Falun Gong’s Challenges Reveal the Path to China’s Future

How the spiritual group responds following revelations about ’transnational repression' could set it on the road to freedom.

A parade in celebration of Falun Dafa, including a float depecting 'Zhuan Falun', the principle text of the practice, passes through central London on May 7, 2022. Yan Ning/ Epoch Times

The Chinese people you encounter today don’t know their own history; they know only the CCP’s warped version of it. They don’t know the good things of the past, and they don’t know the terrible things that have happened under the CCP rule—they don’t know what really happened in the bloody intervals of the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen massacre.

Americans need to understand that the CCP is quietly waging war on the United States through spying, so-called soft power, and hacking. The CCP is preparing to have the world’s most dominant military apparatus by 2020 in order to wage loud war, if necessary.

The CCP feels threatened by what America represents. America, with all its faults, shows the world that freedom and democracy can exist in a vibrant, powerful nation. Our values in the West support human dignity, individual rights and freedoms.

This scares the CCP because it knows that its own people will want those freedoms, if they can see that freedom works. In this sense, America represents a primal threat to the survival of the CCP. The CCP cannot afford for Chinese people to see what may be the scenario when the CCP’s heavy hand is no longer pressing down.

The above four paragraphs are not mine, but those of former Epoch Times Editor-in-Chief John Nania. John died in 2022 at the age of 63.

John was a Falun Gong practitioner, just like everyone that worked for The Epoch Times from the early days of the company in 2004.

Just like me.

I have worked for the paper since 2005, when it was founded in the UK. Back then we had a print edition and I not only edited the entertainment page but got up very early every Wednesday to hand out the paper in London’s City area.

It was hard work but we felt guided by a higher mission. We believed then—and Falun Gong practitioners still do—that the paper “saves” people.

That’s why I was willing to work for no pay until 2016 when I finally made it my full-time job.

Not because of ambition, but because I believed that the paper’s reportage on Falun Gong has the power to prevent the eternal destruction of people’s souls.

That’s more or less how the founder of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, puts it in his many teachings. You can read some of them on this website’s home page.

The “Fa-rectification” as he calls it has been approaching for the last 25 years. It’s the reason for the existence of Shen Yun, the dance company you'll find extensively covered by The Epoch Times, TV station NTD, YouTube knock-off Ganjing World, the NGOs Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting and Falun Info Center, and many other Falun Gong-related companies and projects.

I’m sure John Nania died believing in it. Maybe he even believed that he had failed as a practitioner because he couldn’t identify his inner problems.

A friend of mine here in the UK died in excruciating pain believing that Li had “forsaken him.” His own wife, also a practitioner, believes that he simply couldn’t get to the bottom of his human attachments, and if he had he wouldn’t have died.

There are many people who work for The Epoch Times who have died; some of their graves can be seen in footage posted to social media platform X of a cemetery for practitioners.

A parade in celebration of World Falun Dafa Day passes through the streets of central London on May 7, 2022. Yanning Qi/The Epoch Times

In Falun Gong, it’s generally understood that practitioners shouldn’t die. Instead they should become more and more youthful the more they practice. If they die, it must be the result of them “having attachments,” or being persecuted by the “old forces”—Li’s name for gods other than himself—or because they were to be made an example of for practitioners to see.

And yes, you read that right: Li is regarded as a god by practitioners, which includes the entire upper management of The Epoch Times.

The “Creator” that he is referring to in “Why The Creator Seeks To Save All Life“ is himself. But he won’t spell this out explicitly in order to maintain a little plausible deniability. ”I never said I was the Creator.”

Just like he never told people not to go to the hospital when they get sick. Except you'll have failed in some aspect of your practice if you do. But he never said not to go.

Many readers of The Epoch Times are Christian, and indeed Falun Gong’s political support, especially with the recent Falun Gong Protection Act, has largely come from Christian lawmakers.

But what these people don’t know is that Falun Gong practitioners do not believe that Jesus saves people any more. Only Li can save people because he is the highest god. The god of all gods, if you will. The “Fa”—which was created by Li—has actually created “millions and millions of Jesuses and Sakyamunis,” he said in 2002.

They also believe—or most of them do because it’s implicit in Li’s teachings—that Islam is an “evil religion.”

By telling you this, practitioners believe I will go to hell. They believe I have been “dragged down by the evil.” It’s something I have had to come to terms with since I gave up practicing. Perhaps it’s something that will be with me for the rest of my life, because despite the numerous controversies surrounding Falun Gong, I doubt the practice will be affected much. It’s a cult, after all.

By labeling it a cult they will say I am “perpetuating the narrative of the Chinese Communist Party.”

But two things can be true. The CCP can be persecuting Falun Gong—though the extent of this is very difficult to ascertain—and Falun Gong can still be a cult.

It ticks all the boxes: messianic leader, in-group and out-group dynamic, information control, illegal exploitation of members, imminent “apocalypse” driving fanaticism.

So why am I telling you this? Because I have a deep sense of shame over my 20 years in the practice. I was fooled.

It’s nothing to do with intelligence. There are many extremely intelligent people still in Falun Gong. Many I would call friends, though it remains to be seen how long that is true.

But they are also extremely stupid, because they have been blinded by mind control. Myself included.

Every day in New York The Epoch Times office staff members follow a rigorous schedule that involves “studying the Fa” from 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.; “sending righteous thoughts” for 15 minutes at 9 a.m. and again at 12 p.m.; 30 minutes of Falun Gong exercises on the steps of Penn Station at 12:15 p.m. in their lunch break; another Fa study session at 1:30 p.m.; sending righteous thoughts at 6 p.m.; and often an evening Fa study session and sharing from 7 to 9 p.m. It may be “voluntary” but the net result is they rarely have a break from Falun Gong. The office reeks of Chinese food that is prepared for the staff so they don’t ever have to leave.

One colleague who was forced to leave—and her content almost entirely erased—was journalist Simone Gao. In early 2024, Falun Gong website Minghui announced she was no longer a practitioner. In my time as a practitioner I’ve only seen this happen to people if they are outed as “spies.”

So what was Simone’s misdemenor? She asked publicly whether there was any truth to the allegations emerging around the abuse of child dancers at Shen Yun. She had committed thought crime.

Shen Yun is known as “Master’s project.” Therefore, anything negative—no matter how truthful— must be evil.

This is why over the last year or so, practitioner-run media have relentlessly tried to paint the former Shen Yun dancers—who were children at the time they were in Shen Yun—as “disgruntled former employees” or CCP stooges.

The New York Times, likewise, has been painted as a CCP mouthpiece, with journalist Nicole Hong and her father, seemingly only by virtue of their Chinese heritage, as extensions of the communist regime. Truth be damned. As I understand it, journalists like Petr Svab and Eva Fu never even asked the NYT or Hong for comment, breaking this paper’s own journalistic standards. They have never interviewed the former Shen Yun dancers.

A practice that regards “truth” as a core tenet has discarded it to focus on protecting Li and the practice.

Now, as you’ll no doubt have read, the narrative of the “transnational repression of Falun Gong” has taken hold and is also being pushed by this paper and various Falun Gong NGOs.

If you care to drill down to the proof, all you’ll find is some leaked documents seen only by Falun Info Center.

I could go on and on, and I expect in the coming years I may well do so. Because for me, this is the beginning of the rest of my life.

For practitioners, my suggestion is to try stopping reading Zhuan Falun every day. Try stopping the exercises. See how you feel. What surprised me is that I didn’t feel like evil was dragging me down. I didn’t feel overcome with human thoughts. In fact, I felt more or less the same. I stopped over a year ago and none of you could tell. So what did over 20 years of “cultivation” amount to?

For lawmakers, please do your due diligence before supporting Falun Gong. It’s not as simple as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

And for Epoch Times readers, stop supporting the media outlet of a cult. Unsubscribe today.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.