Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade could not confirm whether the country’s foreign minister spoke specifically about the brutal persecution of the Falun Gong faith group with Beijing’s top diplomatic envoy during his visit last week.
Beijing’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi completed a whirlwind tour of Canberra and Sydney last week, meeting the Australian prime minister, foreign minister, the federal opposition, and the premier of New South Wales.
Mr. Wang was greeted by human rights rallies trying to raise awareness about systemic human rights abuses against Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Falun Gong practitioners in China.
The foreign minister’s visit comes as the latest step in the ongoing “normalising” of Australia-China ties, which have been fraught since 2018 when the Turnbull Liberal government pushed for a ban on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from entering Australia’s 5G network.
Relations soured further in 2020, when the Morrison Liberal government called for a global investigation into the origins of COVID-19. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) responded with a trade war on Australian exports, slapping sanctions on a wide range of goods.
However, since a change of government in May 2022, the Labor government has endeavoured to normalise ties with Beijing.
This resulted in Beijing dropping its tariffs on Australian barley exports, which in turn, encouraged the federal government to drop its action at the World Trade Organization.
Further, the CCP also released Australian-Chinese journalist Cheng Lei after she was detained in 2020 amid its trade war with Australia. In late 2023, the Labor government also announced it would not be cancelling the 99-year lease held by Chinese company Landbridge over the Port of Darwin.
On March 20, 2024, Mr. Wang met with Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong in Canberra, after refusing to engage with Liberal government ministers for years.
Senator Wong spoke to the press after the meeting saying the two had discussed issues such as trade, tensions in the South China Sea, the suspended death sentence handed to Australian writer Yang Hengjun, and the impending visit of Beijing Premier Li Qiang.
“I told the [Chinese] foreign minister Australians were shocked at the sentence imposed [on Mr. Yang] and I made clear to him the Australian government will continue to advocate on Dr Yang’s behalf,” Foreign Minister Wong told reporters.
“I also raised our concerns about other Australian death penalty cases, as you know, Australia opposes the death penalty in all circumstances for all peoples.”
Ms. Wong also discussed human rights in “Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong.”
The Epoch Times sent inquiries to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) after to confirm if Falun Gong was raised directly with Mr. Wang.
DFAT responded with the following:
“The Australian government is deeply concerned that religious and other minorities in China, including Falun Gong practitioners, continue to be targeted on the basis of their beliefs, and have raised these concerns with China,” said a spokesperson.
“The foreign minister expressed the Australian government’s concerns about freedom of expression, religion, and belief in China with Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during the Australia-China Foreign and Strategic Dialogue on 20 March 2024.”
“The Australian government will continue to speak in defence of human rights and raise with China our concerns about its severe restrictions on freedom of religion and belief.”
The Epoch Times reached out again to confirm whether Falun Gong was raised directly with the CCP foreign minister during the Strategic Dialogue, to which DFAT said it had no further comment to add.
In response, John Deller, a member of Australia’s Falun Dafa Association, said his organisation had received similar responses in the past.
“The CCP are not concerned if you raise concerns in private, they only care if the government raises them publicly,” he told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Deller said the CCP was afraid of being publicly condemned for its actions like forced organ harvesting of people of faith, or other human rights abuses.
Falun Gong is a peaceful meditation practice and is arguably now the largest persecuted faith group in China by number of adherents—70 to 100 million by official estimates in the mid-1990s.
Believing the popularity of the spiritual practice to threaten his power and the atheistic ideology of the CCP, then-Party leader Jiang Zemin on July 20, 1999, ordered the practice to be eradicated.
Since then, millions of Chinese people have been targeted by the regime for their faith; thousands have, or face, arbitrary detention, forced re-education, torture, or have been murdered for their vital organs.
At the same time, Beijing-linked media outlets produced hundreds of hours of propaganda to defame the practice, while CCP officials pressured, and encouraged, overseas institutions and governments to tow the party line.
Practitioners overseas in Western countries also continue to face foreign interference and pressure.
