Transnational Repression in the Digital Age: Briefing on Falun Gong at IRF Summit 2025

So again, I want to thank you all for coming here. This important topic in particular, I want to thank Freedom House. It's done some amazing work on transnational oppression, not the least of which was the important report out in 2021 that really helped frame the topic, allowed us to frame it for others, and really was a great piece of work. I want to start off by showing a couple emails that we received recently. The title of this is called, You Will Meet God, and it proceeds to threaten me, my life, my family members, and other people who have worked at the non-profit Falun Gong Information Center. It's a little Del Buero shotgun. This is one of about 60 emails of mostly bomb threats, threats of violence, threats to rape female employees that has been received by Falun Gong-affiliated organizations, companies around the world over the last year, and it's a tiny piece of a much larger transnational oppression trend that we're seeing. Just real quick on background, for those who don't know, Falun Gong is a Buddhist-based spiritual practice. It was widely popular in the 1990s in China, 70 to 100 million people, according to the Chinese government. It got so popular that in the turn of the century, the Chinese regime ordered it to be eradicated, and so for the last 25 years, millions have been detained in one form or another. Torture is rampant, death by torture, death by forced labor and harvesting is rampant. The Falun Gong community outside of China is extensive, a diaspora. Falun Gong is practiced in over 100 countries around the world, and many companies and organizations and human rights groups have emerged out of the Falun Gong community, started by Falun Gong practitioners, not the least of which is, I'll just give you an example, the Xinyin Performing Arts Company. You've probably all seen the posters, but that really showcases traditional Chinese culture before communism tried to destroy it, and it also showcases the tyranny of the CCP, not a show that Beijing is a fan of, and that is one of the core targets in their transnational repression against Falun Gong practitioners. The transnational repression we've seen started right at the beginning. The day Beijing announced the ban against Falun Gong, we had apartments broken into in New York City, people had to leave the city because of death threats, diplomatic pressure at the very highest levels, Jiang Zemin, the head of the CCP at that time, handed propaganda material to then-President Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice got similar treatment a few years later, and it went on from there. Governments, congresspeople, the amount of diplomatic pressure has been immense, and that is a standard practice of transnational repression. However, it has taken a very dark turn and a very sophisticated turn over the last several years, and one of the things I wanted to point out is this latest campaign, again originating at the highest levels of the Chinese government, the Ministry of State Security, Public Security, to eliminate Falun Gong globally. Their words, not mine. And what they've really done is they've learned to weaponize our own institutions against us, and that is baiting YouTubers and social media people to attack Falun Gong, Shen Yun in particular, having those narratives pitched to major newspapers, including the New York Times. In fact, the person who claims responsibility for pitching the story of Shen Yun to the New York Times to have them go on and attack the company is one of these YouTubers who has actually been arrested for illegal weapons possession. He's been monitored by the federal authorities, but he's one of these people that the Ministry of Public Security has very much been backed. And it doesn't just stop at the media. We know that Chinese nationals, ethnic Chinese people, have been arrested, put in jail for trying to bribe U.S. government agencies to open up an investigation on Shen Yun. And other agencies have received similar type of pressure from Beijing proxies. Lawfare. We have DOJ indictments that explicitly talk about Chinese nationals using the legal system to file frivolous lawsuits against Shen Yun, Falun Gong, and the other communities. And so I think that's one of the things, looking at transnational oppression in the internet-connected world that we now have, I think that's one of the main takeaways, is that they have found a way to weaponize our own institutions against ourselves. And I think that's something we need to take a look at when it comes to transnational oppression. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.