(Minghui.org) Minghui Report: The 20-Year Persecution of Falun Gong in China by Minghui Publishing received an award on May 14 from The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), the largest publishing trade association in the United States.
Minghui Report: The 20-Year Persecution of Falun Gong in China won the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA)’s Bill Fisher Award.
Divided into 16 chapters, this 437-page book documents the persecution of Falun Gong. Also known as Falun Dafa, Falun Gong is a meditation system based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. Although it was practiced by about 100 million practitioners in over 100 countries, it has been violently suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since July 1999. Due to pressure from the CCP, however, very few news media have covered this major human rights violation.
Peter Westmore, former president of the National Civic Council (NCC) in Australia, wrote a book review in the August 8, 2020, issue of News Weekly, highly recommending it to libraries as well as government officials.
“For those concerned about the misuse of Chinese power around the world, this book is an essential source of information. It offers over 430 pages of the most exhaustive documentation of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China, and should be in every library and parliamentary office in Australia,” he wrote.
Michael J. Carson from Midwest Book Review (MBR) also recommended the book in April 2020. “Impressively informative, exceptionally well organized and presented,” he wrote, referring to the book as “a unique, extraordinary, and comprehensive study that is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, community, college, and university library Falun Gong collections and supplemental studies reading lists.”
Rarely Reported by International Media
Commentator Fang Wei said the persecution of Falun Gong has been underreported.
Renowned commentator Fang Wei said the CCP had created the “biggest lie in recent Chinese history” on the issue of Falun Gong. To further sustain and intensify the suppression, for example, the CCP fabricated the staged self-immolation incident at Tiananmen Square in January 2001. About 20 years have passed since then, and hardly anyone knows the scale and severity of these lies crafted by the CCP.
“The regime has no moral bottom line–it could make up any lies at will to suppress people,” Fang explained. “Numerous political campaigns in the past few decades have shown this,” he said.
In addition, the CCP has expanded its terror and lies outside China. The disinformation has been massive – all the time and everywhere, he said.
“In principle, media professionals are not easily misled. Instead they are supposed to provide unbiased information to the public,” Fang continued, “So it is puzzling why so many media have kept silent over the years.”
“One reason why this book received the award could be the surprise and shock it brought to the judges,” he said. “For something so serious, how come we have not heard about it until now?”
He predicted that, as time continues, more facts would surface about how Western media have been silenced by the CCP with economic interests.
Bowing to the Bully
As a media professional, Fang said that in his memory, coverage of the persecution of Falun Gong appeared no more than three times in major Western media. One of them was Wall Street Journal’s report in 2000 on the death of Ms. Chen Zixiu, a Falun Gong practitioner from Shandong Province.
Fang said the mistreatment Falun Gong practitioners have suffered is the biggest human rights violation in modern society and that its severity is much worse than the CCP’s persecution of Uighurs in Xinjiang. For something this important and widespread, he would have expected at least 300 to 500 reports, but there were only three, and it was about 20 years ago.
Fang said the Falun Gong issue has become a foreign policy “red line” set up by the CCP. For several years after Falun Gong began to be persecuted in 1999, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, whenever the U.S. Administration mentioned the suppression of Falun Gong, Chinese delegates would bang on the table and leave.
This way, the CCP trained the U.S. administration and many other governments to avoid this topic as taboo. This has left the CCP’s brutality and worsened human rights violations unchecked.
Hope on the Horizon
Despite harsh suppression by the CCP, Falun Gong practitioners inside China have been raising awareness of the persecution for the past 22 years. They have also submitted information about persecution cases along with perpetrators’ information to Minghui.org. Practitioners outside China have also contacted CCP officials to persuade them to stop participating in these human rights violations.
Minghui Report: The 20-Year Persecution of Falun Gong in China is unique because it comes from firsthand information collected by Minghui.org over the past 22 years. The detailed accounts of persecution, touching personal experiences of improvement in mind and body brought by Falun Gong, and support by citizens from around the globe have made this book a must-have reference. This award will open new doors in the international community for leaders and officials to learn about the persecution in depth and take action to end the ongoing atrocities.
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