(Minghui.org) The coming April 25th marks the 21st anniversary of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners’ peaceful appeal in front of the Chinese Petition Office for the basic right to practice their faith.
As a participant of the appeal on that day, I always feel a bit emotional at this time of the year.
The Chinese Communist Party officially launched a nationwide campaign against Falun Gong in July 1999, three months after the appeal. As the persecution remains unabated after 21 years, the spirit of the monumental appeal is still inspiring Falun Gong practitioners in and out of China to uphold their faith and persevere in their pursuit of freedom and truth.
According to available data collected by Minghui.org, as of July 20, 2019, as many as 86,050 Falun Gong practitioners had been unlawfully arrested, 28,143 had been sent to forced labor camps, 17,963 had been sentenced to imprisonment, 18,838 had been confined in brainwashing centers, and 809 had been sent to mental hospitals, leaving thousands of families torn apart and separated.
As of April 22, 2020, 4,408 Falun Gong practitioners were confirmed to have lost their lives to the persecution, and due to the strict information censorship and cover-up in China, the actual death toll is likely to be much higher.
In addition, the horrific state-sanctioned harvesting of vital organs from living, non-consenting Falun Gong practitioners is still going on today. While it’s against tradition for Chinese people to donate their organs after death, Chinese hospitals are performing back to back transplant surgeries. Some hospitals advertised on their websites that they could provide a matching organ in only two weeks.
According to a study by the China Organ Harvest Research Center, it was estimated that up to 1 million transplants could have taken place in the past 20 years and the majority of the organs could have come from Falun Gong practitioners.
On June 17, 2019, an independent international tribunal in London unanimously concluded, after a year-long investigation, that prisoners of conscience have been – and continue to be – killed in China for their organs “on a significant scale.” The tribunal also concluded that imprisoned Falun Gong members are “the principal source” of organs for forced harvesting.
Now, as the world is struggling to cope with the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese communist regime is still busy persecuting Falun Gong practitioners.
According to earlier Minghui reports, 33 Falun Gong practitioners were sentenced for their faith between February and March 2020, while most of China was still locked down to contain the virus.
As travel restrictions have gradually eased up since mid-March, another 384 practitioners were arrested and harassed in February and 363 in March.
Twenty-one years have now gone by since the “April 25th Appeal.” In addition to the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong, the CCP's evil conduct has also led the international community to awaken to its true nature and its ultimate goal to ruin humanity.
In April 2019, China was listed for the 20th time by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) as a “country of particular concern” for its “systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom.”
Now the spread of the CCP virus (Wuhan coronavirus) around the world has once again exposed the CCP’s deceptive and thuggish nature. There has never been a more united understanding in the international community about the CCP, and the masses of people in China are also becoming more clear-headed about the root cause of their sufferings.
When the CCP decided to unleash the unprecedented persecution of Falun Gong after the peaceful “April 25th,” it’s inevitable that such violent persecution will fail in front of unwavering faith.
The “April 25th Appeal,” as a monument for Falun Gong practitioners' peaceful perseverance in pursuing freedom of faith, will forever be recorded in history.
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Category: April 25 Events
