Falun Gong practitioners march in a parade in Brooklyn, N.Y., highlighting the Chinese regime’s persecution of their faith on Feb. 26, 2023. (Larry Dye/The Epoch Times)
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NEW YORK—Hundreds of Falun Gong adherents paraded down the streets of Brooklyn’s Chinatown area to highlight communist China’s abuses, including its actions targeting residents on U.S. soil.
A week earlier, David Fang, a Falun Gong practitioner, was attacked by a pro-Beijing man at an information booth in New York’s Flushing neighborhood. The assault left minor injuries on Fang’s hand, neck, and knee.
Fang, who was trying to garner support to end the Chinese regime’s persecution targeting his belief, was one of the latest Falun Gong adherents in the United States who has faced abuse from suspected Chinese Communist Party agents.
Several adherents recently spoke to The Epoch Times about their experiences of receiving threats and verbal abuse.
On two occasions, men holding red banners slandering the practice spat on the face of adherents peacefully protesting in front of the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan, they said.
“It’s something that in my mind could only take place in mainland China, but it’s now happening in America,” 49-year-old Li Yongxian, a parade participant who used to run a construction supply business in China’s southeastern province of Fujian, told The Epoch Times.
The Brooklyn event, which also featured dragon dancers, a Chinese waist drum troupe, and a large marching band, was held one day after members of the House Select Committee on China hosted a press conference in front of a former secret Chinese police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown, vowing to spotlight the Chinese regime’s transnational aggression toward its critics in the United States.
Memories of Persecution
Drawn by what she described as the practice’s spiritual and moral benefits, Li had taken up Falun Gong in China in 1996, practicing its gentle exercises and living by the discipline’s core tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. The persecution unleashed three years later would upend her life and those of millions of others.
Li’s husband, also a practitioner, was imprisoned for a total of about three years beginning in the early 2000s merely for persisting in his faith. During this time, Li was often denied a chance to visit him in detention and was forced by authorities to try to get her husband to renounce his belief.
Under the suppressive climate, “although I wasn’t detained, my heart and mind weren’t free,” she told The Epoch Times.
“What we went through wasn’t the cruelest,” said Li, who in addition was subjected to years of constant surveillance, and was once detained for a month at a brainwashing center that involved being forced to watch programs defaming the practice. “Many have suffered far worse.”
Standing near Li in the parade was 58-year-old Wang Yongsheng, a U.S. citizen whose mother was sent to a Chinese psychiatric hospital after a 1999 visit to Beijing appealing to authorities to stop the persecution.
“She wasn’t hospitalized because of mental disorders but because she wanted to practice Falun Gong,” Wang said.
Nurses at the facility would inject drugs into his mother’s body or give her pills, tying her up to force feed her if she refused to take them, according to Wang. Those drugs caused her to feel dizzy and restless, and slowed her speech and movement.
“The Chinese Communist Party will go to any length in persecuting the Chinese people. Its crimes are too numerous to count,” he told The Epoch Times.
Wang’s mother is no longer detained, but she is unable to escape China as she has been denied a passport despite repeated efforts over the years.
Exposing Lies
Karla Wilson Young, a 13-year-old middle schooler from upstate New York, said she believes that the pro-Beijing assailant who attacked fellow adherents in Flushing had been misled by lies from the Party.
“I really want to show people that Falun Dafa is actually good, not what the Communist Party is saying,” she told The Epoch Times. “The lies are taking lots of lives away.”
Young said she was saddened upon hearing the news about Fang’s injuries for doing no more than “telling the truth.”
It’s a motivation for her to be more vocal about the human rights abuses, she said, adding that she hopes that in doing so, ”innocent lives won’t get hurt.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who chairs the House China committee, told The Epoch Times Feb. 25 that he hopes to impose heavier punishment on perpetrators who harass or assault dissidents under the orders of Beijing or other foreign adversaries.
Onlooker Miguel Garcia, a 38-year-old Brooklynite, was attracted by the parade’s vivid colors.
Garcia, who was with his two children, has seen similar Falun Gong parades three times in the past and appreciated its cultural elements, but this was the first time he noticed signs mentioning the regime’s human rights violations, including its state-sponsored forced organ harvesting of detained adherents.
“That’s definitely something to fight against for sure,” he told The Epoch Times, calling forced organ harvesting “horrible.”
“When they’re trying to speak the truth, that’s what [the Chinese regime does]—go after them,” he said about the recent attack in Flushing, adding that exposure is the best way to curb similar abuses.