Persecution of Falun Gong

. The banner reads "Falun Dafa Free-Teaching Exercise Site". Falun Gong's popularity worried senior officials of the CCP. Falun Gong is based around the teachings of its founder and leader: China-born Li Hongzhi. According to NBC News, to his followers, Li is "a God-like figure who can levitate, walk through walls and see into the future. His ultra-conservative and controversial teachings include a rejection of modern science, art and medicine, and a denunciation of homosexuality, feminism and general worldliness." Hongzhi instructs his followers to not talk about "Falun Gong's inner teachings" when talking to outsiders, contradictory to his teachings about "Truthfulness". The practice of Falun Gong was first taught publicly by Li in Northeast China in the spring of 1992, towards the end of China's "qigong boom". Falun Gong initially enjoyed considerable official support during the early years of its development. It was promoted by the state-run Qigong Association and other government agencies. By the mid-1990s, however, Chinese authorities sought to rein in the influence of qigong practices and enacted more stringent requirements on the country's various qigong denominations. Although some government agencies and senior officials continued expressing support for the practices, others grew increasingly wary of its size and capacity for independent organization. On 25 April, upwards of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners assembled peacefully near the Zhongnanhai government compound in Beijing to request the release of the Tianjin practitioners and an end to the escalating harassment against them. It was Falun Gong practitioners' attempt to seek redress from the leadership by going to them and, "albeit very quietly and politely, making it clear that they would not be treated so shabbily." It was the first mass demonstration at the Zhongnanhai compound in the PRC's history, and the largest protest in Beijing since 1989. Several Falun Gong representatives met with then-premier Zhu Rongji, who assured them that the government was not against Falun Gong, and promised that the Tianjin practitioners would be released. The crowd outside dispersed peacefully, apparently believing that their demonstration had been a success. Different from Zhu's conciliatory approach dealing with Falun Gong issue, security czar and politburo member Luo Gan was less conciliatory, and called on Jiang Zemin, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party to find a decisive solution to the Falun Gong problem. ==Statewide persecution==

On the night of 25 April 1999, then-Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin issued a letter indicating his desire to see Falun Gong defeated. The letter expressed alarm at Falun Gong's popularity, particularly among Communist Party members. He reportedly called the Zhongnanhai protest "the most serious political incident since the '4 June' political disturbance in 1989." At a meeting of the Politburo on 7 June 1999, Jiang described Falun Gong as a grave threat to Communist Party authority—"something unprecedented in the country since its founding 50 years ago"—and ordered the creation of a high-level committee to "get fully prepared for the work of disintegrating [Falun Gong]." Just after midnight on 20 July 1999, public security officers seized hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners from their homes in cities across China. Estimates on the number of arrests vary from several hundred to over 5,600. A Hong Kong newspaper reported that 50,000 individuals were detained in the first week of the crackdown. The Public Security Bureau ordered churches, temples, mosques, newspapers, media, courts and police to suppress Falun Gong. Chinese leadership viewed Falun Gong's mobilization power as significant and worried about how it could be used by its US-based leader who was beyond the reach of Chinese state authorities. There were also reportedly rifts in the Politburo at the time of the incident. Willy Wo-Lap Lam writes that Jiang's campaign against Falun Gong may have been used to promote allegiance to himself; Lam quotes one party veteran as saying, "By unleashing a Mao-style movement [against Falun Gong], Jiang is forcing senior cadres to pledge allegiance to his line." Jiang is held by Falun Gong to be personally responsible for the final decision, and sources cited by The Washington Post state that, "Jiang Zemin alone decided that Falun Gong must be eliminated," and "picked what he thought was an easy target." Peerman cited reasons such as suspected personal jealousy of Li Hongzhi; Human Rights Watch notes that the crackdown on Falun Gong reflects historical efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to eradicate religion, which the government believed was inherently subversive. Some journalists believe that Beijing's reaction exposes its authoritarian nature and its intolerance for competing loyalty. The Globe and Mail wrote : "...any group that does not come under the control of the Party is a threat"; secondly, the 1989 protests may have heightened the leaders' sense of losing their grip on power, making them live in "mortal fear" of popular demonstrations. Craig Smith of the Wall Street Journal suggests that the government which has by definition no view of spirituality, lacks moral credibility with which to fight an expressly spiritual foe; the party feels increasingly threatened by any belief system that challenges its ideology and has an ability to organize itself. ==Legal and political mechanisms==

610 Office On 10 June the Party established the 610 Office, a Communist Party-led security agency responsible for coordinating the elimination of Falun Gong. Nonetheless, its tasks were "to deal with central and local, party and state agencies, which were called upon to act in close coordination with that office," according to UCLA professor James Tong. The office is headed by a high-ranking member of the Communist Party's Politburo or Politburo Standing Committee. It is closely associated with the powerful Political and Legislative Affairs Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The main functions of the 610 Offices include coordinating anti–Falun Gong propaganda, surveillance and intelligence collection, and the punishment and "reeducation" of Falun Gong practitioners. Journalist Ian Johnson, whose coverage of the crackdown on Falun Gong earned him a Pulitzer Prize, wrote that the job of the 610 Office was "to mobilize the country's pliant social organizations. Under orders from the Public Security Bureau, churches, temples, mosques, newspapers, media, courts and police all quickly lined up behind the government's simple plan: to crush Falun Gong, no measures too excessive." Official documents and circulars Beginning in July 1999 Chinese authorities issued a number of notices and circulars prescribing measures to crack down on the Falun Gong and placing restrictions on the practice and expression of religious belief: • On 29 July 1999 the Beijing Judicial Bureau issued a notice forbidding lawyers from defending Falun Gong practitioners. The Ministry of Justice also issued instructions that lawyers were not to represent Falun Gong without permission. The legislation was used to retroactively legitimize the persecution of spiritual groups deemed "dangerous to the state". Implications for the rule of law The Ministry of Justice required that lawyers seek permission before taking on Falun Gong cases, and called on them to "interpret the law in such a way as to conform to the spirit of the government's decrees." Edelman and Richardson write that "the Party and government's response to the Falun Gong movement violates citizens' right to a legal defense, freedom of religion, speech and assembly enshrined in the Constitution... the Party will do whatever is necessary to crush any perceived threat to its supreme control. This represents a move away from the rule of law and toward this historical Mao policy of 'rule by man. ==Propaganda==

Onset of the campaign One of the key elements of the anti–Falun Gong campaign was a propaganda campaign that sought to discredit and demonize Falun Gong and its teachings. Within the first month of the crackdown, 300–400 articles attacking Falun Gong appeared in the main state-run papers, while primetime television replayed alleged exposés on the group, with no divergent views aired in the media. The propaganda campaign focused on allegations that Falun Gong jeopardized social stability, was deceiving and dangerous, was "anti-science" and threatened progress, and argued that Falun Gong's moral philosophy was incompatible with a Marxist social ethic. Falun Gong was compared to "a rat crossing the street that everyone shouts out to squash" by Beijing Daily; other officials said it would be a "long-term, complex and serious" struggle to "eradicate" Falun Gong. State propaganda initially used the appeal of scientific rationalism to argue that Falun Gong's worldview was in "complete opposition to science" and communism. For example, the ''People's Daily'' newspaper asserted on 27 July 1999 that the fight against Falun Gong "was a struggle between theism and atheism, superstition and science, idealism and materialism." Other editorials declared that Falun Gong's "idealism and theism" are "absolutely contradictory to the fundamental theories and principles of Marxism," and that the "'truth, kindness and forbearance' principle preached by [Falun Gong] has nothing in common with the socialist ethical and cultural progress we are striving to achieve." Suppressing Falun Gong was presented as a necessary step to maintaining the "vanguard role" of the Communist Party in Chinese society. At the early stages of the crackdown, the evening news also would broadcast images of large piles of Falun Gong materials being crushed or incinerated. By 30 July, ten days into the campaign, Xinhua had reported confiscations of over one million Falun Gong books and other materials, hundreds of thousands burned and destroyed. These messages were relayed through all state-run—and many non-state-run media channels—as well as through work units and the Communist Party's own structure of cells that penetrate society. Elizabeth Perry, a Harvard historian, writes that the basic pattern of the offensive was similar to "the anti-rightist campaign of the 1950s [and] the anti-spiritual pollution campaigns of the 1980s." As it did during the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party organised rallies in the streets and stop-work meetings in remote western provinces by government agencies such as the weather bureau to denounce the practice. Local government authorities have carried out "study and education" programmes throughout China, and official cadres have visited villagers and farmers at home to explain "in simple terms the harm of Falun Gong to them". A broad translation of that term is "heretical teaching" or "heterodox teaching", but during the anti–Falun Gong propaganda campaign it was rendered as "cult" or "evil cult" in English. Julia Ching writes that the "evil cult" label was defined by an atheist government "on political premises, not by any religious authority", and was used by the authorities to make previous arrests and imprisonments constitutional. In this process of relabelling, the government was attempting to tap into a "deep reservoir of negative feelings related to the historical role of quasi-religious cults as a destabilising force in Chinese political history." While Falun Gong was falling outside this association, leaving them vulnerable to the government's reclassification of "cult" to delegitimize them. Overseas Chinese propaganda using this label has been censured by Western governments. The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission in 2006 took issue with anti–Falun Gong broadcasts from Chinese Central Television (CCTV), noting "they are expressions of extreme ill will against Falun Gong and its founder, Li Hongzhi. The derision, hostility and abuse encouraged by such comments could expose the targeted group or individual to hatred or contempt and... could incite violence and threaten the physical security of Falun Gong practitioners." Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident A turning point in the government's campaign against Falun Gong occurred on 23 January 2001, when five people set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square. Chinese government sources declared immediately they were Falun Gong practitioners driven to suicide by the practice, and filled the nation's media outlets with graphic images and fresh denunciations of the practice. The self-immolation was held up as evidence of the "dangers" of Falun Gong, and was used to legitimize the government's crackdown against the group. Falun Gong sources disputed the accuracy of the government's narrative, noting that their teachings explicitly forbid violence or suicide. Several Western journalists and scholars also noted inconsistencies in the official account of events, leading many to believe the self-immolation may have been staged to discredit Falun Gong. The campaign of state propaganda that followed the event eroded public sympathy for Falun Gong. As noted by Time magazine, many Chinese had previously felt that Falun Gong posed no real threat, and that the state's crackdown against it had gone too far. After the self-immolation, however, the media campaign against the group gained significant traction. Posters, leaflets and videos were produced detailing the supposed detrimental effects of Falun Gong practice, and regular anti–Falun Gong classes were scheduled in schools. CNN compared the government's propaganda initiative to past political movements such as the Korean War and the Cultural Revolution. Later, as public opinion turned against the group, the Chinese authorities began sanctioning the "systematic use of violence" to eliminate Falun Gong. In the year following the incident, the imprisonment, torture, and deaths of Falun Gong practitioners in custody increased significantly. ==Censorship==

Interference with foreign correspondents The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China has complained about their members being "followed, detained, interrogated and threatened" for reporting on the crackdown on Falun Gong. Foreign journalists covering a clandestine Falun Gong news conference in October 1999 were accused by the Chinese authorities of "illegal reporting". Journalists from Reuters, the New York Times, the Associated Press and a number of other organisations were interrogated by police, forced to sign confessions, and had their work and residence papers temporarily confiscated. Entire news organizations have not been immune to press restrictions concerning Falun Gong. In March 2001, Time Asia ran a story about Falun Gong in Hong Kong. The magazine was pulled from the shelves in mainland China, and threatened that it would never again be sold in the country. Partly as a result of the difficult reporting environment, by 2002, Western news coverage of the persecution within China had all but completely ceased, even as the number of Falun Gong deaths in custody was on the rise. and individuals found downloading or circulating information online about Falun Gong risk imprisonment. It is reported that many Falun Gong practitioners have been jailed in recent years for posting messages about the spiritual group or human rights abuses on social media, accessing banned websites, and possessing or sharing prohibited VPN technology. Chinese authorities began filtering and blocking overseas websites as early as the mid-1990s, and in 1998 the Ministry of Public Security developed plans for the Golden Shield Project to monitor and control online communications. The campaign against Falun Gong in 1999 provided authorities with added incentive to develop more rigorous censorship and surveillance techniques. The government also moved to criminalize various forms of online speech. China's first integrated regulation on Internet content, passed in 2000, made it illegal to disseminate information that "undermines social stability", harms the "honor and interests of the state", or that "undermines the state's policy for religions" or preaches "feudal" beliefs—a veiled reference to Falun Gong. The same year, the Chinese government sought out Western corporations to develop surveillance and censorship tools that would let them track Falun Gong practitioners and block access to news and information on the subject. North American companies such as Cisco and Nortel marketed their services to the Chinese government by touting their efficacy in catching Falun Gong. Domestic Chinese telecommunication companies and internet service providers are similarly required by law to participate in the censorship process. China's 2017 Cybersecurity Law empowered officials to stop the transmission of contents that are perceived as "threatening the public order", which has been applied to content related to Falun Gong. Internet Service Providers in China that fails to reporting and restricting such content would face fines and criminal liability. In addition to censoring the Internet within its borders, the Chinese government and military use cyber-warfare to attack Falun Gong websites in the United States, Australia, Canada and Europe. According to Chinese Internet researcher Ethan Gutmann, the first sustained denial of service attacks launched by China were against overseas Falun Gong websites. In 2005, researchers from Harvard and Cambridge found that terms related to Falun Gong were the most intensively censored on the Chinese Internet. Other studies of Chinese censorship and monitoring practices produced similar conclusions. A 2012 study examining rates of censorship on Chinese social media websites found Falun Gong-related terms were among the most stringently censored. Among the top 20 terms most likely to be deleted on Chinese social media websites, three are variations on the word "Falun Gong" or "Falun Dafa". In response to censorship of the Chinese Internet, Falun Gong practitioners in North America developed a suite of software tools such as Freegate and Ultrasurf to bypass online censorship and surveillance. These two freeware programs are capable to circumvent China's Great Firewall by routing internet traffic through proxy servers. ==Torture and extrajudicial killing==

Reeducation A key component of the Communist Party's campaign is the reeducation or "transformation" of Falun Gong practitioners. Transformation is described as "a process of ideological reprogramming whereby practitioners are subjected to various methods of physical and psychological coercion until they recant their belief in Falun Gong." The transformation is considered successful once the Falun Gong practitioner signs five documents: a "guarantee" to stop practicing Falun Gong; a promise to sever all ties to the practice; two self-criticism documents critiquing their own behaviour and thinking; and criticisms of Falun Gong doctrine. A similar three-year campaign was launched in 2013. The Special Rapporteur referred to the torture allegations as "harrowing" and asked the Chinese government to "take immediate steps to protect the lives and integrity of its detainees in accordance with the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners". Numerous forms of torture are purported to be used, including electric shocks, suspension by the arms, shackling in painful positions, sleep and food deprivation, force-feeding, and sexual abuse, with many variations on each type. The Falun Dafa Information Center reports that over 3,700 named Falun Gong practitioners have died as a result of torture and abuse in custody, typically after they refused to recant their beliefs. Amnesty International notes that this figure may be "only a small portion of the actual number of deaths in custody, as many families do not seek legal redress for these deaths or systematically inform overseas sources." Two years before her death, Gao had been imprisoned at the Longshan forced labor camp, where she was badly disfigured with electric shock batons. Gao escaped the labor camp by jumping from a second-floor window, and after pictures of her burned visage were made public, she became a target for recapture by authorities. She was taken back into custody on 6 March 2005 and killed just over three months later. On 26 January 2008, security agents in Beijing stopped popular folk musician Yu Zhou and his wife Xu Na while they were on their way home from a concert. The 42-year-old Yu Zhou was taken into custody, where authorities attempted to force him to renounce Falun Gong. He was tortured to death within 11 days. Government authorities deny that Falun Gong practitioners are killed in custody. They attribute deaths to suicide, illness, or other accidents. These allegations prompted an investigation by former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas. In July 2006, the Kilgour-Matas report found that "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six-year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained" and concluded that "the government of China and its agencies in numerous parts of the country, in particular hospitals but also detention centres and 'people's courts', since 1999 have put to death a large but unknown number of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience". called attention to the extremely short wait times for organs in China—one to two weeks for a liver compared with 32.5 months in Canada—indicating that organs were being procured on demand. A significant increase in the number of annual organ transplants in China beginning in 1999, corresponded with the onset of the persecution of Falun Gong. Despite very low levels of voluntary organ donation, China performs the second-highest number of transplants per year. Kilgour and Matas also presented incriminating material from Chinese transplant center web sites advertising the immediate availability of organs from living donors, as well as transcripts of telephone interviews in which hospitals told prospective transplant recipients that they could obtain Falun Gong organs. Kilgour followed up on this investigation in a 680-page 2016 report. (left) with Edward McMillan-Scott at a 2009 Foreign Press Association press conference In 2014, investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann published the results of his own investigation. He reported that organ harvesting from political prisoners likely began in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the 1990s, and then spread nationwide. Gutmann estimates that some 64,000 Falun Gong prisoners may have been killed for their organs between the years 2000 and 2008. In 2016, the researchers published a joint update to their findings showing that the number of organ transplants conducted in China is much higher than previously believed, and that the death from illicit organ harvesting could be as high as 1,500,000. In December 2005 and November 2006, China's Deputy Health Minister acknowledged that the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners for transplants was widespread. However, Chinese officials deny that Falun Gong practitioners' organs are being harvested, and insist that China abides by World Health Organization principles that prohibit the sale of human organs without written consent from donors. In May 2008, two United Nations Special Rapporteurs reiterated their requests for the Chinese authorities to adequately respond to the allegations, and to provide a source for the organs that would account for the sudden increase in organ transplants in China since 2000. The tribunal said it had clear evidence that forced organ harvesting has been taking place in China for at least 20 years. China has repeatedly denied the accusations, claiming to have stopped using organs from executed prisoners in 2015. However, the lawyers and experts at the China Tribunal are convinced that the practice was still taking place with the imprisoned Falun Gong members "probably the principal source" of organs for forced harvesting. In June 2021, the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council voiced concerns over having “received credible information that detainees from ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities may be forcibly subjected to blood tests and organ examinations such as ultrasound and x-rays, without their informed consent; while other prisoners are not required to undergo such examinations.” The press release stated that UN's human rights experts “were extremely alarmed by reports of alleged ‘organ harvesting’ targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians, in detention in China.” ==Arbitrary arrests and imprisonment==

Foreign observers estimate that hundreds of thousands—and perhaps millions—of Falun Gong practitioners have been held extralegally in reeducation-through-labor camps, prisons, and other detention facilities. Large-scale arrests are conducted periodically and often coincide with important anniversaries or major events. The first wave of arrests occurred on the evening of 20 July, when several thousand practitioners were taken from their homes into police custody. In November 1999—four months after the onset of the campaign—Vice Premier Li Lanqing announced that 35,000 Falun Gong practitioners had been arrested or detained. The Washington Post wrote that "the number of detained people... in the operation against Falun Gong dwarfs every political campaign in recent years in China." By April 2000 over 30,000 people had been arrested for protesting in defense of Falun Gong in Tiananmen Square. Seven hundred Falun Gong followers were arrested during a demonstration in the square on 1 January 2001. In advance of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing over 8,000 Falun Gong practitioners were taken from their homes and workplaces in provinces across China. Two years later authorities in Shanghai detained over 100 practitioners ahead of the 2010 World Expo. Those who refused to disavow Falun Gong were subjected to torture and sent to reeducation through labor facilities. Reeducation through labor From 1999 to 2013, the vast majority of detained Falun Gong practitioners were held in reeducation through labor (RTL) camps—a system of administrative detention where people can be imprisoned without trial for up to four years. The RTL system was established during the Maoist era to punish and reprogram "reactionaries" and other individuals deemed enemies of the Communist cause. In more recent years, it has been used to incarcerate petty criminals, drug addicts and prostitutes, as well as petitioners and dissidents. RTL sentences can be arbitrarily extended by police, and outside access is not permitted. Prisoners are forced to do heavy work in mines, brick manufacturing centers, agricultural fields, and many different types of factories. Physical torture, beatings, interrogations, and other human rights abuses take place in the camps, according to former prisoners and human rights organizations. China's network of RTL centers expanded significantly after 1999 to accommodate an influx of Falun Gong detainees, and authorities used the camps to try to "transform" Falun Gong practitioners. Amnesty International reports that "The RTL system has played a key role in the anti–Falun Gong campaign, absorbing large numbers of practitioners over the years... Evidence suggests that Falun Gong constituted on average from one third to, in some cases, 100 percent of the total population of certain RTL camps." International observers estimated that Falun Gong practitioners accounted for at least half of the total RTL population, amounting to several hundred thousand people. "Black jails" and re-education centers In addition to prisons and RTL facilities, the 610 Office created a nationwide network of extrajudicial reeducation centers to "transform the minds" of Falun Gong practitioners. The centers are run extrajudicially, and the government officially denies their existence. "brainwashing centers", "transformation through reeducation centers", or "legal education centers". If a Falun Gong practitioner refuses to be "transformed" in prison or RTL camps, they can be sent directly to transformation centers upon completion of their sentence. Robin Munro, former director of the Hong Kong Office of Human Rights Watch and now deputy director with China Labour Bulletin, drew attention to the abuses of forensic psychiatry in China in general, and of Falun Gong practitioners in particular. He says that large-scale psychiatric abuses are the most distinctive aspect of the government's protracted campaign to "crush the Falun Gong", and he found a very sizable increase in Falun Gong admissions to mental hospitals since the onset of the government's persecution campaign. Munro claimed that detained Falun Gong practitioners are tortured and subject to electroconvulsive therapy, painful forms of electrical acupuncture treatment, prolonged deprivation of light, food and water, and restricted access to toilet facilities in order to force "confessions" or "renunciations" as a condition of release. Fines of several thousand yuan may follow. Lu and Galli write that dosages of medication up to five or six times the usual level are administered through a nasogastric tube as a form of torture or punishment, and that physical torture is common, including binding tightly with ropes in very painful positions. This treatment may result in chemical toxicity, migraines, extreme weakness, protrusion of the tongue, rigidity, loss of consciousness, vomiting, nausea, seizures and loss of memory. He agreed that Falun Gong practitioners sent to psychiatric hospitals had been "misdiagnosed and mistreated", but did not find definitive evidence that the use of psychiatric facilities was part of a uniform government policy, noting instead that patterns of institutionalization varied from province to province. Prisons Since 1999, several thousand Falun Gong practitioners have been sentenced to prisons through the criminal justice system. Most of the charges against Falun Gong practitioners are for political offenses such as "disturbing social order", "leaking state secrets", "subverting the socialist system", or "using a heretical organization to undermine the implementation of the law"—a vaguely worded provision used to prosecute, for instance, individuals who used the Internet to disseminate information about Falun Gong. According to a report by Amnesty International, trials against Falun Gong practitioners are "Grossly unfair—the judicial process was biased against the defendants at the outset and the trials were a mere formality... None of the accusations against the defendants relate to activities which would legitimately be regarded as crimes under international standards." ==Societal discrimination==

Since July 1999, civil servants and Communist Party members have been forbidden from practicing Falun Gong. Workplaces and schools were enjoined to participate in the struggle against Falun Gong by pressuring recalcitrant Falun Gong believers to renounce their beliefs, sometimes sending them to special reeducation classes to be "transformed". Failure to do so has results in lost wages, pensions, expulsion, or termination from jobs. Writing in 2015, Noakes and Ford noted that "Post-secondary institutions across the country—from agricultural universities to law schools to fine arts programmes—require students to prove that they have adopted the 'correct attitude' on Falun Gong as a condition of admission." For example, students at many universities are required to obtain a certificate from the public security ministry certifying that they have no affiliation with Falun Gong. The same is true in employment, with job postings frequently specifying that prospective candidates must have no record of participation in Falun Gong. In some cases, even changing one's address requires proving the correct political attitude toward Falun Gong. ==Outside China==

The Communist Party's campaign against Falun Gong has extended to Chinese diaspora communities, including through the use of media, espionage and monitoring of Falun Gong practitioners, harassment and violence against practitioners, diplomatic pressure applied to foreign governments, and hacking of overseas websites. According to a defector from the Chinese consulate in Sydney, Australia, "The war against Falun Gong is one of the main tasks of the Chinese mission overseas." In 2004 the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution condemning the attacks on Falun Gong practitioners in the United States by agents of the Communist Party. The resolution reported that party affiliates have "pressured local elected officials in the United States to refuse or withdraw support for the Falun Gong spiritual group," that Falun Gong spokespeople have had their houses broken into, and individuals engaged in peaceful protest actions outside embassies and consulates have been physically assaulted. The overseas campaign against Falun Gong is described in documents issued by China's Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO). In a report from a 2007 meeting of OCAO directors at the national, provincial, and municipal level, the office stated that it "coordinates the launching of anti-'Falun Gong' struggles overseas." OCAO exhorts overseas Chinese citizens to participate in "resolutely implementing and executing the Party line, the Party's guiding principles, and the Party's policies," and to "aggressively expand the struggle" against Falun Gong, ethnic separatists, and Taiwanese independence activists abroad. the 610 Office and the People's Liberation Army, Earlier that year, several Falun Gong-related organizations were designated as 'undesirable' in Russia. According to The Diplomat, Xi Jinping reportedly directed CCP officials in 2022 to intensify efforts to "completely, and on an international scale, suppress Falun Gong's momentum" by shaping global public opinion and using legal warfare against Falun Gong organizations abroad, including in the United States. In 2023, John Chen and Lin Feng, two unregistered PRC agents, were indicted for bribing an IRS official to manipulate the IRS whistleblower program against Shen Yun Performing Arts in order to strip its tax-exempt status. Both were sentenced in 2024. In November 2024, Ping Li, a 59-year-old Florida resident, was sentenced to four years in prison for acting as an unregistered PRC agent. Li provided China's Ministry of State Security with corporate information about his former employers and personal details about a Florida resident affiliated with the Falun Gong religious movement. ==International response==

The persecution of Falun Gong has attracted a large amount of international attention from governments and non-government organizations. Human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have raised acute concerns over reports of torture and ill-treatment of practitioners in China and have also urged the UN and international governments to intervene to bring an end to the persecution. The United States Congress has passed multiple resolutions calling for an immediate end to the campaign against Falun Gong practitioners both in China and abroad. At a rally on 12 July 2012, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called on the Obama administration to confront the Chinese leadership on its human rights record, including its oppression of Falun Gong practitioners. "It is essential that friends and supporters of democracy and human rights continue to show their solidarity and support, by speaking out against these abuses", she said. In 2008 Israel passed a law banning the sale and brokerage of organs. The law also ended funding, through the health insurance system, of transplants in China for Israeli nationals. ==Response from Falun Gong practitioners==

Falun Gong's response to the persecution in China began in July 1999 with appeals to local, provincial, and central petitioning offices in Beijing. It soon progressed to larger demonstrations, with hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners traveling daily to Tiananmen Square to perform Falun Gong exercises or raise banners in defense of the practice. These demonstrations were invariably broken up by security forces, and the practitioners involved were arrested—sometimes violently—and detained. By 25 April 2000, a total of more than 30,000 practitioners had been arrested on the square; The production, possession, or distribution of these materials is frequently grounds for security agents to incarcerate or sentence Falun Gong adherents. Outside China, Falun Gong practitioners established international media organizations to gain wider exposure for their cause and challenge narratives of the Chinese state-run media. These include the Epoch Times newspaper, New Tang Dynasty Television, and Sound of Hope radio station. In 2004, the Epoch Times published "The Nine Commentaries", a collection of nine editorials which presented a critical history of Communist Party rule. This catalyzed the Tuidang movement, which encourages Chinese citizens to renounce their affiliations to the Chinese Communist Party, including ex post facto renunciations of the Communist Youth League and Young Pioneers. The Epoch Times claims that tens of millions have renounced the Communist Party as part of the movement, though these numbers have not been independently verified. In 2007, Falun Gong practitioners in the United States formed Shen Yun Performing Arts, a dance and music company that tours internationally. Falun Gong software developers in the United States are also responsible for the creation of several popular censorship-circumvention tools employed by internet users in China. Falun Gong Practitioners outside China have filed dozens of lawsuits against Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Bo Xilai, and other Chinese officials alleging genocide and crimes against humanity. According to International Advocates for Justice, Falun Gong has filed the largest number of human rights lawsuits in the 21st century and the charges are among the most severe international crimes defined by international criminal laws. The court in Spain also indicted Bo Xilai, Jia Qinglin and Wu Guanzheng. ==See also==