A Practice Now Banned in Its Country of Origin

The Chinese government banned Falun Gong in 1999 and has since conducted a sustained campaign against it that international human rights organizations, journalists and numerous governments have documented as including mass detention, and credible reporting has raised serious allegations of torture and forced organ harvesting affecting practitioners, making Falun Gong's contemporary situation one of active, serious and internationally documented human rights concern rather than a settled historical matter, a context this entry treats as directly relevant to why careful, accurate general description matters considerably more here than detailed reproduction of specific exercise or teaching content.

Falun Gong continues to be practiced by adherents outside mainland China, including significant communities in Taiwan, Hong Kong prior to more recent restrictions there, and across the wider global Chinese diaspora, and Li Hongzhi's written teachings, including Zhuan Falun, remain published and available through the movement's own channels for readers seeking direct access to its specific content rather than a general summary. The scale and severity of the allegations against Chinese state treatment of Falun Gong practitioners have made the movement a recurring subject of formal reporting by bodies including the United States Congress and various United Nations human rights mechanisms, distinguishing its contemporary situation from most other new religious movements catalogued in this atlas.