Special Report | Sit by My Side_Across from the Chinese Embassy in London, a Peaceful Vigil That Has Lasted for 24 Years

Across from the Chinese Embassy in London, a peaceful vigil has continued for 24 years. There is no grand stage—only ordinary people taking turns to sit quietly, day after day. Some pass by. Others stop, ask questions, or even sit beside them. Sit by My Side tells the story of this remarkable vigil and asks a simple question: what enables ordinary people to persevere for so long?

Special Report | Sit by My Side

Across from the Chinese Embassy in London,

a Peaceful Vigil That Has Lasted for 24 Years

2 a.m., 5 June 2026. London is not really asleep. Cars are still moving along Portland Place — taxis, night-shift traffic, people heading home late, and occasionally a traveller pulling a suitcase behind them.

On one side of the road stands the Chinese Embassy. On the other, near the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), someone sits quietly on the pavement in meditation. There are no loudspeakers, no angry crowd, no slogans being shouted again and again.

Beside the practitioner are display boards calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong and a wooden storage cabinet. Inside are meditation cushions, raincoats, a low tent, leaflets, petition sheets, a player for the exercise music, and other things needed for the shifts. At night, the small tent can be put up so that the person on duty can lie down for a short rest. In recent years, a large garden umbrella has been added for rain and strong summer sun, together with a solar lamp for reading at night. That is most of the equipment at the site.

How Did the 24-Hour Vigil Begin?

This vigil, now more than two decades old, was not conceived as a long-term project. It began as an urgent protest in June 2002, shortly before Jiang Zemin, then China’s top leader, visited Iceland.

Falun Gong practitioners from several countries planned to travel to Iceland to protest peacefully against the suppression of the practice in China. Icelandic authorities then took steps that prevented some practitioners from travelling to or entering the country. Official Icelandic records later confirmed that a list had been used and that Icelandair was asked to refuse carriage to some people believed to be Falun Gong practitioners. Iceland’s data-protection authority later found that the transfer of personal information identifying people as Falun Gong practitioners, for the purpose of preventing their entry, had been unlawful.

When news of this reached Britain, Falun Gong practitioners went to the Chinese Embassy in London and began a continuous, 24-hour protest. Their reasoning at the time was simple: Jiang was still in Europe, and peaceful protests by Falun Gong practitioners abroad were being restricted, so they would maintain a protest outside the Chinese Embassy in London. For several days there was someone there in the morning, in the evening and through the night. Some practitioners who had travelled from outside London remained at the site, while others came to relieve them. The continuous protest lasted until Jiang completed his trip and returned to China.

At that point, it might naturally have ended. But when several British practitioners discussed what to do next, one question changed the direction of the story: Jiang had returned to China — but had the persecution in China ended? If it had not, why should the protest overseas end simply because his European visit was over? They decided to continue.

Everyone had a job, a family and an ordinary life, so no one person could remain there indefinitely. The day was therefore divided into shifts, with practitioners taking turns to sit opposite the embassy. Over time, a shift of roughly four hours became the usual arrangement, and Gao Yudong and others helped make the rota more systematic. Today the group uses a shared Google Sheet. On a phone, volunteers can see which periods are covered and which are still empty; anyone willing to take a shift simply enters their name. There is no employer, no salary and no one ordering another person to attend. Behind the rota is the same simple idea agreed upon in 2002: as long as the persecution continues, the protest should continue too.

Three Chinese Characters from Iceland: “We Apologize”

Meanwhile, several thousand kilometres away, the decision to restrict Falun Gong practitioners’ entry was provoking controversy inside Iceland. On 13 June 2002, the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið carried a full-page advertisement of apology. Across the top were three large red Chinese characters: “对不起” — “We apologize.”

The notice also contained Icelandic and English text. It expressed the signatories’ disapproval of the way their government had treated the affected Falun Gong practitioners and offered an apology. The episode later became one of the most memorable images of Jiang’s visit: the Chinese words were not written by Chinese people apologising to Icelanders, but by Icelanders apologising to Chinese visitors whose peaceful protest had been restricted.

For practitioners in Britain, the Iceland episode also sharpened a broader question. Was a campaign that had begun inside China starting to affect the ability of Falun Gong practitioners to express themselves peacefully in other countries? The long-running London vigil took shape against that background.

Winter, especially the period around Christmas, is the hardest time. London rarely experiences the deep cold or heavy snow of northern Europe, but wind, rain and damp cold can be relentless. The wind funnels along Portland Place, sometimes carrying sleet. Even after layers of clothing — and, in later years, battery-heated garments — the cold can work its way in. Hands and feet go numb; after sitting for a long time, the whole body can feel chilled. Many who have taken winter shifts describe the same practical response: when they become too cold, they stand up and do the Falun Gong exercises. Gradually the hands and feet warm again. Then they sit down once more and wait for the next person to arrive.

Four Hours, Passed from One Person to the Next

To understand how a vigil can last for more than twenty years, it may be better not to begin with the enormous number — twenty-four years — but with a much smaller one: four hours. For most of its history, the vigil has operated through shifts of roughly that length. The core group carrying much of the regular rota has never been very large — around a dozen or so people at various times. They have jobs, businesses, research, children and homes that may be far from central London.

Putting your name into a Google Sheet cell means that someone finishing the previous shift expects you to arrive. If a volunteer suddenly cannot come, another person will usually try to cover. If nobody is immediately available, the person already there may simply stay longer. Four hours can become six or eight, until someone else arrives. No one in 2002 drew up a twenty-four-year plan. They dealt with one day, then the next, and then another.

London changed mayors. Britain changed prime ministers. China changed leaders. Smartphones arrived and social media transformed communication. Children who once passed this corner grew into adults. Over time, the sight became so familiar that some Londoners could say, in effect: they were already sitting here when I was a child.

Twenty-Four Years Is Not a Perfectly Unbroken Legend

There is one qualification that matters if this story is to be told accurately. During the strictest Covid lockdown, the normal fixed rota could not operate as before. Practitioners living nearby still went to the site in the morning and evening to check that the display boards, cabinet and other equipment were safe. As restrictions eased, regular shifts resumed. Today, the daytime periods are generally covered, while there can occasionally be gaps late at night or in the early morning because of limited manpower and the demands of ordinary life.

So the most accurate description is not that a person has been present for every minute of every day for twenty-four years. It is that a vigil begun in 2002, and organised for most of its history around a 24-hour relay, survived the pandemic, changing personnel and countless practical difficulties and is still continuing today. The more interesting question is not whether there was ever an empty hour. It is why, after twenty-four years, people still come back.

Sometimes Persistence Means Drinking Less Water

From a photograph, a shift can look simple: sit, meditate, hand a leaflet to someone who stops, answer a question, or invite a passer-by to sign a petition. But after four hours the body begins to present very ordinary problems. One of the most persistent has been finding a toilet.

During the day there are cafés, restaurants and shops nearby. In the early years, RIBA also allowed practitioners to use its toilets, but later stopped doing so. The reason is not established. Some practitioners wondered whether pressure from the Chinese Embassy played a part; it could equally have been an internal management decision. What mattered at two in the morning was the practical result: there was often nowhere to go. Some night-shift volunteers therefore drank less water — not because they were not thirsty, but because they did not want to need a toilet.

This is what twenty-four years looks like when the heroic language is removed: cold, tiredness, thirst, no public transport, a relief volunteer running late, and the ordinary decision of whether to leave or stay.

Christmas Without the Tube

London slows dramatically over Christmas. Shops close and public transport is sharply reduced; on Christmas Day much of it stops altogether. For people travelling from across London to Portland Place, that created a simple problem: how do you reach your shift? In the early years, Gao Yudong sometimes stayed near the site for two or three days, resting when necessary in the low tent. Later, a Western practitioner, Lilach Hazan, arranged temporary accommodation near the embassy over the Christmas period so that shifts could still be covered on foot.

Over the years, practical problems were met with equally practical solutions. Rain? Buy a large umbrella. Nowhere to store the cushions and tent? Build a cabinet. Someone cannot come? Find a substitute. The vigil did not survive because of one grand plan. It survived because people kept solving the next small problem.

A Scientist Builds a Wooden Cabinet

Dr Zhang Zhiyi was among the early participants. A research scientist, he had worked as a senior researcher at a leading London university, published extensively in international scientific journals and held patents. Yet the problem Portland Place presented to him was decidedly low-tech: the volunteers needed somewhere to keep their things.

Zhang built a wooden storage cabinet. The tent, cushions, raincoats and other supplies could be kept inside. On top was a small platform, roughly 40 centimetres by 80 centimetres. It was not a seat. Its most useful purpose was to give passers-by a surface on which to sign a petition calling for an end to the persecution; at other times it could hold a cup, a book or a few leaflets.

Gao Yudong helped establish the rota. Zhang built the cabinet. Someone else later added the large umbrella. Others maintain the display boards and replenish the leaflets. Eventually paper arrangements became a Google Sheet. The tools changed; the underlying requirement did not: someone had to take the next shift.

A British magazine photographer, who often saw Falun Gong practitioners sitting quietly by his side, captured this familiar scene in a photograph. The person on the left with their back to the camera is Ms. Gao, and the person on the right is Tony. (Epoch Times)

“Sit by My Side”

In 2004, Zhang did something very different. This time he did not pick up tools; he picked up a pen. After spending so much time opposite the embassy, he and other participants asked themselves how they could help passers-by understand why they were sitting there. The result was a short poem built around a simple invitation: “Sit by my side.”

Zhang later recalled that they wanted passers-by to pause, close their eyes for a moment and quietly join them in wishing for the killing and persecution to end. Some people really did stop and sit beside them. The poem was later turned into a song performed by the Chinese singer Guan Guimin.

The title captures something unusual about the vigil. Protest usually brings to mind anger, chanting, loudspeakers and confrontation. Here, the most common image is simply someone meditating. Early participants said that they opposed the persecution without treating embassy staff or ordinary Chinese Communist Party members as personal enemies. Falun Gong practitioners say they try to guide their conduct by the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance. Their chosen form of protest was therefore deliberately quiet.

Why Was a Group Practising in Parks Suppressed?

For a British reader unfamiliar with Falun Gong, an obvious question follows: why did the Chinese authorities suppress such a group? The story goes back to the 1990s. Falun Gong was introduced publicly in China in 1992. Practitioners read Zhuan Falun, seek to live by Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance, and practise five sets of exercises. It emerged during China’s wider qigong boom but spread unusually quickly.

One reason, according to many practitioners, was personal experience. People reported improvements in health and wellbeing and told spouses, parents, colleagues and friends. Older practitioners taught newcomers the exercises without tuition fees or membership charges. A 1998 Beijing survey of 12,731 practitioners reported very high levels of self-reported recovery or improvement. Such a survey is not a randomised clinical trial and cannot establish a medical cure rate. Its historical relevance is different: many participants believed they had benefited personally, and that belief helped drive word-of-mouth growth.

By 1999, estimates of the number of practitioners varied enormously. Contemporary estimates ranged from the millions into the tens of millions. On 25 April 1999, around 10,000 practitioners gathered peacefully near Zhongnanhai in Beijing to seek relief from official pressure and a lawful environment in which to practise. Representatives met government officials and the crowd dispersed peacefully. A nationwide crackdown followed in July 1999. Human Rights Watch condemned the ban and subsequent arrests at the time; current UK government country guidance continues to report harassment, arrest, detention, long prison sentences and allegations of torture against practitioners in mainland China.

Why the leadership regarded Falun Gong as a threat remains a subject of interpretation and dispute. Falun Gong practitioners argue that the movement’s rapid growth and independence from Communist Party structures made Jiang Zemin see it as a challenge to Party authority. Independent reporting and later government assessments have likewise described the Party leadership as alarmed by the group’s scale, organisational independence and ability to mobilise large numbers. The Chinese government, by contrast, has characterised Falun Gong as an illegal or “evil cult” organisation and has defended its suppression on grounds including social and political stability. Those positions should not be collapsed into one another; they are competing accounts of the same historical conflict.

Behind them lies a broader question: who is entitled to shape a person’s moral judgement? A citizen can work for the state, or even belong to the Communist Party, yet privately read a spiritual text, practise exercises in a park and try to judge personal conduct by Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance. Does the state have a legitimate claim over that inner space? For the people who later came to Portland Place, this was not an abstract philosophical question. Some had been detained, lost jobs, been sent to labour camps or prisons, or fled China. Human-rights organisations and current UK government guidance continue to document serious abuses against practitioners in custody.

Once You Are Free Yourself, Why Come Back?

Li Yong was one of those who later reached Britain. Reports about her case say that she suffered severe abuse in the Masanjia labour camp in Liaoning and at one point lost consciousness. She arrived in Britain in 2008 and was granted asylum. Once she was able to support herself, she stopped relying on state assistance. Yet she continued to make time to sit opposite the Chinese Embassy.

That raises one of the central questions of the vigil: once you yourself are free, why give your time to people who are not? Luo Jianyang offers another example. Luo is a computational fluid dynamics scientist and, according to information provided for this article, serves as chief technology officer and chief scientist at an international software company while also helping to manage a major Chinese school in Britain.

His employer once praised him with an extravagant line: “If Luo Jianyang cannot solve a problem, nobody in the world can.” It is not a scientific ranking, of course, but it conveys how highly his technical work is valued. Yet each week Luo also gives time to distributing free copies of The Epoch Times, driving his BMW to Chinese supermarkets, restaurants and other places frequented by Chinese residents. People who do not know him can be surprised to see a man arriving in a BMW to deliver free newspapers himself. They do not know that the delivery driver is also a CTO and chief scientist.

When someone once suggested that people who maintained the embassy protest must be paid to do it, Luo reportedly laughed and replied: “With my salary, who could afford to hire me?” The line is humorous, but the point behind it is serious. His time is not worthless. Precisely because it has value, his decision to give some of it away is worth examining.

Luo connects that choice to his own experience of Falun Gong. He says a long-standing stomach problem disappeared after he began practising and that the practice helped him approach high-pressure scientific work more calmly. That is his personal testimony, not a medical conclusion offered by this article. But it helps explain why Falun Gong is not, for him, merely a phrase in the news. It became part of his life.

A Christian passer-by once asked him why, now that he lived in Britain and could practise freely, he still sat there in the winter cold. Luo answered with a question of his own: Christians, too, had once suffered severe persecution. If those who reached safety had simply stopped defending their faith because they themselves were free, what would have followed? The question shifts the focus. It is no longer simply, “Why protest?” It becomes: once I am free, what relationship do I have to those who are not?

A Cup of Coffee and a Pot of White Flowers

More than twenty years in the same place has also turned many strangers into witnesses. On one cold winter day, while Li Li was practising there, a British police officer on duty outside the embassy went to a nearby café and bought two hot coffees. One was for himself. He insisted that she take the other.

On another night, Tina was alone on duty when a taxi driver stopped. He said he had driven past the site for years and often seen them there. That evening he brought her a small pot of white flowers because, he said, it seemed lonely to sit there by herself. A police officer’s coffee and a taxi driver’s flowers did not change Chinese government policy. But they showed that quietness does not mean invisibility.

There was also a day when the practitioner on duty had stepped away from the usual spot to speak with people nearby. A young British cyclist stopped and asked why nobody was there. “Has the persecution ended?” he wanted to know. If it had, he said, he would tell his friends the good news. If not, he was willing to stay until a practitioner returned. He was not on the Google Sheet. Nobody had assigned him a shift. Yet in his memory of the city, the place had acquired a simple logic: if the persecution had not ended, someone should be there.

Does It Make Any Difference?

After twenty-four years, one question cannot be avoided. If the persecution has not ended, what has sitting there achieved? It is a reasonable question. Gao Yudong has said that the vigil was never intended only for the people inside the embassy. It was also for everyone who passed along Portland Place — taxi drivers, police officers, tourists, office workers, students, neighbours, and people who first saw the site as children and now pass it as adults.

Some look and walk on. Some take a leaflet. Some sign a petition. Some bring coffee or flowers. One young man, seeing the place briefly empty, asked whether the persecution had ended. A long-running peaceful protest may not work like a stone thrown at a locked door. It may work more like a seed. No one knows where it lands, or when it may grow.

Twenty-four years sounds enormous. Broken down, however, it is made of ordinary four-hour pieces. No single person completed “twenty-four years”. One person handed a shift to another. When it was too cold, someone stood up to do the exercises, warmed a little, then sat down again. When there was no Tube at Christmas, someone found another way. When the rain came, they opened the umbrella. When the tent needed repair, they repaired it. When leaflets ran out, they brought more. When the next person could not come, someone stayed a little longer.

In 2002, nobody knew that the vigil would still exist in 2026. They simply kept answering the same question: who will take the next shift? Someone opens a phone, checks the Google Sheet, sees an empty slot and types in a name: “This shift, I’ll take it.”

More than two decades ago, Zhang Zhiyi and other participants placed another invitation into their poem: “Sit by my side.” It does not mean: you must believe me. Nor does it mean: you must agree with everything I think about China, the Communist Party or Falun Gong. It asks a stranger to stop for a few minutes, look across the road, listen to why these people came, and then think for themselves.

Perhaps that is what remains after twenty-four years on Portland Place: not a grand slogan, but two very simple choices. Faced with an empty slot on the rota, someone says, “This shift, I’ll take it.” Faced with a stranger passing by, they say, “If you are willing, sit by my side.”

Fang Tianliang · An Invitation to Think

We often imagine perseverance as something heroic: one person gritting their teeth for ten or twenty years, never falling. The London vigil suggests another possibility. No single person has persisted for twenty-four years. When one person was tired, another arrived. When someone could not come, the previous volunteer stayed a little longer. Someone organised the rota. Someone built the cabinet. Someone brought cushions. Someone replenished the leaflets. A British police officer brought hot coffee. A taxi driver brought a pot of white flowers. A young man who was not on the rota at all saw the site briefly empty and asked, “Has the persecution ended? If not, I can stay until you come back.”

Perhaps the things that last are not completed by a single hero. They are carried by ordinary people who, at different moments, make the same small decision: when I am tired, you come; when you cannot come, I stay a little longer. One four-hour shift passes into the next. Then one day you look back, and twenty-four years have passed. They are still there.

Source Note

Details about the London vigil — including the rota, participants’ experiences, the wooden cabinet, Christmas transport, the coffee, the flowers and the origins of “Sit by My Side” — are based primarily on participant recollections and reports gathered over the years. The account of how the continuous London protest began on 5 June 2002 is presented as the recollection and historical record of the British Falun Gong participants involved.

For the Iceland episode, official Icelandic records and later legal and parliamentary materials confirm that authorities restricted some Falun Gong practitioners from travelling to or entering Iceland during Jiang Zemin’s June 2002 visit and used personal information identifying individuals as Falun Gong practitioners. Later Icelandic findings concluded that aspects of the handling of that personal data were unlawful. Contemporary and later records also document the full-page “We Apologize” notice published in Morgunblaðið on 13 June 2002.

For the treatment of Falun Gong in China since 1999, this article also draws on Human Rights Watch and current UK government country information. Personal accounts of health changes, interpretations of political motives and other evaluative claims are presented as testimony or viewpoint rather than as medical or historical conclusions.