A quarter century ago, Communist China began what would soon become the world’s largest and most severe campaign of religious persecution in the new millennium.
In the spring and summer of 1999, regime authorities began to arrest adherents of Falun Gong — a new and immensely popular spiritual practice rooted in the ancient Chinese tradition. That July 20, the Communist Party launched a nationwide action that it hoped would crush Falun Gong within weeks.
Also called Falun Dafa (法輪大法), which can be rendered as “the Great Law” or “Great Way,” Falun Gong was founded in 1992 by Master Li Hongzhi. The Buddhist-school teachings comprise five sets of meditation exercises and books that guide practitioners in their spiritual cultivation and moral self-improvement.
From the onset, the Party’s newest mass repression included “public book burnings, 24/7 demonizing propaganda, mass arrests, and soon, an insidious obsession with forcing practitioners to renounce their faith, including by means of torture,” a report published this June by the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC) reads.
While over 5,000 people are confirmed to have lost their lives at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a result of its persecution of Falun Gong, the true number of victims is believed to be far higher, given the difficulty of obtaining such sensitive information from China.
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According to human rights investigators, Falun Gong practitioners made up the bulk of victims in China’s state-sponsored practice of organ harvesting, which is estimated to result in the deaths of tens of thousands of prisoners every year.
Survival and dissent
Despite Chinese government estimates that Falun Gong was being practiced by 70 million to 100 million people, the repression against nearly 10 percent of the Chinese population, as well as the broader Falun Gong phenomenon, has received scant coverage in the Western media.
As noted in the FDIC report, while the CCP quickly revised its estimates of those practicing Falun Gong to around just 2 million soon after the persecution began, many foreign news stories repeated Beijing’s numbers without further investigation.
Even prestigious media groups like The New York Times adopted the CCP’s claims about having “crushed” Falun Gong, despite human rights organizations such as Freedom House estimating that as many as 20 million people in China continued to practice Falun Gong — with many of them risking their safety and freedom to tell other Chinese about their faith and expose the persecution against it.
“The regime’s propaganda against Falun Gong typically tries to belittle its importance, presenting it as a marginalized part of society, rather than a focus of the security apparatus’s work,” the FDIC report reads.
Looking at leaked internal speeches and documents, as well as publicly available information posted on Chinese government websites, FDIC found that “the campaign to eradicate Falun Gong is viewed as a central component to the CCP’s efforts to control the population, maintain political power, and retain ideological supremacy, both within China and among the Chinese diaspora.”
Of particular concern for the CCP is the Tuidang movement, initiated by Falun Gong practitioners in 2004, which encourages Chinese to renounce the Party and the oaths they made to it when either joining the CCP itself or its two youth organizations.
Because nearly all Chinese have made such oaths, the Tuidang — which means “quit the party” — movement holds universal currency across society as ordinary citizens become increasingly angry with the CCP’s corruption and misrule. Many of the hundreds of millions of people giving their assumed or real names in the Tuidang movement cite factors such as the draconian “zero-COVID” lockdowns or lack of economic prospects in leading them to break with the Party and communism.
As such, “in recent years the regime has redoubled its efforts to monitor, detain, imprison, and ‘transform’ Falun Gong practitioners in China and to surveil, harass, silence, and malign believers around the world,” the FDIC report said. “This has continued even after the November 2022 death of Jiang Zemin, the former CCP chief who launched the ruthless campaign.”
