While Falun Gong is practiced openly in the 70-plus countries where it is found, today in its homeland of China it is subject to well-documented egregious human rights violations. The scale and scope of abuses taking place make this possibly the largest religious persecution in the world today.

Suppression officially began on July 22, 1999 following years of escalating state abuses (timeline).

One basic explanation for the seemingly irrational campaign is the proclivities of China’s atheist Communist Party (the CCP), which fears all groups outside its control – particularly ones that subscribe to a different ideology.

The Party has tried several times to eradicate all expressions of religion from China (a country traditionally referred to as "the land of the divine"). To this day Roman Catholics, many Protestants, and Tibetan Buddhists cannot worship freely in China and are at constant risk of detention and torture. By 1999, Falun Gong became a natural target as it was the largest - and fastest growing - spiritual group in China with 100 million practitioners nation-wide, according to Chinese Government reports at the time.

Perhaps the most prominent feature of the campaign has been its prevalent use of extreme torture. Torture of Falun Gong adherents has been documented in each of China’s provinces, in jails, labor camps, brainwashing centers, and schools in China’s big cities, small towns, and villages.

Popular torture techniques include shocking with electric batons, burning with irons, tying the body in painful positions for days, force-feeding saline solutions through a plastic tube inserted up the nose, and prying out fingernails with bamboo shoots, to name a few; rape and sexual torture of the Falun Gong in detention are prevalent as well.

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