Lord Alton: UK Understanding of Falun Gong an ‘Imperative’ to Recognise CCP Threat

Crossbench peer Lord David Alton speaks to NTD's "British Thought Leaders" programme in London on Nov. 22, 2022. (NTD/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

To recognise Beijing’s interference with democracy in the UK, it’s “imperative” to recognise what’s happening to Falun Gong, Lord Alton of Liverpool said on Monday.

Speaking at a seminar in Parliament, Mr. Alton said the human rights atrocities happening to Falun Gong adherents are “the next big human rights crisis in China after Xinjiang.”

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditative practice that consists of slow-moving exercises and teaches the values of “truth, compassion, and forbearance.”

Originating in mainland China in 1992, Falun Gong attracted some 70 million to 100 million practitioners, including Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members and cadres, before former Chinese regime leader Jiang Zemin turned the party and state apparatus against it in 1999.

Having failed to achieve Mr. Jiang’s goal to “eradicate Falun Gong within three months,” the CCP’s suppression of Falun Gong has been ongoing for 24 years, with practitioners monitored, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

“The CCP is officially atheist, and suppresses all religion to varying degrees,” Mr. Alton said, noting that Mr. Jiang had “recognized that Falun Gong could not be controlled.”

“Even party officials had begun to practice. Mr. Jiang feared, in his own words, that CCP Marxism will become ‘a thumping joke.’”

According to a recently published report (pdf) by parliament’s watchdog of the UK’s intelligence services, Falun Gong is seen by the CCP as a threat to the party and its monopoly on state power and is one of the main targets of the CCP’s overseas espionage and interference activities.

“The UK is unlikely to be the top priority for China when it comes to espionage and interference,” the report reads, adding, the United States “and perceived domestic threats to the CCP’s rule (known as ‘the Five Poisons’—Taiwanese independence, Tibetan independence, Xinjiang separatists, the Chinese democracy movement, and Falun Gong), are likely to receive the most attention from the Chinese Intelligence Services.”

The report also highlighted the CCP’s prevalent interference in British academia, saying it “exerts influence over institutions by leveraging fees and funding, over individual UK academics through inducements and intimidation, over Chinese students by monitoring and controlling, and over think tanks through coercion.”

Referring to the report, Mr. Alton said the CCP’s interference is “particularly acute when it involves the so-called five poisons.”

He also said he believes the “ongoing nationwide campaign in China to eradicate Falun Gong” is “a modern-day genocide.”

Iain Duncan Smith: More Awareness Needed on Falun Gong

Among the five so-called poisons of the CCP, Falun Gong is the least understood by the West.

An independent people’s tribunal chaired by prominent British barrister and judge Sir Geoffrey Nice, KC, in 2019 found that adherents of Falun Gong had been and continued to be the main group of victims killed for their organs.

David Matas, one of the first investigators of the alleged forced organ harvesting, told the seminar that “one of the most chilling ways” they found out about the murderous business, is that in Chinese prisons, “Falun Gong were blood-tested and organ-examined, and non-Falun Gong were not.”

Undated file photo of former Conservative Party leader, MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith. (Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA Media)

Two witnesses, Han Fei and Grace Song, told the seminar about their experiences of being blood-tested in prison. Ms. Song, who works for The Epoch Times, also said she was forced to go through “detailed” physical exams, including blood tests, X-ray scans, organ checks, and a close examination of her skin for scars.

While the atrocity has been unveiled for more than a decade, it has gone largely unnoticed, partly because of a lack of understanding of what Falun Gong is, according to Sir Iain Duncan Smith, founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).

By the time the Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities were found to have also fallen victim to forced organ harvesting, IPAC members already knew about “a tremendous amount of abuse” of Falun Gong practitioners, including forced organ harvesting, but found it “very difficult to get that across to a wider public, who for the most part have never really understood what Falun Gong is about,” Mr. Duncan Smith told the seminar.

“And so, ironically, the Xinjiang genocide has helped us a lot to start to get that right,” he said, adding that more people need to understand what’s happening with Falun Gong.

“They are being persecuted as a minority, but with a belief, and a sense of history that is being shut down in China right now,” he said.

Mr. Duncan Smith highlighted Shen Yun Performing Arts—a premier classical Chinese dance company founded by Falun Dafa practitioners—and the CCP’s attempts to cancel its performances.

According to Shen Yun’s website, the company sees its performance as “a revival of the beauty and goodness of China before communism.”

They also say the CCP has attempted to sabotage their performances by arranging other shows on the same dates, pressuring theatres to cancel the performance, writing nonsensical letters to theatres posing as Falun Gong practitioners, and slashing the tires of their tour buses.

Mr. Duncan Smith said the Chinese Embassy has made failed attempts to interfere with Shen Yun’s performance in London, and that the destruction of culture is “critical” for the CCP.

“They must destroy any sense that there was a time before the Communist Party, before the concept of their government and their rule,” he said.

Falun Gong practitioners hold rally marking the 24th anniversary of the CCP's persecution, in London on July 15, 2023. (Yanning Qi/The Epoch Times)

Victoria White, a spokeswoman for the Falun Dafa Association in the UK, also said she believes it’s important people understand more clearly what Falun Gong is.

“That’s because the demonisation of Falun Gong by the CCP has been so intense and ongoing that Falun Gong has been completely dehumanized in China. Dehumanization is an incitement to genocide. Internationally, we have a duty to prevent genocide. Therefore, I believe we have a duty to reverse the dehumanisation of Falun Gong,” she said.

Ms. White said Falun Gong practitioners see the teachings of “truth, compassion, and forbearance” as the “principles of the universe” and “a way to elevate spiritually.”

She described the exercise as “an ancient Qigong or energy practice in the same way that Tai Chi is a type of Qigong.”

She also dismissed the CCP’s accusation that Falun Gong is an “evil cult.”

“I recall investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann, who spent time with practitioners while he was investigating forced organ harvesting and writing [his book] ‘The Slaughter,’ who mentioned that he quickly realised Falun Gong was not a cult when he discovered they couldn’t agree on anything. They couldn’t even agree on how to describe what Falun Gong is,” she said.