Former US official states that the persecution of this spiritual group is in effect a genocide

Dr. Miles Yu, a former U.S. State Department official said in an exclusive interview that there is more evidence of a genocide perpetrated against the Falun Gong in China than the plentiful such evidence of a genocide against the Uyghurs.

Yu advised former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, when he was in office, on strategies related to China. Now Yu is in effect supporting the view that there is not only a Uyghur genocide, but one against the Falun Gong.

Falun Gong a.k.a. Falun Dafa is a peaceful practice that is based on the tenets of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. By 1999, it was estimated that nearly 70-100 million Chinese were practicing Falun Dafa. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) felt that it was a threat to its communist ideology and began a nationwide campaign of persecution to eradicate the practice.

Adherents of Falun Dafa have been illegally imprisoned, subjected to forced labor, detained in psychiatric wards and even killed for their organs. Forced organ harvesting is probably the worst genocide in human history and is something that requires immediate attention from human rights activists.

Yu wrote in an Aug. 9 email to The Epoch Times, “I am surprised that [a] genocide charge against the CCP re FLG [Falun Gong] has not become a focal point of international human rights campaigns targeting the CCP.”

He continued, “When deciding [a] genocide designation, the most difficult legal barrier is to prove ‘intent’ of the perpetrator.” This finding of intent is the key to a genocide determination, as opposed to other high international crimes.

Yu believes “it would be much easier to prove this [intent] in the FLG case than the Uyghur case, because the CCP has tried harder to disguise its genocidal repression against the Uyghurs while its repression against the FLG has been more blatant.”

There is more documentary evidence of a genocide against the Falun Gong, than there is against the Uyghurs, according to Yu. “The documentation of the CCP’s criminality re FLG is also more apparent and systemic,” he wrote.

International lawyer Terri Marsh, executive director of the Human Rights Law Foundation, agrees. She wrote to The Epoch Times in an Aug. 9 email, “the evidence does support a claim of genocide: there is a plethora of evidence documenting China’s well coordinated plans and policies to subject Falun Gong believers to a widespread suppression campaign that features torture, rape, extrajudicial killing, and other forms of degrading and injurious treatment in regions across China.”

Unfortunately, additional scholarly attention to the Falun Gong genocide is relatively lacking. According to a 2018 study published in the international journal, Genocide Studies and Prevention, “the genocide against Falun Gong stands out as anomalous because it is virtually ignored.”