Today, the persecution of Falun Gong in China is widely known in the West, but this year July 20, marks 24 years since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began its brutal campaign to eradicate Falun Gong in China.
However, the significance of this persecution and its impact on Western democratic freedoms may be less understood.
The CCP’s response to this growing practice was to ban Falun Gong on July 20, 1999. It sought to destroy Falun Gong because it awakens China’s spiritual and moral foundation, which was crushed during the Cultural Revolution.
The CCP promotes and rewards officials who “excel” at persecuting Falun Gong and threatens those who don’t, which has led to the destruction of good governance and morality in China.
The methods of physical and psychological torture refined on Falun Gong since 1999, have also been transferred by experienced Party officials to persecute Tibetans, Uyghurs, Christians, and now the good people of Hong Kong.
The CCP also uses its economic power to either induce or force other nations to be silent on the persecution of Falun Gong, leading to the subjugation of human rights to trade and economic interests.
It has also spread its anti-Falun Gong propaganda overseas so that some Western academics and government officials even follow the CCP’s false narratives.
The CCP’s contempt for international agreements and the rule of law has created hostile and even criminal market forces that impact industries around the world.
In short, the unchecked persecution of Falun Gong has damaged Chinese society and promoted corruption and dishonesty while exporting the CCP’s influence to defraud nations and damage morality and ethics around the world.
Standing Up for Freedom of Belief
At the start of the persecution, Falun Gong practitioners stood up for their right to freedom of belief, not because they were against communism. They all worked and lived within that system.But they soon realised that the CCP’s ideology was entrenched and awakened to the poisonous nature of communist propaganda they had absorbed over decades. That process was assisted by the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times’ publication of the Juiping (Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party) in November 2004.
The only way to uphold their right to freedom of belief and protect that right for other Chinese, and even the people of the world, was to expose the true nature of the CCP.
Response to Forced Organ Harvesting in China
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a China where the military and medical worlds perversely combine to select and kill citizens to sell their vital organs for profit. A regime with such a disdain for human life presents an extreme danger to the world.Western democracies can expose these atrocities and avoid complicity in China’s illicit organ harvesting practices by enacting appropriate national legislation.
Approach to Soviet Communism Applicable to China Today
Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan was known as a man of strong Christian faith. In the 1980s, he forged an effective partnership with Pope John Paul II to help end communism in Poland.
Mr. Reagan was, of course, referring to Soviet communism.
Mr. Inboden also noted that previous Cold War U.S. presidents “had seen Soviet communism as a challenge to be managed or contained. Reagan reverses that, he sees the Cold War as a battle of ideas, and he sees Soviet communism as a vile idea to be defeated, rather than a geopolitical rival to be managed.”
He also explained that when Mr. Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘the focus of evil in the modern world,’ it was deliberate and calculated.
Mr. Inboden said, “This is part of the sustained offensive that he was engaging in the battle of ideas to highlight the truth, the viciousness, the depredations of Soviet communism and the better way of the free world, and, as part of that, included this very unvarnished, straightforward language condemning the Soviet Union for these iniquities.”
Mr. Reagan’s approach provides Western liberal democracies with a clear yet peaceful and strategic approach to expose China’s communist regime.
Falun Gong practitioners have seen that the CCP is an evil entity that cannot be managed but only dissolved.
When Chinese people stop accepting the lies that support it, and the West stops enabling it and starts exposing it, the CCP will disintegrate, and there will be a new China.
July 20 is a time to remember Falun Gong practitioners’ commitment to defending morality and goodness in China, not just for the Chinese people but for the benefit of the world.
