Memorializing 27 Years of Communist Persecution of the Falun Gong

This week 27 years ago, the Communist Party of China began the widespread and systematic persecution of the Falun Gong movement.

What the Falun Gong has experienced both in China and increasingly in the United States and elsewhere abroad—where the long arm of the Chinese Communist Party repression follows them—underscores that the greatest victims of the Chinese Communist Party are the Chinese people themselves.

And it is very important at the outset that we make a distinction between the Chinese Communist Party—the CCP—and the Chinese people, as that is a distinction that the Party seeks to blur.

For the history of the CCP is written in the blood of the Chinese people.

Even before 1949—that tragic year the Communists emerged victorious over the Nationalists and founded the People’s Republic—the Party was drenched in blood.

As early as 1930, during the Jiangxi Soviet period, we saw the Party under Mao Zedong turn against its own members, killing tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers and Communist Party members accused of being “anti-Bolsheviks,” but who were in reality people Mao suspected of being rivals or potential rivals.

This set the template of subsequent purging and bloodletting, including the Yan’an Rectification Movement of the early 1940s, when American propagandists such as Edgar Snow were presenting the CCP as a rural reform movement, and Mao as a reformer.

But it was post-1949 that the full monstrosity of the CCP came to the fore on a national level. From the early 100 Flowers, land “reform” and anti-Rightist campaigns, through the Great Leap Forward and the Party-induced famine that accompanied it, through the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party has shown itself not to be “great, glorious and correct,” wěidà, guāngróng, zhèngquè, as it claims, but rather, the greatest enemy of the Chinese people.

And what about the so-called “Reform Era,” when the Chinese Communist Party opened itself to global investment and became the factory of the world, that period of engagement which accelerated in the 1990s?

That period of the 1990s was bookended by the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre—a crushing of a nascent democracy movement that happened not only in Beijing, but throughout China—and the 1999 crackdown on and persecution of the Falun Gong which we commemorate this week, and which continues to the present day.

Today, we also see the horrific practice of forced organ harvesting, of which Falun Gong practitioners were among the first victims and the first to warn us, continue on an expanded, almost industrial basis, principally targeting the Uyghurs in a genocidal campaign.

And we see the long arm of CCP repression extend to these shores.

The constant harassment of Shen Yun performances at venues around the world, the physical attacks on peaceful protestors that occurred at the November 2023 APEC Summit in San Francisco that the Washington Post has documented were coordinated by the PRC consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the burning down of a statue of Xi Jinping which called attention to his role in the unleashing of the COVID virus throughout the world at Liberty Sculpture Park in Yermo, California, are all examples of transnational repression, as well as egregious violations of American sovereignty.

And we have seen just this month, with the enactment of the so-called “Ethnic Unity Law” in the PRC, an effort to strengthen the long-arm instruments of transnational repression. For article 63 of that law explicitly states that “organizations and individuals outside the territory of the People’s Republic of China” are subject to it.

That law also underscores the totalitarian nature of the CCP and the regime. For it also reaches into the family, and requires parents to teach children “love the Chinese Communist Party” and guard against ideas that are deemed harmful and contrary to unity by the Party.

It is this concern over what ideas and beliefs are in the heads and hearts of people that distinguishes the People’s Republic of China under the CCP as a “totalitarian” regime, and not simply an “authoritarian” one.

For an authoritarian regime cracks down on those who directly oppose the government, but leaves a degree of independent civic space for religious freedom. A classic example of an authoritarian regime was Taiwan during the martial law era. It was during that period of authoritarian repression that the Democratic Progressive Party, then called the tangwai movement and which today governs Taiwan, was born and nurtured in the Presbyterian Church. That was a civic space where people were allowed to gather, to worship and to think freely.

And why is this distinction in nomenclature important?

Because the linguistic change to describe the CCP regime from “totalitarian” to “authoritarian” that took place in the 1990s coincided with that period of engagement, when the West built up and subsidized the rise of the PRC and concomitantly deindustrialized, deluding itself into thinking that by engaging with China and granting most favored trade treatment, the People’s Republic would matriculate into a democracy, just as Korea, the Philippines, Spain, Chile and most relevantly, Taiwan, had done in the 1980s and 1990s.

But the nature of the regime had not changed. Totalitarian regimes can modulate their level of repression, as happened under Lenin in the Soviet Union with the New Economic Policy. With China’s totalitarian regime, the face that they showed the West in the so-called “Reform Era” was a façade. It was a stratagem of “deceiving Heaven while crossing the ocean,” Mántiān guò hǎi.

And that is also why it is important to remember what happened this week 27 years ago. Because the systematic suppression of the Falun Gong and the horrific torture, including organ harvesting, that the regime inflicted upon practitioners who refused to renounce their faith shows that the notion of a true “Reform Era” was a fantasy.

Totalitarian regimes seek to control the mind, and what you believe in your heart. That is why the CCP could not, and cannot, tolerate the Falun Gong, with its independent beliefs and adherence to a moral law above Party and State.

And that is why your witness here today, practicing your religious freedom, is so important. For while I do not share your religious beliefs, I do respect that you held onto them despite torture and persecution, and that you refused to conform to the dictates of an evil ideology.

Thank you.

These remarks were given by Piero A. Tozzi on July 23, 2026, at The Lincoln Memorial.