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

SPECIAL: Wang Chunyan held a photograph up to the camera, his hands shaking slightly as he pointed to each of the 21 smiling faces: a husband and wife, a university lecturer, a young engineer, friends he had met in prison.

Some died in custody, he said. Others after years of abuse. Others became entangled in China’s vast security system and never returned. “More than 25 of my friends died in this persecution. I only have photos of 21 of them,” Chunyan said, his voice breaking.

The 70-year-old Falun Gong practitioner said that for more than two decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) systematically ripped apart his life, taking away the business he started, the home he once shared with his family, and eventually spending seven years of his life in prison.

But the hardest thing for her is that she believes that it took her husband with her. “My beloved husband died due to persecution,” Chunyan said during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.

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This statement comes as President Donald Trump prepares to travel to China next week to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping; Trade, security and regional tensions are expected to dominate the agenda. But behind the geopolitical rivalry lies another conflict: Beijing’s decades-long campaign against religious and spiritual groups the Communist Party sees as threats to its own authority.

Former U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback believes Wang’s story reflects a much broader struggle unfolding in China. “Either the world will change China, or China will change the world,” Brownback told Fox News Digital.

Brownback recently told Chunyan’s story and the experiences of other survivors in his book China’s War of 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.

The photo that Falun Gong practitioner Wang Chunyan showed during a Zoom interview with Fox News Digital shows friends and fellow practitioners who he said 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 oppression targeting Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners. He argues that the Chinese Communist Party sees independent faith communities as a direct threat to its authority.

“They’re afraid of religious freedom more than anything. They’re afraid of our aircraft carriers, our nuclear weapons, everything because they think that’s the biggest threat to the regime.”

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Protesters chant slogans and hold posters of victims during a demonstration against China’s crackdown on Uyghurs in front of the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul, Türkiye, on November 30, 2022. (Halil 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. Later, her older sister introduced her to Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa; He says it is a spiritual practice that focuses on meditation 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, citing it as a threat to Communist Party control.

Chunyan said Falun Gong helped improve his “physical condition.” “My business was booming. My family was happy. My life was perfect,” he said.

Chunyan is convinced that the practice saved his life. He owned a successful company selling chemical manufacturing equipment and had become wealthy by Chinese standards, but after the crackdown began, he felt compelled to publicly defend Falun Gong against what he believed were lies from the government.

He bought a printing house and started distributing brochures. Surveillance soon followed everywhere, he said.

“The buildings where I worked were under constant surveillance,” Chunyan recalled. “I left to escape and was afraid to return home.”

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A pro-democracy activist holds banners with the image of Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan in front of the Chinese central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong on December 28, 2020. Zhang was released from prison after serving four years on charges related to reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, according to a video statement released on Tuesday, May 21, 2024. (Kin Cheung/AP)

She lived in hiding for years with her husband, Yu Yefu, using prepaid calling cards and public phones to secretly arrange meetings in restaurants, cafes, and hotels around the city. The two briefly tried to maintain a sense of normalcy.

Yu himself never practiced Falun Gong, but the police repeatedly pressured him to reveal where his wife was hiding. He never did. Later in 2002, Wang stopped hearing from him.

When he finally returned home, he found her unconscious. Doctors couldn’t save him. “He protected me,” she said through tears.

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

The devastation then spread to the family, Chunyan said. Her mother-in-law stopped eating and later became paralyzed. His father-in-law died of sadness. His sisters were also imprisoned and tortured.

Then came Chunyan’s imprisonment.

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The Chinese flag flies behind a pair of security cameras in front of the Central Government Offices in Hong Kong, China, on Tuesday, July 7, 2020. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam defended the national security law imposed on the city by China last week, just hours after her government asserted sweeping new police powers including warrantless searches, online surveillance and property 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 became so severe that he fainted three times in one day.

One memory still bothers him the most. Wang said authorities conducted unexplained blood tests and medical examinations shortly before his release from prison. At that time, his fellow prisoners told him that the government only checked Falun Gong prisoners before they were released. But later, after learning about allegations of forced organ harvesting involving detained Falun Gong practitioners, she began to fear why the testing might have been done. “I was horrified,” Chunyan said.

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

Today, Chunyan lives in the United States, leaving China in 2013 and heading to Thailand before arriving in America in 2015.

But even decades later, the losses remain much the same for him.

Chunyan wants the world to know that “there are millions of families like ours in China.” “He is being persecuted by the CCP.”

Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu denied the allegations and defended Beijing’s actions against Falun Gong in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The above-mentioned statements are nothing but malicious fabrications and sensational lies,” Liu said. “Falun Gong is an anti-humanity, anti-science, and anti-social cult organization. It is anti-religious, endangers the public, and serves as a malignant tumor in society.” Liu argued that “the Chinese government has banned the Falun Gong cult in accordance with the law, thus protecting the basic human rights and freedoms of the vast majority of Chinese people.”