(Clearwisdom.net) Recently my son and I visited Shanghai, and we found elementary schools in Shanghai forcing students to search for anti-Falun Gong materials on the Internet, effectively instilling young hearts with lies and hatred.

I returned to Shanghai amidst the hottest days of August, and when I visited several friends' homes in Xuhui District, I discovered that all of their children were sweating in frustration while rushing to complete summer homework assigned by their teachers. I picked an assignment up to find that 20 out of the 40 questions involved anti-Falun Gong subjects, and the children were evidently having a hard time answering those 20 questions. Clearly the topics were beyond the children's understanding, and so they resorted to looking up anti-Falun Gong materials published by the government. Some children even had to search for answers on Internet, and by the summer's end, they will all have become victims of the anti-Falun Gong education.

For those of us living overseas, the unilateral propaganda intended for adults already seems very unfair, yet adults can at least form relatively independent judgments based on their acquired knowledge over the years and are not so easily deceived. Such indoctrination of children, however, is simply an immoral crime.

Also, through conversations with my friends in Shanghai, I came to realize that most people there do not seem to know the situation of Falun Gong overseas. Moreover, Shanghai does not have many active Falun Gong practitioners in comparison to other Chinese cities, and the anti-Falun Gong measures in Shanghai are exceptionally stringent.

First, there is an overwhelming amount of propaganda inundating the populace. Even people who would rather not hear it are forced to listen, and there is a particularly stringent policy for what students are taught both in and out of the classroom. Because the minds of children are so simple and pure, they are easily influenced by such negative propaganda.

Another problem in Shanghai is the strictness of the residency management. Even a relative from overseas living in a building temporarily will not escape the knowledge of the administrators, and his or her every move would then be under surveillance. There are also the buildings' guards, who know exactly the frequency of visitors and gatherings at every residence.

Shanghai is the gate China opens to the world, yet the anti-Falun Gong education its citizens receive from the city government alienates them from the rest of the world.

Furthermore, Shanghai and other southern cities with growing economies are in some ways the only windows through which foreigners view China, and this limitation could cause uninformed foreigners to fail to understand the persecution of Falun Gong in China. In other words, the more a Chinese city's economy matures, the more representative, important, and influential the city becomes.

With Shanghai's highly developed economy, the government can take advantage of the fact that its citizens are accustomed to comfortable lives and afraid of trouble to prevent them from persevering to learn the truth about Falun Gong. Many simply choose to distance themselves from any and all involvement with Falun Gong, thinking it will make their lives in today's China easier.

I traveled to several cities while in China, and I found that my friends in northern cities were more open on the topic of Falun Gong. They would listen to my explanations on Falun Gong overseas, and they already knew quite a lot about the truth of Falun Gong. However, in Shanghai and other southern cities, most of my friends were either not interested or not willing to converse on the subject of Falun Gong.

Friends who are interested should consider getting together to discuss some good ways to clarify the truth about Falun Gong and the persecution to people in Shanghai.