CCP’s Repression Campaign Reaches America, Falun Gong Spokesperson Testifies Before Congress

WASHINGTON—The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) sweeping repression targeting one faith group is creating a challenge to America and allowing Beijing to expand its toolbox to persecute other communities, a Falun Gong spokesperson testified to Congress.

Erping Zhang described a wide spectrum of Beijing-linked tactics targeting the spiritual community, playing out in America—assault, anonymous violent threats, spying, disinformation, frivolous lawsuits.

Emerging from that is a playbook that “can be pointed at any group the CCP decides is a problem,” Zhang told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Sept. 22.

Falun Gong practitioners have faced these threats for simply practicing their faith in America, Zhang said.

Falun Gong is a meditation practice featuring three core tenets: truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. In the 1990s, 70 million to 100 million people took it up, crediting the practice for uplifting their physical and mental well-being. Fearful of its popularity, the regime in 1999 marked it for eradication.

Organizations monitoring the persecution have verified thousands of deaths, which they say represent a drop in the ocean. Between March and April, close to 800 practitioners reported experiencing harassment, arrest, or house raids, according to Minghui.org, a clearinghouse for such information. The oldest of them is 94.

Since 1999, Falun Gong practitioners have been “detained by the millions, tortured, sexually abused, forced into producing goods that reached American shelves, subjected to forced organ harvesting,” Zhang said. “That apparatus was later turned on to the Uyghurs.”

Several Chinese officials hit with U.S. sanctions for repressing Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region have a history of persecuting Falun Gong, an Epoch Times review of their records found.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who chaired the congressional hearing, noted that the repression doesn’t end at the prison gate.

To see “spiritual disciplines like Falun Gong suffer so horribly in China underscores that we have to do more, not less,” he said.

Be it Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, or Uyghurs, Smith said, “they are the best citizens imaginable.”

“Very often, they have a code of conduct that’s written on their hearts,” he told The Epoch Times. “Why wouldn’t you want more of that? I don’t get it.”

Beyond China, the Falun Gong community has become a top target for the regime’s “unrestricted war” against religious freedom, Zhang wrote in his prepared testimony.

The center also counted dozens of cases in which individuals impersonated Falun Gong practitioners to make fake threats.

Zhang said Falun Gong has long served as a target of Beijing’s repression tactics.

“The Party has tried all means to bankrupt us, to silence us, and to delegitimize us,” Zhang said in his testimony. “What it has done to Falun Gong is one of the most comprehensive demonstrations available of how the Party behaves when it believes it is threatened.”