Swoop Films on the History of the Persecution of Falun Gong (Falun Dafa)

In the late 90s, Chinese government surveys said up to 70 million people were practicing Falun Gong daily. Health bills were decreasing, crime rates were falling, and morality was rising. So why were these people targeted for elimination and organ harvesting? Mona Ye was one of the millions meditating in parks every day. There was a park across the street from my house. Because the first exercise site couldn't hold so many people anymore, it divided into the second, the third, the fourth. So at every street corner and in every park, you could see people practicing Falun Gong. It was from different kind in society. It was many policemen and military. It was just fundamental part of society at that time and everybody knew somebody who practiced. Falun Gong is a traditional practice of self-cultivation. A practice of slow-moving exercises, meditation, and studying of the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, and trying to adopt those into your life. While morning exercises had always been popular in China, Falun Gong brought more than just health benefits. For thousands of years, the Chinese people have believed in Buddhas and Daos and becoming an immortal. Falun Gong really dared to talk about these things and immediately people took it to heart. Oh, the true ancient good things of China have come back. However, after 50 years of political campaigns to destroy traditional beliefs, any revival of spirituality was seen as a threat to communist rule. Since I was 11, I experienced all of the Chinese Communist Party's campaigns. Group after group of good people were targeted. There was no faith, no truth. Falun Gong stood in stark contrast with communist ideology, so it would be very hard for it to be tolerated by the CCP. With more practitioners than members in the Communist Party, the party chief, Jiang Zemin, saw it as a threat to his power and overruled the government's support of Falun Gong. Jiang Zemin issued an order to set up a special office called the 610 Office in charge of the nationwide campaign of persecution. Known as China's Gestapo, the 610 Agency was above the law and could use any and all means necessary to achieve its sole mission, to eliminate Falun Gong. The nationwide campaign began July 1999. People were disappearing. I couldn't find my friends. You know, one day there were 30 of us in the park, and the next day they're gone. And in the middle of the park, tacked on the tree, was a government declaration that this has been outlawed. First time I heard about the persecution, I didn't believe it at first. And when I heard my mom was in the labor camp, I was very worried. And later on, my sister was put in the labor camp, my younger brother was put into jail. Basically, my family was just torn apart. When this family is torn apart, I feel inside, torn apart. Many practitioners, Pan Qi went to Beijing to appeal. She was arrested and imprisoned in the infamous Masanjia labor camp. I often hear the sounds of electric batons. And frequently, in the middle of the night, I hear heart-wrenching screams from practitioners. The goal was to make practitioners sign a statement to guarantee they would stop practicing, that they would renounce their faith. She took the electric baton. When she was beating me, it felt like it was directly piercing through my heart. It was like my entire body started convulsing, like it was going to fall apart. I personally have a friend whose mother was submersed in a cage. They put her in a little cage, they put her in the sewer water, in complete darkness for days. These are the different methods they're using on Falun Gong practitioners around the country, trying to transform them. Wu Zhiming was teaching practitioners how to break through Internet censorship in Shanghai when he was arrested. Police did not know what I did, but they knew that I practiced Falun Gong, so they arrested me first. Then they investigated my background and arrested everyone who had been in touch with me. After two years of interrogation, he was sentenced to four years at a Shanghai prison for teaching others to visit mingwei.org, which reports daily on the persecution. Every morning after I woke up, I was taken to a room and forced to sit about one meter away from the TV set and forced to watch videos slandering Falun Gong. This kind of brainwashing did not work, so they changed to another approach, which was intensive slave labor. Outside the labor camps, propaganda campaigns against Falun Gong were running 24-7 on all media. Like, you'd turn on the TV, and literally the only way to describe it is propaganda marathons. You'd have mass book burnings organized by the party, steamrollers going over Falun Gong cassette tapes and CDs. Essentially, it's a process of demonizing and dehumanizing, you know, incessant propaganda. In January 2001, Chinese Central Television broadcast this news that people were setting themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square, and they claimed that these were Falun Gong practitioners. This propaganda story used a mother and her 12-year-old daughter. It was a major turning point in the CCP's campaign. They turned Tiananmen Square into a movie set, and they used movie techniques to try to create something, but it was staged. Because state-run media broadcasted constantly for a year, people around China, their views on Falun Gong started to change. Initially, the Communist Party was very public about its campaign against Falun Gong. But what happened after about, I would say, starting from 2002, is that you started to see really almost more of a media blackout. Falun Gong simply became a taboo topic. With millions of practitioners in detention, one of the worst crimes in history began taking place in hospitals throughout the country, as organ transplants suddenly began to skyrocket. We've been asked to investigate allegations that there has been harvesting of organs of Falun Gong in China. Our bottom line conclusion, after considering everything as best we could, was that the allegations are true. I began conducting comprehensive interviews with medical professionals, Chinese law enforcement personnel, and over 50 refugees from the Lao Gai system. But I estimate that 65,000 Falun Gong were murdered for their organs from 2000 to 2008. Essentially what organ harvesting means is they're taking Falun Gong practitioners, literally like cattle, holding them in prison camps, testing their blood and other vital organs. And when someone comes into the country that needs a heart, a liver, a kidney, they find a match. They take the Falun Gong practitioner, extract their organs, of course killing them in the process. It is literally life and death for many of the upper echelon of the Party members that run China. To not let the Falun Gong story be told. Falun Gong has been exemplary in its response. It has never dealt with violence in a violent way. It's always responded with forbearance, with love, with truth, with patience, and ultimately that's going to prevail.