A Persecution That Has Gone on 20 Years Too Long

For the past two decades now, practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong have been violently persecuted in China for their beliefs.

If a person sits down in a park in China to do the Falun Gong meditation exercise—which involves sitting peacefully in the full-lotus position—they may be arrested, thrown into prison, or even tortured to death. For fear of being persecuted, practitioners do the sitting meditation and other Falun Gong exercises in secret in their homes.

Around 20 years ago, this wasn’t the case. Tens of millions of people all over China were practicing Falun Gong freely, and parks were often crowded in the mornings with people doing the exercises to peaceful music. The government praised Falun Gong for its health benefits, and the practice was well-known in China for helping people recover from illnesses.

But on July 20, 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a brutal persecution and changed all that.

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with practicing Falun Gong. Rather, it’s that launching persecutions against different groups of people is a tactic used by communist governments to gain or keep political power.

The CCP has persecuted many other groups over the decades, including landlords and teachers. To this day, it persecutes spiritual and ethnic groups such as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and house Christians.

Because the head of the CCP envied the popularity of Falun Gong, he selected it as the next target for persecution.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the persecution, as well as Falun Gong practitioners’ peaceful efforts to resist it.

In addition to the meditative exercises, Falun Gong includes moral teachings on how to be a better person by following the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Being a peaceful group, Falun Gong practitioners never resort to violence to resist the persecution, but that doesn’t mean they’re powerless against it.

For the past 20 years, they have been working nonstop to raise awareness of the persecution, and many of the CCP’s other crimes, both in China and in the rest of the world.

In mainland China, practitioners have risked their lives to get information out to the public in order to counter the CCP’s slanderous anti-Falun Gong propaganda. Since the CCP controls the media in China, practitioners are unable to tell their story in official Chinese news outlets, so they put up posters or hand out fliers in person.

Efforts like these have led to over 300 million Chinese people deciding to quit their membership in the CCP and its affiliated organizations.

Outside China, where practitioners are free to raise awareness without fearing persecution, they have held parades and other activities to let the public know what Falun Gong is and what’s happening in China.

At first, many mainstream media around the world were either deceived by the CCP’s propaganda or frightened into silence by the CCP. As a result, the persecution of Falun Gong has been vastly underreported.

The persecution is still ongoing today. However, thanks to practitioners’ efforts over the past 20 years, government officials and other people around the world have gradually begun to realize the severity of the situation in China. They have joined the voices of Falun Gong practitioners in calling for an end to the persecution.