitioners who were illegally detained. Whenever one of Master's new articles was published, he always tried his best to inform fellow practitioners in prison as soon as possible. He once took a loud speaker with a prerecorded broadcast of Teacher's new article to an area near Wafangdian City's Detention Center and hung it up. By the time he hung up the speaker, it was dark. There were no buses and a taxi cost extra money. In order to save money to clarify the truth, Zhongmin hitched a ride on a motorcycle from Wafangdian City back to Dalian City during the bitter winter nights without any warm winter clothing. A tearful fellow practitioner recalled: When Zhongmin walked in, I was speechless. He was pale and his eyes were running. With the freezing wind, his tears and mucus froze into several icicles dangling down his jaw. His face and lips were frozen stiff and numb. He was so cold that he could not even speak clearly.

Zhongmin was frugal and down-to-earth. When it was summer and there wasn't a refrigerator, leftovers would sometimes go bad before the next meal. Every day, Zhongmin would eat the leftovers first, even if they had gone bad, enjoying his meal as usual. On one occasion when there wasn't any food in the house, I asked Zhongmin to buy some groceries when he was out on an errand. He seldom did any grocery shopping, but he returned with a huge bag of vegetables that he had bought. He said that it cost him only one Yuan. There were many big and old eggplants in varying gray-green and gray-yellow colors. Everyone was delighted and ate them for several days. Zhongmin never spent money to bathe in a public bathhouse. During the frigid winter, he would just take a cold sponge bath at home. He never spent money on food when he was out and about; he would wait until he returned home to eat. He spent every penny on making Dafa materials to save sentient beings.

Like so many Dafa practitioners, the persecution caused many to lose their jobs, families and material possessions. It had been almost four years since he visited and spoke with his own family. In fact, he had lost everything that a normal person would be entitled to. In order to validate Dafa and save sentient beings, Zhongmin devoted himself completely to the great current of Fa-rectification. But this does not mean that practitioners do not care about their families or miss them. When I first met Zhongmin, I asked about his family. When he spoke about his parents, an indescribable sorrow was written all over his face because he had not seen his family for such a long time.

The purpose of telling you these stories to help everyone understand our fellow Mainland Chinese practitioners' character, cultivation, forbearance, sacrifice, and profound wish to save the people of the world. It is to help all of us who work on Dafa websites to create and protect our own cultivation environment, to promote our sense of upright righteousness, purify our righteous thoughts, and fortify the sense of responsibility and duty to our own cultivation, as well as to the work we do on Dafa websites.

Let us be proud of Yuan Jiang, Wang Chan, Li Zhongmin, and the many Mainland Dafa disciples whose names we cannot mention for the time being. All of them are our fellow practitioners and peers in our work. While we remember the names and deeds of those who preceded us -- "Compliance is cultivation" -- let us continue to study and cultivate together in this special environment, work on Dafa websites, fulfill our historic missions as Fa-rectification Period Dafa Disciples even better, and do our best in taking the final steps in our path!

Please see Part 1 on
http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2004/2/18/45210.html