27 Years After Falun Gong's Peaceful Appeal in Beijing – A Persecution That Continues
There are moments in history that become etched in the collective memory of an era without the world initially noticing. April 25, 1999, is one of them. On that spring day, around ten thousand people gathered in silence in Beijing. No chants, no banners with demands, no violence. Passersby saw a long line of people stretching along Fuyou Street, near the Zhongnanhai government district. Some were reading books, others meditating motionless in the morning sun. It was, as one eyewitness later described it, the largest and most peaceful protest in Beijing in years – and at the same time, one of the most thoroughly suppressed.
These people were practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-inspired meditation movement that originated in Jilin Province in the early 1990s and spread across China with remarkable speed. By the end of the decade, the movement claimed to have tens of millions of followers—a number that did not escape the notice of the Chinese Communist Party, which viewed it with growing suspicion. Falun Gong taught the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. It required no membership fees, had no hierarchies in the Western sense, and yet was able to mobilize tens of thousands in a single morning. For a regime that prioritizes control as a matter of state policy, this poses an existential challenge.
Falun Gong—also known in Chinese as Falun Dafa, the Great Law of the Wheel of Dharma—was founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi in Jilin Province, northeast China. Rooted in the Buddhist Qigong tradition, it combines meditation exercises with its own cosmology and a decidedly ethical way of life. The movement spread not through advertising or institutional structures, but through personal recommendations, public practice groups in parks, and the simple experience of its physical and mental benefits. By the late 1990s, Falun Gong was ubiquitous in China: in every urban park during the morning hours, in work collectives, and among professors and laborers alike. The regime initially supported the movement as a cost-effective contribution to public health. When the number of practitioners appeared to exceed that of the Communist Party, support turned into hostility.
Li Hongzhi himself left China in 1998 and has lived in the United States ever since. His writings, especially his main work Zhuan Falun, were banned and destroyed in China—an auto-da-fé reminiscent of the darkest chapters in intellectual history. Yet the movement lives on: in the diaspora, in clandestine practice groups within China, and in the tenacious presence of practitioners who publicly draw attention to their persecution in many Western cities. This persistence is not fanaticism, as Chinese propaganda claims. It is what remains when people have no other way to stay true to their beliefs than to make them visible—in public squares, in front of parliaments, in silent vigils, year after year, even when cameras and headlines have long since turned their attention elsewhere.
An Appeal and Its Consequences
The immediate trigger for the appeal on April 25 was an incident in the nearby city of Tianjin. There, on April 23 and 24, police officers had beaten Falun Gong practitioners and arrested 45 of them—an attack that followed a polemical newspaper article defaming the movement. When those affected appealed to the authorities in Tianjin for the release of those arrested, they were referred to Beijing. And so they came to Beijing. They did the most obvious thing in a state governed by the rule of law: they appealed. They lined up properly, cleaned up after themselves, and didn't block any entrances. In the evening, representatives of the government came out to hear their concerns. The arrested individuals were released. Everyone went home.
Historians refer to this as a classic technique of authoritarian repression: the retrospective rewriting of narratives. What was peaceful is recoded as dangerous; what happened defensively is framed as an attack. The Chinese regime mastered this technique to perfection. The persecution began immediately. Arrests, torture in labor camps, psychiatric confinement—the arsenal was broad and brutal.
The persecution campaign employed a wide range of tactics. Falun Gong practitioners were sent to so-called re-education camps through forced labor, tortured in detention centers, institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals, and socially marginalized. Their families were pressured, their employers forced to dismiss them, and their children bullied at school. The "610 Office," a specially established extrajudicial agency, coordinated the repression and was not accountable to any regular justice system. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented the abuses, but the international response remained muted. China had only joined the World Trade Organization in 1999; Western businesses had other priorities.
The Silence of the World
Twenty-seven years have passed since then. On April 25, 2026, that appeal will mark its 27th anniversary. It is an anniversary that receives hardly any mention in the major opinion pages, is absent from the evening news, and appears at best as a footnote in diplomatic communiqués. Yet what the human rights community has known for decades is of a shocking scale.
The so-called China Tribunal, an international panel of human rights lawyers chaired by the British jurist Sir Geoffrey Nice, reached a final conclusion in March 2020: For years, organs have been harvested from prisoners in China on a significant scale – and Falun Gong practitioners are one of the central, if not the most important, target groups. The organs are not obtained from voluntary donors. They are taken from people who are available as prisoners, classified, and processed like a raw material.
In 2021, twelve UN human rights experts jointly expressed their deep dismay at the available reports. In January 2024, the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning the systematic, inhumane, and state-sanctioned organ harvesting from prisoners in the People's Republic of China—specifically, Falun Gong practitioners. The parliamentarians called for an end to the repression of religious minorities, international investigations, and sanctions. The resolution also focused on the case of practitioner Ding Yuande, who was arrested in 2023 and whose fate remains unknown. In 2025, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed the so-called "Falun Gong Protection Act," which empowers US authorities to impose sanctions on perpetrators involved in forced organ harvesting.
Particularly alarming is the geographical reach of the repression. Reports of transnational oppression are mounting: Chinese security agencies are allegedly monitoring, intimidating, and pressuring Falun Gong practitioners in Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and other Western countries to return to China. Freedom House has repeatedly documented these practices in its annual reports. In some cases, family members in China have been used as leverage against practitioners living abroad—a method that not only harms those affected but also undermines the right to asylum and the sovereignty of Western states. The People's Republic is exporting its repression; it does not stop at its own borders.
The issue of forced organ harvesting deserves special consideration, as it transcends what we know from other contexts of persecution. The China Tribunal did not speak of isolated incidents but of a systemic crime on a massive scale. People are not only imprisoned, tortured, and killed—their bodies are exploited as a resource after death. This is a form of total reification of humanity, which, in its consequences, represents the ultimate act a state can take against its citizens. Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once said that indifference is the most dangerous of all feelings because it strengthens the perpetrator and weakens the victim. One is tempted to recall this statement in light of the global political reaction to the persecution of Falun Gong.
And yet: The persecution continues. The International Society for Human Rights has pointed out that the intensity of the violence against Falun Gong has never diminished, despite its near disappearance from Western media coverage. Public silence is not tantamount to acquiescence—but it does create leeway for those operating in secret.
What Makes Meditation a Threat
We must take seriously the question that lies beyond the concrete human rights violations: Why does a major power with nuclear capabilities, one of the world's strongest economies, and a seat on the United Nations Security Council persecute a group of meditators with such consistency? The answer points to something fundamental in the nature of authoritarian rule.
Falun Gong offers its practitioners an ethical orientation that exists outside the state. For a regime that claims the authority to interpret all aspects of society, this is a structural threat. It's not about the exercises themselves—the slow arm movements, the sitting in silence. It's about the fact that millions of people live a system of meaning that owes nothing to the state, that is not derived from party resolutions, that demands no ideological loyalty.
Falun Gong offers its practitioners an ethical orientation that exists outside the state. Jiang Zemin, according to eyewitnesses and historians, saw Falun Gong as a threat greater than the Communist Party itself. This finding initially sounds absurd—and upon closer examination reveals the true pathology of authoritarian power: its inability to conceive of coexistence. A regime that defines itself through control cannot tolerate anything beyond its control. For it, independence, not enmity, is the most threatening thing.
It would be wrong to treat this issue as a fringe phenomenon concerning only specialists in Chinese domestic politics. What has been happening to Falun Gong in China since 1999 is a lesson in the mechanisms of modern authoritarianism: the instrumentalization of law for disenfranchisement, the fabrication of enemy images to legitimize violence, and the reversal of the supplicant and the guilty party. It is also a lesson about us: about the limits of what democratic societies are willing to sacrifice for human rights when economic interests stand in the way. April 25, 1999, was a day of dignity. What it became is a day of shame – not only for Beijing, but for everyone who looked the other way.
Remembrance as Resistance
April 25, 1999, was a moment of moral clarity. Ten thousand people stood in a street, made no noise, harmed no one, and pleaded—with the trust of people who believe in the state's rationality—for justice. That this appeal was reinterpreted within a few months as the basis for legitimizing a campaign of mass extermination says everything about the regime and nothing about the people making the plea.
Twenty-seven years later, the situation remains as dire as ever. Practitioners worldwide are harassed, monitored, and pressured—including in Europe, including in Germany. Reports of transnational repression, in which Chinese state security intimidates Falun Gong practitioners in the diaspora, are increasing. The long arm of the Beijing security apparatus does not stop at the borders of the People's Republic.
Commemorative days have a function beyond piety: they compel us to be present. They remind us that history is not a closed event, but a process whose consequences continue to resonate. Those who stood silently on Fuyou Street on April 25, 1999, had no idea they were standing at a turning point. They thought they would be heard. They were persecuted.
This raises an uncomfortable question for the Western public: What justifies the silence? Not ignorance—the facts have been documented for years, established by independent courts, and enacted by parliaments. Not powerlessness—the EU, the US, and the United Nations have instruments they hardly ever use. What remains is the most honest and sobering motive: a balancing of interests. China is too important a trading partner, too significant a geopolitical player, for anyone to get seriously upset about its treatment of meditators.
This is not an accusation—it is an assessment. And this is the real scandal: not just what is happening in China, but the deliberately calculated indifference with which much of the world reacts. Ten thousand people once stood silently in a street and demanded justice. They kept orderly, cleared away their trash as they left, and trusted that a state that invokes laws would also act according to laws. The response they received still shames us today—if we so choose.
Sapere aude!
S.
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