WASHINGTON—U.S. officials and leaders of human rights organizations joined a rally in Washington on July 11 to call for an end to the Chinese communist regime’s 25-year-long persecution of Falun Gong.
“The United States, in a bipartisan way, stands with Falun Gong,” Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) told thousands gathered at the National Mall.
“[The U.S.] stands for religious freedom and stands against the Chinese Communist Party’s direct attacks on that religious freedom.”
Also speaking at the rally, Asif Mahmood of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said that “the U.S. condemns in the strongest possible terms the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal repression of Falun Gong practitioners.”
Mr. Ryan, in an interview with NTD, The Epoch Times’s sister media outlet, called the bill a “critical life and death legislation.”
The lawmaker described the regime’s forced organ harvesting as “the most egregious and, and disgusting violation of a human and their dignity and their values.”
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that involves five meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Introduced to the public in China in the early 1990s by Mr. Li Hongzhi, the practice quickly gained widespread popularity, largely due to its health benefits and almost entirely through word of mouth. By official estimates, between 70 million and 100 million people had taken up the practice before the end of the decade.
Threatened by its popularity, the CCP in 1999 started a mass campaign to “eradicate” Falun Gong by slandering the practice and detaining, torturing, and destroying the reputations of practitioners who refused to renounce their spiritual beliefs. July 20 marks the date when the CCP launched the persecution, a campaign that persists to this day.
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) is one of several organizations that have documented evidence of the CCP’s live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners.
“We need this consistent witness by outsiders, by the West, against the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party against Falun Gong,” VOC President and CEO Eric Patterson said at the rally.
While the House of Representatives is doing its part, companies need to do their due diligence to avoid unintentionally aiding Beijing’s organ transplant industry, he told The Epoch Times.
“It’s not just statistics. These are individuals, people with family members,” Mr. Tozzi said.
Sean Nelson, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom International, thanked international advocates for persisting in raising awareness of Falun Gong.
“Many people have said the CCP has been launching a war on faith, and the Falun Gong were the initial victims of that 25 years ago,” he said. “Thousands and thousands thrown into prison every year in hopes that people would forget them, but I’m so glad that none of you have forgotten them.”
Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, recalled his own experience participating in the anti-communist movement that brought an end of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime. He considered Falun Gong a role model for human rights advocates around the world.
“Despite repressive, ruthless CCP campaigns to eradicate this ancient spiritual practice grounded in millennia of authentic Chinese tradition and universal including truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, practitioners have survived,” he said.
Speakers at the rally also included Christian Freedom International President Wendy Wright; Friends of Falun Gong Executive Director Alan Adler; Tuidang Center President Zhongyuan Yi; World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong Chair Zhiyuan Wang; and Chen Jingyu, a Falun Gong practitioner and victim of the CCP’s persecution.
Stories of Persecution
The CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong has not relented since 1999. Some rally attendees who experienced it firsthand shared their stories with The Epoch Times.
Chen Jingyu’s sister Chen Jinghui was one of dozens arrested this spring in Changchun, in northeastern China’s Jilin Province. Both sisters practice Falun Gong, and Ms. Chen had been sent to a labor camp herself when she used to live in China.
In March, about seven police officers waited outside her sister’s apartment and arrested her just as she went outside. Ms. Chen said she suspects the police had been monitoring her sister for a while. She learned of the arrest only weeks after it occurred, through a friend.
“My family didn’t get an explanation,” Ms. Chen told The Epoch Times. The police initially didn’t inform the family of her sister’s arrest or where she was held. There was no arrest warrant or other documentation. Both her sister’s lawyer and her son were denied a visit request.
Her sister is the sole caretaker for their parents, both in their 80s. Their father’s thrombus worsened after the arrest, and he’s still in the hospital for treatment, Ms. Chen said.
Ms. Chen, 53, used to work in an auditing firm in Changchun. Both she and her husband lost their jobs under the persecution. In the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, police arrested her; at the police station, they opened all the windows and ordered her to lie on the cold floor, in a bid to torment her. They later sent her to a labor camp, where she worked more than 10 hours every day making products, such as parts of rag dolls for export to Japan.
Several practitioners she knew were sentenced to prison for nine or 10 years. One of them got a life sentence.
“They could torture someone to coerce a confession, to make you say you did this and that wrong,” she said. “I’ve lived in those fears, the fear for your life. Just think: How many people have been tortured to death, how many had their organs harvested?”
