NEW YORK CITY—With the setting sun over the Hudson River, a few hundred Falun Gong practitioners gathered on the evening of July 20 at Hudson River Park across from the Chinese Consulate in New York City to mark 27 years of brutal persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual practice in China by the Chinese regime.
Supporters and practitioners delivered speeches as a group of Falun Gong adherents gathered on the walkway from Pier 81 to Pier 84 to call for an end to the persecution.
“The fact that they have to [mark] a 27th [year] of it and it won’t end, to me, is horrific,” Ceceilia Crowley, managing director of Newcomb and Associates Investment Banking, said at the rally before a candlelight vigil.
Falun Gong is a traditional spiritual discipline involving meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a nationwide persecution targeting the practice in July 1999.
Since then, millions have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, hundreds of thousands tortured, and thousands have been documented as killed, according to statistics collected by the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Crowley decided to join the event because she said she feels it is important to give a voice to the voiceless. She said she sees the sincerity and goodness of the people she has met who practice Falun Gong.
“And look what they’ve suffered to come here. They’ve given up everything. I don’t know if I would be brave enough,” she said.
One such practitioner who recently did just that is Liu Siyang, who arrived in the United States on April 3. Liu fled China after his superiors requested he turn over his passport. An engineer at the Agricultural Development Bank of China, he was up for promotion in 2025. A background check required for the promotion uncovered that he was a long-time practitioner of Falun Gong.
After numerous conversations with superiors who pressured him to renounce Falun Gong, Liu was publicly disciplined at the bank. He could see the direction in which things were heading and realized he was in danger when superiors ordered him to hand over his passport, he said. That’s when he decided it was time to leave.
Upon arriving in the United States, he said, his first thought was, “Finally, I have a safe environment.”
Brian Wang, who lives in Manhattan and was passing by the vigil Monday night, said he sympathized with Falun Gong. Originally from China himself, Wang said he could understand why the practitioners were gathered at the consulate.
“They’re looking for their rights, for the right to protect themselves,” he said.
Wang said he came to the United States four years ago to find a safe place to live. He said he did some things against the government in China and then became afraid for his safety, so he decided to leave. He wanted to live in a place where he could express himself freely.
Observing hundreds of practitioners seated on the ground for a candlelight vigil, Wang said this was the largest Falun Gong gathering he had seen in the United States. He said he knew that in China, Falun Gong is persecuted by the CCP.
“They just help the community. Yes. I think it’s good,” Wang said of practitioners’ efforts to raise awareness of the human rights abuses still happening across China.
In addition to marking 27 years of the persecution of Falun Gong, 17 Chinese people proudly shared their decision to quit the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated organizations at the rally event. Each received a certificate to record their declaration of quitting the party.
Among them was Hao Fangfang. Hao said she started accessing more and more information from outside China in 2017 when she was able to break through the internet blockade. That’s when she decided, out of conscience, to quit the Party and distance herself from its crimes.
She said she was first inspired by some public intellectuals on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. She said that from a young age, everyone was educated in that education system, so we all thought the CCP was good. But gradually, she said, she came to see through all of its many lies.
