What is the Falun Gong and Why Does the CCP Fear It?
Segment #551
"If 100 million people are practicing it, that's 100 billion yuan saved per year in medical fees. Premier Zhu Rongji is very happy about that. The country could use the money right now."
That quote was from an unnamed official at China's state sports commission, as reported by U.S. News and World Report in February 1999. It pertained to Falun Gong. Also known as Falun Dafa, the belief system is based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, along with a set of meditative exercises. Since its introduction in the early 1990s, the practice grew rapidly in the country, with an estimated 70 million to 100 million people learning it by 1999.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) no longer welcomed Falun Gong's health benefits when it realized that the practice was also a belief rooted in Chinese traditional culture, according to Zhang Erping, a spokesperson for the faith group. Months after the quote was reported, on July 20, 1999, the CCP unleashed a sweeping campaign to eliminate Falun Gong—a persecution that continues to this day.
Wen Ying at a candlelight vigil commemorating Falun Gong practitioners who were persecuted to death by the Chinese Communist Party in China, in Washington on July 17, 2025. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
"Out of all religions, the regime fears Falun Gong the most," said Amb. Sam Brownback at a forum in the U.S. Capitol on July 17, commemorating the 26th anniversary of the start of the persecution. "Falun Gong is very natural to China, the Chinese mentality, and the Chinese heart, and I think that's why the Communist Party so fears and does everything it possibly can to stomp out this faith," the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom told hundreds in the audience.
"They won't get it done because it's a physical man attacking a spiritual entity. It's the kingdom of man against the kingdom of God, and it won't succeed." However, the persecution could "cause a lot of harm in the process," he added.
Amb. Sam Brownback, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, speaks during a panel discussion at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in Washington on July 17, 2025. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
Nothing illustrates the harm more than forced organ harvesting—the state-sanctioned program of extracting organs from detained prisoners of conscience for sale on the transplant market. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), also present at the event, described it as an "industrial-sized atrocity that is very reminiscent of Josef Mengele in Nazi Germany, using ... so-called medicine as a way to make huge profits, billions."
The victims usually die in the process, and their bodies are cremated right away. As the first known forced organ harvesting survivor, Cheng Peiming was a rare exception. After he arrived in the United States in 2020, he underwent a series of medical examinations that confirmed his suspicion: his organs were stolen. He lost a part of his left liver and left lung at a nonconsensual surgery at a prison-affiliated hospital in northeastern China in November 2004. The operation left a 14-inch (35-centimeter) scar around the left side of his chest.
When the prison guards took him to another hospital in March 2006 for another surgery, he managed to escape the hospital after using the restroom. In 2015, he fled China to a third country and arrived in the United States in 2020, with the help of Robert Destro, the then-Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Destro recalled that he faced "enormous resistance" inside the State Department during his rescue effort of Cheng, despite having the authority as an assistant secretary.
"Remember, this is a chop shop we're talking about. You're actually worth more in pieces than you are as a person, and that's the government that our country is dealing with," he said. "And so if you don't understand that as you start to think about foreign policy, you're missing the point."
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) speaks at a forum titled "Safeguarding Freedom: Countering CCP Transnational Repression," at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on July 17, 2025. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times). He joined Smith and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who introduced the Falun Gong Protection Act that passed the House in May, in congratulating a dozen Chinese people for publicly quitting the CCP organizations at the same forum. They represent a small portion of the nearly 450 million Chinese people who have denounced the Party. One of them thanked Falun Gong practitioners for their decades of efforts in raising awareness of the CCP's true nature and building software to enable Chinese people to circumvent China's Internet firewall and obtain uncensored information.
Perry called Falun Gong practitioners "brave souls" and shared his vision of how freedom would prevail. "Where there's one of you, there's 10 of you. And where there's 10, there's 100. And where there's 100, there's 1000. And where there's 1000, there's 10,000," he said. "And that's how Falun Gong and all the people who want to be free win this struggle against the communist party."
Brownback is another who noticed Falun Gong's power of change. He urged the U.S. government to support all faiths in China, particularly Falun Gong, "because of their incredible importance to changing China, to getting it back to be the cultural beauty and free society… that can be a great contributor to the world, instead of the most really oppressive regime in the world today."
By Terri Wu
To dig deeper into the subject, read the following original reporting by our journalists:
In October 2022, Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a secret meeting instructing top state officials—overseeing political, intelligence, and influence operations—on a new strategy to target the Falun Gong spiritual group internationally, The Epoch Times has learned.
The focus of the Chinese regime’s latest anti-Falun Gong strategy is launching disinformation campaigns via social media influencers and Western media outlets and using the American legal system to go after companies started by Falun Gong practitioners.
Details of the 2022 secret meeting were provided by Yuan Hongbing, a Chinese legal scholar living in exile in Australia who has maintained connections within the Chinese regime’s top political circles. His account is based on information he received from two sources: an individual from a veteran Chinese Communist Party (CCP) family, who now opposes Xi, and an insider with knowledge speaking out for reasons of conscience.
The meeting took place right before the 20th National Congress, which saw Xi secure an unprecedented third term as Party leader. Xi told officials at the meeting that the regime’s previous efforts to suppress Falun Gong overseas had essentially failed.
In the early 1990s, Falun Gong was the fastest growing spiritual group in China. Based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, as well as meditative exercises, Falun Gong teaches practitioners to improve their moral character. In 1999, the CCP saw the practice’s growing popularity as a threat and launched a persecution campaign, vowing to eliminate it. Since then, the group has been severely persecuted by the CCP, including through widespread forced organ harvesting.
Xi’s instructions, which have not been previously reported, appear to have quickly led to an escalation in the long-running operation against Falun Gong practitioners abroad—a campaign that has cast a shadow over the lives of those who have sought refuge in the United States and elsewhere.
‘Dire Situation,’ Xi Said
The meeting was held by the Political and Legal Affairs Commission and was attended by the ministers of National Security and State Security; the secretary and several deputy secretaries of the Political and Legal Affairs Commission; officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and officials from the United Front Work Department, the key Chinese agency tasked with overseas influence operations, according to Yuan.
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Yuan said one of the main reasons Xi deemed international efforts against Falun Gong to be a failure was the growth of media organizations started by Falun Gong practitioners, which Xi said have become the main “hostile force” against the CCP—not just in Chinese, but also in English.
Media founded by Falun Gong practitioners include The Epoch Times and NTD, which were started in the early 2000s initially in Chinese. Both outlets now report in 23 languages and have branches around the world.
A television station control room of NTD, one of the media outlets targeted by the CCP, at its headquarters in New York City, in this file photo. The Epoch Times
Xi said that despite years of expending large amounts of manpower, material resources, and money, the CCP had not only failed to suppress these media, but watched them grow into a leading counterforce to the CCP internationally.
According to the insiders’ accounts, the CCP leader described the situation as “dire” and said it was a major oversight on the part of the responsible officials.
Xi said he believed the failure stemmed in part from a lack of “strategic planning” and “thorough, forceful coordination.”
On top of that, Xi considered the existing suppression tactics as too “reserved, conservative, and not creative enough”; and while the regime has poured a significant amount of resources into the effort, a large portion of that, upon disciplinary inspection, turned out to be wasted through corruption.
Xi told the attendees to start “cultivating anti-Falun Gong forces afresh” and reassessing the current personnel designated to the task overseas, imposing punishment or cutting them off if necessary.
Shift in Strategy
“Infiltrate, break down, and dissolve”—these have been the strategies Chinese influence operatives have used against targets in the Chinese diaspora such as Falun Gong.
Xi said they were not sufficient.
Traditionally, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the 610 Office—an extralegal apparatus specifically charged with carrying out the persecution against Falun Gong—had carried out the campaign overseas. Xi ordered a structural overhaul, according to Yuan.
Xi assigned the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the overseer of all legal enforcement authorities, to coordinate the task both inside and outside China.
Under the commission’s oversight, the Ministry of Public Security, with its roughly 2 million law enforcement officers, was put in charge of persecution efforts in China.
The Ministry of State Security, the Chinese regime’s top spy agency, was tasked with attacking Falun Gong overseas, with the United Front Work Department, the CCP’s overseas influence operation arm, and the relevant department from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs playing supporting roles.
“To fight a snake, hit at the seventh inch,” Yuan’s source quoted Xi as saying. The phrase is a Chinese idiom meaning to strike where it hurts most.
Chinese legal expert Yuan Hongbing, in this file photo. Chen Ming/The Epoch Times
Xi instructed officials to attack Falun Gong with lawfare and disinformation, deploying social media and media with no traceable ties to the CCP. He told them to direct their energy toward smearing Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, and to discrediting Falun Gong-founded media through inside operatives.
Xi wants to use social media and Western media in his war of public opinion because he believes using CCP state media is not effective overseas, since it is seen as propaganda.
The Western press has long been used in propaganda wars by communist countries.
“What the CCP is doing is precisely what the Soviets did in terms of trying to get their narrative, their propaganda into recognized Western newspapers, magazines, media outlets,” Ronald J. Rychlak, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Mississippi and an expert on disinformation, told The Epoch Times.
Casey Fleming, CEO of BlackOps Partners and a counterintelligence expert, said the CCP has been at this for decades and has “become very, very good at it.” He added that new technologies have allowed the CCP to scale up.
With social media, the CCP can instantaneously distribute a false message worldwide, and use it to “unseat people’s opinion and unseat our freedom in the United States in the free world,” Fleming said.
A New Security Chief
Days after the Party Congress, the Ministry of State Security got a new leader, Chen Yixin.
Chen had previously been the mayor of Wuhan and later the secretary-general of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. During his tenure at both posts, persecution increased against Falun Gong.
A separate whistleblower, who came forward last month, also said Chen is personally driving the campaign against Falun Gong overseas.
The whistleblower said Chen considers the issue his political capital and is aiming to “resolve the ‘Falun Gong issue’ by the end of the year.”
The spy chief’s ascension to the post was accompanied by a surge in human rights abuses under his charge.
Tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners suffered harassment or arrest during Chen’s time as head of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. Hundreds of practitioners died during that period, according to incomplete estimates by Minghui.org, which collects accounts directly from China.
Meanwhile, Wuhan, the city Chen had previously presided over, became a model for persecution. The commission even dispatched people to Wuhan’s brainwashing center—a facility used to force people to renounce their faith—so that they could learn the tactics and apply them nationwide, according to Minghui.
Overseas, Chen’s ministry has a number of networks that can be readily deployed. A letter obtained by The Epoch Times from March 2021 shows that the agency and the Ministry of Public Security collectively oversee an “anti-Falun Gong North America Office.”
An individual named Wu Xiuhua was named the director of the office, according to the letter. It credits him for “planning and organizing multiple tasks to hinder” Falun Gong practitioners’ efforts to spread information about the persecution inside China and describes him as a man with “extensive anti-Falun Gong experience.”
There’s little information about this office online, suggesting it is one of the Party organs that operates in secrecy. Aside from the North America office, the regime has embedded an extralegal network of agents in other ways. In 2023, the FBI arrested two CCP agents who operated a secret police station in Manhattan, under the cover of a pro-Chinese civil organization.
(Top) Two Chinese police officers arrest a Falun Dafa practitioner at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Jan. 10, 2000. (Bottom) Falun Gong practitioners perform their meditative exercises ahead of a candlelight vigil in memory of practitioners who died because of the CCP’s ongoing persecution, at the National Mall in Washington on July 20, 2023. Chien-Min Chung/AP Photo, Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times
‘Systematic and Complete Plan’
The international campaign against Falun Gong and its affiliated groups has notably intensified over the past year.
Dozens of social media accounts have sprung up specifically targeting Falun Gong and Shen Yun Performing Arts, a classical Chinese dance and music company founded by Falun Gong practitioners that depicts traditional China as it existed before communism.
One Chinese American influencer publicly claimed credit for helping The New York Times launch a number of attack pieces targeting Shen Yun.
“I was the one who introduced people [ex-Shen Yun performers] to the New York Times, especially for the initial interviews. They found additional people through that,” he wrote on X following the publication of a New York Times hit piece on Shen Yun earlier this year.
The individual also bragged about filing complaints against Shen Yun with New York state authorities in order to generate legal action against the arts group. He encouraged others to do the same.
Last year, he was tracked by law enforcement near Shen Yun’s campus. The FBI issued a warning to local law enforcement describing him as “potentially armed and dangerous.” He now faces charges for possessing firearms illegally.
The New York Times articles attempted to smear Shen Yun by misrepresenting a practicum program that allows a limited number of talented students at two affiliated religious arts schools, Fei Tian Academy and Fei Tian College, to tour with Shen Yun. The publication of its recent articles coincided with the launch of a civil lawsuit filed by a former student claiming labor violations.
The performance “Flowing Sleeves” from the 2009 Shen Yun Performing Arts program. Shen Yun Performing Arts
The woman who filed the lawsuit has been linked to a Chinese government entity and has given interviews to individuals that the CCP apparatus has then used to attack Shen Yun, according to a statement from Shen Yun.
According to two whistleblowers who spoke to the Falun Dafa Information Center in August, officials at a Ministry of Public Security meeting two months earlier had asked all provincial-level governments to “fully support” the social media influencer who spoke to The New York Times by supplying “all malicious information on Falun Gong” that the ministry had gathered internally.
The CCP also increased its efforts to target Shen Yun using the U.S. legal system.
U.S. authorities in September and November sentenced two Chinese agents who conspired to bribe an IRS agent with $50,000 to open an audit on Shen Yun. The money was obtained from CCP officials during trips to China.
The same two agents had traveled to Orange County, New York, where Shen Yun is based, to surveil Falun Gong practitioners and collect information that would serve as “the basis for a potential environmental lawsuit meant to inhibit the growth of the Falun Gong community in Orange County,” according to court filings.
Separately, an American man with deep ties to China initiated a string of frivolous environmental lawsuits targeting Shen Yun. In the latest case, Judge Kenneth Karas of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York dismissed the suit with prejudice over its flaws, meaning it can’t be refiled.
A garden outside the South Gate of the Dragon Springs campus in Cuddebackville, N.Y., on Oct. 1, 2023. Cara Ding/The Epoch Times
Meanwhile, in November, a Chinese national was sentenced for spying on Falun Gong in the United States.
Calls for Vigilance
The escalating transnational repression against Falun Gong has alarmed U.S. lawmakers such as Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.).
An “adversarial country trying to use the instruments of our federal government to punish their ideological rivals is completely out of bounds and exceptionally concerning,” Perry told The Epoch Times. In the House, he sponsored the Falun Gong Protection Act, a bill that aims to hold the CCP accountable for the crime of forced organ harvesting.
Other legislators expressed similar concerns about the CCP exporting its human rights abuses to the United States.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he “strongly condemn[s] China’s latest series of attempts to commit human rights violations against pro-democracy group Falun Gong in the U.S. and abroad.”
“The CCP has a history of repressing pro-democracy groups beyond its borders as it seeks to strengthen its authoritarian grip on its own people,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that he commends U.S. law enforcement for “protecting democratic activists’ lives, civil liberties, and the rule of law.”
Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.) has previously called for legal means to combat the regime’s transnational suppression of dissidents. Like the others, she said she believes there needs to be liability for what Beijing is doing.
“For 25 years, the Chinese Communist Party has been persecuting Falun Gong practitioners and all who seek to practice their faith without government interference,” she told The Epoch Times. “Oppressive regimes like the CCP must be held accountable for attacking human rights through disinformation and persecution.”
Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), elected in November to the Senate, cited the Countering China’s Political Warfare Act he introduced. To tackle covert Chinese operations, Congress needs to pass the bill to “sanction CCP groups like the United Front that are waging political warfare against U.S. citizens and Chinese dissidents on American soil,” he told The Epoch Times.
Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), a member of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, called the leaked instructions from Xi “disturbing.”
“We must continue to investigate the ways the Chinese Communist Party seeks to exert influence in the United States,” Carson told The Epoch Times.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), marking Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, said the occasion is a reminder that “we all need to recommit ourselves to upholding a high standard of human rights for every person on this planet.”
(Top L–R) Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on June 25, 2024. Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.), in this file photo. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 30, 2018. (Bottom L–R) Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) on Capitol Hill on March 27, 2019. Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) in Washington on June 8, 2017. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, in Washington on Aug. 29, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times, Yiyuan Chang/NTD, Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times, York Du/NTD, Larry French/Getty Images for Starz
“The Chinese government, sadly, has had a horrific human rights record, and they have attacked numerous groups in China, and some of these attacks have come in the most vicious forms,” McGovern, a member of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, told The Epoch Times. He added that it’s important for everybody—not just lawmakers—to “stand up and denounce that.”
Only by holding perpetrators of transnational repression to account can dissidents live in the United States free of fear, he said.
Perry said that since the CCP is an adversary, the United States must be vigilant.
“We should have increased scrutiny on all their activities and with the mindset that they would do these things purposefully,” he said. “And when we find that to be the case, severe, strict, and sudden consequences need to be imposed.”
He said the situation presents an opportunity to “send a stronger message” to the CCP and Xi Jinping.
“Closing consulates and other diplomatic means can be things that we would consider,” Perry told The Epoch Times.
“The Communist Party of China is essentially a criminal organization running a country,” he said, adding that since the United States doesn’t allow criminal organizations to use government systems to persecute adversaries or violate basic human rights, “we certainly shouldn’t let the CCP do it either.”
Luo Ya, Sherry Dong, and Terri Wu contributed to this report.