Falun Gong practitioners call for an end to the persecution of the spiritual group in China, during an event marking 24 years since the launch of the persecution, on Capitol Hill on July 20, 2023. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times
NEW YORK—The Chinese regime’s human rights abuses have turned a group of meditators into its “single largest whistleblower,” according to a new documentary.
Released on April 15, the short film titled “the Long Arm of Beijing” draws attention to Beijing’s long-running campaign to silence the targeted spiritual community Falun Gong, a group espousing tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance in China and globally.
The chain of events goes back to China’s 1990s, when the faith group was the “pride of a nation.” Some 70-100 million people took up the practice then over its health benefits—around one in every 13 individuals in the mainland. That changed in 1999, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided Falun Gong’s popularity was a threat to its power over the people. Overnight, the group of meditators became the “public enemy no. 1,” the film said.
Falun Gong books are set on fire in Shouguang City, China's eastern Shandong Province, on Aug. 4, 1999. Chinese authorities in cities across China burned millions of Falun Gong books and materials after the communist regime launched a campaign to persecute the spiritual practice in July 1999. STR/XINHUA/AFP via Getty Images
In the United States, volunteers shedding light on the persecution and human rights violations in China found themselves stalked and harassed. An engineer was attacked in his Atlanta home and left bleeding on his front lawn, with intruders taking his computer and hard drive. Another New York native received phone calls in the dead of the night playing back recordings of her private conversations. A U.S. intelligence officer warned the community that the regime had deployed assassins on U.S. soil, according to the film.
Alongside the assaults and intimidation, top CCP officials also went all out to malign the faith group. Now-deceased communist leader Jiang Zemin, who initiated the persecution in July 1999, was spotted later that year handing then-U.S. President Bill Clinton a book filled with unfounded claims from the CCP’s propaganda vilifying Falun Gong. In 2001, three Chinese diplomats called then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice at the White House to read to her a 20-minute prepared speech defending the suppression campaign, according to reports from the time.
Falun Gong practitioners do the sitting meditation exercise at Santa Monica Pier, Los Angeles on Oct. 17, 2015. Larry Dye/Epoch Times
With the threat of arbitrary arrest, torture, and possible death looming over them, tens of millions inside China mobilized to clarify their story in the face on an onslaught of state propaganda.
They printed leaflets and, under the cover of the night, hand distributed them from neighborhood to neighborhood to raise awareness of what Falun Gong was about and the CCP’s persecution. At the cost of their lives, some hijacked the state-run broadcast networks to tell their side of the story.
When it became clear that the regime was profiting off its persecution of Falun Gong, using them as a living organ bank for lucrative crimes of forced organ harvesting, formerly imprisoned adherents still in China started reached out to foreign officials about unexplained disappearances of their friends—knowing full well the danger they were bringing to themselves under the CCP’s suppressive atmosphere, where it tries to control all information going in and out of the country.
Rep. Zachary Nunn (R-Iowa) speaks at a hearing about the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) forced organ harvesting before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in Washington on March 20, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
Outside of China, the Falun Gong diaspora established the website Minghui.org, coordinating grassroots networks in China to supply first-hand accounts of abuse inflicted on Falun Gong practitioners. Engineers who practice Falun Gong pioneered software technologies to help people in China break through the CCP’s internet firewall to access uncensored information.
Then, there’s also Shen Yun, a New York-based performing arts group that has many artists who practice Falun Gong, that travels around the world with the mission of “giving people the world over a glimpse of what China was before communism,” its website says.
All together, the film said, they amount to “the single largest whistleblower of the CCP, exposing its crimes and tyrannical nature to the world.”
“There’s no other single group that even remotely comes close to the impact inside China and outside China,” Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, told The Epoch Times.
Passersby sign a petition held by a Falun Dafa practitioner during a march through the center of Warsaw, Poland, on Sept. 9, 2022. Mihut Savu/The Epoch Times
What makes this “whistleblowing environment” unique, he said, is not necessarily who they are but what they are up against.
“We’re talking about a party that itself is everywhere,” he said. “We’re dealing with a party that not only runs an entire country but has extensive operations around the world.”
He views the regime’s persecution of Falun Gong as “a macabre laboratory for horrific persecution methods that are now deployed against other groups across China.”
By escalating its campaign into the West, the regime has “built up a capacity to influence, manipulate, and outright suppress any group right here in the United States, and around the world,” he said in a statement.
“Make no mistake: Falun Gong is a test case, but the end game is potentially any of us.”
Eva Fu
Reporter
Eva Fu is a New York-based writer for The Epoch Times focusing on U.S. politics, U.S.-China relations, religious freedom, and human rights. Contact Eva at [email protected]
