Sarah Cook, senior research analyst for East Asia, Freedom House, at a panel discussion on Forbidden Feeds: Government Controls on Social Media in China at the Freedom House in Washington on March 19, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
NEW YORK—Decades of campaigns aimed at suppressing faith have not served the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and instead have turned a large group of Chinese civilians into grassroots activists, according to a human rights researcher.
“Up to today, what stands out in a lot of ways is the futility of the CCP’s efforts to repress religious believers,” Sarah Cook, a longtime China analyst, said in a webinar on April 25, the 25th anniversary of the peaceful Zhongnanhai demonstration.
One case in point is Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, a meditation discipline centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. On April 25, 1999, around 10,000 Falun Gong adherents stood near Beijing’s leadership headquarters, Zhongnanhai, petitioning for the right to exercise their belief without fear.
The authorities, while granting their request at the time, began a large-scale persecution of Falun Gong just three months later, subjecting adherents to slave labor, imprisonment, and forced organ harvesting.
Jiang Zemin, the late regime leader who initiated the campaign, certainly didn’t expect that 25 years later, “Falun Gong would have survived,” and even less so that there would be others helping—human rights lawyers, neighbors, or even local police officers—to protect Falun Gong practitioners, said Ms. Cook.
“The campaign against Falun Gong in many ways is a failure of the party’s repressive apparatus,” she said.
As the repression intensified, she said, the tens of millions of Falun Gong adherents “just wanting to live their lives” became petitioners and later “grassroots information activists,” whether they were “young tech-savvy people” or “grandparents ... [needing to] learn to use a computer in order to jump the firewall and print something out to hand to a neighbor.”
Spreading leaflets, gathering signatures from neighbors, talking to people face to face, and writing to prison officials, members of the persecuted group constantly adapted to the changing persecution machinery as they sought to make people aware of the regime’s crimes. By 2009, around 200,000 underground leaflet-printing sites had appeared in China, according to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that tracks the persecution campaign.
Letters addressed to Grace Chen's parents from her friends in the United States. Ms. Chen's parents have been detained in China since 2020 for practicing Falun Gong. (Courtesy of Grace Chen)
As the CCP built and strengthened the “Great Firewall,” the adherents created software to bypass it and shared the technology with the Chinese population to help them access free information. They got burner phones to protect their identities and moved around to make location tracking more difficult. When the regime staged a self-immolation incident at Tiananmen Square in 2001 to vilify Falun Gong, practitioners disseminated DVDs pointing out discrepancies in the footage of the event, one by one.
‘Spiritual Resilience’
On China Dissent Monitor, a Freedom House project, Falun Gong practitioners represent the largest contingent of those speaking out, but there are also incidents involving Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians belonging to underground church groups, Ms. Cook noted.
It’s an indicator of the “spiritual resilience,” she said.
“These efforts to change people’s actual beliefs—even with all this brutality, even with all the billions of dollars, the CCP hasn’t been able to do that,” said Ms. Cook.
A Falun Dafa practitioner distributes materials raising awareness, during World Falun Dafa Day celebrations in New York City's Times Square on May 13, 2015. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
The ground-up efforts have had an impact. In 2017, while doing a research report about Falun Gong, Ms. Cook learned about a case involving an adherent named Pang You, a Beijing native. In preparing to defend Mr. Pang, his lawyer met with a policeman who showed him a stack of letters, all from friends of his client. The officer said the police station’s phones had been constantly ringing. He demanded that the lawyer tell Mr. Pang’s friends to stop calling for his release.
Ms. Cook noted that when Mr. Pang was released from extralegal detention in June 2015, more than 1,000 civilians in Beijing had signed a petition asking for his release.
“This Party is too evil; it doesn’t let civilians live,” one man said as he signed the petition, according to the report.
Another Beijing villager, surnamed Wei, told The Epoch Times in 2015 that “all those who practice Falun Gong are good people.”
In trying to suppress dissidents, the Chinese regime has been expanding its campaign overseas. Suspected Chinese agents have broken into adherents’ homes and harassed them with threatening phone calls. Police have arrested their family members in China.
After attending a show at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Larry Liu, deputy director of Falun Dafa Information Center, returned to find his parked car broken into and the laptop in the trunk stolen.
“It was a pretty safe neighborhood,” he said at the webinar.
He added that his car was a “very old Toyota Corolla, one of the cheapest cars.” What made his car special was a lotus flower hanging on the rear mirror with the words “truthfulness, compassion, tolerance.”
‘Peaceful Warriors’
Such tactics, also known as transnational repression, have received growing backlash internationally as countries look to counter Beijing’s influence.
In the United States, lawmakers have introduced bills to criminalize such acts and held hearings spotlighting violence from Chinese actors.
Falun Gong practitioners hold up a banner calling on the Chinese regime to end its state-sanctioned practice of forced organ harvesting, in San Francisco, Calif., on Nov. 14, 2023. (Zhou Rong/The Epoch Times)
Texas, Utah, and Idaho recently passed laws to counter the CCP’s forced organ harvesting and to ensure that residents are not unknowingly complicit in the regime’s abuses.
Congress has made efforts to address the issue of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting.
A landmark bill passed by the House in March 2023 would impose sanctions on individuals involved in forced organ harvesting. It is still awaiting a Senate vote.
During a recent appearance at Harvard University, Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng was repeatedly interrupted while making his opening remarks as protesters representing Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong denounced the regime’s repression of their communities.
Meanwhile, a civil disobedience movement has grown in the Chinese community.
In a rally recently commemorating the 1999 Zhongnanhai appeal, organizers noted that nearly 430 million Chinese people have chosen to renounce their ties with CCP-affiliated organizations they once joined.
“They’re actually fighting against any ideology that they were born into,” Cecilia Crowley, a rally speaker who works in investment, told The Epoch Times. She called them “peaceful warriors.”
Eva Fu is a New York-based writer for The Epoch Times focusing on U.S. politics, U.S.-China relations, religious freedom, and human rights. Contact Eva at [email protected]
