‘China’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners is an attack on religious freedom and human rights,’ Sen. Ted Cruz said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has criticized the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its ongoing human rights abuses, particularly forced organ harvesting, against Falun Gong practitioners.
“China’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners is an attack on religious freedom and human rights. It’s long past time to dismantle the CCP’s state-sponsored organ harvesting industry,” Cruz, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote on social media platform X on May 13.
Cruz was responding to an X post by the nonprofit Falun Dafa Information Center, which shared that millions of people in more than 110 countries had celebrated World Falun Dafa Day this week, which is observed annually on May 13.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that encourages practitioners to abide by its core principles: truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It was first introduced to the public in 1992 and grew rapidly in popularity, with official estimates indicating that by 1999, it had attracted at least 70 million people in China.
The CCP deemed Falun Gong’s widespread appeal as a threat to its rule and launched a brutal crackdown in July 1999—a campaign of persecution and human rights abuses that continues to this day.
Many Falun Gong practitioners have died after suffering abuses while incarcerated, while others have been killed for their organs.
In 2019, the China Tribunal in London concluded that the Chinese regime had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a substantial scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the “principal source” of human organs.
“Amid the past 25 years of brutal persecution, there has never been an act of retaliatory violence by Falun Gong practitioners,” Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, said in a statement on May 13.
“What is it about Falun Gong that endeared itself so quickly to so many, and gave them the inner strength to peacefully withstand the full force and terror of the Chinese regime? The answer lies in its core tenets and how the teachings offer people a way to genuinely live by them.”
By Frank Fang
