NEW YORK CITY—Dozens of Falun Gong practitioners gathered at U.N. Plaza in Manhattan on Sept. 23 to urge world leaders attending the U.N. General Assembly to stand against the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of the group.
In 1999, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the time, Jiang Zemin, launched a brutal persecution of Falun Gong practitioners using the weight of the entire state apparatus. He directed state agencies and personnel to physically destroy the believers, ruin them financially, and destroy their reputations, in the belief that the regime would crush the practice within six months. Since then, untold numbers of practitioners have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death by forced organ harvesting.
“We’re here today to tell the world that Falun Dafa is good; that truth, compassion, and tolerance are good,” said Wang Zhiyuan, a local resident who practices Falun Gong. “We want to take the opportunity to address world leaders, and the world’s people, to call for the end of the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong ... in China and overseas, [which] has already gone on for more than 26 years.”
Wang referred to the regime’s practice of live organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience as “an evil never before seen in history.”
He and others at the demonstration said the CCP’s persecution of faith and infringement on freedom of belief go beyond Falun Gong in China.
“We’re calling on the world to resist and stop this persecution of not only Falun Gong, but the whole world. Recognize the CCP’s evil nature. It’s the world’s biggest violator of human rights; it’s a terrorist organization,” he said.
Sam Brownback, former Kansas senator and U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, said the CCP won’t win its war on religion.
“They are opposed to all religions, they’re at war with religion, and the religion they fear the most is Falun Gong ... because it is so natural to China,” he said. “It’s the roots of what the Chinese ancient civilization is about.
“China’s at war with faith. It is a war they will not win.”
CCP Losing Members
Wang is also chair of the Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP, an online platform and network of volunteers who have helped people withdraw from the CCP and its affiliate organizations.After The Epoch Times published “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” in 2004, it sparked a global grassroots movement of Chinese people quitting the CCP and its affiliate organizations—groups where membership is often mandatory for Chinese citizens through work or study. Thousands, then tens of thousands, of people began to withdraw from the CCP daily, including high-level officials.
As of Sept. 23, more than 452 million people have quit.
Wang said he is seeing not only an acceleration in the number of people quitting the CCP, but also a change in attitude. In the early days, people often used pseudonyms to make a public statement of withdrawal, but many are now using their real names and speaking out publicly.
Practitioners Say CCP Deceives Public
Lucy Sun, 10, said she and her family had come to the United Nations last September as well, hoping to raise awareness for her grandmother, who was detained in China for practicing Falun Gong.“I’m here because I want to tell the world Falun Dafa is good, and that we want to stop the persecution,” she said.
In communist China, only state-controlled versions of religions are considered legal, and the regime often brands non-state religious practices as “cults” or “heresy.” Lucy’s grandmother had been wrongfully detained more than once because of her belief in Falun Gong.
Li Dianqin said she has joined peaceful demonstrations in front of the United Nations General Assembly every year since moving to the United States in 2016, in hopes of giving a voice to Falun Gong and raising awareness of the persecutions. This advocacy means she has had to cut off all contact with her daughter, Li said, or risk endangering her daughter if she draws the regime’s ire.
“But she told me, ‘Mom, Falun Gong saved your life. You have a responsibility to tell the truth about Falun Gong,’” Li said. “She supports my advocacy.”
Li said she learned about Falun Gong from her daughter in 1995. She was extremely ill at the time, with multiple organs affected by disease. Like many other early practitioners of Falun Gong in China, Li experienced tremendous health benefits from the practice.
Li says she wants people to understand what Falun Gong is and the unjust nature of the persecution, and she believes this will inspire people to stand on the right side of history.
“If good people don’t step forward, evil will have free rein,” she said.
Sunny Guo said she was shocked when she began to hear the same slanderous terms used by CCP-run media in China coming from the mouths of teenagers at a shopping center in New York.
Guo said she first learned about Falun Gong when the persecution began and the name of the practice was plastered all over the news. It was a decade later before she would meet someone who gave her the primary text of Falun Gong. After she read the book, she understood Falun Gong to be a practice that taught one how to be a better person, and took up the practice herself.
Until this year, Guo had never heard Americans parroting CCP propaganda about Falun Gong, she said. But now young people are copying what they see on social media, and certain media outlets have adopted the same narrative and phrases that Chinese state-run media have been using for decades, she said.
“Falun Gong is a very, very peaceful spiritual practice, and the principles of Falun Gong are truthfulness, compassion, forbearance,” she said.
