The Long Arm of Beijing: The CCP’s Global Campaign to Silence Falun Gong

It is widely known that the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, rules China with violence and fear. What is far less known is how the CCP intimidates, attacks and silences people right here in the United States and around the world. And while the CCP targets anyone it feels threatens its power, for more than 20 years there is one group the CCP has made a top priority to oppress worldwide. This is Emily Myers, a native of New York. One night she and other volunteers received ominous phone calls in the middle of the night, playing back recordings of their private conversations. Death threats to some volunteers followed. Emily contacted the FBI seeking protection. This is David Liang, he lives in Australia. Whilst attempting to file a lawsuit against a travelling Chinese delegation for their roles in human rights abuses, assailants shot David with semi-automatic rifles. David was hospitalised and would take almost a year to learn to walk again. This is Peter Li, a graduate of Princeton University. Peter pioneers some of the earliest software to help people inside China reach the free internet. Peter was attacked in his Atlanta home by Chinese-speaking intruders and left bleeding and unconscious on his front lawn. The assailants took only computers and hard drives, nothing else. While Emily, David and Peter all volunteer their time in different ways to help end human rights abuses in China, they all have one thing in common. They are practitioners of Falun Gong. In the 1990s, the Buddhist-based spiritual practice Falun Gong was wildly popular. Every morning, across China, parks were filled with people doing Falun Gong slow-moving exercises and meditation. The practice was promoted by the government and featured on state-run television as a model for achieving good health and a strong moral character. By 1999, 100 million people were practising Falun Gong in China. That proved to be too many for a few leaders of the CCP. In July of 1999, CCP leadership ordered the practice to be shut down. The practice was shut down by the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party was forced to leave the country. In July of 1999, CCP leadership ordered the practice to be eliminated, unleashing a campaign of propaganda and violence against the group. Because Falun Gong was so popular at the time, even among high-ranking military and government officials, the CCP leader formed an entirely new security agency to carry out the persecution. Officially called the 610 Office, the agency is known as China's Gestapo for Falun Gong and oversees the brutal campaign worldwide. Millions in China have been illegally detained. Thousands have been killed from torture and abuses. Hundreds of thousands may have been killed from harvesting their vital organs to sell for profit. In the early 2000s, the CCP reportedly used a quarter of its GDP to pay for the persecution. Police who abduct and break Falun Gong practitioners through torture were given bonuses. A massive expansion of surveillance technology was created to monitor and harass practitioners. And the government subsidized the expansion of labor camps, prisons, black jails and organ harvesting hospitals. Falun Gong first gained popularity in the West on the campuses of Ivy League schools. In the 1990s, as China's best and brightest enrolled at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other top universities, groups of students could be seen doing Falun Gong meditation on campus. Just like in China, the practice grew by word of mouth and was always taught by volunteers for free. By 1999, Falun Gong practice sites were found in parks of many American cities. By July 1999, when the persecution began in China, the ripple effect was immediately felt in the US. The government of the People's Republic of China is brutally suppressing the practice of Falun Gong. A few Falun Gong volunteers in New York City had their homes broken into. Death threats became common. Weeks later, US security agents warned American Falun Gong volunteers that the CCP had deployed assassins in the US. Over the next few years, Falun Gong volunteers in Western countries were assaulted, beaten, and their families and businesses threatened. But CCP tactics extend way beyond simple thuggery and violence. During the 1999 APEC meeting, CCP leader Jiang Zemin personally handed US President Bill Clinton a propaganda book on Falun Gong in an attempt to defend the violence. Two years later, US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice walked out of a meeting with high-level Chinese diplomats after they insisted on reading a prepared statement demonizing Falun Gong. This tactic was repeated over and over with senior leaders around the world. After defecting to the West, former Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin testified before the US Congress that the CCP has installed a special anti-Falun Gong unit in every Chinese embassy around the world. With a specific mandate to marginalize and suppress Falun Gong in their home countries. It didn't take long for Western businesses to realize that a surefire way to gain access to the Chinese market was to be complicit in or even an accomplice to the persecution of Falun Gong. Speaking at the Milken Institute, former media executive James Murdoch surprised even Beijing supporters by reading the CCP's most vilifying propaganda against Falun Gong while defending the Communist regime's human rights record. Investigative journalist Ethan Gutman disclosed brochures from Cisco Systems that explicitly show how the company was pitching technology and services to help the Chinese regime track and detain Falun Gong. Internal CCP documents and directives recently leaked to human rights organizations in the US make it clear that the CCP's global campaign against Falun Gong is a mandate issued by Beijing. Treat countries and regions with serious Falun Gong activities such as the United States as the main battlefield. It is necessary to meticulously fight the overseas struggles. Carefully organize the strategy to strike and divide them. The document also explicitly demands that economic ties be leveraged to further the persecution. The commercial and trade departments should make use of our economic entities outside the country to suppress the economic and cultural entities of Falun Gong. Thugs, violence, diplomatic pressure, economic coercion. All of this begs an important question. Why does the CCP make silencing Falun Gong around the world a top priority? While the persecution raged on, tens of millions inside China mobilized. Throughout the country, Falun Gong practitioners began printing leaflets to expose the CCP crimes and distributing them, usually under the cover of night, to every city, town and village across China. At the same time, teams of Falun Gong practitioners tapped into the broadcast networks of state-run TV and aired programs debunking the lies of the Communist regime. Anyone caught doing so was tortured and often killed. And a massive movement to encourage Chinese people to renounce their membership in Communist Party organizations spread like wildfire. Resulting in hundreds of millions of signatures and renunciations. With tens of millions of people participating, all of these efforts constituted the largest grassroots civil disobedience movement in the world. Outside of China, Falun Gong communities also mobilized. Established in the US, Minghui.org began coordinating with the vast grassroots network inside China that produced an unprecedented volume of first-hand persecution reports. Falun Gong practitioners in North America and Europe then established human rights groups to provide these reports to governments and NGOs. We've been asked to investigate allegations that there has been harvesting of organs of Falun Gong in China. I did not believe it when I first heard the story, but the evidence is unmistakable. These groups worked side-by-side with journalists and human rights lawyers to uncover the atrocity of forced organ harvesting, paving the way for governments to enact laws to curtail the horrific practice. Meanwhile, Falun Gong engineers pioneered software and network technologies to allow Chinese citizens to break through the CCP's firewall and reach the free internet. The Falun Gong community also inspired the formation of media companies that quickly became the most accurate window into China, offering an unrivaled level of first-hand documentation, analysis and insight into the CCP. Falun Gong-inspired performing arts groups began travelling the world, exhibiting the beauty and majesty of authentic Chinese culture, giving people the world over a glimpse of what China was before communism. In short, the Falun Gong diaspora became the single largest whistleblower of the CCP, exposing its crimes and tyrannical nature to the world. Twenty years ago, the most damaging thing you could call a group was a cult. Today, it's a racist. The CCP has wielded both labels and everything in between, with force and effectiveness, and a complete disregard for the truth. Consequently, today in the US and other Western countries, the narrative about Falun Gong is very muddied and all over the place. Some reports stick to the facts, telling the story of a peaceful persecuted group in China. Yet other politically-oriented reports mix into the story bizarre and false allegations of racism or extremism. This is no accident. The CCP is proficient in the art of character assassination, and it has carefully studied the evolving sentiments of the American public. While misinformation about Falun Gong originates from CCP propaganda, it is carefully attuned to the hot-button issues in the West and often delivered through third parties. The CCP pays social media influencers to propagate their message, couched in various forms of entertainment and educational videos. Most US movie studios self-censor and depict China-friendly characters to maximize their chances of playing in theaters across China. The CCP is arguably the single most influential force over US media through business partnerships with companies and executives. The leaders of almost every big tech company have been granted positions of prestige in Chinese universities and organizations. Many government officials in the West are also making tens of millions of dollars in China investments. Make no mistake, the CCP holds significant influence over our news and information sources, as well as the powers that shape our society more broadly. And they use that influence to affect the narrative here. For more than 20 years, Emily, Peter and David have worked to shine a light on the tyranny of the CCP, not only inside China, but around the world. Their efforts, and those of countless others, are starting to bear fruit. We're following breaking news out of the Justice Department. Attorney General Merrick Garland has just announced arrests over alleged espionage involving the Chinese government. In recent years, Western government agencies have increasingly taken action to stop CCP spies and proxies from targeting Falun Gong. This nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in lower Manhattan has a dark secret. In April 2023, the FBI arrested two individuals acting as agents of the CCP and were operating an illicit Chinese police outpost in New York City, targeting Chinese dissidents, including Falun Gong practitioners. Now just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing. It would be unthinkable. The federal government alleges they tried to bribe an IRS agent to open a bogus whistleblower complaint. I want to show you some of the court documents here on my screen. A month later, the FBI made additional arrests, charging another two men with attempting to bribe US government officials in a scheme aimed at toppling Falun Gong in the United States. But if that's not sufficient, they will either send covered agents abroad from Beijing or from other places in China to go after the target directly. But what can be done? How will this all end? The ripple effects of this civil disobedience movement are being felt across China as people learn the truth. And in the West, as more and more CCP agents are arrested, and the shadowy influence of Beijing over our society is forced into the light of day here too, the ripple effects are being felt, and here too, people are learning the truth. Throughout history, gross tyranny has never prevailed for long. Nor will it in this case. The truth will prevail.