Falun Gong’s reaction to the propaganda campaign

Those practicing Falun Gong reacted to the suppression by the Chinesegovernment by creating petitions nationally and locally. These lead to demonstrations where hundreds of Falun Gong members would travel to Tiananmen Square and practice Falun Gong exercises or hold banners defending Falun Gong. Security forces usually broke them up and those involved were invariably arrested, detained and often violence was used against them. By 2000, over 30, 000 Falun Gong members had been imprisoned on the Square. 700 Falun Gong members were arrested in on demonstrations in 2001 but they continued to publicly demonstrate far into 2001. One journalist writing for the Wall Street Journal suggested than the members of Falun Gong could be the most prolonged challenge to the Chinese state in the past fifty years under the Communist party. Later in 2001 the regular protests by Falun Gong declined and became much more underground. Falun Gong knew that their protests in public hadgone out of favour and so started underground sites where they had literature and DVDs which countered the governments claims against them. These materials could be passed door to door, with such sites still existing in their thousands. Possessing, distributing or making such material and being caught doing so frequently lead to imprisonment.

Falun Gong practitioners succeeded in hacking the television broadcasts run by the state and showed their own programmes in 2002. The most notable hacking occurred in 2002 when eight TV stations were intercepted and ran their own broadcasts for almost sixty minutes. The programme they showed was called ‘Self-immolation or a Staged Act’. The people involved in this interception were all detained during the following months. Two of them were killed on the spot and the other four died later in prison.

Across the world those Falun Gong practitioners created media organizations that exposed their cause and challenged the Chinese governments propaganda against them. Radio stations and newspapers broadcast and wrote articles about the positives of the Falun Gong teachings and revealing the Lies the Chinese government had created against them. A newspaper called The Epoch Times ran nine articles revealing the critical history behind the Communist party. In turn this created the Tuidangmovement, which encouraged Chinese people to go against the Communist party, and the same paper later suggested that millions of Chinese people renounced the Communist party although the exact numbers cannot be verified.

Over in the USA, Falun Gong practitioners created a music and dance company called the Shen Yun Performing Arts, which toured across the world. Software developers who practiced Falun Gong also created tools that removed censorship in America that people in China could use.

Many Falun Gong members outside of China have filed lawsuits against the people that they believe to have committed genocide and crimes against humanity. Those filed against include JaingZemin and other Chinese officials involved in the campaign against Falun Gong. Practitioners are believed to have filed the biggest number of lawsuits against Chinese officials in the 21st century and the crimes they believed to have been committed are some of the most severe crimes defined by criminal law. In 2006 there were fifty-four lawsuits against Chinese officials in over 30 countries. Many of the courts around the world would not touch the cases on the grounds that of sovereign immunity. But in 2009, courts in both Argentina and Spain accused Jiang and the other Chinese officials of charges against humanity and genocide and asked for them to be arrested. This was more of a symbolic act and their arrests by these courts are unlikely to ever happen. Lawsuits made by Falun Gong members against the company Cisco Systems were made in 2011, believing them to have made surveillance systems used by the Chinese government to extinguish Falun Gong. The company denied using their technology in this way.