The Falun Dafa Information Center is the latest human rights group urging U.S. President Donald Trump to raise the issue of human rights in China as he is headed into a bilateral meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping in South Korea on Oct. 30.
The center released a statement asking the president to bring up the issue of detained Falun Gong practitioners with family in the United States, and that the CCP end its campaign of transnational repression of believers on American soil.
Among the unknown number of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience in China are several with family in the United States who have been petitioning for their release.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline centered around the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance.
It was introduced in the early 1990s and saw tremendous popularity by the end of the decade. Official counts estimate 70 million to 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong in China by the time the CCP launched a violent persecution against it in 1999. The persecution is ongoing, and there continue to be documented cases of practitioners being subjected to illegal detention, torture, forced labor, and even live organ harvesting for their faith.
Today, Falun Gong is practiced in about 100 countries, and practitioners who have family members in China sometimes face pressure from the CCP threatening harm to family members if they participate in overseas advocacy.
Americans at large were alerted to the CCP’s practice of transnational repression in recent years with the discovery of a Chinese police station operating illegally in New York. However, the closure of that single station was far from the end of such operations.
According to Freedom House, which publishes an annual report on transnational repression by authoritarian states, China is one of the worst offenders, and the most prolific. Insiders told The Epoch Times that in 2022, Xi ordered various agencies to step up their persecution of Falun Gong overseas, focusing on media manipulation to sway public opinion in the regime’s favor and co-opting U.S. government agencies to target Falun Gong.
Despite the pressure, Falun Gong practitioners around the world have continued to raise awareness of the CCP’s persecution.
In the United States, some with family members detained by the CCP for their faith have been calling for their release. The Falun Dafa Information Center has published several such cases, but notes that it is a non-comprehensive list.
Karen Kang, a U.S. citizen living in California, has a sister and nephew in China who have been detained since 2022. They were arrested for distributing information about the CCP’s religious persecution and sentenced in secret, according to Kang. In 2024, Kang learned from China’s 109 Hospital that her nephew, Hou Lijun, was in “critical condition.” Kang has another sister who was imprisoned in 2009 and died in prison in 2020.
Siblings Steven Wang and Shanshan Wang, U.S. citizens living in New York, have been petitioning for the release of their mother, Aihua Liu, who was sentenced to four years in prison for practicing Falun Gong. According to the siblings, a lawyer the family hired was pressured not to take the case, and she has been denied family visitation since July 2022. Her condition is unknown. The siblings wrote in an online petition that their parents had been detained for their faith continuously since 2011, and their mother 11 times. Their father died in 2009.
Chen Jingyu, a New York resident, is petitioning for the release of her sister Chen Jinghui, who was arrested in March 2024 and denied visitation. Her sister, an accountant, had twice been arrested previously for distributing information about Falun Gong.
Ding Yue, a California resident, is petitioning for the release of her mother, Meng Zhaohong, who was arrested for talking to people about Falun Gong in May 2023. Meng’s family was told by her lawyer that Meng and another practitioner she was arrested with, Yuan Xinhua, had been beaten by police at the Anziling Police Station when they refused to respond in an interrogation session. They were subsequently hospitalized for two months, during which the lawyer visited, according to the family account shared with Falun Dafa Information Center. The lawyer told the family that Meng’s neck and ear were still damaged after two months in the hospital, and she had a blocked artery.
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