Falun Gong Practitioner Details Two Decades of Persecution Under Chinese Communist Party

Wang Chunyan’s hands trembled as she held up photographs of 21 smiling faces during a recent interview. “More than 25 of my friends have died in this persecution. I only have photos of 21 of them,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion.

For the 70-year-old Falun Gong practitioner, these images represent just a fraction of what she describes as a systematic campaign by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to dismantle her life over more than two decades. According to Wang, the government stripped away her business, her home, and ultimately, seven years of her freedom through imprisonment.

The most devastating loss, she says, was her husband. “My beloved husband died due to the persecution,” Wang claimed, explaining that authorities repeatedly pressured him to reveal her whereabouts after she went into hiding. He never did.

Wang’s account emerges as President Donald Trump prepares to travel to China next week for high-level meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. While trade, security, and regional tensions are expected to dominate discussions, Wang’s testimony highlights what human rights advocates call China’s ongoing campaign against religious and spiritual groups.

Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, who documented Wang’s experience in his book “China’s War on Faith,” told Fox News Digital: “Either the world changes China or China will change the world.” Brownback argues that personal testimonies like Wang’s reveal the reality of persecution more powerfully than statistics alone.

Wang’s troubles began in the late 1990s when she discovered Falun Gong, a spiritual practice centered on meditation exercises and teachings rooted in “truthfulness, compassion and tolerance.” The movement had spread rapidly across China during that decade, attracting tens of millions of followers before Beijing banned it in 1999, labeling it a threat to Communist Party control.

Initially, Wang found that Falun Gong improved her physical condition, helping with severe insomnia. “My business was booming. My family was happy. My life was perfect,” she recalled. She had built a successful company selling chemical production equipment and had become relatively wealthy by Chinese standards.

But after the government crackdown began, Wang felt compelled to defend Falun Gong against what she believed were official lies. She purchased a printing press and began distributing informational leaflets, which soon led to government surveillance. “The buildings where I worked were under constant surveillance,” she said. “I left to escape and was afraid to come home.”

For years, Wang lived in hiding, using prepaid calling cards and public telephones to secretly arrange meetings with her husband, Yu Yefu, in restaurants and hotels across the city. Though Yu never practiced Falun Gong himself, police repeatedly pressured him to reveal his wife’s location.

In 2002, Wang stopped hearing from her husband. When she finally returned home, she found him unconscious. Doctors couldn’t save him. He was 49 years old. Their daughter was still in college.

The tragedy rippled through the family, Wang said. Her mother-in-law stopped eating and later became paralyzed. Her father-in-law died from grief. Her sisters were also imprisoned and tortured.

Wang herself spent seven years in detention, where she described enduring forced labor, sleep deprivation and physical abuse so severe that she once fainted three times in a single day. One particularly disturbing memory still haunts her: shortly before her release, Wang said authorities conducted unexplained blood tests and medical examinations. She later feared these might have been connected to allegations of forced organ harvesting from detained Falun Gong practitioners.

Today, Wang lives in the United States, having left China in 2013 and eventually making her way through Thailand before arriving in America in 2015. Despite the passage of time, her losses remain fresh.

“There are millions of families in China like ours,” Wang said, “persecuted by the CCP.”

When contacted for comment, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu rejected Wang’s allegations, calling them “malicious fabrications and sensational lies.” Liu defended Beijing’s actions, stating: “Falun Gong is a cult organization that is anti-humanity, anti-science and anti-society.” He added that the Chinese government “outlawed the Falun Gong cult in accordance with the law, thereby safeguarding the fundamental human rights and freedoms of the vast majority of the Chinese people.”

As global attention focuses on U.S.-China relations ahead of next week’s presidential visit, Brownback and other human rights advocates argue that Beijing’s treatment of religious and spiritual minorities deserves greater international scrutiny. “They fear religious freedom more than anything else,” Brownback said, “more than our aircraft carriers, more than our nuclear weapons, more than anything else because they think it is the biggest threat to the regime.”