A Campaign That Has Not Ended

The 1999 ban was not a single event but the opening of a sustained campaign that has continued in varying intensity for more than two decades. Independent human rights researchers, foreign government reports and organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented mass detention of practitioners, extrajudicial re-education through labour sentences before that system's formal abolition in 2013, and credible reports of torture and deaths in custody, and Falun Gong's own advocacy organisations have additionally alleged systematic forced organ harvesting from detained practitioners, a claim examined by independent investigators and researchers with differing conclusions about its extent and evidentiary basis.

Li Hongzhi and the bulk of Falun Gong's organised advocacy and media activity, including the Falun Dafa Information Center and the Epoch Times newspaper, have operated from outside China since shortly after the ban, making the movement's continued domestic practice in China difficult to observe directly and dependent substantially on accounts from practitioners who have left the country or from state sources with their own clear interest in the narrative.