The Persecution of Falun Gong

On July 22, 1999 practicing your beliefs suddenly became illegal for tens of millions of people in China. That was the day the Chinese Communist Party banned Falun Gong, and the government of Jiang Zemin began arresting thousands of practitioners of Falun Gong. The immediate massive appeals by Falun Gong practitioners, and the police response of beatings and mass arrests, began a conflict that continues to this day. Practicing Falun Gong remains illegal in China almost two years later. Recently leaked documents reveal that the persecution was in fact engineered by China’s president, Jiang Zemin, out of perceived threat to his rule.

The persecution of Falun Gong has been brutal, severe, and unrelenting. The Chinese government uses propaganda and a system of state terror to attempt to coerce the practitioners of Falun Gong into giving up their beliefs. The terror includes arbitrary and illegal arrests, beatings, torture, slave labor, confinement in mental hospitals, forced abortions, and sexual abuse. Tens of thousands languish while illegally imprisoned. At least 302 are known to have died of torture and abuse while in police custody. Government sources inside China have disclosed that the actual number exceeds 1,000. The fate of millions of others remains unknown.

In addition, practitioners of Falun Gong are routinely deprived of jobs, educations, apartments, and pensions. They are forced to pay huge fines, including for their own imprisonment, and suffer having their property confiscated. Their families, neighbors, and workplaces are made to be responsible for them, meaning that they, too, face punishment if the practitioner does not renounce Falun Gong. Millions of families and friendships have in this way been torn apart, as practitioners are forced to abandon their loved ones in order to protect them, and neighbors and fellow employees are set against one another. Many couples have even been forced by authorities to file divorce.

At the same time, an array of institutions have been contorted to further the persecution of Falun Gong. The legal system, for one, has been manipulated to justify detaining and sentencing practitioners, for example, and has even been finagled to punish practitioners retroactively. All of China’s vast state-run media have been charged with the task of demonizing Falun Gong and its teacher; a relentless barrage of contrived images and stories are paraded on television, the airwaves, and in the press to inspire public hatred and resentment of the practice. Even psychiatric hospitals have been turned into an instrument of persecution. Throughout China these facilities illegally detain perfectly mentally healthy Falun Gong practitioners expressly for the purpose of breaking their wills through torture and mind-bending techniques.

Wang Lixuan and her 8-month old baby died while in police custody Despite growing criticism from China’s citizenry as well as the international community, Jiang and China’s leadership have yet to lessen their persecution. To date, all wrongdoing in China has been flatly denied in what amounts to a policy of lying. Many of the worst perpetrators, including jailers and police guilty of murder, have even been promoted or rewarded for their brutality.

Falun Gong has responded to this persecution by non-violent appeals to the government to obey its laws, and by working ceaselessly to clarify to the Chinese people the truth about Falun Gong, the government’s persecution, and the fundamental human rights of everyone. In the power of their courageous example, and in their efforts to educate the Chinese people, Falun Gong has become China’s first mass civil disobedience movement. Amidst persecution Falun Gong has shown the people of China a way out of their history of despotism by teaching the necessity of the rule of law, the inalienability of our fundamental human rights, and the true source of human dignity