EU-CHINA: Europeans cannot afford to ignore the plight of the Falun Gong
By Aaron Rhodes and Marco Respinti for Human Rights Without Frontiers
HRWF (23.09.2024) – Practitioners of Falun Gong gathered in Brussels on the morning of 20 September 2024. They came from all over Europe to hold a street parade in the European District. In these days, while the new European Commission chaired by Ursula von der Leyen is taking office, the eyes of the world are fixed on the Belgian capital, which is also the headquarters of many European institutions, and there is no better occasion for make an important case be heard.
After the parade, Falun Gong practitioners rallied at “Place Jean Rey.” Local politicians and human rights activists on behalf of several NGOs took the floor to address the staggering situation of Falun Gong in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where the Communist regime violently persecutes them, committing one of the most egregious violations of human rights and religious freedom in the world today.
Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) is a large Chinese new religious movement, established by Li Hongzhi in 1992. It teaches both a variety of exercises of qi gong (the traditional Chinese gym) and is spirituality rooted in the so-called “Three Teachings”, with some New Age distinctions and connotations. The “Three Teachings” refers to a common source of Chinese spirituality and religion that includes Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.
Originally, Falun Gong was tolerated and even praised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a movement offering good health for the good citizen, but things changed rapidly. Despite the regome’s attempt to water it down in ideological propaganda, the spiritual nature of the moment could be not be suppressed, and the rapid growth of its membership became worrisome an alternative source of authority. Falun Gong was thus banned in 1999, and included in the list of the “xie jiao,” an ancient expression meaning “heterodox teachings” and used by the government to condemn rival groups. The CCP resurrected the term in recent years, rebranded such movements as “evil cults” after a Western, non-academic and largely functional fashion, and used to justify persecution. No authoritative definition of the “xie jiao” exists, as no agreed-upon definition of “cult” exists; the CCP uses the expression to arbitrarily label all those it wants to target. To be categorized as “xie jiao” in the PRC, groups need only to be listed by the state among the directory of the “xie jiao,” which Beijing periodically revises.
The practitioners of Falun Gong gathered in Brussels to sensitize European institutions, and through them the entire world, on the tragedy that has befallen their movement at the hands of the CCP. Indeed, Falun Gong has been decimated, and is a victim of the heinous practice of organ harvesting, whereby doctors and institutions remove organs of “political prisoners” or “prisoners of conscience”, often when they are still alive, and sell them on a lucrative black market that goes far beyond China’s borders.
Readers should keep in mind that the PRC sets world records in the death sentences it carries out yearly. While countries that Amnesty International lists as the worst in this respect kill between 300 and 500 per year, the number executions in the PRC is estimated by observers to be around 8,000. The actual number is a state secret.
Speakers at the Brussels event included Annick Ponthier, a Belgian MP; Hans Noot, spokesperson for Brussels-based NGO Human Right Without Frontiers; Géraldine Monti, spokesperson for Nurses Against Forced Organ Harvesting; and Manyan NG, board member of the International Society for Human Rights and an expert on the PRC.
An important direct testimony was brought by Ding Lebin, a Falun Gong practitioner now residing in Berlin, Germany, for security reason, about his parents, Ma Ruimei (born October 7, 1967) and her husband Ding Yuande (born October 19, 1963). Early in the morning of May 12, 2023, more than ten law enforcement agents in disguise stormed the couple’s tea plantation in Yanjiazhuang Village, Wu Lian County, Rizhao city, Shandong province, led by Xia Jingde, the CCP local secretary. They were first handcuffed and then abducted. Lebin was speaking with his mother by telephone at the time — a dramatic 33-second call followed by silence.
The police confiscated many Falun Gong books and pieces of spiritual literature. Of course, owning those ‘weapons’ was deemed incriminating and resulted in the couple’s detention in a unknown place. Lebin immediately made the detention public and, thanks to the efforts of a few NGOs, her mother was released on bail on May 24, 2023. But his father has remained in custody, since June 13, 2023, in the Rizhao City Detention Center and from March 20, 2024, in the Shandong Province Prison. His mother is now out of prison but constantly visited by intimidating policemen.
European institutions, and more importantly European citizens, owe it to the Chinese people, and to themselves, to be aware of China’s intolerable oppression of Falun Gong, and other minority groups.
It is a window through which we can see the true character of the CCP regime. We should not avert our eyes.
Aaron Rhodes is president of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe. He as executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights 1993-2007.
Marco Respinti is director-in-charge of “Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights.”
Hans Noot, the spokesperson of Human Rights Without Frontiers
Further reading about FORB in the EU and in China on HRWF website