Falun Gong is a large new religious movement in China. It was founded by Li Hongzhi (李洪志) in 1992, and teaches physical exercises and martial arts as well as meditation and breathing techniques. Initially the Chinese Communist Party encouraged such groups, but turned against them in the late 1990s and banned it in 1999. Falun Gong members have faced severe persecution since then.
“EU-CHINA: Europeans cannot afford to ignore the plight of the Falun Gong,” by Aaron Rhodes and Marco Respinti, Human Rights Without Frontiers, September 23, 2024:
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….
