Professor Calls on Americans to ‘Stand With Falun Gong’ Amid CCP’s Persecution

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Jul 1, 2025 - 10:04 Updated: Jul 1, 2025 - 09:50
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Professor Calls on Americans to ‘Stand With Falun Gong’ Amid CCP’s Persecution

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The CCP has weaponized the media and legal systems of the United States to target Falun Gong and Shen Yun, La Salle’s Mark Thomas told a Philadelphia rally.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is persecuting Falun Gong practitioners in the United States, a university professor warned at a rally in Philadelphia on June 28.

Mark Thomas, an assistant professor of international relations and political science at La Salle University, told rallygoers in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood that the CCP has escalated its transnational suppression of the spiritual practice.

Thomas pointed out that “nothing is more fundamental to a person’s existence than the freedom of expression.”

“The Communist Party holds the monopoly on truth,” he said. “It thinks on behalf of the people and forbids rights that democratic societies consider so precious.”

Falun Gong is an ancient Chinese mind-body practice introduced to the public in China in 1992. It teaches its adherents to follow the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. By 1999, it had attracted at least 70 million people across the country, according to official estimates at the time. Fearing that Falun Gong’s popularity posed a threat to the CCP’s rule, the regime launched a brutal campaign to eradicate the practice in July 1999.

Since then, millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

“But it is more than the system of beliefs that threaten the CCP,” Thomas noted. “It is that Falun Dafa has gained a large following as a community of individuals willing to think for themselves outside the confines of Communist Party ideology—this makes Falun Dafa an existential threat to the CCP.”

The Chinese regime’s transnational repression targeting Falun Gong practitioners outside China has increased in recent years. It has weaponized the media, legal systems, and other institutions in the United States to target Falun Gong and its affiliated entities, including the New York-based classical Chinese dance company Shen Yun Performing Arts, he said.

“We need to speak out against this repression!” said Thomas, who has seen Shen Yun several times.

“We need to stand with Falun Gong and Shen Yun the same way people of faith stood with Martin Luther King on the bridge in Selma when they demanded equal rights for African Americans.”

Shen Yun, founded in 2006 by Falun Gong practitioners, showcases dance and music performances under the motto “China before communism.” The performances include stories about human rights abuses suffered by practitioners for adhering to their faith in China. Some of the performers and their family members have experienced the persecution firsthand.
Over the past year, the regime’s targeting of Shen Yun has escalated significantly, with dozens of bomb and death threats aimed at intimidating theaters that host Shen Yun performances, as well as the company’s training facilities in upstate New York.
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Following a secret directive from top leadership in Beijing, Chinese regime agents in the United States have attempted to bribe the IRS to open a probe against Shen Yun. They also went to Orange County, New York, where Shen Yun is based, to surveil local Falun Gong practitioners, according to a court filing.
Articles targeting Shen Yun have appeared in Western media and have been boosted on social media platform X by thousands of accounts with suspected links to Beijing.

“The CCP’s persecution of Falun Dafa abolishes freedom and extinguishes the fire that burns naturally in each of our hearts to live our lives justly and honestly,” Thomas said.

“We need to stand with Falun Gong because tyranny over one group is tyranny over all.”

Eva Fu and Frank Fang contributed to this report.

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