Since 1999, Freedom House has been one of the most consistent international voices in support of Falun Gong practitioners’ right to practice their faith without fear of persecution. In 2000, Freedom House included Falun Gong practitioners in its delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. In March 2001, the organization awarded Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi and the Falun Dafa Association its International Religious Freedom Award.
Freedom House reports have regularly referenced the human rights violations suffered by practitioners in China and senior staff have repeatedly spoken at annual Falun Gong rallies in Washington D.C. for over 26 years. Former board members such as the late Ambassador Mark Palmer and Professor Arthur Waldron have been outspoken in their own capacities on behalf of Falun Gong practitioners.
Excerpts from Recent Freedom House Reports and Statements:
- China Dissent Monitor, 2024
“CDM has collected 200 total cases of religious adherents practicing or sharing their faith
despite restrictions against these activities since June 2022. Occurring across 29 provinces or regions of the PRC, the majority (163) involved Falun Gong practitioners…In May 2023, Wang
Shulan was reported for sharing Falun Gong information at a market Jixi, Heilongjiang Province, resulting in her arrest and eventual four-year prison sentence.”
- Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach, 2021
“China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” Falun Gong practitioners are among the primary targets of its global campaigns.
“Practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China, also face regular reprisals from China and from Chinese agents. These include frequent harassment and occasional physical assaults by members of visiting Chinese delegations or pro-Beijing proxies at protests overseas, as in cases that have occurred since 2014 in the United States, the Czech Republic, Taiwan, Brazil, and Argentina. Media and cultural initiatives associated with Falun Gong have reported suspicious break-ins targeting sensitive information, vehicle tampering, and pressure from Chinese authorities for local businesses to cut off advertising or other contractual obligations with them. Multiple Falun Gong practitioners in Thailand have also faced detention, including a Taiwanese man involved in uncensored radio broadcasts to China and several cases of Chinese refugees formally recognized as such by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In October 2017, a Falun Gong practitioner who had survived a Chinese labor camp and become a high-profile informant on CCP abuses—sneaking a letter into a Halloween decoration when detained and later filming a documentary with undercover footage—died of sudden kidney failure in Indonesia. Some colleagues consider his death suspicious, but no autopsy was performed.”
- China Media Bulletin, Oct. 2019
Falun Gong adherents, who are flagged in centralized security databases, can be subjected to algorithmic flagging and location-based tracking without notice or recourse. “By 2008, Hongda Software’s Public Security Personnel Information Management Work System was being used to collect information on practitioners of the Falun Gong meditation and spiritual group, whose adherents have been subjected to a large-scale campaign of intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and extrajudicial killing since 1999. Police were able to record who introduced practitioners to the movement, where and with whom they practiced, and their level of spiritual dedication—criteria that resemble precursors to more recent police assessments of Uighurs as “safe,” “average,” and “unsafe.”
Evidence is growing that the popular social media network TikTok regularly censors material considered sensitive by the Chinese government. The video-sharing platform has emerged as one of the most downloaded and popular applications globally in 2019, especially among teenage users. According to internal documents obtained by the Guardian, employees of the company, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, are required to remove content related to such topics as the Tiananmen Square massacre and the persecuted Falun Gong spiritual group.
- China chapter, Freedom in the World 2017
“Falun Gong practitioners across China continue to be subject to widespread and severe human rights violations. Nevertheless, repression appears to have declined in some locales. President Xi has offered no plan to reverse the CCP’s policy toward Falun Gong. But recent arrests of officials associated with the campaign, together with Falun Gong adherents’ efforts to educate and discourage police from persecuting them, have had an impact.” English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese versions of the report are now available.
- China chapter, Freedom in the World 2010
“Security forces led by the 6-10 Office, an extralegal agency created in 1999, continued to target Falun Gong adherents nationwide for surveillance, imprisonment, torture, and forced conversion, sometimes leading to deaths in custody. In January 2009, Chongqing resident Jiang Xiqing died while held at a ‘reeducation through labor’ camp for practicing Falun Gong; lawyers seeking to investigate his death were detained and beaten.”[1]
- China chapter, Freedom in the World 2009
“According to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, repression of the Falun Gong spiritual group […] intensified following central government directives. The crackdown included increased propaganda efforts to vilify the group, restrictions on movement, arrests, and sentencing of adherents to ‘reeducation through labor’ camps and prisons, with terms of up to eight years.”[2]
Press Release ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Visit to China, November 2009
“Freedom House urges President Obama to raise the names of the following […] individuals who have been the subject of intense repression by the Chinese Communist Party and to urge their immediate release from custody:
[…] Xu Na: Xu Na, a poet and a painter, was detained in January 2008 with her husband, Beijing musician Yu Zhou, for possessing Falun Gong-related literature. Yu died in custody 11 days later under mysterious circumstances. Xu was sentenced in November 2008 to three years in prison after an unfair trial because of her identity as a Falun Gong believer. She had reportedly been tortured during a previous detention and is at risk of abuse.”[3]
Excerpt from Statement by Freedom House Asia Research Analyst Sarah Cook, Congressional-Executive Commission on China roundtable on spiritual movements, June 2010.
“Since 1999, Freedom House’s annual and other publications have recorded the ongoing rights abuses suffered by those who practice Falun Gong in China. Several aspects of the persecution stand out from a review of those findings. […]
- First, large scale detentions and widespread surveillance. […]
- Second, ongoing torture and deaths in custody. […]
- Third, the sentencing of practitioners to long prison terms following unfair trials or to “reeducation through labor” camps by bureaucratic fiat. […]
- Fourth, Falun Gong is a permanent taboo for Chinese media outlets and one of the most systematically censored topics on the internet.”[4]
Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania and former board member of Freedom House, writing in the Foreword for an earlier issue of the Falun Dafa Information Center’s Compassion magazine.
“[Falun Gong’s] continuing existence and growing strength are among the most prickly and difficult problems facing the authorities in Beijing today. This is not because of anything Falun Gong practitioners themselves have done. Rather, it is because of what Beijing has tried to do to them—and failed.
[…] Far from being ‘marginal’ as many commentators seem to imagine, the Falun Gong and other ‘dissident’ groups in China are in fact as central to that country’s future as the Soviet dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s were to the future of Russia.”[5]
Notes:
[1] Freedom House, “China,” Freedom in the World 2010; http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=363&year=2010&country=7801
[2] Freedom House, “China,” Freedom in the World 2009; http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=22&year=2009&country=7586
[3] Freedom House, “Support Chinese Human Rights Activists, Freedom House Tells Obama on Eve of Visit,” November 13, 2009; http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=70&release=1096
[4] Sarah Cook, “Congressional-Executive Commission on China Roundtable: China’s Policies Toward Spiritual Movements,” June 18, 2010; http://www.cecc.gov/pages/roundtables/2010/20100618/cookTestimony.pdf?PHPSESSID=5df33ec8a63bfadd3a54264e7697530a
[5] Author Waldron, “The Falun Gong Factor,” Compassion, June 28, 2007; /article/504/
