About Us
Our Mission
The Center’s mission is to tell the Falun Gong story, giving voice to tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners in China who daily face arbitrary detention, wrongful imprisonment, torture, or death at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
Our Strategic Priorities are…
Our History
In 1999, when the Chinese Communist Party began beating down doors and hauling innocent meditators away to prison, even Beijing reporters were caught off-guard, let-alone media and policy-makers around the world. Into this void poured communist propaganda against Falun Gong. As millions were targeted in China for their faith, very few had the facts to tell the world even the basics of who, what, and why of the persecution against Falun Gong.
People were being tortured and dying, and virtually no one knew who they were. Or worse, they were being fed lies by the communist regime in China.
In the fall of 1999, a few volunteers gathered in an upper West-side apartment of New York City and formed the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Over the next few years, we coordinated with Western journalists—using encrypted software, pay phones and faxes—to help tell the Falun Gong story, while working to keep those in China safe.
In time, a growing network of brave citizen journalists developed across China, coordinated by Minghui.org. From this network, the Center began receiving daily first-hand accounts of wrongful imprisonment, torture, and a wide array of other abuses from across China. We work to get these reports into the hands of human rights workers, media, and policy makers.
This work continues today as tens of millions of people across China remain under constant threat from the on-going persecution campaign to “eradicate” Falun Gong, which experts now call a genocide.
Our Sources
Our documented cases, statistics, and analysis are built upon reports from a variety of high-quality sources. Here’s a closer look at five of the most common sources…
Hundreds of people who have escaped from China bring with them not only heart-wrenching tales of abuse, but often scars and sometimes even photos, videos, or police paperwork that corroborate their tales.
Dozens who were rescued by international efforts from Chinese prisons are also among those whose personal accounts help fill in the story.
Lastly, those who died from persecution, yet their stories were captured on camera and smuggled out of China, are also a source of first-hand account evidence.
Read our collection of personal accounts of persecution.
Over the past two decades, Minghui.org editors have received tens of thousands of first-hand reports from across China — more than any other organization in the world. This vast and resourceful network of heroic citizen journalists spans every province in China, and provides day-to-day reports of what’s happening on the ground, often at great risk to themselves.
Read more about Minghui.org.
Over the past two decades, a wide range of international human rights groups and international bodies such as the United Nations have independently documented and recounted the systematic rights abuses – including torture and deaths in custody – suffered by those who practice Falun Gong in China.
The following are a few examples…
Freedom House, 2017: “Falun Gong practitioners across China are subject to widespread surveillance, arbitrary detention, imprisonment, and torture, and they are at a high risk of extrajudicial execution. Freedom House independently verified 933 cases of Falun Gong adherents sentenced to prison terms of up to 12 years between January 1, 2013, and June 1, 2016, often for exercising their right to freedom of expression in addition to freedom of religion.” (see Freedom House reports on Falun Gong)
Amnesty International Annual Report, 2018: “Falun Gong practitioners continued to be subjected to persecution, arbitrary detention, unfair trials and torture and other ill-treatment.” (see Amnesty International reports on Falun Gong)
Review our complete collection of independent documentation.
When the Chinese Communist Party launched the persecution campaign against Falun Gong 20 years ago, the world was, understandably, caught off-guard. After all, most in the west had never heard of Falun Gong. While it took some time to sort through the facts amidst the Chinese regime’s web of propaganda, many in western media soon gained their footing.
The Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize exposing the violent campaign against Falun Gong practitioners. The Washington Post and others followed with their own ground-breaking coverage, exposing Beijing’s top-down orders to use torture and propaganda to “break” Falun Gong.
Ethan Gutmann, a US investigative writer, human rights defender, China watcher, and an widely published author is best known for his two books: Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal and The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem. He has testified before the U.S. Congress, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the European Parliament, and the United Nations.
Unfortunately, in more recent years, the CCP’s political and economic influence has often resulted in a lack of coverage of Falun Gong in western media, or perhaps worse, driving false narratives about Falun Gong — originally crafted by the CCP — to be headlined in western media.
Review our complete collection of investigative journalism
Ironically, many cases of abuse and trends can be cross-checked with local Chinese government websites who sometimes unwittingly confirm details of the campaign against Falun Gong. This is not overly common, but does occasionally provide further evidence of abuses against Falun Gong practitioners.
