Australians with roots in Malaysia are calling on the Albanese government to speak out, after nearly 80 Falun Gong practitioners—including U.N. refugees—were detained by police in Kuala Lumpur ahead of CCP leader Xi Jinping’s recent visit.
Two days before Xi’s arrival in mid-April in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, around two dozen police officers raided a private venue where nearly 80 Falun Gong practitioners had gathered for a routine study of Falun Gong’s spiritual texts.
The officers demanded their identification documents and forcibly detained the group.
Those detained included an elderly woman in her 80s and a 10-year-old child. Among the group were 29 Chinese nationals seeking protection from the widespread persecution of their faith in China, several of whom hold U.N. refugee status.
The 47 Malaysian citizens were released hours after Xi’s departure, while the Chinese nationals were freed over the following two weeks.
Falun Gong practitioners have practiced freely in Malaysia for over three decades. The mass arrest—the first of its kind in Malaysia—occurred as Xi toured Southeast Asia to promote the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a reliable trading partner amid an escalating tariff war with the United States.
“It is really [a] violation of human rights,” Elaise Poh, a Melbourne-based Australian citizen originally from Malaysia, told The Epoch Times.
“They are just there for spiritual study and do not have weapons or anything.”
Poh, a nurse manager at a medical centre, said she had practiced Falun Gong for nearly 25 years.
Australia is home to the second largest Malaysian expat population (165,616) in the world after Singapore, which neighbours the country.
Several household names originate from the South East Asian nation including singer Kamahl, celebrity chef Adam Liaw, mathematician Eddie Woo, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice rooted in the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
Since 1999, the Chinese communist regime has carried out a widespread persecution, subjecting practitioners to mass arrests, torture, forced labour, sexual abuse, and even forced organ harvesting in an effort to eradicate the practice.
Calls for Foreign Minister to Act
Sheaumay Chang, a fellow Malaysian expat and Falun Gong practitioner based in Adelaide, echoed Poh’s concerns.
“I’ve been practicing since 2000, soon after the persecution, and my health, me [as a] person just changed tremendously,” she told The Epoch Times, adding that her family members in Malaysia, despite being influenced by CCP propaganda, saw the positive changes in her after she took up the practice.
Chang hopes that Australian Foreign Minister Wong, originally from Sabah, Malaysia, and now based in Adelaide, will speak out to help address the situation—just as the U.S. State Department has done.
“I hope that Australian government, the Foreign Affairs Department, [if it] gets a chance can speak with the Malaysian government, [and tell them], ‘Don’t send practitioners from China back to China, otherwise their lives will be in danger.
“As we know, the persecution [is] still very severe in China,” she said.
“Australia and Malaysia both are Commonwealth countries, and used to be under British [governance], so we should have common values. We should have freedom of speech and belief,” Chang said.
After detaining the practitioners, Malaysian police initially said they would be released after completing some paperwork.
However, in the early hours of the next morning, authorities reversed course—confiscating the detainees’ phones and Falun Gong texts, and sending some to a magistrate’s court to extend their detention.
Around the same time, local practitioners reported that their homes were searched, and one individual was taken to a police station for questioning.
Officers at the detention site said they were acting under “pressure from above,” The Epoch Times learned.
Local sources also reported that Chinese agents had been monitoring Falun Gong exercise sites and information booths in the weeks leading up to Xi’s visit.
Xi departed Kuala Lumpur for Cambodia on April 17, after the Malaysian king sultan voiced support for Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative—a China-led infrastructure program that critics warn can leave participating countries mired in debt.
Similar preemptive arrests took place in Russia and Serbia in 2024 ahead of Xi’s visits. Earlier this year, Thailand deported 40 Uyghurs to China at Beijing’s request—a move that drew international condemnation and prompted U.S. sanctions.
The Epoch Times reached out to Penny Wong’s office for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
Eva Fu contributed to this report.
