27 Years of Persecution: Falun Gong Marks a Grim Anniversary as Beijing's Reach Follows Dissidents to US Streets

Candlelight Vigil, Falun Dafa - Minghui.org

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A Somber Anniversary by the Hudson

On the evening of July 20, a few hundred Falun Gong practitioners sat along Hudson River Park in Manhattan, directly across from the Chinese Consulate. They lit candles to remember the thousands of fellow believers who have died in China since the Communist Party outlawed the practice in July 1999.

The gathering followed a livelier event the day before, when close to a thousand practitioners marched through Chinatown in a parade with drummers, dragon dancers, and banners calling for an end to the persecution.

Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, combines slow-moving meditation exercises with a moral code built around truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It was practiced by tens of millions of people in China before the government moved to eliminate it.

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Voices From the Vigil

For many at the rally, the anniversary was personal, not abstract. Ceceilia Crowley, a Wall Street investment banker who joined the vigil, said she found it disturbing that a 27th anniversary of the crackdown was even necessary.

Also present was Liu Siyang, an engineer who fled China in April after a routine background check at his state-owned bank uncovered his years of practicing Falun Gong. He described his arrival in the United States simply: he finally felt safe.

A passerby named Brian Wang, originally from China himself, said he understood why practitioners were demonstrating outside the consulate — in his words, they were asking for the right to protect themselves.

Seventeen Chinese nationals used the occasion to publicly announce they were quitting the Communist Party and its affiliated youth organizations, each receiving a certificate to mark the step. One of them, Hao Fangfang, said she had spent years quietly reading uncensored information online before deciding, out of conscience, to break with the Party.

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A Persecution That Has Not Stopped

The Chinese government's campaign against Falun Gong, ordered in 1999 by then-Party leader Jiang Zemin, remains active today. According to Minghui.org, the practitioner-run outlet that documents abuses directly from contacts inside China, at least several thousand adherents have died as a result of the campaign, and thousands more are detained, monitored, or barred from traveling each year.

Independent monitoring groups have also documented a pattern of the Chinese state pressuring practitioners' families, employers, and even overseas communities — part of what Washington-based researchers call transnational repression: a foreign government's attempt to reach beyond its borders to silence critics.

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When Repression Follows Activists Abroad

That pattern extends well beyond Falun Gong. Just five days before the New York vigil, longtime Chinese pro-democracy organizer Jie Lijian was attacked near the Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing. According to Jie and his organization, the China Democracy Party International Alliance, three men followed him, struck him repeatedly with a club-like object, and left him bleeding before he managed to board a bus and lose consciousness. He woke up more than two days later in intensive care.

No assailants have been publicly identified, and the incident has not yet been independently confirmed by police or news organizations beyond Jie's own account and that of his group, which in a July 17 statement accused the Chinese Communist Party of hiring the attackers. Jie has asked US authorities to investigate.

Jie has described years of prior incidents that he links to his activism: being struck by a car in 2021, stabbed in the jaw in 2022, and knocked unconscious in a separate assault in 2023. He has also said trackers were twice found attached to his vehicle, and that relatives in China somehow learned of one incident before he had told anyone himself.

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The Legal Battle Behind the Threats

Jie's activism intersects with an active federal case that has already produced a conviction. In September 2025, Yuanjun Tang — a Flushing, Queens resident and one-time Tiananmen Square dissident — pleaded guilty to a federal charge of conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government.

According to the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, Tang secretly reported to China's Ministry of State Security for years, identifying and photographing pro-democracy activists at their own protests and passing details to Chinese intelligence officers. He is scheduled to be sentenced in early 2026.

Separately, Jie is a plaintiff in a Los Angeles civil lawsuit that now names the People's Republic of China and its Los Angeles consulate as defendants, stemming from a January incident in which a consulate security guard pepper-sprayed protesters. The FBI defines transnational repression broadly, listing surveillance, threats against family members, and physical assault among the tactics used by foreign governments against diaspora communities in the US.

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What Comes Next

For Falun Gong practitioners, the 27th anniversary is unlikely to be the last one marked in exile. Minghui.org's recent reporting counted hundreds of new arrests and harassment cases inside China in just the first months of 2026.

For dissidents like Jie, the risk calculus is different but connected: physical safety in the United States is no longer something they can take for granted. Both cases point to the same underlying story — that leaving China does not necessarily mean leaving its reach behind.

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Sources

1. Minghui.org — "Manhattan, New York: Candlelight Vigil Held to End the CCP's Brutality," https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2025/7/24/229012p.html
2. Vision Times — "Thousands Rally in Manhattan to Condemn 27 Years of Falun Gong Persecution," https://www.visiontimes.com/2026/07/20/thousands-rally-in-manhattan-to-condemn-27-years-of-falun-gong-persecution.html
3. Vision Times — "See You in Chinatown on July 19!," https://www.visiontimes.com/2026/07/19/see-you-in-chinatown-on-july-19-new-york-falun-gong-holds-grand-parade-marking-the-27th-anniversary-of-the-anti-persecution-campaign.html
4. U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York (DOJ) — "Queens Man Pleads Guilty To Participating In A Conspiracy To Act As An Illegal Agent Of The Chinese Government In The United States," https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/queens-man-pleads-guilty-participating-conspiracy-act-illegal-agent-chinese-government
5. PBS NewsHour — "China scrutinized for secret police watching and intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad," https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/china-scrutinized-for-secret-police-watching-and-intimidating-chinese-dissidents-abroad

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