Falun Gong Adherents Brave Rain in Brooklyn to Denounce Chinese Communist Party’s Abuses

NEW YORK CITY, N.Y.—Heavy rain and cold winds did not deter hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners from parading down Brooklyn’s Chinatown on Oct. 2 to call for an end to the Chinese Communist Party’s 23-year-long persecution of the spiritual group.Participants, drenched by the rain despite many of them wearing yellow plastic rain jackets, held banners and signs urging people to distance themselves from the myriad abuses committed by the communist regime, and supporting the more than 400 million who have severed their ties with the Party. The wind and rain, however, were nothing compared to what adherents have experienced in China, said organizer Yi Rong, a representative of the Falun Dafa Association in New York. “In mainland China, there’s no way that practitioners can hold a parade [like this],” Yi told The Epoch Times. “If you do the Falun Gong exercises, you will be arrested and sentenced, and even lose your life.” Falun Gong practitioners attend a parade in Brooklyn, New York City, on Oct. 2, 2022, to call an end to the Chinese regime’s persecution. (Zhang Jingchu/The Epoch Times). An untold number of Falun Gong adherents have died from torture or forced organ harvesting while detained in prisons, labor camps, detention centers, and brainwashing centers across the country during the CCP’s more-than-two-decades-long campaign to suppress the faith group. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, includes meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. It found itself the target of Beijing’s repression after the group surged in popularity, with an estimated 70 million to 100 million practicing by 1999—with the communist party deeming such numbers and their values to be a threat to the regime’s control over society. A Broken Family One parade participant, He Aishan, who recently arrived in the United States from the central Chinese province of Hubei, relayed her own experiences of persecution. “It might be very hard for someone from a free society to imagine this: that in China from 1999, a good person who has done nothing wrong and simply believes in Falun Gong and ‘truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance’ will suffer vicious persecution from the CCP,” she told The Epoch Times. He started practicing Falun Gong while in high school before the persecution, a decision, she said, that helped with her studies and health. But after 1999, everything changed. Her mother, also a practitioner, was sent to labor camp twice, and detained and sent to brainwashing facilities multiple times, He said. Falun Gong practitioners attend a parade in Brooklyn, New York City, on Oct. 2, 2022, to call an end to the Chinese regime’s persecution. (Zhang Jingchu/The Epoch Times). When He was in college, the university referred her to detention at a labor camp where she was forced to under brainwashing classes where she was psychologically tormented. Ahead of a major party meeting in 2012, authorities stepped up their persecution of Falun Gong, seeking to round up known adherents. He’s family was targeted again. She was followed by police and her phone was tapped. The police ransacked her home and arrested her mother again. He avoided this fate as she was not at home at the time. But when her father returned home and found the apartment turned upside down, he collapsed, suffered a stroke and later died. “In my family, we have been left ruined and broken from the CCP’s persecution,” she said. Members of the Falun Gong marching band at a parade in Brooklyn, New York City, on Oct. 2, 2022, to call an end to the Chinese regime’s persecution. (Zhang Jingchu/The Epoch Times). Understanding the Persecution Passerby Liu Aling was impressed seeing the Falun Gong practitioners brave the torrential conditions. Having grown up in mainland China herself, she said it was difficult for people there to get uncensored information about the spiritual practice hated by the regime. “In China, the websites only give you good news. They censor all the bad news,” Liu told The Epoch Times. On the internet, television, and print, the only information about Falun Gong is CCP propaganda that vilifies the practice, aiming to stir up mass hatred towards the group. Any information about the persecution is heavily censored on the CCP-controlled internet. So Liu didn’t believe what was happening in China. It wasn’t until she came to the United States, where she was able to access uncensored news sources and websites, that she slowly came to understand that the persecution of Falun Gong was real. “It’s too horrific,” Liu said, describing the regime’s rights abuses targeting adherents. Falun Gong practitioners attend a parade in Brooklyn, New York City, on Oct. 2, 2022, to call for an end to the Chinese regime’s persecution. (Zhang Jingchu/The Epoch Times) She also quit the party not long after coming to New York, noting that she—like virtually all other children—had join