More than a hundred Orange County residents gathered in downtown Goshen on July 13 to raise awareness about the quarter-century persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese communist regime.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that combines meditative exercises with moral teachings based on the core tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
It rapidly gained popularity in China in the early 1990s, with an estimated one in every 13 Chinese citizens practicing Falun Gong before the communist regime started an all-out persecution of the practice on July 20, 1999.
Since then, scores of practitioners have traveled overseas for safety, and many settled down in Orange County west of Hudson River.
“They are, in a real sense, ‘Americans,’” Liam O’Neil, president of the growing Falun Gong Club in Orange County, said. “America is a country founded by people escaping persecution to pursue freedom of faith and belief.”
The Falun Gong club is a nonprofit that organizes the annual rally in Goshen.
Shusen Guo, a former petroleum engineer, came to the United States with his family just five months ago after enduring a life of persecution, harassment, beatings, and detention over two decades in China.
At one time, he was put in solitary confinement by the regime because he practiced Falun Gong, and he had minimal access to food, water, or a bathroom for two months; he was also deprived of sleep via a large overhead bulb in the small room that was never turned off.
“Here in America, I can freely practice Falun Gong, share the benefits of the practice, and spread awareness of the persecution,” Mr. Guo, now a Middletown resident, said in Chinese at the rally podium. “I want to thank America for sheltering us at the most trying time!”
Feng Yang, who also recently moved to Middletown, lost his job as a computer science lecturer in China in 2000, when he had a growing family to feed, because he practiced Falun Gong.
For most of his daughter’s childhood, he led a displaced life away from home to avoid persecution. When his daughter was a teenager, he was incarcerated for four years for not giving up on the practice.
Guoxian Ren, another Middletown resident, began practicing Falun Gong in 1998 and endured more than 10 different methods of torture during her two and half years behind bars in Beijing, including exposure to extreme temperatures, force-feeding, and high-voltage electric shocks.
In addition to imprisonment and torture, Falun Gong practitioners face the danger of having their organs forcibly harvested by the communist regime.
Minghui.org, a website that tracks the persecution of Falun Gong, has documented 5,088 confirmed deaths of practitioners over the past 25 years as a direct result of the persecution.
“Why are so many people willing to forsake almost everything in their lives to continue their faith in Falun Gong and follow the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance?” Mr. Yang said at the podium in Chinese. “Twenty-five years of perseverance is thought-provoking.”
Most rally speakers spoke of the benefits they received from practicing Falun Gong, including their recovery from hard-to-cure illnesses and the positive transformation of their character.
Laurie Gorham, a California transplant living in Otisville, said at the rally that practicing Falun Gong helped her be honest with herself and change for the better—something she had been yearning to do for much of her adult life but could not figure out how to do.
“Though years of tempering my obsession with myself, I was able to put my life aside while I cared for my aging parents at the end of their lives,” she said. “I could do this because I had changed for the better by practicing Falun Dafa.”
“[When] I do change, the rewards are a deeper connection to God and other people around me.”
Ms. Gorham urged local residents to support a bill that the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed on June 25.
Dubbed the Falun Gong Protection Act, the bill, for the first time, requires the U.S. government to impose sanctions on foreign individuals who have knowingly participated in the Chinese Communist Party’s forced organ harvesting.
“Please help stop the persecution of Falun Gong in China by signing the petition to see this binding legislation pass the Senate,” Ms. Gorham said at the podium. “We will continue to speak for those who do not have a voice, and goodness will prevail!”
