NEW YORK CITY—Dozens of Falun Gong practitioners gathered at the United Nations Plaza on Sept. 23, to urge world leaders attending the General Assembly to stand against the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution of the faith group.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance. It was introduced to the public in China in the early 1990s, with 70 million to 100 million people practicing in China by the end of the decade, according to official estimates.
In 1999, then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin launched the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners using the weight of the entire state apparatus. He directed state agencies and personnel to physically destroy the believers, ruin them financially, and destroy their reputations, in the belief that the regime would crush the practice within six months. Since then, untold numbers of practitioners have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death by forced organ harvesting….