NewNow you can listen to Fox News articles!
Exclusive: Wang Chunyan posed for a photo toward the camera, his hands trembling slightly as he pointed to each of the 21 smiling faces: a husband and wife, a university lecturer, a young engineer, friends he met in prison.
Some people died in custody, he said. Others after years of abuse. Others disappeared into China’s vast security system and never returned. “More than 25 of my friends have died in this persecution. I only have photographs of 21 of them,” Chunyan said, crying.
The 70-year-old Falun Gong practitioner said, for more than two decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) systematically destroyed her life, taking away the business she built, the home she once shared with her family and, ultimately, spending seven years of her life in prison.
But the hardest thing for her is that she believes that it also took away her husband. “My beloved husband died because of the harassment,” Chunyan claimed during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.
Report details growing pressure on underground Catholics as China refuses to take action
Falun Gong practitioner Wang Chunyan holds up photos of friends he says died during the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on the spiritual movement during an interview with Fox News Digital. (Fox News)
His details come as President Donald Trump prepares to travel to China next week for a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with trade, security and regional tensions expected to dominate the agenda. Yet behind the geopolitical rivalry lurks another conflict: Beijing’s decades-long campaign against religious and spiritual groups that the Communist Party views as a threat to its authority.
Sam Brownback, former US ambassador for international religious freedom, believes Wang’s story reflects a much broader struggle going on inside China. “Either the world will change China or China will change the world,” Brownback told Fox News Digital.
Brownback recently wrote about 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 reality of persecution more powerfully than statistics alone. “Stories are more powerful than data,” he said.
Photo shown by Falun Gong practitioner Wang Chunyan during a Zoom interview with Fox News Digital depicts friends and fellow practitioners she says were persecuted during the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on the spiritual movement. (Fox News Digital)
The book examines what Brownback describes as an increasingly sophisticated system of surveillance and repression targeting Christians, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners. He argues that the Chinese Communist Party views independent faith 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 regime.”
Cruz pushes Senate to hold China accountable for Beijing church crackdown
Protesters chant slogans and hold posters of victims during a demonstration against China’s crackdown on Uighurs in front of the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on November 30, 2022. (Khalil Hamra/AP)
Chunyan’s story began in the late 1990s, when she suffered from severe insomnia, sometimes sleeping only two or three hours a night. Then her older sister introduced her to Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, a spiritual practice, she says, focused on meditative practice and teachings rooted in “truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.”
The movement spread rapidly throughout China during the 1990s, attracting millions of followers, before Beijing banned it in 1999, citing it as a threat to Communist Party control.
Chunyan says that Falun Gong helped improve his “physical condition”. He said, “My business was booming. My family was happy. My life was perfect.”
Chunian was convinced that this practice had saved his life. She owned a successful company selling chemical production equipment and had become wealthy by Chinese standards, but after the crackdown began she was forced to publicly defend Falun Gong against what she believed to be government lies.
He purchased a printing press and began distributing leaflets. Soon after, surveillance started everywhere, he said.
“The buildings where I worked were under constant surveillance,” Chunyan recalled. “I set out to run away and was afraid to come home.”
Graham family responds to global crackdown on Christians with $1.3 million defense fund and call for immediate action
A pro-democracy activist holds placards with the photo of Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan outside the Chinese central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong on December 28, 2020. According to a video statement released on Tuesday, May 21, 2024, Zhang was released from prison after serving four years for charges related to reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. (Kin Cheung/AP)
For years, she lived in hiding, using prepaid calling cards and public telephones to secretly arrange meetings with her husband, Yu Yifu, in restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels across the city. Both tried to maintain some degree of normalcy.
Yu himself never practiced Falun Gong, but police repeatedly pressured him to reveal where his wife was hiding. He never did. Then, in 2002, Wang stopped hearing from them.
When she finally returned home, she found him unconscious. Doctors could not save him. “He protected me,” she said, crying.
He was 49 years old when he died. His daughter was still in college.
Chunian said, after this there was devastation in the family. Her mother-in-law stopped eating and later became paralyzed. Sadly his father-in-law died. His sisters were also imprisoned and tortured.
Then came Chunyan’s own imprisonment.
Watchdog highlights countries where Christians face persecution around the world
China’s flag flies behind a pair of surveillance cameras outside the central government offices in Hong Kong, China, Tuesday, July 7, 2020. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam defended a national security law imposed on the city by China last week, hours after her government claimed sweeping new police powers including warrant-less searches, online surveillance and asset seizures. (Roy Liu/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
He described years of forced labor, sleep deprivation, and physical abuse. At one point, she said, the torture became so severe that she fainted three times in a single day.
One memory still haunts him the most. Shortly before his release from prison, Wang said that authorities conducted unexplained blood tests and medical examinations. At that time, fellow prisoners told him that the government was screening Falun Gong prisoners before release. Later, after learning of allegations of forced organ harvesting involving detained Falun Gong practitioners, she began to wonder why the trials might have taken place. “I was terrified,” Chunyan said.
Click here to download Fox News App
Falun Gong practitioner Wang Chunyan is speaking out about the death of her husband, who she says was tortured by Chinese authorities for refusing to reveal his whereabouts. (Fox News)
Today, Chunyan lives in the United States, having left China in 2013 and making her way through Thailand before eventually reaching the US in 2015.
Yet decades later, the loss remains immediate for him.
“There are millions of families like ours in China,” Chunyan wants the world to know, “persecuted by the CCP.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu rejected the allegations and defended Beijing’s actions against Falun Gong. “The above comments are nothing more than malicious fabrications and sensationalist lies,” Liu said. “Falun Gong is a cult organization that is anti-humanity, anti-science, and anti-society. It is hostile to religion, endangers the public, and acts as a malignant tumor within society.” Liu argued that “the Chinese government outlawed the Falun Gong cult in accordance with the law, thereby protecting the fundamental human rights and freedoms of the majority of the Chinese people.”
