Canaries in a Cold War (2022)

Nobody likes to use the word evil anymore, but after the journey I've been on this past year, I don't know what else to call it. My name is James H. White. I'm a human rights activist. I'm also a singer-songwriter and a recovered alcoholic. It all started in February 2021 Hey. Keith. Hey, what's happening James? You're looking good man. Okay, well you're just sitting there, you got your white sweater on. There you go. Keith, an old friend of mine, was helping me set up a meeting for a song I was working on. A song about the upcoming 2022 Beijing Olympics in China. His name is Kim, Kim Ang, but his wife was in China and she had to escape out of China and she was, you know, the word persecution doesn't really, you know, have any meaning for me anymore. She was tortured and her family had to escape out of there and ultimately make their way to the U.S. Two weeks later, I was heading to Washington D.C. to meet with the family. I brought a small film crew with me to help capture their story. A story representing what I feel must be among the biggest cover-ups in modern history. My plan was just to write a song and help raise awareness, but little did I know how far the encounter would actually take me. I finally met Kim on a windy day at the end of winter 2021. A decade earlier, Kim had married Chun Mei, the oldest of the three sisters I was about to meet. He had arranged for me to spend a whole day with the three sisters and was there to translate and give emotional support. I had read about a wide range of torture cases in China over the years. In most cases, the victims don't make it out alive to share their story. It had been a journey of almost 20 years for the three sisters making it to the U.S. Ten years out of that time, Kim and his wife had been working from the U.S. to get the other two sisters out of a detention center in Thailand, where they escaped to from China. It was a huge, like, uphill battle. The oldest sister, Chun Mei, started practicing Falun Gong in 1997 after learning it from her two younger sisters. Within three months, she was of a spinal injury and bronchitis she had for 25 years. The middle sister, Chun Ling, was the first sister to start practicing Falun Gong in 1996. The practice cured her chronic ailments such as hepatitis and vertigo without charging her a penny, she told me. She then taught the youngest sister, Chun Sha, who also started practicing in 1996. Chun Sha gravitated to the moral, spiritual elements of the practice. Falun Gong practitioners tried to adhere to truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance in their daily lives, which is part of China's ancient culture. It was a throwback, really, to the traditional spiritual roots, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism. I mean, it really spoke to the core values that those traditions had. Falun Gong kind of slipped through the cracks of the way in which the Chinese Communist Party tries to control religion and faith because it was a qigong. It was a form of kind of meditation and exercise, which was really popular. There was a qigong boom happening in China then. People we had talked to when I was working on this research report, who had been inside the party state system at the time, and they said, oh yeah, there were 70 million people practicing Falun Gong. In 1999, that was more than the membership of the Chinese Communist Party. I first came across Falun Gong in Washington, D.C. when I met Keith, the guy who put me in touch with the Three Sisters. The year was 2000. I was neck deep in drug and alcohol addiction. Keith taught me Falun Gong. I got sober. I returned to college and graduated on the dean's list. Like the Three Sisters, Falun Gong changed my life. One of the tragic parts about this is even the government, you know, back in 98, was saying one of the reasons we really like Falun Gong is the health benefits. I mean, they openly talked about that, the highest levels of the government. In terms of why they changed their mind, this is sort of a tragic story. Once the persecution began, the oldest sister, Chun Mei, went to Tiananmen Square to peacefully protest four times. She was arrested twice, once for 45 days and the second time for one year. She was tortured and forced to do slave labor 19 hours a day. The middle sister, Chun Ling, went to peacefully protest several times in Beijing and Dalian City. She was arrested five times. She was also tortured and forced to do slave labor. The youngest sister, Chun Xia, also went to Tiananmen Square to peacefully protest. She was arrested once, forced to do slave labor, and had money extorted from her. At the same time, human rights lawyers and judges trying to help Falun Gong practitioners were targeted across China. In democracies, you'll have access to a lawyer. They have to read you your rights. They're going to make sure they have access to your family. You should be protected from torture, right? You know, your case is going to go through the system. You're going to be able to hire your own defense lawyer who can defend you in court. Not in China. In China, it can be over in like a few hours and then they just make a decision and next thing you know you get a piece of paper telling you you're going to be in prison for the next three, five, ten years. So it's just a totally different system that's, again, in a lot of ways actually functions a lot more like a mafia. So they would hang you up? As an American who grew up in a free society, their story was hard for me to take in. So you're just hanging from your arms? The sisters would be hung from their arms, feet dangling. The two older sisters were tortured on the dead man's bed. The prison guards tie the practitioner to a bed and stretch their arms and legs for hours at a time. The practitioner often struggles to walk or even stand afterwards. This four, five policewomen beat me. Yeah, this is my friend. This is my friend, Sun Shuxiang. She was prosecuted, died in China. Before in China, before here, before I come out, I was with her together. If I don't come out, maybe I same thing. The sisters were shocked with electric batons on their face and body. They could smell the burnt flesh. They were force-fed to the point where they'd throw up blood. The middle sister was forced to sit on a hard Chinese stool for a week straight in the harsh winter until her bottom turned black. To break the spirit of Falun Gong practitioners in order to, quote, transform them, the prison guards used every type of torture they could think of. So the 18 female practitioners were put inside the cells with the men. Where were they put, the female practitioners were put where? Put in the men prison. Oh, in the male prison. And they were assaulted? Yeah. The Chinese Communist Party created an entire system to encourage evil and persecute its people. One, one girl, one girl never married. One girl come out. One boy was born, but she don't know who is the boy's father, you know? The oldest sister, Chunmei, and the middle sister, Chunling, also underwent medical tests that made no sense to them at the time, considering how badly they were tortured. Chunmei was given a comprehensive physical examination, including eyes, head, chest, abdomen, and a urine test. Three tubes of blood were drawn from her. Chunling was also given a full body examination and had a large tube of blood drawn. Typically for normal health checks, only a few milliliters of blood are taken. A full vial of blood, however, is required for tissue matching for organ transplants. Chunling told me that most of the practitioners she knew that had a large vial of blood drawn later disappeared without a trace. You know, this persecution is so high price for, for my parents. My mother, even, even use his body to. Mother. Mother, lie down. Don't let the car move. Take her away. The second time the police were taking the oldest sister, Chunmei, away, their mother tried to stop them. She lied down in front of the police car to block them. Yeah, if you arrest my daughter, you'll, you'll kill me first. Yeah, my mother. Police pull out my, my mother and arrest my sister to imprison the, imprison the, yeah, my mother. My daughter, come back, come back. Yeah. My mom called my name. I didn't start writing music because I wanted to be a musician or a songwriter. I started writing music because I had stories to tell mainly painful ones. The three sisters. It's not just a story about three people. The suffering they went through is also the reality of tens of millions of Chinese people today who practice Falun Gong for over two decades. These people have suffered alone in the dark with almost no coverage in Western mainstream media. But there was a group in London that was finally able to shed some light on the issue. I decided to cross the Atlantic to hear their story. I knew absolutely nothing about it. And it's one of the remarkable features of recent period of time. Forced organ harvesting attracted very little public attention. Despite the fact that outside many embassies of the People's Republic of China around the world, Falun Gong practitioners were demonstrating and handing out leaflets. I managed to miss whatever it was they were handing out. My shortcoming, not theirs, but it's a shortcoming shared by many people. I knew nothing. When I first heard about it, I was, of course, extremely shocked. How could you not be? They are really to be commended for their willingness over all those years to be doubted and nevertheless to stick with what they believed. But it wasn't their belief we worked on. It was the hard evidence. Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, a barrister and former judge, was the chair of the China Tribunal, a people's tribunal. These tribunals are typically initiated by citizens to investigate grave crimes committed during events of mass suffering. Previously, Sir Geoffrey Nice led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Would you be in a position, Mr. Sabi, to give us a list, maybe not comprehensive, but a list of all those who've been invited to contribute to these proceedings and who may have declined to do so? Yes, sir. On behalf of the tribunal, we have sent invitations primarily to the embassy of People's Republic of China in London with reminders and many requests for their engagement with this tribunal and making a statement. No answer has been received. The China Tribunal was asked to consider the evidence regarding forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience in China and to determine whether international crimes have been and continue to be committed. At that time I was in a terrible pain. My head was like as if it's going to blow up. I was screaming. I was screaming. I was electrocuted for about 20 to 30 minutes. Then I was taken back to myself. The judgment has not been unpicked or deconstructed by anyone. Not only because all the reasoning is there, but all the evidence is there. You can see all the witnesses bar just about one or two who had protected measures and weren't seen. You can see it all on video. Every document is there. Originally when you approached the hospital, did you ask for kidney as an organ or did you ask generally that you need an organ transplant for your friend? One thing that makes this process very sad is that it would not have been possible without participation of very highly educated, skilled medical practitioners. They must have known what they are doing in China. Hamid Sabi, a London-based human rights lawyer, was the counsel to the tribunal. Previously he had been counsel to the Iran tribunal, which investigated mass killings of political prisoners by the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980s. In China what they had done, they had over, at some time they had over two million Falun Gong in the camps. Next to each camp was a military hospital. Every single one of the witnesses that was camp survivor mentioned that every three months they were taken to clinic or to the hospital next door. Substantial amount of blood was drawn. When a tourist came to have an organ, they matched his request for organ with the existing data bank that they had created of the Falun Gong prisoners and selected the proper donor, so-called forced donor, took his organs and transplanted into the recipient. I had recurring flashbacks to the story of the three sisters while listening. The health checks, the blood tests, the torture, it all lined up with the findings of the tribunal. It was really a miracle all three of them made it out alive. But how many don't? It's hard just thinking about it. The judgment of the China tribunal is over 160 pages long with extensive appendices that include details of all documents, reports, witness testimonies, and submissions reviewed by the tribunal over 12 months. Over 50 fact witnesses, experts, and investigators contributed evidence and it confirms tragically the Falun Gong practitioners were and continue to be killed on a significant scale for their organs. Any who interact in any substantial way with the PRC, including doctors and medical institutions, industry and businesses, most specifically airlines, travel companies, financial services businesses, law firms, pharmaceutical insurance companies, together with individual tourists, educational establishments, and art establishments should now recognize that they are to the extent revealed in this judgment interacting with a criminal state. Falun Gong is a source, probably the principal source of organs for forced organ harvesting. Transplant tourism, that's where people are now flocking to China. While the China tribunal received some press coverage, it also got a rude awakening. On the 17th of June of 2019, which is when I read out the short form judgment, on that same day there was a planned film going out on Newsnight, which is the BBC's principal evening political program. And in the afternoon the program was pulled and one of the reasons it was pulled was because the British foreign office walked into the BBC or metaphorically walked into the BBC and said don't broadcast this. And I think pretty shocking was that the foreign office would take that step. In an Epoch Times article dated November 4th 2020, a spokesperson for the UK foreign office denied the allegation. Shortly after the verdict, the CCP banned Sir Geoffrey Nice and the other investigators of the tribunal from ever traveling to China. Yet the tribunal's findings remain unchallenged. All religions are persecuted in China by the government since the beginning of the communist regime 1949. The Chinese regime is still today a communist regime. They still work on a Marxist-Leninist premise. It's a one-party system, no election, no freedom, technical surveillance. So all religions are enemies and also they are perceived as potential competitors in giving the citizen, Chinese citizen, his or her rule for life. It's perceived as a competitor and pretty quickly it becomes an enemy and as an enemy it should be eradicated as soon as possible. There were 100 million people practicing. That many people doing anything outside of the government's control is going to make some leaders nervous and addicted. There was a cultural component. You know this was traditional Chinese culture that believed in sort of Buddhist values. That's completely the opposite from communist ideology and in fact the communist regime had spent decades trying to root out traditional Chinese culture. So those are the sort of contributing reasons but the driving reason was the man in charge, Jiang Zemin. This was the first leader of China who was not part of the revolution. He didn't really have, for lack of better words, street cred among the leadership and so he was sort of desperate to build up a legacy to establish a power base. And just as he's about doing this, Falun Gong explodes on the scene. It's all over the country. Everybody's talking about it. It's like all this great thing Falun Gong and it's brought back the great traditions of China and everybody's talking about essentially stealing his thunder. And so he was the man who said crush it. And the way the system works in China is if the head of the communist party says you're now an enemy of the state, there's nothing to stop him. But even more sinister than the order itself was the system already in place to carry it out. Falun Gong was sort of very much a litmus test when Jiang Zemin first started this persecution. It said either you persecute your Falun Gong or you're out. And the priorities within the system for communist party official advancement is set up so that those who are able to carry out political oppression, those are the ones who make their way up through the system. If somebody goes to petition in Beijing, you lose a point. If you successfully quote re-educate or transform, which is the word they use, a Falun Gong practitioner, you gain points. And so it develops. It actually encourages bad actors and it pushes out people who want to do the right thing. Because if you're somebody who's like, well, no, you know, I'm not going to stop this house church or this Bible study in my district because who are they hurting? Well, then you failed on your like religious affairs implementation and you get a demerit and you're not going to get your next promotion. In China, the communist party is above the law. Its leader is above the law. There's no genuine interest in conducting police work and determining whether a person is innocent or guilty of a charge. The day somebody is arrested, they will not be released. That is why you have 99.9% conviction rates in China and 99.9% failure rates for appeals in China. The Chinese Communist Party runs everything. It has a direct oversight over the military. It runs the whole government and every large business in China. There is a communist party member there who's there to make sure that things are in line with the party. The party is everywhere. And so then when they want to push out a policy or they want to persecute a group of people, they have the ability to take that to every little corner of China. People have to realize that the persecution of Falun Gong is an incubator for persecutory tactics that are now unleashed on a whole other group of people. Torture methods that were literally refined, I don't just mean they first started on Falun Gong, they actually had trainings. There was one labor camp in northeast China that became very good at breaking Falun Gong via torture. They had them travel to different labor camps and train those people on how to break Falun Gong. Those torture techniques are now being unleashed on the Uyghurs. That was basically what they learned. They learned how to do this. They got promoted through the system and then they went to Tibet and did some things and then now they're in Xinjiang. And so this idea that what stays surrounding just one targeted group just stays there is something that the CCP has just proven time and again. It's just not the case. It definitely spreads. The organ harvesting, and this is something that clearly comes from the Falun Gong persecution, has become much more systematic. Every camp it's the same thing. I barely interviewed two people who are from the same camp in Xinjiang. Every one of them was from a different camp. Every one of them describes the health checks in the camp every month, every two months, like a drumbeat. And then 10 days later, the people disappear. Two or three, maybe four or five. It's really about 2.5% to 5%. But overall, if you look at the camps, you're looking at at least, you know, almost 70 people a day, maybe 130 people a day. There's something in that range. So if you look at the overall picture, it's a kind of maintenance genocide. About a decade ago in Los Angeles, I met Ethan Gutmann, one of the journalists to do groundbreaking research early on about forced organ harvesting. I went to see Ethan in London and hear about his latest investigation, the Uyghur situation in Xinjiang. We found a hospital that was built inside a camp. And then 900 meters away is a crematorium, massive crematorium. Have you ever heard of a crematorium with 50 security guards? And then we can even see that it's got pipes. So it's probably a water-based system where the water dissolves the fats and the bones and the hair and then dumps it into the Aksu River. 20 minutes away is an airport with a fast lane for human organs, a green lane. It's called a green passage. This is why people are starting to use this term genocide or make comparisons to the Holocaust. It's not completely inappropriate. Since January 2021, the U.S. government has officially designated the crimes against the Uyghurs living in China as a genocide. Organ transplant abuse is something that has spread from Falun Gong to Uyghurs. And China, the Communist Party, would be more than happy to have it spread elsewhere. Human rights lawyer David Metas, along with David Kilgore, the former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific, were the two pioneers to investigate forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China. You can't wait for somebody to come and get you for your organ to stop the practice. By then, it's going to be too late. As we can see, human rights violations spread. I mean, COVID, to a certain extent, is a metaphor. It starts in China and spreads throughout the world. And partly because of this tendency for cover-up, party comes first. It really was too late to try to stop COVID by the time it got to Canada or the UK. If it had stopped in China when it was first discovered, we wouldn't have this problem now. If the world had taken organ harvesting seriously to the point that they insisted on the transparency needed into the medical system to ensure they were no longer harvesting organs, it's that transparency that would have noticed, wait a minute, these doctors in Wuhan, they're texting each other on, what was it, December 30th, saying, hey, we've got, you know, a coronavirus-like something happening here. And they would have seen that right away. Taiwan doctors were watching and interacting with the Wuhan doctors on that very day, December 30th. By January 1, they had already taken steps to limit travel from China, from Wuhan. And look at Taiwan. Universities are open, shops are open. It's like they're on another planet. But now we're all paying the price. I was wandering around, letting it sink in, when I saw the wall. It was a COVID memorial wall. So many lives lost. All those hearts wouldn't have had to be there. Ignoring a bad actor doing this kind of atrocities on one group is enabling that bad actor to turn around and do something to the rest of us. And that's exactly what happened. If you look at the progression of how the virus came out, what's next? Especially given what the CCP, the amount of influence they have around the world. I was thinking about Hong Kong and the changes that went through. Answer is part of the question. To me, Hong Kong shows how the CCP feels about free and open societies. And it shows what it is prepared to do to change them. There's been widespread international condemnation of China following a parliamentary vote to impose new national security laws. A pro-democracy protester in Hong Kong was sentenced today to nine years in prison. Police, in fact, have already detained at least 300 people since the law took effect 24 hours ago. It's in total breach of promises that were made by the Chinese government under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which is an international treaty registered at the United Nations, signed by China and the UK, which promised that Hong Kong would have its basic freedoms, a high level of autonomy for at least 50 years from the time of the handover. So at least until 2047. And we're less than halfway through that period. And already China has completely reneged on its promises, torn up that treaty. And I think that is very sad for Hong Kong. It's also, I think, very concerning for the free world, because if we allow them to do what they've done to Hong Kong, I don't think they'll stop there. Benedict Rogers is the co-founder of Hong Kong Watch and the UK Conservative Party Human Rights Commission. He worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and witnessed how the city changed in just a few short years. From the umbrella movement in 2014, the disqualification of pro-democracy legislators, we saw, of course, the protests in 2019 against the extradition law that was being proposed and the police brutality that was really shocking. And then in the last year, the introduction of a very draconian national security law that basically has destroyed all of Hong Kong's remaining freedoms and autonomy. The national security law is intentionally vague and allows the government to charge a person with something as serious as sedition or terrorism simply for criticizing the Chinese regime or any of its policies. And the law applies to everyone on the planet. If you criticize the Chinese regime anywhere in the world and then travel to Hong Kong, the law says that they can arrest you and imprison you. Hong Kong has fallen. It's really gone from being one of the most open, freest cities in Asia to now being an increasingly closed and repressed place. People who still speak out are taking a very big risk. And most of the leading pro-democracy voices in Hong Kong are either on trial, already in jail, or in exile. Jim Wong, a young Hong Konger now living in exile in London, is one of them. Jim was among the hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers peacefully protesting the draconian CCP measures. On August 31, 2019, he was one of the main victims of the brutal police attack inside Prince Edward MTR station in Hong Kong. It's also known as the 831 attack, where Hong Kong police cornered 30 peaceful Hong Kong activists on the train station elevator. The police trampled, pepper sprayed, and beat them bloody. Jim was officially charged with nine false crimes and was not allowed due process. The people in Hong Kong really do not want to live under the CCP's rule. They, of different generations, they have grown up in a society that had all the hallmarks of freedom. The UK has become one of the top destinations for the almost 90,000 people who left Hong Kong after the national security law was implemented in June 2019. Despite all the hardships he'd been through, Jim was in good spirits enjoying his regained freedom. There was just one problem. Freedom House published a new report on what's called transnational repression. It's where different regimes will go after and engage in physical attacks on their exile and diaspora communities in other countries. And it was a global report that some of my colleagues worked on. I helped with the China chapter. They found 600 cases of physical attacks, so physical assaults, renditions, kidnappings, detentions, assassinations by 31 countries against people who had fled the country and were living in other countries. More than a third of the cases were from China. So China and the Chinese regime, by far, we found as engaged in the most widespread, comprehensive, and really global campaign of transnational repression. And what's also unique about China isn't just the sheer scale. It's the breadth of the targets. So it's the minorities. It's Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs and Tibetans. It's activists. It's dissidents. It's journalists. It's political activists. It's Hong Kongers now. So you actually have a situation where there are people living in the United States and a lot of other democracies who feel that presence. And even those physical attacks are just the tip of the iceberg, because there's all these other forms of surveillance, intimidation, phone calls from the embassy saying, you know, you better not say that on social media, you know, just because you're in Australia, we can still bring you back. 19th District Council member Tony Abella is so concerned about the Chinese regime's role in the violence, he has spoken to the State Department and the FBI. So we must use every method at our disposal to stop the way they distribute the hate message. They're entitled to their opinion, but when they start spreading it and advocating violence, that's when we have to step in. I couldn't stop wondering, if it continues, how long will it be until people like the three Chinese sisters, Jim Wong, and the other Chinese refugees won't have any country to go to anymore? 30 years into the experiment of the engagement policy, instead of moving towards democracy, the CCP is now deeply embedded into our societies. Emboldened by Western capital and innovation, it is slowly turning our own system against us. History shows any attempt to reform the CCP categorically ends up with the CCP trying to reform us. Their authoritarian system can control how ordinary Americans think. Miles Yu was the principal China policy advisor to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He's a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. A sports manager for a team somewhere in Texas can be the source of a firestorm between two countries because of a single tweet supporting people in Hong Kong. Yeah, we apologize. We love China. We love playing there. They show us the most support and love, so we appreciate them as a fan base, and we love everything they're about. A single individual from a high finance of the American capitalist society can influence the presidential decision on major policies toward China because China and that particular individual share common economic interests, which is in conflict with American national policy. This is very different from the old days when we dealt with the Soviets because Soviet Union and Americans were completely separated. It's cold war from distance. Now the enemies are with you. Did you know that 90% of U.S. media outlets are owned by only six corporations? And these corporations have massive business ties with the Communist Party of China. For example, Disney, who owns ABC and ESPN, just opened a theme park in China that costs 5.5 billion U.S. dollars. In 2010, Disney's chairman Bob Iger met with China's propaganda minister and promised to use Disney to spread Communist Party propaganda around the world. CNN's parent company, Warner Media, has a 50 million dollar partnership with China Media Capital, which is controlled by the Communist Party. NBCUniversal operates both MSNBC and NBC. In 2010, NBC partnered with Xinhua News, the Chinese Communist Party's official mouthpiece, to establish an international broadcast partnership. NBCUniversal also has a stake in a Chinese media venture worth 3.8 billion dollars. The FBI calls Chinese Communist Party America's greatest long-term threat. I wasn't surprised that the story of the three sisters and millions like them never made it into the American news headlines. The CCP has maybe the most sophisticated propaganda outfit that we've ever had to confront. They understand that they can shape how we understand them. They pay very close attention to the principles and the ideals that that we find attractive, to the things that we find threatening, and then they try to recast their actions within that framework. Dr. Murray Bissett is director of academic programs at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. We met by the Victims of Communism Memorial statue in Washington, which is dedicated to the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world. If we wanted to be even, you know, more accurate, it would be billions of people who have suffered under this ideology. And in fact, billion, you know, more than a billion, it's about 1.7 billion today, live under a single-party communist dictatorship. 20% of the world's population, one in five. But the truth about communist implementation in history is being purged. On the communism page of Wikipedia, what we're seeing is a complete and utter whitewashing of communist history. There's basically zero references to the mass atrocities, to the man-made famines, to the absolutely gross violations of human rights that have happened in every single country where communism has been tried. It appears to be that there's a concerted effort on the part of communists and its fellow travelers to basically erase from the public record any mention of any of the terrible things that have happened. On the Wikipedia page of the Chinese Communist Party, it's the same thing. Little mention of all the mass suffering and death. If you look at the amount of money they've put into Harvard and Yale and all these universities, they're all over business, our entertainment industry, Hollywood, our media. We're not talking about, you know, France having a lot of influence over, you know, our different institutions here. We're talking about the Chinese Communist Party, which has a very specific track record and a very sort of nefarious evil core in terms of what it's doing. That is what has all this influence over all of our institutions, and I find that very scary. The song I had set out to write for the upcoming Olympics in China was gone, overshadowed by the sheer magnitude of this story. But we kept going, and that's how this film came to be. I'm honored to be at the U.S. Capitol with you, and my heart breaks for those of you who have lost family and friends and fellow practitioners. And I want to assure you of the Institute on Religion and Democracy's continuing commitment to work for the human rights and religious freedom of all who are oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party. Governments seeking utopia on Earth killed tens of millions of human beings in 70-some years of wars, gulags, starvation, and mass killings. While the utopia of Adolf Hitler's thousand-year Reich ended in military defeat and the Soviet workers' paradise ended in humiliation for Russia, the dream of centrally planned utopia lives on in China under the Chinese Communist Party. Every year in Washington, D.C., thousands of Falun Gong practitioners hold a peaceful rally, parade, and candlelight vigil in late July. The activities are to remember the day the persecution began, July 20, 1999. Every year I see the number tick up. Falun Gong has been persecuted by the CCP for 5, 10, 15, now over 20 years. Some of the children whose parents were killed are now adults marching here, calling for an end to this nightmare. Hello, thank you. It's such an honor to be standing in solidarity once again with the Falun Gong community. This year we had the U.S. government officially designate the Uyghur Muslim community as victims of Chinese government genocide. It's time that the United States recognize what is happening, the genocide occurring against practitioners of Falun Gong in China. Genocide is the destruction in part of a religious community, for example, with the intent to eradicate it. And I don't think there's any doubt that what has happened these past decades to Falun Gong meets that criteria. It had been half a year since I met with the three sisters. Over that time, their story took on a whole new meaning for me. American people so nice, heart so good, they don't understand the truth. Today, killing, force organ harvesting Chinese people, maybe in the future they do that around the world. CCP stay here one minute, this around the world danger one minute. I hope America freedom continue, don't get lost. For more than 20 years, we've been warned of the dangers of the Chinese Communist Party. But we didn't listen. Now the threat is here at our doorstep, knocking. Freedom isn't free. It never has been. All the people I met on this journey have showed me that. I've always admired the Chinese people. They're tough. They're resilient. Their spirit is unwavering in the face of impossible odds. In the face of evil. It is from people like these three sisters that we learn, no matter how dark and ominous the CCP looms over our lives and our country, with faith and resilience, there's a way forward. When I first went to our nation's capital to meet the three sisters, I thought I was helping them by telling their story. But in truth, they were the ones helping us.