Xi convened a secret meeting in 2022 to develop a new strategy to more effectively target Falun Gong worldwide.
Commentary
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) persecution of people who deviate from communist orthodoxy is comprehensive, severe, and relentless.
Those who resist the CCP in any way are considered enemies of the state and threats to national security—the true meaning of this phrase is whatever the CCP means it to be in the moment. Since 1949, those threats to the CCP’s hegemony have included ethnic minorities, adherents to any form of religion not approved by the state (and even pre-CCP traditions), and anyone who protests publicly against the CCP (or who protests privately and gets caught by the state).
The CCP’s persecution of minorities began in Tibet in 1950 and has extended throughout China over the years, becoming ever more brutal, sophisticated, and barbarous in its practice by the state. The coercion has included physical and
psychological torture,
concentration camps,
forced labor, and
organ harvesting.
The legal framework in Chinese law to justify these actions has also evolved over the decades. For example,
Article 300 of the Chinese criminal code targets faith-based movements and religions. The definitions are vague, which allows Beijing to prosecute (persecute) anyone it deems to be in violation of this provision—including the Falun Gong, minority religious sects, or even adherents of major religions, such as Christians loyal to the Holy See.
A Chinese
national security law passed in 2020 to govern the descent of free Hong Kong into the communist abyss also provides the legal framework to investigate, prosecute, suppress, harass, and even inflict bodily harm on dissidents in
overseas Chinese communities around the world. The body of Chinese law has evolved to support what
Freedom House described in a 2021 report as “the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.”
Transnational repression refers to the CCP’s continuing and expanding efforts at extending extraterritorial control outside China of the overseas population of Chinese and members of minority communities, including “multiple ethnic and religious minorities, political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, and former insiders accused of corruption,” the report states.
These tactics range “from direct attacks like renditions, to co-opting other countries to detain and render exiles, to mobility controls, to threats from a distance like digital threats, spyware, and coercion by proxy,” according to Freedom House.
By the end of 2022, according to
Safeguard Defenders, China was operating more than 100 police stations in 53 countries around the world to help coordinate and facilitate these actions under communist Chinese law, including in the United States.
The CCP would have all Chinese—and the world, for that matter—believe that Chinese history began in 1949. The pre-1949 history of the Chinese people is irrelevant to the Party, except for how it can be revised and conveyed to support the inevitable, logical, and so-called legitimate rule of the CCP over all Chinese endeavors wherever Chinese people live and work.
CCP orthodoxy involves the implementation of totalitarianism with Chinese characteristics on the unfortunate Chinese people. The Party, as guided by Xi Jinping and his communist apparatchiks, applies the Marxist dialectic to all Chinese endeavors, with the goal of squeezing out all historical Chinese spiritual, mystical, religious, metaphysical, and moral cultural traditions in favor of a tangible physical and material society that can be micromanaged by communist ciphers. The ultimate goal is to remake all Chinese citizens as the functional equivalents of the “new Soviet man” (with Chinese characteristics) who docilely and passively accept and follow all of the CCP’s policies and diktats, no matter how bizarre.
The “new Soviet man” was the Russian communists’ attempt at the supposed “renewal” of humanity according to socialist (godless) ideals—the Marxist concept of converting God-fearing and independent-thinking human beings into little more than cogs in the wheels of a dystopian future world.
Aiming to achieve what the Soviets failed to do, the “new Chinese man” is being constructed by the CCP with the assistance of automated social controls and surveillance systems that monitor the behavior and conformance of Chinese citizens to CCP policies.
Will the CCP’s dogged perseverance in this project overcome basic human nature, or will the “new Chinese man” be finally discarded as just another crackpot communist idea?
Targeting Falun Gong, Shen Yun
In true CCP fashion, the regime has been targeting Falun Gong for cultural genocide.The CCP aims to wipe out the
Falun Gong spiritual group inside and outside China, and any overseas Chinese groups who don’t abide by Chinese communist orthodoxy and, like the Shen Yun Performing Arts Company, seek to preserve and honor pre-1949 traditional Chinese culture. After all, Falun Gong and Shen Yun are direct threats to the creation of the “new Chinese man” and the preservation of the CCP’s totalitarian control of China.
Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, was introduced to the Chinese public in 1992. It encourages its practitioners to abide by the moral principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. By 1999, according to official estimates, more than 70 million people took up the practice.
Fearing that Falun Gong’s growing popularity was a threat to its rule, the CCP launched a brutal
persecution campaign against the group in July 1999 under then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin. Since then, millions of practitioners have been abducted and arbitrarily detained in prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands having been tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
In July, the Center
published a statement marking the 25th anniversary of the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong, noting that in recent years, the CCP “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 number of Falun Gong believers documented to have died due to persecution reached 5,069 in May 2024, although the true figure is likely larger due to the regime’s censorship,” the Center’s 2024
report reads.
The report contains this jaw-dropping sentence: “Falun Gong practitioners have been, and continue to be, killed to harvest their organs.”
In 2019, the China Tribunal, an independent people’s tribunal based in London, determined that the Chinese regime had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a substantial scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the “principal source” of human organs.
These are the worst kinds of human rights violations that must be condemned by civilized people everywhere!
Despite the relentless persecution campaign, the CCP has not been able to eliminate Falun Gong in China. As a result, as reported earlier this month by
The Epoch Times, Xi convened a secret meeting in 2022 to develop a new strategy to more effectively target Falun Gong worldwide.
The new strategy involves empowering the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission to coordinate all domestic and international legal enforcement under Chinese law, with the Ministry of Public Security (China’s law enforcement agency) given new responsibilities for domestic actions, while the Ministry of State Security (China’s top spy agency) has been charged with overseas actions against Falun Gong.
Concluding Thoughts
The result of the new strategy to attack Falun Gong overseas has been a ramping up of state security-orchestrated social media attacks against practitioners, spies within overseas Chinese communities, and influence operations through foreign media aimed at suppressing Falun Gong.Meanwhile, the Shen Yun Performing Arts Company (founded by Falun Gong practitioners) has also come under increasing transnational repression tactics as a result of Xi’s secret anti-Falun Gong strategy meeting. This will be explored in the second part of this series.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
