Falun Gong Persecution Escalates in 2020 and 2021

Which brings me to the first point of update and that is over the last 18 months, the persecution of Falun Gong in China has escalated significantly. Anywhere between, we get between 10 and 20,000 cases a year of different types of persecution. Incarceration, abduction, imprisonment, ransacking of homes, this kind of thing. And it went up significantly over this last 18 months. Why? There were three reasons. The first was Falun Gong is targeted these days inside China not just because of their practice, although that is a major part of it, but because they have developed a network of information sharing inside China that is unprecedented in scale. Millions of people are involved in reporting on the crimes inside China and getting it outside of China. Both about the persecution of China, but it's just in general of things that the CCP is doing. And of course in the case of Xun Na, you saw this, she was reporting on the pandemic. So that's one reason that when we saw the pandemic and people should have been in lockdown in large parts of China, you actually saw a significant increase in the amount of practitioners being detained and kidnapped. The second reason is something called the zero-out campaign. And that's something that started at the beginning of last year about, and it's a new, it's sort of breathing life into the anti-Falun Gong campaign of the CCP. And they do this every few years, the CCP leadership. And the goal of this campaign is to, this is where it gets its name, to zero out all the practitioners in their local area, make sure there's no one practicing anymore. And unlike previous years where they rely heavily on abduction and imprisonment and sentencing, in the zero-out campaign they're using a wider range of tactics. They break down your door in the middle of dinner, they ransack your home, they extort money, they put pressure on your business and family. They're doing those kind of things to try and pressure people to give up their Falun Gong belief. The third reason the escalation has happened is because of the hundred-year anniversary of the CCP. As happens with a lot of sensitive dates, they go after Falun Gong and other targeted groups, and we saw that again happening this year. A couple other things to note about what's happening recently. Obviously Hong Kong is a big concern. For many years, as an example, for many years Falun Gong operated information booths on the streets of Hong Kong, so that when tourists come from mainland China, where they live under state-run media, have no idea what's going on, they can actually get real information from journalists and other NGOs about what's really happened to Falun Gong and what's happening inside their country. It's very valuable for these people. Those information booths have been violently attacked, destroyed. People who have manned them have been attacked. Falun Gong practitioners who are either journalists or working to expose the crimes in Hong Kong have been attacked, sometimes with baseball bats, violently, and so what's happening in Hong Kong is of grave concern to us. I think the last point I'll make in terms of what's happening is a continuation of a pattern that we've seen for years, but again it's escalating, and that is the transnational repression. The CCP, according to Freedom House, the CCP is by far and away the biggest aggressor when it comes to transnational suppression. That is persecuting Chinese people, religious minorities, outside of China in their own countries, and they do this through their missions throughout the country. They do this through technology, and that has taken a big step forward so that Falun Gong people in New York or Sydney or Paris continue to suffer at the hands of the local mission, putting pressure on local businesses, politicians, or even engaging in outright thuggery and having a lot of our own people outside the country, including the U.S. being beaten up and things of that nature. So those are the main points that I wanted to cover just so we understand the state of the Falun Gong issue, both inside China and around the world today. Thank you.