Falun Gong practitioners are among those targeted by Chinese authorities for forced organ harvesting.
NAPLES, Fla.—The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) ongoing campaign of forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience illustrates how communist regimes continue to commit human rights abuses into the 21st century.
Cynthia Sun’s “Beijing’s Playbook for Religious Persecution Inside and Outside China,” presented at Ave Maria Law School’s “Victims of Communism” conference on Feb. 18, revealed how the Chinese regime defies its own constitution by arresting religious practitioners, jailing and torturing them and submitting some to forced organ harvesting.
“Practitioners are systematically arrested, detained, sentenced to lengthy prison terms of up to 20-plus years for their faith, and this is across every province in China,” said Sun, a senior researcher at the Falun Dafa Information Center and a fellow at the First Freedom Foundation.
Steven Mosher, author of “The Devil and Communist China,” discussed in his presentation how communism arose in China before leading to the deaths of tens of millions.
Forced Organ Harvesting
Falun Gong practitioners are among those targeted by the CCP for forced organ harvesting.
Falun Gong—also known as Falun Dafa—is a spiritual meditation practice based on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Falun Gong was introduced to the public in the early 1990s and grew in popularity, with an estimated 100 million people practicing at the time, Sun said.
Feeling threatened by Falun Gong’s popularity, the CCP and its then-leader Jiang Zemin launched a systematic elimination campaign in July 1999. Since then, millions have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Sun described six main methods of social and religious persecution in China: mass detentions and harsh sentences; digital surveillance and high-tech repression; deaths; torture and forced labor; forced organ harvesting; and transnational repression and malign influence.
“Last year, at least 2,864 [Falun Gong] practitioners were documented to have been harassed by police, either in their own homes or in public,” Sun said.
The 2,828 who were arbitrarily detained were arrested unconstitutionally, Sun noted, as China’s constitution technically allows for religious practice, which the CCP defies.
