This year marks the 22nd anniversary of the April 25 appeal, the largest peaceful appeal in China after the Tiananmen Square Protest in 1989. On April 25, 1999, over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered outside the Appeals Office of the State Council in Beijing to ask the authorities to release fellow practitioners who had been wrongly arrested (and beaten) by police in Tianjin Municipality, according to Faluninfo.net. The arrests in Tianjin came after three years of intense official oppression, in which time Falun Gong books were banned from publication, the first propaganda article smearing Falun Gong was published in a major state-run newspaper, and police began disrupting group exercises sessions in parks. During the silent and peaceful gathering, the premier of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the time, Zhu Rongji, won international acclaim for peacefully resolving the problem by engaging with practitioners in dialogue. However, this all changed overnight when …