On April 25, 1999, roughly 10,000 practitioners of a qigong-based spiritual movement called Falun Gong surrounded the Zhongnanhai compound in central Beijing — the walled seat of Chinese Communist Party leadership — and sat in silent meditation for twelve hours. They were protesting recent media criticism of their movement and the arrest of practitioners in Tianjin. The protest was peaceful. It was also the largest unauthorized demonstration in Beijing since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests a decade earlier. Chinese President Jiang Zemin, observing the gathering from inside the compound, reportedly reached a conclusion that would define the next twenty-five years of Chinese religious policy: a movement that could mobilize 10,000 people to a guarded government facility without the state’s intelligence services knowing about it in advance was a threat to CCP authority, regardless of whether its stated aims were political. Three months later, on July 20, 1999, the Chinese government banned Falun Gong, declared it an “evil cult,” and created an extra-constitutional body called the 6-10 Office — named after the date of its founding, June 10, 1999 — with a mandate to eradicate the movement. What followed has become one of the most sustained religious persecution campaigns of the 21st century, and one of the most politically consequential diaspora networks in the world.
What Falun Gong is
Falun Gong — also called Falun Dafa — was introduced to the Chinese public in May 1992 by Li Hongzhi, a former clerk at the Changchun Cereals and Oil Company who had spent the previous year studying qigong under various masters. The practice combines five meditation exercises with a moral framework built on the three principles of zhen (truthfulness), shan (compassion), and ren (forbearance). Its theological content draws on Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian elements, incorporating beliefs about cosmology, karma, spiritual cultivation, and — in Li’s later teachings — extraterrestrials, multiple dimensions, and racial cosmology that critics have called pseudoscientific and bigoted. During the Chinese qigong boom of the 1980s and early 1990s, when traditional Chinese health practices were being rebranded as scientific wellness techniques, Falun Gong grew faster than any of its competitors. By 1999, the Chinese government’s own estimate put adherents at 70 million — more than the membership of the Chinese Communist Party itself. Li’s own estimate was 100 million. Freedom House’s more recent estimates put the figure between 7 and 20 million. The discrepancy between those numbers is itself part of what the Chinese state found threatening.
Li moved to the United States in 1998, citing health reasons. Critics argued he was leaving before a crackdown he saw coming. He settled in Deerpark, New York, where Falun Gong’s global headquarters remain — a 400-acre compound called Dragon Springs that now houses schools, temples, and rehearsal space for the Shen Yun performing arts company. Li rarely speaks publicly. His lectures and writings, particularly the foundational text Zhuan Falun, are the basis for practice worldwide. His views on race, sexual orientation, interracial relationships, and modern medicine have drawn sustained criticism — Li has taught that mixed-race children are part of a plot by aliens to destroy humanity’s connection to higher spiritual realms, that homosexuality is an expression of demonic possession, and that medicine interferes with the karmic cleansing that illness provides. Practitioners argue these teachings are misinterpreted. Former practitioners interviewed by Western journalists have confirmed them as authentic.
The persecution
The state campaign that began in July 1999 has been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the State Department’s annual religious freedom reports, and multiple independent tribunals. The pattern is consistent across sources. Practitioners who refuse to renounce the practice are subject to detention in “legal education” facilities — the Chinese state’s euphemism for forced reeducation camps predating the Xinjiang camps by two decades. Torture techniques documented by detainees include sleep deprivation, forced feeding, electric shocks, stress positions, psychiatric abuse, and sexual violence. Practitioners who publicly identify themselves face job termination, school expulsion, and pressure on family members. Falun Gong sources have documented more than 4,000 named deaths in custody. Independent estimates suggest the actual number is substantially higher. The New York Times reported in 2009 that at least 2,000 practitioners had been killed in the persecution campaign by that point.
The most severe allegation — that China harvests organs from living Falun Gong detainees to supply its rapidly growing transplant industry — has been investigated by multiple independent parties. In 2006, former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas published the first comprehensive investigation of the allegations, concluding that large-scale organ harvesting from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners was ongoing. Their initial finding was that 41,500 organ transplants in China during 2000-2005 had no plausible source other than executed detainees. Journalist Ethan Gutmann subsequently estimated that 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners had been killed for their organs between 2000 and 2008. In 2019, the China Tribunal — an independent panel chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, the British prosecutor who had led the Slobodan Milošević war crimes case — concluded unanimously that forced organ harvesting had been occurring in China “on a significant scale” for at least twenty years and that “Falun Gong practitioners have been one — and probably the main — source of organ supply.” The U.S. Congress has repeatedly cited these findings in legislation, including the 2023 Falun Gong Protection Act. China denies the allegations. The gap between China’s stated transplant volume and the number of registered organ donors — 5,146 registered donors in 2017 against an industry performing tens of thousands of transplants annually — has never been publicly explained.
The media empire
What makes Falun Gong a Shadowcraft case study rather than a human rights case study is what the movement built in the United States after 1999. Falun Gong practitioners founded The Epoch Times in 2000 as a Chinese-language newspaper in New York. The outlet expanded into English and other languages over the next decade. It founded New Tang Dynasty Television in 2001, Sound of Hope Radio in 2003, and Shen Yun Performing Arts in 2006. Financial documents suggest the various organizations share executives, staff, and strategic direction, though the formal corporate structures are deliberately separate.
The strategic pivot that made the operation globally consequential happened in 2016. Before 2016, The Epoch Times had been a relatively marginal publication covering primarily Chinese political issues and producing critical coverage of the CCP. In 2016, according to an NBC News investigation published in 2019, the outlet began running aggressively pro-Trump coverage, spent $1.5 million on Facebook advertising in six months during 2019-2020 (at which point Facebook banned it from running political ads), and rapidly expanded its English-language reach through social media distribution, email newsletters, and video content on platforms including YouTube and later Rumble. The outlet’s revenue reportedly doubled during the Trump administration. Its content during the COVID-19 pandemic included pieces promoting ivermectin, questioning vaccine safety, and suggesting the virus had been deliberately released from a Chinese laboratory. Its coverage of the 2020 election featured prominent coverage of fraud allegations, QAnon-adjacent material, and content from sources mainstream conservative media had avoided. Li Hongzhi reportedly stated that Donald Trump had been “sent by heaven to destroy the Chinese Communist Party” — a theological framing that explained why a movement that had been politically marginal in American politics became one of the largest funders of pro-Trump digital content.
Shen Yun, the performing arts company, operates in parallel. The company tours internationally with productions that combine classical Chinese dance with anti-CCP political content — scenes depicting persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, organ harvesting, and the party’s suppression of traditional Chinese culture. The advertising is ubiquitous in major American cities. The ticket revenue is substantial — Shen Yun’s parent organization reported more than $200 million in revenue across its performing arts operations in recent years. Dragon Springs, the New York compound, houses dancers and rehearsal facilities. Former performers have described the training as involving 10-hour rehearsal days starting at age 13, with limited contact with family members, mandatory religious instruction, and restrictions on outside relationships. The organization denies the characterization.
Chinese counter-operations
The CCP has pursued Falun Gong practitioners outside China for twenty-five years. In December 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice charged John Chen and Lin Feng with operating as unregistered agents of the Chinese government in a plot to bribe an IRS official to manipulate the whistleblower program against Shen Yun’s tax-exempt status. Both were convicted in 2024. In November 2024, Ping Li, a 59-year-old Florida resident, was sentenced to four years in prison for acting as an unregistered PRC agent who had provided China’s Ministry of State Security with information about a Florida resident affiliated with Falun Gong. Multiple similar cases — involving surveillance of practitioners, pressure on family members still in China, and attempts to suppress Shen Yun performances through diplomatic complaints to host venues — have been documented across Europe, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Xi Jinping reportedly directed party officials in 2022 to intensify international efforts against the movement. The resources China continues to invest in suppressing Falun Gong abroad are themselves evidence of how seriously the party treats the movement as a threat.
Why it’s in Shadowcraft
Falun Gong sits at the intersection of three Shadowcraft categories. As a persecuted religious minority, it belongs with the documented cases of state repression — the CCP’s treatment of the movement constitutes one of the longest-running and best-documented religious persecutions of the post-Cold War era, and the organ harvesting allegations, validated by an independent tribunal led by one of Britain’s most experienced international war crimes prosecutors, describe a category of human rights abuse with few modern parallels. As a religious movement with cult-like characteristics, it raises the same analytical questions as the Gülen Movement — where the line runs between a legitimate civil society organization and a hierarchical group exercising coercive control over members. And as the operator of a major pro-Trump media empire, it represents something genuinely unusual: a foreign-origin spiritual movement that has become one of the most influential funders of American right-wing digital content, with theological reasons for its political positioning that most American consumers of that content have never encountered.
The analytical question the course raises is not whether Falun Gong’s persecution in China is real — the evidence is overwhelming that it is — but what it means when a religious movement subjected to severe persecution builds, in response, a global media and cultural infrastructure that operates at the intersection of human rights advocacy, religious proselytization, and partisan political influence. The Stasi KoKo apparatus turned sanctions evasion into a state revenue stream. The Western Goals Foundation turned nonprofit status into an intelligence-file preservation vehicle. Falun Gong’s media operations turned the infrastructure of religious persecution into a cross-spectrum media empire that reaches tens of millions of Americans and Europeans weekly, with very few of them knowing what they’re actually consuming.
We cover Falun Gong alongside the Gülen Movement, China Poly Group, United Front Work Department, and 20 other case studies of covert institutional power across our Shadowcraft course — where a meditation practice that mobilized 10,000 people to Zhongnanhai in 1999 became, twenty-five years later, one of the largest operators of right-wing media in the United States, and the persecution that made it possible is still ongoing.
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