Lawmakers Stop Insured Organ Harvesting, Addressing the Cult Label – Falun Gong Bulletin Ep 06

Welcome to Falun Dafa Information Center's show, Falun Gong Bulletin, where we cover news from China and offer our insight and analysis on why it matters to us, even here in the West. I'm Ben Maloney, Digital Outreach Director for Falun Dafa Information Center. And I'm Cynthia Sun, Researcher for Falun Dafa Information Center. In today's show, we'll cover an important new bill in the Texas House and Senate that will block organ tourism from Texas patients in countries like China, who are engaged in forced organ harvesting. And we'll also share updates from an urgent family rescue case involving the mother of two U.S. citizens. Lastly, we'll talk about forced labor surrounding the leading Chinese sportswear brand sold internationally and worn by Chinese Olympians. And we'll wrap up today's show with an important deep dive that covers perhaps the biggest lie that the Chinese Communist Party propaganda has pushed to the West, the idea that Falun Gong is a cult. So let's start today with the news items. The first news item is about Texas lawmakers who are looking to crack down on forced organ harvesting with two new bills in the House and the Senate. On March 29th, a proposal by Texas lawmakers aims to prevent insurance policies from funding transplants that practice involuntary organ harvesting from nations, namely China. Senator Lois Kolkhorst filed Senate Bill 1040 to prohibit health insurance companies from covering organ transplant procedures. And in the House, Representative Tom Oliverson is carrying identical legislation. So what will these two bills do? If passed, the bill will first stop insurance companies from covering these procedures. Two, it'll also prevent and discourage physicians and medical professionals from participating in the advertisement of forced organ harvesting in China and other nations. So the Texas Medical Center is one of the largest in the world, which is why this is so significant. For years, physicians and patients have alleged that this is happening. And some patients even said they went to China and got an organ from an unknown source. Forced organ harvesting in China actually affects millions of Americans. Patients or organ tourists who pay for the transplants are affected. The insurance companies who pay for it are affected. The American medical schools and hospitals who train Chinese physicians. Pharmaceutical giants who provide Chinese military hospitals and transplant centers with immunosuppressants. Medical equipment suppliers who sell to the CCP. Medical journals that allow Chinese transplant surgeons to submit their papers on forced organ harvesting. The conferences that provide a platform for these unethical transplants to be presented. This bill in Texas would be a second stage of the effort to condemn forced organ harvesting and actually halt it in its tracks. On the federal level, the House of Representatives also just passed a bill, 1154, to stop forced organ harvesting on March 27th. This received overwhelming bipartisan support and the U.S. Senate is voting on this version of the same bill sometime this year, after which it will head to the president's desk. Yeah, the U.S. congressional bill passed 413-2, so it doesn't get much more overwhelming than that. Exactly. The second news item is about an urgent family rescue case of the mother of two U.S. citizens, Stephen and Lydia Wong. On March 29th, we were informed by these residents that their mother, Mrs. Ai Hualiu, was sentenced to four years in prison. According to the verdict obtained by Falun Dafa Information Center, their mother was sentenced because she distributed materials like flyers, CDs, paper bills, books, calendars, and other printed literature to neighbors in her community to tell them the truth about Falun Gong and the persecution. Freedom House estimates that 20 to 40 million Falun Gong practitioners within China are actively involved in civil disobedience like Ai Hualiu. A lower court in Changsha City ruled her guilty via Article 300. After pressuring her family's lawyer to not take her case and placing a court-appointed lawyer in her stead. Yeah, you should go into a little bit of detail on Article 300 because it's actually pretty interesting, so maybe you can give a little context. Yeah, so actually an expert on Chinese judicial law informed us Article 300 of the Chinese criminal constitution has never proven a single Falun Gong practitioner guilty. The application of Article 300 is for felonies such as homicides, assault, robberies, or other crimes, and an individual must first commit that crime to qualify as guilty under Article 300. Of course, this is a bigger issue because Falun Gong is not actually illegal to practice in China. That's kind of the big kind of reveal here is that it's not on the list of banned cults. There's no law against practicing Falun Gong, and so for these courts to do this kind of, you know, clown court sentencing of Falun Gong practitioners, they need something to put down on paper. So, it seems like that they're always using Article 300 as some charge even though even legally it doesn't make sense. It doesn't hold in court at all. It doesn't hold legally, and so not a single verdict out of the thousands of Falun Gong practitioners ruled guilty under Article 300 has ever explained why distributing flyers would count as a crime, as a felony, like homicide or assault or robbery. It should be noted that practitioners are assigned sentencing, that wide range of sentencing, in this case four years, could be seven, could be ten, could be any amount of years under Article 300. So, it's very arbitrary, and oftentimes we've heard that the amount of years they'll be sentenced is told to the family members before they even arrive in court. So, of course, this is all sham trial. As for Ai Hualiu's family, this recent sentencing follows 23 years of resilience and of persecution for this family, and the distinction that I want to make for this case is Ai Hualiu has tried to leave China before. In 2017, her son Stephen held a wedding, and before she could leave the country, police put her into custody, and it's assumed that it's in relation to her son's career in Shen Yun Performing Arts. Her son is a principal dancer in this performing arts troupe. Family is also worried that she might be harassed this time around for his participation in performing arts. In the United States. In the United States, and the reason that the CCP is so against Shen Yun is because it provides viewers around the a different lens and a different perspective of how China used to be. Before communism. Before communism. And it completely demolishes all of their propaganda about how the CCP has led to the greatness of the Chinese people, has led to the prosperity of the Chinese people. Yeah, of real traditional Chinese culture. And so, this is actually an example almost of like, almost kind of like a transnational repression case where you have somebody that's, you know, prominent in the United States as a principal dancer, that's doing something the Chinese Communist Party doesn't agree with. And they have family in China that, you know, are apparently suffering, or will have additional sentencing or will their, you know, their ability to travel will be withheld because of, you know, what their, you know, relatives are doing in the United States. Right now, there's a two month deadline for this case. It's very urgent because has appealed her sentence. And until June 1, the higher court will not have made their decision. And so she remains detained in Changsha number four detention center. So within the next two months, we need to make sure as much international attention comes to this case as possible. So that the Chinese government are pressured to let her go. Yeah. And so there's actually a petition, right? We'll link to it in the description below. That was started by the family members that you can sign that something easy that you can do to help. So we'll link to that. The third story today is about a sportswear company called leaning. This brand you might have known was worn by all of the Chinese athletes in the 2022 Beijing Olympics last year. Now it's alleged that these products were made from slave labor. And we'll explain. The leading Chinese sportswear brand leaning is sold worldwide via luxury retail giant Essence is alleged to source their clothing from prisoners of conscience. So there's this one Guo Yangda, a male Falun Gong practitioner revealed in early April, dozens of leaning signature down coats were made under forced labor. He said he was forced to work from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. making these coats. And it's also found that 800,000 puffer down jackets from this brand are made in Shenyang City, first prison in Liaoning province every single year. Practitioner Guo Yangda, a former chef, was unpaid and tortured in custody during the manufacturing process. As a prisoner of conscience, he was detained there for 10 years for possessing Falun Gong books. So from 2013 to 2023, he experienced making dozens and hundreds of products for leaning and other brands. And there's actually, there's a bigger point you were talking about earlier. In those conditions, in the prison conditions, it's not safe or sanitary, obviously. And there's a lot of tuberculosis actually happening within the prisons. And so there's a lot of allegations, not only that this is obviously needs to stop because it's using forced labor, which is illegal to import those internationally, especially selling them in the United States, but that actually those could be contaminated with diseases like tuberculosis. And then they're exporting those diseases even into the West to customers. So by buying it, which is really insane if you think about it. On another point, many of the made in China goods and products consumed by us internationally are made in prison. And they have a front where online and in public leaning will say that they're sourced from this one location, but actually the prison will send their products to this location, get it checked. And if it doesn't pass quality checks, then it'll be sent back to the prison to be reformed. It's like a bunch of, it's like a shell game. Exactly. And so they say that it's from this one place, but actually it's sourced from prison. And a lot of people can't find this because when they go to that location and that factory, it seems like the products are all there, but actually they're being made somewhere else. This is actually a larger trend, right? And there's a very famous film, Letter from Ma Sanzha, which follows Falun Gong practitioner Sun Yi. And he was detained in Ma Sanzha, which is an infamous forced labor camp in China. And he was making Kmart Halloween decorations. He actually put a note into the decorations, made its way to the U.S. and a woman found this note, became international headlines. You can look it up. We'll link to that film below. And so that became kind of like one of the first things that was like, wait, these decorations are being made. How come we haven't heard more of it? Are there consequences for his whistleblowing? And there is definitely a big conversation happening about forced labor, especially around like Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the cotton and stuff there. Sun Yi was one of the first people to bring this out to the West. But what happened to Sun Yi was he escaped and was in Bali and was kind of picked up by what many believe were agents of the CCP. And then a little bit later was in a hospital and died of kidney failure, but he had no kidney problems. So the belief, his family believes that it was actually a poisoning by the Chinese Communist Party, which wouldn't be anything abnormal or out of the ordinary for them to do. So basically he was assassinated for whistleblowing. But Sun Yi isn't the only example. Crystal Chen's another good example who you've talked to before. Yeah. So we have a lot of interviews from survivors of these camps and prisons who've undergone slave labor. And Crystal Chen actually has a clip with us on TV, on Fallen Info TV, where she said she was made to produce Christmas lights and different products for Disney and other big brands. And she was doing that under really extreme conditions. Both my arms are tied behind my back and they put me in the middle of that dark room and started to beat me, started to insult me for 14 hours straight without break, without bathroom. After that, my leg totally lost sensation for a long time. That painful experience just almost drive me crazy. So for today's deep dive, we wanted to address the biggest lie that the Chinese Communist Party propaganda has spread to the West, started in China, spread to the West, which is that Falun Gong is a cult. It's an important topic because for over two decades, the CCP has been disseminating propaganda against Falun Gong into the West. And its aim is to alienate Falun Gong, breed suspicions among Westerners, and undermine any kind of support that Falun Gong would gain among the media, the public, government officials. And they've actually been remarkably effective in ejecting this propaganda into the Western media narratives. And we'll talk about exactly their game plan and exactly how they've done it. But before we do that, maybe some broader context about this label and some of the persecution of Falun Gong in China. So just some background for people. Falun Gong was the fastest growing spiritual movement in Asian history, introduced in 1992 by Mr. Li Hongzhi, from 92 to 99, spread in China, growing from zero to almost 100 million practitioners. One out of every 13 people were practicing in China. So it was everywhere, every park, everywhere. The CCP originally was promoting it, invited Mr. Li Hongzhi to teach it in the French embassy to the West, was promoting it on TV, newspapers. Many of the officials were saying how it makes people healthier, saves health costs. Even high level Politburo. Very high level military officials, all practicing, all practicing Falun Gong. And then Jiang Zemin, who was kind of the dictator despot at the time of China, out of jealousy and out of the fact that there was more people practicing than were in the Chinese Communist Party, decided personally to start a persecution against Falun Gong. And so we should read from Freedom House here in a 2017 report. They wrote, the cult label only appeared in party discourse in October, 1999, months after the crackdown, as the propaganda apparatus seized on a manipulated English translation of the Chinese term Xie Jiao. This suggested the term was applied retroactively to justify a violent campaign that was provoking international and domestic criticism. Furthermore, in November, 1999, the Washington Post wrote, it was Jiang that ordered that Falun Gong be labeled as a cult and then demanded a law to be passed banning cults. Even today, actually, Falun Gong is not one of the banned cults within China, but that kind of doesn't matter in terms of its impact. There's also allegations that the CCP helped with a Western PR company that helped brand this cult term. The cult term in the West, obviously, is very, very powerful. It brings up ideas of David Koresh and Jonestown and all these kinds of crazy things that have happened and makes people in the West feel an aversion immediately to the group. First, we need to talk about the scholarly consensus on the people that really know about this topic. What have they said about Falun Gong as a religion, as a spiritual practice? The first thing to understand is that there's clear consensus around the board that Falun Gong is not a cult. Ian Johnson, who's an authority on this figure, he won the Pulitzer Prize in the Wall Street Journal for his reporting on Falun Gong. It's written for the New York Times. In his book Wild Grass, he wrote that the group Falun Gong didn't meet many common definitions of a cult. Its members marry outside the group, have outside friends, hold normal jobs, do not live isolated from society, do not believe the world's end is imminent, and do not give significant amounts of money to the organization. Most importantly, suicide is not accepted, nor is physical violence. Falun Gong is, at heart, an apolitical, inward-oriented discipline, one aimed at cleansing oneself spiritually and improving oneself. Clearly, Falun Gong doesn't force anyone, doesn't ask for money, doesn't isolate, doesn't do any of the things that you would associate with the common definitions of any cult. Moreover, practicing Falun Gong does not involve any worship, and learning Falun Gong is completely free. All books and videos are free online on the internet, and soliciting donations is actually prohibited within the Falun Gong community. There's no binding membership, and everyone's free to go or leave as they please. And I think that's important because even in the teachings, it talks about how you shouldn't force anyone to practice. This is completely voluntary, which is, again, the opposite of any cult. It's trying to control members or do kind of shady things, so none of that is happening. And also, the idea of the cult label means that what they're trying to do is get people to feel like Falun Gong is this little, small, isolated group of thousands of people that are doing some weird stuff in China. Not at all. Falun Gong is practiced by tens and tens of millions of people all around the world in over 100 countries, from Togo, Africa, to New York City, to Paris, Spain, Italy, like everywhere in Europe, Korea, Japan, everywhere. And not even just Asians, because the books themselves are translated into dozens of languages, like Khmer. We have dozens of Indian languages and dialects. Russian. So this is available for anybody. Anyone to learn all over the world. For more evidence, David Ownby, who's a scholar in Chinese religions, wrote a book, Falun Gong and the Future of China. And in it, he wrote, the entire issue of the supposed cultic nature of Falun Gong was a red herring from the very beginning, cleverly exploited by the Chinese state to blunt the appeal of Falun Gong and the effectiveness of the group's activities outside China. When Falun Gong kind of diaspora was escaping China, raising awareness in the West, it was becoming effective. Again, a lot of early articles. Ian Johnson's won the Pulitzer Prize. So the Chinese Communist Party had to do something, both inside and outside of China, to kind of turn the tide against Falun Gong. It was reactive. Very reactive. And just some more evidence here. The US Congress has passed five bipartisan resolutions in support of Falun Gong. Most recently on forced organ harvesting, voted 413 to 2, which is all about the forced organs harvesting of Falun Gong. One of them, House Resolution 605, reads, Chinese authorities have devoted extensive time and resources over the past decade worldwide to distributing false propaganda, claiming that Falun Gong is a suicidal and militant evil cult, rather than a spiritual movement, which draws upon traditional Chinese concepts of meditation and exercise. It's very important because when you look at, even today, for instance, the House bill that just passed, 413 to 2, that went through the House, there was a Chinese official in the consulate that wrote an email to Chris Smith, who is the sponsor of the bills, saying, how could you pass something like this? And Falun Gong is an evil cult. So we know that the playbook of Beijing is to call Falun Gong a cult to justify their genocide of Falun Gong. And the fact that they've persecuted 100 million of their own citizens, torture, death, documented very widely. And so in 2001, the Washington Post actually explained that the CCP has a three-pronged strategy to crush Falun Gong. One critical tactic is the high-pressure propaganda against the group. And the Post article says, as Chinese society turned against Falun Gong, pressure on practitioners to abandon their beliefs increased, and it became easier for the government to use violence against those who did not. So this is justifying violence. The first step, whether it's the Nazis, whether it's Stalin, whoever it is, you need to start labeling these people and vilifying their beliefs and vilifying them in order to justify the violence against them. One of the things that this article is very important in noting is quoting a Chinese government official saying, pure violence doesn't work. Just studying doesn't work. And none of it will be working if the propaganda hadn't started to change the way the general public thinks. You need all three. That's what they figured out. And so the CCP has a playbook against its own citizens, all the way back from the Cultural Revolution, where it understands how to vilify a group and understands how to target and persecute that group. That is what they're very good at in an evil way. Amnesty International has also raised concerns that the official campaign of public vilification against Falun Gong and the official Chinese press has created a climate of hatred against Falun Gong practitioners in China, which may be encouraging acts of violence against them. This is how do you report your neighbor when you know they're going to get their organs harvested? Well, if they're in this evil cult, it becomes easier. I have a question. Yeah, please. So if all of this, there's overwhelming evidence that Falun Gong is not a cult, that none of the aspects of the spiritual practice qualifies as a cult. So why are reporters increasingly calling it dangerous and giving it these labels? Yeah, this is very important. So we can kind of, I guess, understand why the Chinese Communist Party is doing it and their propaganda, right? Because they're an evil regime, they're persecuting this group. But the important part is how has this made its way to the West? And what is Chinese Communist Party's playbook with Western journalists and Western outlets to disseminate this information? So if you look back at two decades early on, there was some good coverage of Falun Gong. But kind of over the years, some of the media, irresponsible reporters have started to shift a bit. And instead of calling it a spiritual practice or a religious belief, which is what it is, widely recognized everywhere as a protected religion, they're starting to kind of insinuate or label or suggest that Falun Gong is a cult or has dangerous beliefs. And so why do they do that? I think the first thing is to understand what is the CCP's playbook in the West. So in the 2017 Chinese Communist Party internal document, it outlines their strategy of mobilizing foreign journalists and international media to report on Falun Gong in a manner that more closely matches Beijing's own demonization. So I'll quote from that. By cultivating non-governmental forces, we can fight heterodox religions such as Falun Gong, thereby mobilizing influential and friendly people such as experts, scholars, journalists, and overseas Chinese community leaders to speak up. We should strive to have foreign media take a tone more fable to us on Falun Gong. Pause here for a second. So if they can get even people to doubt. Now, not all the so-called experts or journalists need to come out and say, this is an evil cult or go really on the spectrum of the CCP. Some have done that, but you don't need to do that. You just need to inject enough to get Westerners to kind of be like, what is going on here? What is this thing? Most people in the West don't know a Falun Gong practitioner. They might not know a lot about this issue because most of the people practicing were in China. They went to the West. So it's not like Judaism or Christianity or Muslims or these mainstream Catholicism, these mainstream religions where you know someone, if someone called it a cult, you'd say, that's crazy. You don't know what you're talking about. This is some of the kind of the groundwork that allows this to happen. So let's give a little bit of the playbook. So in recent years, some of the experts, so-called experts, let's start there. So for example, the Chinese regime paid an alleged cult expert who runs this cult institute or whatever nonprofit he started named Rick Ross. He's visited China multiple times on paid trips and he's helped the regime to legitimize its defamation and persecution against Falun Gong, lectured in China on this. And China's state-run media referred to him as an international friend. For anyone that's listening to this, if you did your research, you'd say that is not a credible source of information. He's not an independent expert. He's a Westerner that the CCP paid that clearly has this agenda. But an NPR local affiliate did a radio show recently, used him as like half the story to frame that like, oh, people say it's a cult and here's legitimization of that. Then they found a few people that are one person that was maybe practiced for a little, but was disgruntled in some way and had some understandings to kind of speak ill of Falun Gong, which I mean, you could find in any religion that has millions of members, right? So you could find someone that's disgruntled or has whatever kind of agenda. And then the third thing that they do is they go and they pick maybe small passages or things out of context and Falun Gong teachings. So Falun Gong has over a million words and 50 books. The main tenants are for people to become better people, cultivate truthfulness, compassion, tolerance. And there's obviously in any religious belief, there's a lot of beliefs within the context of that religion or that spirituality. So the Quran, the old Testament, the new Testament, the Tibetan book of the dead, I'm sure journalists could go through all of those and find something that they disagree with, or they want to take out of context to vilify or make people feel like this is a strange group. It'd be pretty easy to do that because religion takes context, takes understanding to do that. You'd be much more accurate to look at the behavior of the group, not at some out of context passage, right? So they frame all that. And then they're not interested in talking to and really understanding the beliefs because they have this agenda. Now, why do they have this agenda? Part of the reason is that many Western media companies or parent companies have significant business ties with China. So they're vulnerable to the influence of the CCP. They spend 10 billion annually in external propaganda and audiences around the world. So major publications take money from the CCP to insert like China Daily and all these English publications. So there's a business aspect there. Another though, is that it's a little bit more subtle is that a lot of these people have very secular worldviews. Their view is they're not religious and they have sort of like a view of religion that I don't think they particularly have a lot of compassion for religion. I don't think they believe anything to do with religion. And so for them, it's very easy to just kind of pick out things and sort of make fun or vilify a religious belief because they themselves don't have one. A lot of media today, not all, but some are really just about attention, grabbing attention. So they'll take something and try to make it really, really controversial because that can get clicks and views. So you see that in Australia, ABC did a very, they did a hit piece on Falun Gong for whatever reason, the same playbook. I think what's important is that why is this even able, why are they able to do this? If this was again, the Quran or the Torah or the New Testament, in a second that they tried to air that or put that out, people would say what they are. You're a bigot. You can't just label people as a cult and then that gets used. And these people are persecuted, protected religious minority, even though it's practiced by tens of millions, but there's no consequences to doing it against Falun Gong. Why? Because like we said, they are like a persecuted group and they don't have power, so to speak, in the West. There's not a Falun Gong practitioner living next door to everyone. It's not mainstream in the West. So part of the reason is that when people read cult or read these other things, people don't know any better. People in the West, they don't know a Falun Gong practitioner. They don't really know about the history of this, everything we've talked about. They don't know that it's not a cult. They don't know any of that. So you take these things out of context, that's all they read. It's literally propaganda. It's propaganda that works against Westerners. What we really need to be doing is understanding that all of it is false and that not only is it false, it's extremely harmful. The Chinese Communist Party takes these articles and they translate them into Chinese and they feed them to the Chinese people and say, look, the West even says that these people are evil. Because people in China don't know that Falun Gong is practiced freely in the world. They don't know that nobody thinks it's a cult. They don't know that governments support it and the UN supports it and these human rights organizations like Amnesty and Freedom House all support it. They don't know any of that because they live under the communist propaganda. This actually helps persecute people in China. I think the main point of covering this head on is to educate people that this is crazy. This is not a cult at all. Two, you should have the facts to stand up and speak for people that are being persecuted and are underrepresented that have peaceful and non-violent and non-dangerous and completely normal religious beliefs that are protected in the U.S. Just because journalists don't agree with religion doesn't make that religion bad. No one's asking you to become a member of Falun Gong or practice Falun Gong or practice Christianity or Judaism. No one's asking you to do that, but certainly, just because you don't agree or you're not religious or you have a secular worldview, that doesn't mean you can use those teachings to vilify a group of people. Thank you for the answer. I think it sounded like the CCP created a witch's brew somehow and put in a bit of misinformation, sprinkled in a little bit of money and influence and coercion. It seems like that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to make themselves good, and they're trying to make Falun Gong look evil. Yeah. All you have to do is move the needle a little. In China, they move it totally. We're going to support that group. I was going to stand up and say something. I was going to post something on social media. When somebody mentions China, I was going to mention Falun Gong. But, oh, I heard that thing about their cult or something. People are busy. They don't have time to go do a bunch of research. They read something, it enters, and maybe it has an influence. That's really the danger of all of this, is that people are being misinformed and fed propaganda even here in the West. That thought will linger, I think. The cult label will linger in their heads. To doubt. Why would they say it's a cult if it's just a religion? Sometimes it also makes Falun Gong seem like a very, very small issue as well. That's the other benefit that the Chinese Communist Party gets from this. Oh, it's just a very small group of people. It doesn't matter. Falun Gong, at its peak of 100 million, was larger than Tibetans, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs combined, times three. That combined group is about 30 million in Falun Gong, and its peak was at 70 to 100 million. Those are all important issues. I don't mean to discount that, but the point is that Falun Gong is a huge issue. It's the biggest issue in Chinese human rights. They're able to bury it under the rug by saying cult. People think, oh, it's probably just a small group of people affected when it's the largest persecution of Chinese citizens in its history. The persecution of Falun Gong is one of the largest, most horrific human rights violations. This cult label, this propaganda is used to try to get people against Falun Gong. The world should not subscribe to it to victimize a group. People should really learn the facts and do the research on your own and figure out that all of this is the lies of the CCP. That's a good suggestion to just read between the lines. Whenever you read anything about China, a lot of it is backed by CCP money. A lot of Chinese language newspapers, nearly all, are backed by CCP money. They're state-run institutions. Whenever you see media or whenever you see reports about China, just read between the lines and see, do they get anything from this? Are there any vested interests that I should be concerned about because you might be the misinformed? Absolutely. Good closing. Thank you for joining us today. We will see you next time.