Falun Gong survivor says CCP destroyed her life before Trump-China trip

INTERMEDIATE: Wang Chunyan held the photo towards the camera, his hands shaking slightly as he pointed to 21 smiling faces: a husband and wife, a university lecturer, a young engineer, friends he met in prison.

Others died in custody, he said. Some after years of abuse. Some disappeared into China’s massive security system and never returned the same. “More than 25 of my friends have died in this persecution. I only have 21 of their pictures,” Chunyan said, his voice trailing off.

For more than two decades, the 70-year-old Falun Gong practitioner said, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) destroyed his life, took away the business he had built, the home he once shared with his family, and, finally, seven years of his life in prison.

But the most difficult thing for her is that she believes that she took away her husband. “My beloved husband died because of persecution,” Chunyan said during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.

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His account comes as President Donald Trump prepares to travel to China next week to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with trade, security and regional tensions expected to dominate the agenda. Yet behind the country’s rivalry lies another conflict: Beijing’s years-long crackdown on religious and spiritual groups the Communist Party views as a threat to its authority.

Former US Ambassador for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback believes Wang’s story reflects a broader struggle unfolding within China. “Either the world is changing China or China is going to change the world,” Brownback told Fox News Digital.

Brownback recently recounted Chunyan’s story and the experiences of other survivors in his book China’s War on Faith, arguing that personal testimony can often reveal the truth of persecution more powerfully than statistics alone. “News is more powerful than data,” he said.

A photo shown by Falun Gong practitioner Wang Chunyan during a Zoom interview with Fox News Digital shows friends and colleagues he says were persecuted during the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on the spiritual movement. (Fox News Digital)

The book examines what Brownback describes as a growing system of surveillance and repression targeting Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners. He says the Chinese Communist Party views independent religious communities as a direct threat to its authority.

“They fear religious freedom more than anything else. More than our aircraft carriers, more than our nuclear weapons, more than anything else because they think it’s the biggest threat to the government.”

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Protesters chant slogans and hold victims’ placards during a demonstration against China’s oppression of Uyghurs in front of the Chinese embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 30, 2022. (Khalil Hamra/AP)

Chunyan’s story began in the late 1990s, when he suffered from severe insomnia, sometimes sleeping only two or three hours a night. His older sister then introduced him to Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, a spiritual practice, he says, focused on exercises and teachings based on “truth, compassion and tolerance.”

The movement spread rapidly across China in the 1990s, attracting tens of millions of followers before Beijing banned it in 1999, portraying it as a threat to Communist Party control.

Chunyan says that Falun Gong helped improve his “physical condition.” He said, “My business was thriving. My family was happy. My life was perfect.”

Chunyan was convinced that this practice had saved his life. He had a successful chemical company and was wealthy by Chinese standards, but after the crackdown began he felt compelled to publicly defend Falun Gong against what he believed to be government lies.

He bought a printing press and started distributing pamphlets. Soon after, he said, surveillance everywhere followed.

“The buildings I worked in were constantly guarded,” Chunyan recalled. “I ran away and was afraid to come home.”

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A pro-democracy activist holds placards with a photo of Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan outside the Chinese government’s communications office in Hong Kong on December 28, 2020. Zhang was released from prison after serving four years on charges related to reporting on the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, according to a video statement he released on Tuesday, May 22, 4. (Kin Cheung/AP)

For years, she remained in hiding, using prepaid calling cards and public phones to secretly arrange meetings with her husband, Yu Yefu, at restaurants, coffee shops and hotels throughout the city. The two tried, briefly, to maintain some sense of normalcy.

Yu himself did not practice Falun Gong, but the police repeatedly pressured him to reveal his wife’s whereabouts. He didn’t do that. Then in 2002, Wang stopped hearing from him.

When he finally returned home, he found her unconscious. The doctors could not save him. “He protected me,” she said, crying.

He was 49 years old when he died. Their daughter was still in college.

The damage spread to the family after that, Chunyan said. Her mother-in-law stopped eating and later became disabled. His father-in-law died of grief. His sisters were also arrested and tortured.

Then came his arrest in Chunyan.

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A Chinese flag is flown behind two surveillance cameras outside the Central Government Offices in Hong Kong, China, Tuesday, July 7, 2020. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam defended the national security law imposed on the city by China last week, hours after her government unveiled sweeping new powers, including warrantless searches, internet surveillance and asset seizures. (Roy Liu/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

He described years of forced labor, sleep deprivation and physical abuse. He said that at one point the torture was so severe that he fainted three times in one day.

Another memory still haunts me. Just before his release from prison, Wang said authorities conducted mysterious blood tests and medical examinations. At that time, his fellow prisoners told him that the government only checks Falun Gong prisoners before they are released. It was only later, after hearing about allegations of forced organ harvesting involving imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners, that he began to fear why the experiments might have taken place. “I was shocked,” said Chunyan.

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Falun Gong practitioner Wang Chunyan recounts the death of her husband, who she says was persecuted by the Chinese authorities for refusing to reveal his whereabouts. (Fox Stories)

Today, Chunyan lives in the United States, having left China in 2013 and eventually passed through Thailand before arriving in America in 2015.

Yet decades later, the loss remains close to him.

“There are millions of families in China like ours,” Chunyan wants the world to know, “They are being persecuted by the CCP.”

In a statement sent by Fox News Digital, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu dismissed the allegations and defended Beijing’s actions against Falun Gong. “The above-mentioned statements are nothing but lies and incredible lies,” said Liu. “Falun Gong is an anti-humanistic, anti-scientific and anti-societal cult. It is hostile to religion, endangers society, and acts as a dangerous tumor in society.” Liu argued that “the Chinese government has banned the Falun Gong religion in accordance with the law, thereby protecting the basic human rights and freedoms of the majority of Chinese people.”