Inside China’s Largest Civil Disobedience Movement, And Why You Haven't Heard of It: Larry Liu

Like Orwell's big brother, China's communist regime has an iron grip on all forms of information in China. But a grassroots group of Chinese have been putting their lives on the line to cut through the regime's censorship and indoctrination machine. We estimate about 200,000 underground print shops run by Falun Gong practitioners, family So who are these people? And why is their story critical to understanding China today? Larry Liu is deputy director of the Falun Dafa Information Center. Today marks 25 years since the Chinese regime launched a nationwide persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual discipline, turning tens of millions of Falun Gong adherents into de facto enemies of the state. Some of the narrative out there saying, okay, Falun Gong has been crushed in China, but the internal document from the CCP tells a very different story. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Larry Liu, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me, Jan. Larry, recently the Falun Gong Protection Act was passed by a unanimous voice vote in the House of Representatives in the U.S. So for starters, you know, why is it important to pass legislation like this? You know, the persecution started in 1999. The House passed several resolutions in the past 25 years on Falun Gong, but this is the first legally binding bill on Falun Gong issues. And it was passed right before the 25th anniversary. So it's very significant for Falun Gong communities around the world. And it certainly gave a lot of hope to Falun Gong practitioners still suffering in China, and so that they can feel that they're not alone. You know, the leader of the free world is caring about them, you know, he's trying to protect them. And it also set up a good example for the rest of the free world, and to have similar legislations in their countries. And certainly this bill also alerts Americans about forced organ harvesting issues. It will alert the medical community in the U.S. not to collaborate or cooperate with the Chinese transplantation industry. It certainly will also help raise awareness among American patients, so that they will not unknowingly go to China for organ transplant and become accomplice of this heinous crime. And also, I will say that many people probably never heard about Falun Gong. But this persecution of Falun Gong is one of the largest, the longest running, and also the most brutal persecution of human rights atrocities in modern Chinese history. And Falun Gong practitioners in the past 25 years, in response to this persecution, also launched, I would say, this is the largest civil disobedience movement. We can also call it the information freedom movement in modern Chinese history. But a lot of times, people never heard of it. So this is making it more interesting, more important to talk about it today. Tell me a little bit more about, let's just go to the basics, the largest civil disobedience movement in Chinese history. What exactly is happening? I think I probably will start from the very beginning. What is Falun Gong, the history in China, how the persecution started. Maybe I'll just give a little history so people understand why there is such a resistance or civil disobedience movement. So Falun Gong is a spiritual practice rooted in the Buddhist tradition. It combines meditation and qigong exercises, very similar to tai chi or yoga, and also moral teachings. And the core principle of Falun Gong is truth, compassion, and tolerance. And that's a principle we consider as a universal principle we try to live up to in our daily lives. And so it was first introduced to the public in China in 1992, and became the most popular qigong just within a few years because of its health benefit. Many people with a severe disease or chronic disease just disappeared after they practiced Falun Gong. And also the moral teaching really helped give people some hope, you know, see, okay, this is something, you know, returning to our traditional values, you know, especially after the Cultural Revolution, a lot of the traditional values in China were destroyed. Traditional culture is destroyed. And people say, oh, this is the traditional good things in China is coming back. And so at that time, even many communist government officials, you know, Chinese government officials supported Falun Gong. Many of them practiced themselves, their family members practiced it. And by early 1999, Chinese government's own estimate was over 70 million to 100 million people in China practiced Falun Gong. That outnumbered the Communist Party membership, which was 60 million at that time. So that raised some alarm to some hotliners inside the party members. And also the independence of Falun Gong, because it is independent from the state control. It was the largest independent civil society in China at that time. And also some of the CCP leaders consider it's also ideological competition to them. And so the former Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin started this crackdown, you know, to eradicate Falun Gong in July 1999, exactly 25 years ago this month. And so it's continued to this very day. And so after the persecution started, many Falun Gong practitioners went to Beijing, went to their city, provincial governments to appeal, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of Falun Gong practitioners went to Beijing, went to Tiananmen Square to unheard a banner or something like that. With time goes by, you know, we realized that that doesn't work. You know, the Chinese government won't listen to us. So we felt that the best way to counter this persecution is to help Chinese people to learn the truth. Because one component of this persecution is propaganda to demonize, dehumanize Falun Gong. You know, all the media, you know, 24-7 TV network, thousands of newspapers, and they're all demonizing Falun Gong, just propaganda marathon. And so that really polluted a lot of Chinese people's minds. And so we felt that the best way to counter this persecution is to help people to learn the truth about Falun Gong, about the persecution. And gradually, you know, when nobody would like to cooperate with the CCP in this persecution, and the persecution will naturally end. And so that's why they launched, practitioners in China launched, you know, the largest information freedom movement in Chinese history. And we estimated about 200,000 underground print shops run by Falun Gong practitioners, family run, and they print DVDs, brochures, booklets, and they pass out to their neighborhood, to their co-workers. And so just to educate the fellow Chinese about not only just the truth about the Falun Gong and the persecution, but also in general, what is the Communist Party, their history, the origin, how they lied, you know, how they exerted tyranny to Chinese people over the past 70 plus years. So it's really changed the hearts and minds of millions of Chinese people. I just want to give you one example. I have a close friend of mine actually in China, and we talk from time to time over the phone. And he's a little bit older than me. And he pretty much believed most of the things Chinese government said, you know, because when I talked to him about Tiananmen Massacre, you know, June 4th, 1989, and he said the Chinese government did the right thing. Because the state-run TV is painting a very different story, saying that how this is right, and they killed some of the soldiers, you know, they burned their bodies, all those gruesome images. They basically made it sound like the students were the ones responsible for the atrocity. Yes. They made a student look like a villain, not a victim. And they also kind of saw a social contract to Chinese people, basically, after Tiananmen Square Massacre. Basically, we can make you rich, we can keep your economic growth, and don't touch politics. So that's kind of the social contract a lot of the Chinese people bought at that time. So including this friend of mine. And he basically was saying, you know, if the government didn't really maintain the stability at that time, how can we have such economic growth? That was the narrative from the Chinese government. But then, you know, I emailed him a software, which was developed by some of the computer scientists here in America who practice Falun Gong. And you know, there are two of them, basically, one is Free Gate, the other is UltraSurf. So I emailed an encrypted copy of that to him, so that he can use that to get around the firewall, and to access free information. And after he saw the photos, the documents, the videos of Tiananmen Square Massacre, he completely changed, 180-degree change. And he says, I was shocked, I couldn't believe that they did this kind of thing. But the younger generation of Chinese have never heard about that, Tiananmen Massacre, they never heard about that. And so this is the way that Falun Gong practitioners from both inside China and outside China have been doing it over the past 25 years. And to help Chinese people to see their own history, which is something many Chinese people don't know, their own history, so that they can see through the CCP's lies. And I want to give you another example. Before the national security law was passed in Hong Kong, 2019, right, there was a big movement in Hong Kong. At that time, I remember many Falun Gong practitioners in Hong Kong told me, or others, that many Hong Kongers apologized to them. And they said that, you know, in the past, we didn't believe you. We didn't care about you. We didn't care about your plight. And we didn't believe what you said about organ harvesting. Now, I believe it. All of you said it's true. And so, when things happen to yourself, you will begin to realize, okay, this is the true nature of the CCP. And a similar thing happened during the lockdown. A lot of Chinese people were just really harmed by the pandemic, and they were hit very hard by the iron fist of the CCP. At that moment, they started to reflect what they have believed for so many years, propagated by the CCP, whether it's true or not. So that really also helped to change a lot of Chinese people's minds. So this is a very unusual, and I guess kind of an unexpected, long-term movement. And I remember reading a few years ago in a report specifically about human rights in China and religious persecution in China, there was a section on Falun Gong, and there was just a very, very interesting development in that, which was basically this persecution continued to be extremely serious. People were dying over the years, millions and millions of people incarcerated. But in certain regions, they noted where the Falun Gong activity, this exact activity that you were just talking about, was larger. It's like those regions, the persecution kind of lessened a little bit. The authorities would just sort of leave Falun Gong practitioners alone as a testament to this just, I guess, this kind of relentless, as it's called, truth clarification, clarification of reality. So I found that was fascinating. It's also a very difficult thing to kind of fathom. Freedom House published, maybe that's what you refer to, Freedom House published a report, a very comprehensive report in 2017. The title is The Battle for China's Spirit, and there's one chapter for Falun Gong. And I think that's probably one of the most comprehensive reports on Falun Gong by a major human rights organization. So what happens is, and we call it truth clarification. And so overseas Falun Gong practitioners, especially those in Taiwan, because they speak Chinese, but also many of them here, make phone calls to China, especially to those detention facility, prison camps, and call those police and tell them that, clarify truth to them, tell them that Falun Gong is not what they learn from the Chinese TV, state-run TV. And these are good people, and you shouldn't torture them. And you shouldn't follow the party rule, because when the party collapse one day, which could come sooner than you imagine, and then you'll have to take responsibility for what you did. Just like what happened in many political campaigns in communist history, after the Cultural Revolution or many other political campaigns before that. After the campaign, those perpetrators, they were also punished, because they became the scapegoats of what they did, actually. So the practitioners make a phone call to these police and tell them that, you will become the scapegoat in one day. So don't do these things. And so many of them, at least some of them listened. And so they decided not to torture Falun Gong practitioners. And also one other tactics that Falun Gong practitioners in China use, which can be also quite effective, is they post, because they're all local, in the same town and same village, and so they document what the police or prison guard, what they did in the prison. Like say they torture, abuse Falun Gong practitioners, they documented that. And they post it publicly, on a tree, on some public square, certainly at a great personal risk. And there is sometimes even sent to their family members, their spouse, workplace, mail a letter. Because these people, they're also human beings, right? They did horrible things in prison, behind the scenes, but they also have family. They have their kids, and they don't want their kids to know what they did. So their family members know what they did. They just also feel kind of ashamed, and they became more restrained. The other factor, I would say, the sanctions by US government. Both Trump administration and Biden administration's State Department sanctioned a few Chinese officials involved in persecution of Falun Gong. And so these sanctions also help, because these CCP officials, they don't know whether one day they will become the target of sanction. They also want to have their kids go to America to go to college, or it's very corrupted in China, so they have maybe a lot of money, they want to store them overseas, they have some assets here. So that made them worried too. So I think these things could contribute to what you described. The persecution lessened a little bit in some local areas, but the policy remains the same. It's unabated, 25 years onward, unabated at all. So I've got a bit of a picture here. Now let's go back to that legislation. There were two bills passed, the Falun Gong Protection Act this year. Last year, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act was also related. Just tell me a little bit about what the substance of this legislation is. The Falun Gong Protection Act is a long overdue bill on Falun Gong. And there are a few components. One is the reporting component. And you ask the State Department, basically the executive branch, to have a report every year about forced organ harvesting issues in China. And also another component is to have a statement of policy, basically just the stance of American government. American medical industry will not cooperate or collaborate with the Chinese transplantation industry. Another component is the sanction part. And so for anybody involved in the persecution of Falun Gong, especially in the forced organ harvesting, the U.S. government will deny them a visa to enter the U.S. And their assets in the U.S. will be freezed. The bill also asks the Secretary of State to determine whether the persecution of Falun Gong is a crime against humanity or genocide. And that's actually very interesting, right? Because why would it be important to distinguish between crimes against humanity, which is quite extreme, and genocide? I think there may be a little bit of a difference in the level of the severity and also the intention. The severity of this persecution certainly meets the criteria of genocide, but there is also a factor of intention. But several scholars have designated this persecution as genocide. For example, Nina Hsieh of the Hudson Institute, I think she's a director of International Religious Freedom, and she had an article in National Review saying that the CCP committed another genocide other than the Uyghur genocide, which is the persecution of Falun Gong. And also there is a very influential academia paper published in the journals about genocide study, and the title is called Genocide. So that paper laid out a very profound concept of cold genocide. It's more behind the scenes, and it's taking a longer time, so it's less noticeable. But it's also not only just destroying you physically, but in many other ways, destroying a group socially, mentally, all the other ways. When this persecution first started, the instruction by Jiang Zemin, who was Communist Party leadership, Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin, he started this persecution single-handedly, actually. And all the other six members of the Politburo Standing Committee were not for this persecution at all. So he started this persecution single-handedly. So at that time, he claimed to eradicate Falun Gong within three months in China. I just want to highlight that. He used, it was his words, right? Eradicate. Yeah, eradicate. It's a very, very strong word. Yeah, eradicate Falun Gong completely within three months. And he thought he picked the easy target, because we practice tolerance, we don't retaliate, we don't resort to violence. He knows that. And we talk about benevolence, compassion. And so he thought this is the easy group, and he thought this is the easy target. And he also wanted to use this political campaign to consolidate his power, and to see who is with me, who is not with me, within the party, to see who is a legion, play a legion to me. And the strategy laid out by him is a three-pronged strategy, defame their reputation, bankrupt them financially, destroy them physically. The party destroyed them physically. That's the part we're talking about. And so I just give you a few numbers. 2009 State Department of Human Rights annual reports, and they estimated about at least half of labor camp inmates in China at that time were Falun Gong practitioners, at least half of, across China, labor camp inmates. And Lao Gai Foundation, which specialized in studying forced labor in China, they estimate at that time about three to five million inmates in Chinese labor camp. If you take half of that, that's 1.5 million. That was just, at that time, a snapshot in that year. But if you consider all the past 25 years, definitely millions have been detained in labor camp, various detention facilities. And documented death cases from the persecution have surpassed 5,000. And these are only the people we know their name, we know how they died, we know the details, and their family members agree to send that information overseas. But the real number could be many times higher. And I want to jump in here a little bit, because I know you're talking about 5,000 cases where there's incredibly detailed information about exactly what happened to the person, who did it, how they died. In these kinds of situations in the human rights field, this is actually often very difficult information to get. Can I give you one example? Please. In December 2022, just a year and a half ago, a radio host from Sichuan province, Pang Xun, and his name is Pang Xun, only 30 years old, very handsome, sunny young man, and he died in prison just because he handed out a Falun Gong pamphlet to other people, and other people reported him to the police. He was sentenced to five years in prison. And two years into his prison term, he was tortured to death in prison. And there's a video of him, his dead body, corpse, with bruises on his face, his body, and in the background, we can hear his mother crying and saying that, you know, Pang Xun, I'm going to seek justice for you. It goes viral on Twitter. So it garnered, I don't know, maybe half a million or a million views, and Radio Free Asia reported it, and some other media reported it. So this is just one of the over 5,000 cases, the documented death cases. I mean, it's astonishing. I also remember there was this sort of unwritten rule, if I recall, that Jiang Zemin initiated back in the day. Falun Gong deaths will be considered suicides in the prison. But why would you have a rule like that? Why are they torturing him in the first place? You know, this is not only a persecution to eliminate a physical body. Basically, this is a persecution to try to eliminate a faith. And so eliminating something from people's mind, that's hard, right? How can you eliminate something from people's hearts and minds? So what they do is they force you to renounce your belief. And if you don't, they're going to torture you. It's very simple. If you give up Falun Gong, if you sign some things, you know, say Falun Gong is evil, and you renounce it, and you stop practicing it, you could be fine. But if you don't, and they're going to torture you, they are going to use all kinds of means. They're going to use your family member to pressure you to quit. They're going to torture you. They're going to use various psychological abuses to force you to renounce your belief. And so in this way, you know, I would say this is the evil part of this persecution, because they try to eradicate a moral value, a faith from people's minds. They portrayed the Falun Gong principle, which is choose compassion and tolerance. They try to turn that into something evil. And so you can imagine what that does that do to a society. If choose compassion, forbearance becomes evil in a society. It just destroys the moral fabric of the society. That's exactly what's happening in China right now. And so this impact of this persecution is not only just trying to destroy a group, it just causes huge damage to the whole society because of this moral decline. And they tie that into your job performance. For those policemen, prison guards, their job performance is how many Falun Gong practitioners you transformed, which means that you force them to renounce their belief, actually. And that's tied into their job performance and how much bonus they can get, how much salary raise they can get. This is one of the most brutal, the largest, and the longest running human rights atrocity in modern Chinese history, but very likely you never heard about it. Why? Because the Western media has been really pretty silent in the persecution of Falun Gong. And I remember Andrew Junker, who is a sociologist, had a book in 2019 published by Cambridge University Press. The title of the book is Becoming Activists in Global China. And he also agreed in the book that Falun Gong is one of the most, and by some measure is the most severely persecuted group actually in China. That's his assessment. But why is it so much ignored by the West? And he basically explained that for two reasons. One is a secular bias, because this is a spiritual practice rooted in Buddhist tradition. And the other thing is just the possible CCP retaliation, because Falun Gong is basically perceived as CCP's number one enemy. And so whoever is doing even just a neutral study, you pretty much will have a huge retaliation, whether you're a scholar or you're media, because they all need access in China. They need a visa, they need to stay there. Some of the media's parent companies, they also have big business interests in China. They don't want all those things jeopardized. And for example, New York Times publisher went to Beijing in 2001, had a meeting with Jiang Zemin, the party chief who single-handedly started the persecution of Falun Gong. And a few days after that, NewYorkTimes.com was unblocked in China. It used to be blocked. It was unblocked in China. And so these two factors, Andrew Junker said that, created such a blindness on Falun Gong issues. And he used a very interesting metaphor. And he said that, when we look from outside, the historical episode of Falun Gong and peer in, it is as if one of our eyes is poked out by the CCP. And then we cover the other eye with our own hand. So there's two things that this makes me think of, right? The first one is, having spoken to a number of experts over the years, this is sort of the persecution of Falun Gong was not taken very seriously by the West, by free liberal democracies 25 years ago, and frankly, for a long time since. And so the consequence of that, if people had opened their eyes, this is what a number of experts told me, and saw what was happening then, they might have gotten much more of a hint of what would happen to other groups, what would happen in Hong Kong later, what would happen to the Uyghur people, what would happen to Tibetans. The other part is that Falun Gong practitioners have been responsible for a lot of citizen reporting out of China on incredibly important issues, where there's kind of a total media blackout. Yeah, exactly. For example, during the COVID, Fang Bin, who is a citizen journalist in Wuhan, and he shot some videos at the very beginning of the COVID onsite. He shot some of the videos from Wuhan hospitals, just how people just died there, and he posted it online. So many international media picked him up and reported that, but they didn't report he is a Falun Gong practitioner. And he was jailed before for practicing Falun Gong, but then he was sentenced to three years in prison because of posting the COVID-related videos online. And another one, Xu Na, she's an artist in Beijing, and she and a group of other Falun Gong practitioners also take some photos, just empty streets in Beijing during the COVID lockdown, and post them online. They were arrested and she was sentenced to eight years in prison right before the Beijing Winter Olympic in January, 2022. And her husband was tortured to death right before the 2008 Beijing Olympic. And her husband was a very famous folk musician in China. At that time, many international media also reported his death, Yu Zhou, that's her husband's name. And so you can see this family, just two Olympics, one dead, one sentenced to eight years in prison. So these are some of the citizen journalists. But I want to tie into your earlier question about the consequences of ignoring Falun Gong. And some people say, well, the persecution is half a globe away from me. What does it have anything to do with me, right? And so I want to just mention one story. In December, 2012, that was 12 years ago, Oregon woman called Julie Keith, and she bought something from Kmart, Halloween tombstone kit for her daughter's birthday. And when she opened up, she found a letter stuck inside that tombstone kit. And it was written in choppy English, saying that we are making this product in a Chinese labor camp, it's called Ma Shan Jia. And we were jailed here for our belief for practicing Falun Gong. We're tortured, we work 14 hours a day, under extremely hard, dirty situation. And if you receive this letter, please bring this letter to international human rights organization. So it's such a plea letter. And she posted it on her Facebook. And later on, Oregonian, the largest newspaper in Oregon reported. Then after that, international media all reported on this. And so there was an amazing story. But about a year later, and some of the international reporter found the person who wrote this letter. And he was released from the Ma Shan Jia labor camp. And his name is Sun Yi. And so later on, a documentary was made out of this. And the two person even met, I believe it's in Indonesia. And a documentary made out of that is called a Letter from Ma Shan Jia. And it's available, it's an incredible documentary. You can find it in Amazon, iTunes, all the regular platforms. And so watching that story, that document just made me think, a lot of things I buy from department stores, Walmart, Target, all those stores that I buy from China, made in China, most of them were made in China, right? How many of them were made in a labor camp by a fellow Falun Gong practitioner like me? Right, I mean, endure extremely harsh, dirty environment, slave labor, only four hours to sleep, and being tortured. Have we ever thought about that? So that just made me think that this persecution is far closer to Americans living room than what we think we can imagine. And so that's just one example. And another example is just this organ harvesting thing. And I remember, David Meadows is one of the leading investigator about forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. Maybe just very briefly, what does that mean, forced organ harvesting? So the CCP has been harvesting organs from deaths or prisoners. Those are criminals sentenced to death penalty. And starting from 1980s, they even have a regulation for that. Basically it's allowed, it's legal in China. But that's kind of a small scale, I would say. But after the persecution of Falun Gong started in 1999, and this is according to Chinese transplantation doctors own words from their own publication that they said the year of 2000 was a watershed moment for Chinese transplantation industry. The number of liver transplant, they did like 10 times from the year ago. And then five years later, they tripled that numbers. So anyway, just after the persecution of Falun Gong started, the number of transplant that Chinese hospital have been doing just going skyrocketing, grow exponentially. That just matched perfectly with the timeline of the persecution of Falun Gong. When hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people sent to various detention camps, concentration camps. The world basically gave a free pass, I will say this. Because in 2006, this news of organ harvesting, forged organ harvesting first came out. And so a lot of people didn't believe it. But over the year, there are more and more evidence coming out and people gradually believe in it. And so China Tribunal in 2019 is an independent tribunal in London. It was led by Sir Geoffrey Nice, who was the lead prosecutor of Milosevic in 1990s. And so the China Tribunal spent a year to study all the evidence about forged organ harvesting. And they concluded in 2019 that forged organ harvesting has been going on in China for a long time on a significant scale. Falun Gong is probably the primary organ supply. And in the same year, China Tribunal testified in front of the United Nations Human Rights Council. And in their testimony, they estimated hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in forged organ harvesting. A majority of them were Falun Gong practitioners. And so talking about our earlier conversation about genocide, we talked about the 5,000 documented death cases. Those are only the people we know. We know their name, we know how they died. But for these people who are killed by organ harvesting, we don't know yet their name. We don't know that information yet. But this is just estimated based on all the various data, based on the number of transplant done in China, based on the number of deaths, execution. There's a huge gap between them. And that was filled by these prisoners of conscience, mostly Falun Gong practitioners. And they basically treated Falun Gong practitioners like cattle. Here, you have to wait for three or four years for matching organ or kidney or liver or heart. But you can get that in China within a few weeks, two weeks at most a month, something like that. For big money. Yeah, for big money. Yeah. So that's why China became the hub of international organ tourism. Whenever rich people would like to pay that money, or foreigners or Communist Party officials, they will find a match from their organ data bank. And these are the people, living people in prison, in various concentration camps. And they will pick that person, just like you go to a Chinese restaurant, you see a lobster in a tank. And then they pick that person and extract the organ, and certainly in the process of killing that person, make a huge amount of money. And so this is something we call forced organ harvesting. It's very different from some of the other, you know, illegal organ trade in some other third world country, you know, some of the poor people, you know, sell a kidney, something like that. This is done by state and state sanctioned. And it's a whole system from the police, securities, apparatus to hospital. You know, it's very coordinated. Industry scale. So David Meadows, who is the lead investigator about forced organ harvesting, he said this, if international community paid enough attention to forced organ harvesting in China, and forced Chinese health care system to be more transparent, we wouldn't have this coronavirus pandemic. Yeah, when I saw that statement, you know, when I saw that remark, I just felt it was so enlightening. Because sometimes you don't really make that connection, right? Let me see if I've got this right. You know, basically he's saying if we understood the moral reality around medicine and biomedical research in China, we wouldn't have engaged with them. Yeah, my interpretation is twofold. One part is about this engagement, collaboration with the Chinese. Medical industry, right? Because a lot of the transplant doctors in China were trained here. And a lot of the, you know, the pharmaceutical company, medical industry here center have a lot of collaboration with China in the transplantation industry. And so that's one part. You know, the collaboration really helped, you know, their health care system to develop this, you know, so-called transplantation industry. But it's really based on, you know, killing people. The other thing is this transparency. You know, because we allowed them, you know, we give them a kind of a green pass, a free pass for them to lie to us, you know, and to cover up the things, the dirty things they did in their health care system. And so if we can force them to be more transparent, we can actually, because there are a lot of leverage international community can do, like one of the transplantation journal here, you know, banned Chinese paper on transplantation, you know. So that's one way, you know, there are a lot of ways you can force them to be more transparent. And if they're more transparent, they wouldn't be able to cover up the onsite of the, you know, the coronavirus so easily. There's no doubt that it was because of the CCP's cover up of this onsite of the COVID pandemic, you know, millions of lives were lost. Otherwise, millions of lives could be saved. Right. And certainly, you know, the collaborations that were done in all sorts of areas might have been treated with a different light, with a different level of credulity, and so forth. Yeah, exactly. You know, why do you believe Chinese government's narrative that it doesn't transmit between person to person? Why WHO initially said that, right? It's not transmissible. It's not an issue, whatever, right? WHO actually is also one of the organizations that actually helped to protect China in terms of this, you know, forced organ harvesting issues. All of these issues are connected. I'm haunted by the fact that some of the more recent reports of developments around this forced organ harvesting regime, which frankly, I've called murder for organs, are coming out of Xinjiang province. That's the thing. If you don't stop the persecution to one group, that will go to other groups. I remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that, you know, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And sometimes I understand that kind of conceptually, right? But it's real. You know, for example, in the case of Xinjiang, you know, they did terrible things, horrible things to Uyghurs. But many of their tactics, tools, they apply to Uyghurs, but they were developed and honed in the persecution of Falun Gong. And even some of the top officials in Xinjiang that carried out all of those persecutions and were used to be the ones that carried out the persecution of Falun Gong. Yeah, the same people, the same tool, whether it's a torture method, whether it's a psychological abuse, conversion, you know, force you to renounce your belief. All those things they developed and the tactics they honed in the persecution of Falun Gong, and then they apply to Uyghurs. And they're doing that later on to some of the underground Christians, you know, family church, house churches. And, you know, later on, they do that to Hong Kong. If we give a CCP a free pass, they're just going to move on to one group after another. And then each time it becomes closer and closer to us, because next step, they'll aim for Taiwan, right? That'll be much closer to US. That will break the first defense island chain. So that's their strategy. So Larry, before we continue, maybe tell me a little bit about what you exactly do. Sure. And also, you know, how it is that you came to be doing it. Yeah. Actually, I'm just volunteer, actually. And in doing all the human rights work, it's just my volunteer. My full time job is a senior statistician, you know, or nowadays, you call it data scientist, basically interchangeable. And so I was born, grew up in China and in Liaoning province, northeastern part of China. And I went to college in Beijing at Tsinghua University. And in 1995, after graduation from my college, I came here and I went to Washington University in St. Louis to pursue my PhD study. And so at that time, the persecution happened, actually. That was July 1999, exactly 25 years ago this month. And it was my summer break. And I saw the news and the Chinese government banned Falun Gong overnight. Thousands of people hauled from their bed overnight. Propaganda marathons started on all the Chinese language media in China. And all of them are state-run media to demonize Falun Gong. And at that time, I thought, I couldn't believe it. I thought Chinese government really misunderstood us. They thought we have a political agenda. Maybe they thought that we're trying to seek political power or something. And we're not. Falun Gong never seeks political power, never before, never will. And so at that time, I saw the news that practitioners went to Beijing. My mother even went to the city government, went to the provincial government to appeal. And later on, she went to Beijing, too. And so I thought that, well, I'm here. I can't go back to China. Well, what I can do is I go to Washington. There's an embassy here. So a bunch of us, we're all students. And we ran one. And we drove to D.C. And I stayed in D.C. for three weeks. Basically, we have a daily protest in front of Chinese embassy. And we went in there, actually. We presented the letter, tell them they misunderstood us. We're not really trying to overthrow Chinese government. We have no interest in that. We just want to be left alone to have our own right to practice our own faith. But gradually, the persecution just continued and getting more and more severe. And then we realized that, no, they didn't misunderstand us. And they just want to do it. So later on, we found out that the best way to counter this persecution is to help Chinese people to learn the truth and to counter the propaganda narrative by the Chinese government. If nobody cooperates with the persecution, and the persecution will end. And I guess you've mentioned a number of times as we're speaking, you're, of course, a Falun Gong practitioner yourself. So how did that happen? When I was studying at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, there are quite a few Qigong masters came to Tsinghua University. And just broadly, for those that aren't familiar with the Qigong concept, what is that? Just very briefly. Qigong is a general term, and there are many schools of Qigong. You can say Tai Chi is a form of Qigong. You can say yoga is a form of Qigong. So a lot of them involve breathing, but some of them don't. Like Falun Gong doesn't involve breathing. But it's generally a slow movement, meditative exercise. And a lot of people practice it for health benefit. It certainly can improve your health, energy level. But certainly Falun Gong has more than just the health benefit, the physical component, but also has a spiritual component. And so at that time in 1980s, 1990s, early 1990s, there was a Qigong boom in China. There are hundreds of different schools of Qigong and Qigong masters. At that time in China, the scientific community is very open to Qigong, because it's really tied into some of the traditional Chinese medicine, some of the traditional belief in China. It has a root, historical root. And so in 1995, I came to US. In 1996, one year after that, during the summer break, my mother in China wrote me a letter. And she practiced many different kinds of Qigong before. And she never really wholeheartedly recommended me to practice one. But she wrote me a letter saying that I started to practice Falun Gong. And this one is different, very different from all the Qigong that I practiced. It's free, completely free. It doesn't really charge money. And a lot of the others all charge money. And it's very effective. Her chronic stomach problem just getting better and better. And this one teach people to, you know, the principle choose compassion and tolerance. And I said, oh, this is a little interesting. And also at about the same time, one of my schoolmates at Washington University in St. Louis, and he attended a Falun Gong lecture in China. And so he started kind of a nightly video series lecture in his house. So I went there and so I started. When I read the Falun Gong, I just feel it just explained all the questions that I have in my life. And and also it gave me a deeper understanding about about the science, because I'm a science major, I'm a math major. And so I can see science from a little higher perspective. You know, after studying Falun Gong, I certainly make me feel more energetic, improve my health and sleep better, you know, and I just feel it kind of give me a spiritual path, a tangible way for me to elevate my mind and my body. So you were talking about what the significance is to Americans, right? One of the kind of features of what the CCP does to all sorts of groups, frankly, not just Falun Gong, is kind of reach out to wherever these groups have managed to set up overseas and influence them. So the persecution is not limited in Chinese border, actually. It's here. It's here. And so it takes many forms. And earlier years, they they did a lot of physical attack. You know, they broke into, say, a Falun Gong volunteer coordinator's apartment, like Dr. Peter Yuan Li, who is one of the key computer scientists who developed this software to, you know, circumvent Chinese, you know, Internet firewall. And they broke into his house and beat him almost to death and took all his computer hard drive away. But without touching anything like money, cash or jewelry. Obviously, they are for the information. And so that happened a lot. And it happened on the Flushing Street in New York in 2008, just a mob of Chinese agents just attacking Falun Gong practitioners on the street. And I remember the consul general, Chinese consul general in New York, Peng Keyu, was caught on tape saying that how he instigated these mobs. And but now it becomes more sophisticated. CCP certainly learned and they hone their skill, their tactics in transnational repression. And for example, last year, Justice Department indicted two CCP agents for attempting to bribe a purported IRS official who was actually an undercover FBI agent. And they are trying to bribe this purported IRS official to strip down the nonprofit status of Falun Gong affiliated organization. And we later learned that that's Shen Yun. That's a performing arts group founded by Falun Gong practitioners in New York. And so that's something, they try to use American system to their advantage and try to interfere or try to even destroy Falun Gong here. And I remember back in 2005, and a senior Chinese diplomat in Sydney, Australia, and he was the first secretary of Chinese consul general in Sydney, Australia, and Chen Yonglin. And he defected to Australia government at that time. And he made a headline. And he testified at that time that he know there are about 1000 CCP agents and informants working for CCP in Australia. Australia's population is only like less than 1 10th of the US population. And so the true number in US could be many, many times higher than that 1000, right? And so recently there's another former CCP agent also defected in Australia. He also testified that based on his knowledge, there are about 200 professional spies, CCP spies in Australia. And then another 1000 agent or informants, some of them are paid, some of them are not paid. There is a leaked document from Chinese government. It was a 2017 document from Henan province, CCP branch in Henan province. And so that document just laid out all the CCP strategy about combating Falun Gong, both inside China and outside China. And for example, they say that we're going to use our economic diplomatic influence and sister city program to squeeze Falun Gong's activity space overseas. And we're going to develop non-governmental sources, for example, China-friendly scholars, experts, journalists to speak for us. And we're going to strive to make foreign media to report favorably to us on Falun Gong issues. And so this is in our playbook. And so I'm not really surprised if one day I see a major media come out an article like attacking Falun Gong or Shen Yun and some of the CCP agents behind the scene tip them information or guided their quote unquote investigation or facilitated their reporting process, whatever. I'm not surprised at all if that happens because that's in their playbook. Unrestricted wildfire, right? And so they're not using that to only counter American in terms of military front, but they use it like they use law fire. They use all of things. They may have some people to file lawsuit. That happened to Shen Yun, actually. Some people stay in China for many years and come back to US and begin to file lawsuit to accuse Shen Yun of some environmental violation, which has no substance at all. They use American system like tax issues, media, and to paint a negative picture about Falun Gong to carry their narrative. So it's a lot more sophisticated. It's a lot more hard to discern. Talking about Shen Yun, it's a dance troupe. People probably have heard or saw some of the advertisement about that. So he encountered a tremendous amount of transnational repression, cyber attack, and their bus carrying the artist. The bus tire was slashed many times, but it's not deep enough. The cut is not deep enough to deflate the tire, but it's good enough for the tire to explode when driving on highway. So it's very insidious way. And every time when that happened and somebody tried to temper the tire or the bus, it wasn't done by Asian face or Chinese. It was done by local thugs. So they hire local thugs to do that. Also this year, in March, the transnational repression against Shen Yun just escalated and there were multiple bomb threat, mass shooting threat to both the theaters that Shen Yun performed and also Shen Yun headquarters in New York. Sometimes it's kind of bewildering to think about this. This is the best Chinese show and why Chinese Communist Party is so afraid of it, right? And so a lot of people ask me that question. And so this is a show that reviving traditional Chinese culture, traditional Chinese values. And a lot of Chinese after seeing the show, they said that, I'm so proud of my culture. I never seen such a beautiful show back in China, but I saw it in America. The tagline of the show is China before communism. And so it shows a very different China. People say, I saw a free China. I saw a spiritual China. I saw a moral China. I saw a peaceful China in the show. Very different from the CCP that we know about. CCP's political propaganda, media propaganda, and education indoctrination really blended the concept of China and the CCP in a lot of Chinese people's minds. Because whenever we criticize, Western governments criticize human rights abuses in China, CCP always say that, oh, you're hurting the feeling of 1.4 billion Chinese people. They hide behind Chinese people. But Shen Yun separates the concept of China from CCP. And so in this way, CCP really just feels that their legitimacy of representing China and Chinese culture is being challenged. And they cannot claim they are the sole guardian of Chinese civilization and Chinese culture. And so that's the real reason that they're so afraid of Shen Yun. So they tried everything to sabotage the show from using diplomatic, economic influence to pressure many countries, theaters to cancel the show. And they succeeded in quite a few countries that were vulnerable to their influence. And also, like I said, they used transnational repression. They filed lawsuits, have Americans to do that, filed lawsuits against Shen Yun, environmental lawsuits against Shen Yun, and also tried to bribe IRS officials to strip down the nonprofit status of Shen Yun, all these kinds of things. It's been 25 years that Falun Gong has been persecuted by the Chinese regime. Where are we at today as we finish up? Falun Dafa Information Center released a new report. And the title of the report is 25 Years of Persecution and 25 Years Too Long. And so this report documented not only just the overall picture of the persecution over the past 25 years, but more concentrating on now, what's happening now, the current situation. Because there are some of the narratives out there saying, okay, Falun Gong has been crushed in China. But the internal document from CCP tells a very different story, whether it's their CCP work plan, directives, report. So they all point to one direction, that Falun Gong still remains the top target of CCP. In 2020, the then Minister of Public Security, he gave a speech. And in that speech, he said that, we're going to make full use of our legal weapons and measures to severely crack down Falun Gong. And he put that in a very high priority position in his speech. And then in 2021, also from the Ministry of Public Security, in a press conference, they laid out that Falun Gong is a top target ahead of Xinjiang, Tibet, and other enforcement areas. That basically just means that their campaigns to crush Falun Gong, eradicate Falun Gong, just categorically failed after 25 years. And another important thing that this report covered is the persecution is still going on unabated. So for example, from 2022 until now, just a little over two years, there were over 1,700 new sentencing of Falun Gong practitioners. And the longest is 15 years. And so there are still tens of thousands in custody. Today, every two or three days, there is a new death case confirmed. The Falun Gong Protection Act, it's passed the House now with this unanimous voice vote. What's next for the bill? After it passed the House, the bill has been brought to the Senate. So I hope the Senate can pass the bill as soon as possible so that it can be brought to the president's desk to be signed into the law before the end of the year. And that's what we really hope for. Final thought as we finish? Yeah, I will say just this. 25 years of persecution, 25 years too long. It's time to end this persecution. It's time to end the CCP. Well, Larry Liu, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you for having me. Thank you all for joining Larry Liu and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.