FALUN GONG

In 1999, a few leaders in the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a systematic campaign to “eradicate” the spiritual practice, after witnessing its widespread popularity. This campaign aimed to violently suppress the tens of millions of people who practiced Falun Gong.

For more than 20 years, millions of Falun Gong practitioners in China have been subject to police harassment, abduction, imprisonment, torture, and death in custody. Furthermore, untold numbers have been killed and their organs extracted to fuel a booming, multibillion-dollar organ transplant industry in China.

Meanwhile, the CCP’s vilifying propaganda has been carried over by some media in the West.

Despite the persecution, an estimated 20 million to 40 million practitioners continue to engage in peaceful civil disobedience throughout China.

Four key factors are:

1. In 1998, an official regime survey found that 70 million to 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong. This meant that the spiritual practice saw more popularity than the CCP, which had approximately 60 million members at the time, a fact that some CCP leaders saw as threatening.

2. Falun Gong has no formal membership and no houses of worship, and is loosely organized. Consequently, the practice became the largest group outside of the regime’s control.

3. Falun Gong’s spiritual teachings were perceived by some CCP leaders as a threat to the communist culture of atheism, materialism, and struggle.

4. Ultimately, the decision to persecute Falun Gong boiled down to the personal motivations of then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin. Despite opposition from other Party leaders, Jiang orchestrated the campaign to eliminate Falun Gong and assert his power over the Party and the country.

What is the scale of the persecution of Falun Gong today? Drawing from first-hand accounts, victim testimonies, documentation by independent human rights organizations, research by investigative journalists, leaked government documents, and whistleblower interviews, the scope of the CCP’s campaign against Falun Gong is clear.

Amid a persecution targeting 70 million to 100 million Chinese people, at least several million have been detained. At least hundreds of thousands have been tortured. More than 4,900 have been confirmed to have been killed via torture or sustained abuse in detention, and sources estimate that hundreds of thousands have been killed through forced organ harvesting.

Meanwhile, Falun Gong practitioners continue their efforts to resist the persecution and expose the truth to their neighbors and communities. Today, an estimated 20 million to 40 million practitioners are actively engaged in exposing the CCP’s human rights abuses, constituting the largest civil disobedience movement in the world today.

A growing body of evidence shows that Chinese hospitals have colluded with the CCP to forcibly remove the organs of prisoners of conscience, killing them in the process. The main source of these organs is practitioners of Falun Gong.

Prisoners of conscience are regularly screened for their blood and tissue types, then killed on demand when a matching patient needs an organ transplant. This lucrative state-run business is estimated to be worth at least $1 billion annually.

Deeper analyses of China’s organ donation system, the profiling of detained prisoners and their disappearances, and the accounts of prison guards and Chinese doctors who witnessed the removal of organs from unwilling, living people have painted a picture of this heinous crime.

In 2019, the China Tribunal, an independent people’s tribunal to investigate these allegations, unanimously concluded that “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale.”

For two decades, a grassroots movement consisting of tens of millions of people across China has peacefully challenged the hate and violence perpetuated by the Chinese Communist Party.

These individuals produce leaflets exposing the Chinese regime's human rights abuses, as well as its historical crimes, and distribute them—often under cover of night—to communities throughout China in an effort to inform their fellow citizens, who would otherwise only have access to the propaganda produce by state-run media. They also report abuses inside China to overseas volunteers and organize petitions.

These combined efforts constitute the largest civil disobedience movement in the world today.