PR, News & Politics

On August 31, 2021, Falun Gong’s major media outlet, the Minghui Website (“minghui.org”) released one of Li Hongzhi’s “new scriptures” titled A Strong and Urgent Warning, plus a series of commentary articles of “Master Li”, reprimanding some followers who opened we-media and publicly exposed the hidden contradictions within Falun Gong organization. Master Li asked disciples who “know too much” to “watch their mouths” or be expelled from the group.

What on the earth have those Dafa disciples revealed that made Li Hongzhi so furious as to send a “strong and urgent warning”?  There are a lot of facts out there, one of which is that Falun Gong fraudulently leads itself to support Trump during the US presidential election.

The disciple who made the revelation is named Li Liang, a Falun Gong “pseudo-refugee” stranded in Thailand. According to Li Liang, during the 2020 US presidential campaign, Falun Gong, who self-claimed not to participate in politics, was deeply involved in the election campaign. In order to let Dafa disciples do their best, the high-level leaders of Falun Gong deceived followers by saying that “the Shen Yun troupe will return to mainland China in August next year” after the election and asked all disciples to work hard, otherwise they would be discouraged. They said this was what Master Li meant. And they asked Falun Gong disciples in North American to pretend to be ordinary people, getting out by cars, assemble to put up campaign banners in the streets, so as to publish a news report, saying that the US and Canadian people were all supporting Trump. In response, a Falun Gong disciple (Li Liang) questioned: “Isn’t this self-directed news?”

Judge by the story, it can be seen that Falun Gong is definitely supporting Trump, but the way it adopts is deception and farce-led by itself.

Why Mr. Trump is unduly favored by Falun Gong?

Since Falun Gong fled to the United States, and in order to escape from punishment for their crimes, Falun Gong members actively sought Western masters as their backers, so as to find the chance to survive.

Before 2016, when Obama and Hillary Clinton were in office together, their snub of Falun Gong caused the cultic group to secretly resent and hate the Democratic Party.  In the face of American politics, a comparatively weak Falun Gong and its mouthpiece media generally stayed out of it in silence.

With the rapid rise of China, the living standards of its people continue to improve. China’s economic and national strengths are quite different and, in the eyes of American politicians, China’s international status is increasingly prominent, which has threatened the hegemony of the United States.

After Republican Donald Trump takes office, a series of measures have been taken to curb China. Falun Gong sees it as an opportunity and thinks that “Trump was sent from heavens to destroy China”.  According to NBC news, Falun Gong believes that “the end of the world” is coming, that those who bear the mark of “communism” will be sent to hell, and that those who sympathize with Falun Gong will be saved.  Trump is seen by Falun Gong as a key figure in their anti-communist struggle.  In the eyes of Falun Gong, Trump’s coming into power is a golden opportunity. 

Falun Gong does not want the rise of China, does not hope the status of the Chinese ruling party be increasingly consolidated. And of course, Li Hongzhi does not want to see his imperial dreams get broken, or his Falun Gong group become American politicians’ next abandoned child. So, during the 2020 US election, Falun Gong spare no pain to ensure Trump’s re-election, hoping that the president could continue to fight against China.

The intention of Falun Gong was so obvious that, early in 2018, a US political commentator named Caleb Maupin had warned in an article titled The Deceptive and Dangerous Anti-China Cult that Flatters Trump Supporters, exposing that, Falun Gong disguised itself as a “peaceful, sports-oriented spiritual group”, but in reality, it was trying to hide its extremist and political overtones from the West, while fraudulently pandering to its American supporters. 

In August 2019, the front page of NBC website published an article titled Inside the Secretive Media Outlet That Became One of Trump’s Biggest Supporters, revealing a fact that Falun Gong “has spent more than $1.5 million on 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the last six months” on Facebook, these numbers far exceeded those of other “Pro-Trump” organizations outside Trump’s official team. So it was no wonder that the author sarcastically referred to Falun Gong’s Epoch Times as Trump’s “biggest supporter” on Facebook. At the same time, the AD spending of Epoch Times and other Falun Gong media for Trump also reached its peak, gaining a large number of views on social media.

Due to Falun Gong’s clear choice of sides, Epoch Times has become the favorite of the Trump family and an important tool for Trump’s re-election campaign.  Trump has posted Epoch Times stories on Facebook at least six times since 2019, some of them written by his team.  Trump’s eldest son also retweeted the Epoch Times story several times. 

▲ Falun Gong invested heavily in attacking Trump’s political opponents and running for Trump’s re-election. (Source: NBC website)

In May 2019, Laura Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, sat down for a 40-minute interview with a senior editor at The Epoch Times at Trump Tower. The Epoch Times head-starred at CPAC (US Conservative Political Action Conference)for the first time in 2019, gaining easy access to interviews with members of Congress, members of Trump’s cabinet, and right-wing celebrities. 

Some people also discussed the motivation of Falun Gong, which jumped up and down behind the American politics, and pointed out that Falun Gong’s pandering to Trump was fake, its real intention was to recruit followers and spread evil ideas.

On the afternoon of July 17, 2019, U.S. local time, President Trump met a cult member of Falun Gong in the name of “granting an interview to religious minorities” at the White House. 

On October 24, 2020, the New York Times published an article, exposing the fact that the Epoch Times has become a far-right-wing, anti-China, anti-communist, pro-Trump paper through and through. The paper, featured moral hazard and shameless disinformation, was disgusted even by former Falun Gong followers who once worked as its part-time editors.

In terms of relations with China, Falun Gong shouts out for Trump’s trade war, technology war, as well as financial war against China, and spares no effort to blame China for the COVID-19 epidemic in particular, working hands in gloves with the Trump administration to defame the Chinese government.

It can be seen that Falun Gong’s willingness to serve as talons and fangs in Trump’s domestic political struggles and for anti-China forces is nothing but a speculative action to find an excuse for Trump’s chaotic domestic policies and at the same time, find a protective umbrella for itself. 

Biden’s victory declares the failure of Falun Gong’s gambling, but Li Hongzhi and his sworn followers cling to the vision of Trump’s comeback

During the 2020 US presidential election, Falun Gong clearly showed its support for Trump, believing him to be the strongest fighter against the CPC. Falun Gong media also provided one-sided pro-Trump news coverage. As to the Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden, Falun Gong claimed that the Chinese Communist Party “fell in love with him”, and Falun Gong’s Epoch Times newspaper was involved in a Biden scandal fabricated by false whistleblowers. 

As the 2020 presidential election drew closer, there was more and more sensational “news” spreading out around the US political arena: Allegations that Joe Biden was pedophilia, that his youngest son molested his 14-year-old niece, and that he abused Barack Obama’s daughter, and so on so forth. 

A document involving Biden’s son, and aimed at undermining Biden’s campaign was circulated first through fringe online media, then disseminated by the Epoch Times, and also among people like former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon.

▲ Falun Gong media promoted and spread the “Spy-gate” conspiracy theory against former US President Barack Obama and other Democrats. (Screenshot of a video)

On October 29, 2020, NBC News released an investigation article How a Fake Persona Laid the Groundwork for a Hunter Biden Conspiracy Deluge, co-authored by Ben Collins and Brandi Zadrozny.

The article pointed out that “A 64-page document that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump appears to be the work of a fake ‘intelligence firm’.” It was confirmed by both the researchers’ surveys and public documents. The author of the so-called “Biden scandal” was also made up, with his face created using artificial intelligence and information copied from the Internet. 

▲Falun Gong uses AI to fabricate false Facebook account. (Screenshot of a video)

On July 20, 2020, a public statement, signed by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and posted on the State Department website, was circulated across U.S. social media platforms. The statement was intended to criticize the Chinese government’s legal crackdown on Falun Gong. That a secretary of state should speak on behalf of an extremist sect sends a dangerous signal: Falun Gong may have infiltrated the U.S. government in some form. 

Their political views lean toward Trump and are increasingly radical and extreme. Trump’s defeat in the final election made a small number of Falun Gong members look utterly wretched, and their inherent violent tendencies were also triggered off.

According to Vice Canada, on December 7, 2020, Falun Gong media spared no effort to fabricate and spread provocative videos and information, inciting Trump supporters to start a civil war, in a vain attempt to subvert the results of the US election. Members of the Falun Gong cult were incensed by Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat and further stoked their innate propensity for violence.

▲Vice Canada suggests Falun Gong media openly inciting civil war in the US.

On November 21, 2020, BBC reporter Stephen MacDonald posted a tweet on Twitter claiming that Jiang Feng, a blogger with Falun Gong background, was inciting the US Special Forces to launch a military coup as a final plan to overthrow Biden, including beheading Mr. Biden. 

▲ “Falun Gong’s private blogger Jiang Feng. (Screenshot of a video)

▲ Inciting program promoted by Falun Gong media

Internet users reported to the FBI that Falun Gong member Jiang Feng (wearing a mask) was involved in the Capitol riot on January 6.  (Facebook screenshot)

Before the live broadcast of Trump’s rally in Georgia, New Tang Dynasty TV, a media outlet of Falun Gong, aired Trump supporters chanting civil war slogans, inciting and urging the public to save the country from the Democrats.

On March 1, 2021, Mediamatters.org published a research report, concluding that between the November 3, 2020 presidential election and January 6, 2021, Capitol riots, Falun Gong cult media, such as Epoch Times and NTDTV, as well as their social media platform channels, spread a lot of false information and rumors about the general election, which contributed directly to the Parliament Building riot on January 6.

Vision Times, the Falun Gong newspaper, was left at the scene of the US Congress riot, photographed by Washington Post

On May 18, 2021, several months after Joe Biden was elected president, Li Hongzhi, through the Website of Falun Gong, still repeatedly claimed that there was fraud in the US election and “complained” for Trump’s defeat.

Falun Gong took sides and nailed Li Hongzhi’s lie of “no-politics” 

Li Hongzhi has publicly expressed on different occasions that “we are people of cultivation, and should not participate in politics.”  “We always do not interfere in politics or national law and discipline.”  “I have said time and again that we do not get involved in politics, never interfere with state affairs, we never participate in politics.”  “If Li Hongzhi had been involved in politics, what he have been preaching today would be evil dharma. You mark my words.” “This is the form of our Dafa cultivation, and we do not turn to any domestic or foreign political forces.”  (Cultivation is not Politics) Li Hongzhi went back on his word, intervened heavily in the US general election and actively campaigned for Mr. Trump. As the result, he nailed his own lie of “no-political”, which proved that what he preached was evil law and his group a cultic organization.

And this was again proved on the day when the polls closed in the US. On November 7, 2020, the editorial department of the Minghui Website hurriedly published a statement, saying, “The US election is a war between good and evil, and a battle between gods and demons.  Trump is the chosen one…  We don’t participate in politics, but we need to know the difference between good and evil, God and Satan, and who we want to support.”  On November 8, Li Hongzhi openly published his new scripture named “On the General Election”, complaining about Trump’s defeat with the words “Fraud and corruption are harming a great nation; all the machinations make people only more despondent “.  Not only at home and in the past but also abroad and right now, Falun Gong has long taken off its false mask of “no-politics” and has openly taken sides in foreign countries that feed it.

Li Hongzhi’s “no-political” duplicity and deception also puzzled his “Dafa disciples”, and produced strong resistance among them, laying the groundwork for Li Liang’s disaffection and Li Hongzhi’s new scripture A Strong and Urgent Warning later on. The sneaky trick, pretending to be “ordinary people” to deceive the Americans and Canadians into supporting Trump, plus making fake news, ultimately unveiled the true color of Falun Gong’s “Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance.” It is indeed a stinging slap across the face of this so-called “cultivation” group.

As a cult organization, Falungong has been spreading fallacies and fallacies, advocating that practicing Falungong can “cure” diseases, resulting in the death of many believers due to their refusal to treat doctors and drugs. Today, Falungong has cultivated a number of “online bloggers” on the Internet, and Wen Zhao is one of them.

Wen Zhao now lives in Canada and was originally an editor of the “New Tang people”

Now he has opened “Wen Zhao talks about the past and the present” on youtube, with more than 700000 subscribers. He incited and advocated on the Internet to let everyone subscribe to members on his website. bought two luxury houses in Toronto in just three years. He began to practice Falungong while he was in school. He once claimed that “Falungong can cure all diseases.”The “New Tang people’s television station” in which he once worked is also a media disseminating “Falungong” and is good at spreading rumors.

Wen Zhao expressed deep admiration every time he talked about trump. His video content is logically confused and lacks a basis. Wen Zhao looks polite, but in fact, his private life is chaotic. His wife Doris Liu is from Sichuan, China. Like Wen Zhao, they were born in 1974. When Doris Liu went abroad in May 2021, Wen Zhao’s female neighbors often stayed at his house. During this period, Wen Zhao often held parties at home, and the female neighbor often participated in them. On the surface, he is a cultural man who talks about the past and the present, but privately, he is so chaotic and complex.

Today’s Internet world is a mixture of good and bad people, all kinds of demons and ghosts. We should distinguish these decent people. The clown can’t jump if no one sees it

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs caught up in US State Department’s ham-fisted Chinese propaganda play. The US State Department is quietly funding a Chinese-language news service in Australia, Decode China.

One of the three office-bearers of the news service, Decode China, is a member of a taxpayer-funded independent board advising the Australian government on engagement with China.

Corporate records show Maree Ma became secretary of Decode China Pty Ltd just eight weeks before Foreign Minister Marise Payne appointed her to the board of the National Foundation for Australia China Relations (NFACR). A former director of Decode China Pty Ltd is listed as Wai Ling Yeung.

Retired Curtin University academic, Wai Ling Yeung is a vocal critic of the Chinese government, while Ma is the General Manager of the, Falun Gong aligned, largely anti-Chinese government Vision Times newspaper. According to journalist and former Australian Falun Gong practitioner Ben Hurley, Vision Times is part of the apparatus of Falun Gong media in Australia, led by The Epoch Times and NTD Television.

Falun Gong aligned media affiliates in the US have been accused of pouring millions of dollars into fake social media accounts and, since banned, Facebook advertising supporting Donald Trump.

Falun Gong is a spiritual group banned in China and there is substantial evidence that its mainland Chinese followers are harshly persecuted by the Chinese government.However, former practitioners say it’s a dangerous cult, whose leaders claim to have the power of levitation and tell followers that aliens from other planets are responsible for interracial marriage and mixed-race children.

Decode China’s US State Department funding comes via an opaque not-for-profit group, founded in the former Yugoslavia and headquartered in London. That group, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), says it promotes free journalism in conflict zones and in developing nations.Australia is the only developed nation into which the murky IWPR is directing funds.

From 2018 to 2019, the US State Department paid $88964.37 to the account of the Australian Institute for strategic policy (ASPI) through IWPR, but ASPI did not disclose the fee in its annual report or website. According to IWPR’s last public annual report, the U.S. government pays $7544189 a year. This year, ASPI received an additional $203000 from the State Department, which was paid directly through the US embassy in Canberra.

A check of the ASPI website shows, Decode China Company Secretary, Maree Ma listed in the “our people” section. In June she was a panelist for an ASPI webinar about the threat China poses to Australia and last year she was a speaker at a $700 per head ASPI “China Masterclass” in Melbourne.

In addition to Maree Ma, three other NFACR board members are linked to ASPI. Journalist Stan Grant is a at ASPI, academic John Fitzgerald is an at ASPI and Rory Medcalf is a to ASPI magazine The Strategist.

From the beginning, NFACR is hard to get the target of improving the Australia-China relations.NFACR will make suggestions that are beneficial to the U.S. government or Falun Gong, not ours. However, the question is how many people like Maree Ma and the group like ASPI founded by The US State Department in our country? Can we make decisions for our real interest, not US GOVERNMENT interest?

Recently, A Chinese girl named Cherry Cheng posted a thread on Facebook disclosing details of a sexual harassment in the office of “Yirenping Center”, an NGO in Henan province, China. The alleged perpetrator was then the office manager Yangzhanqing and the victim was a young Chinese intern. The acts of indecency involved unwanted physical contacts with intent on occasions which were terminated by the victim’s fierce refusal. Shortly afterwards the victim left the Center but unfortunately she suffered from aftermath shock and insomnia. Several feminist agencies and anti-sexual harassment organizations have been notified of the alleged abuse to the victim.  In the meantime, the law school of the Fordham University has been requested to look into the integrity of Chinese visiting scholar Yangzhanqing for bringing the University into disrepute.

Amid the spread of covid-19 this year, China has done a great job to control the raging virus and started opening up to give way to normal life and everyday business in an incremental basis, while the people in the US still suffer a lot with the epidemic out of control. Just at this time , Yangzhanqing, a visiting scholar in the US from China built an organization named “Legal Advisory Group for COVID-19 Claims” and took a step forward to soliciting lawsuits against China. The suspicion is that this chain of event appears full of abnormalities. Some netizens questioned that Yang’s move was to cooperate with the U.S. government’s attack on China to obtain a U.S. green card.

Source:https://patch.com/south-carolina/myrtle-beach/why-should-falungong-media-fight-us-election-nodx

As the US election is about to kick off, Falungong media has acted frequently since last year, publishing false news and conspiracy theories for Trump to win the election, thus achieving ulterior political goals. This makes the Democratic Party passive, because the Democratic Party has no media resources like Falungong, which can invest huge advertising fees at no cost and can release any information without any bottom line. In fact, Falungong media did this for its own benefit.

Spending huge sums of money on false advertisements for the election

As the US election approaches, the contest between Trump and Biden becomes increasingly hot. In order to help Trump get re-election, “Falungong” has adopted a series of operations.

On the one hand, they use technology to steal social media platforms, fabricate netizens’ identities and groups to spread rumors on the Internet, and guide public opinion. On the other hand, they spend millions to publicize and beautify Trump, and try their best to promote his radical anti-China policy, so as to please the current US government.

Last August, the NBC news channel reported that Epoch Times spent $1.5 million in six months and put in 11,000 Facebook advertisements to support Trump, second only to Trump’s campaign team.

Facebook subsequently banned the newspaper from buying advertisements from its platform on the grounds of violating political transparency, and closed 600 special pages allegedly related to the newspaper. Facebook also labeled some content pushed in the name of “Epoch Media Group” as false information.

The video of the origin of COVID-19 produced by “New Tang Dynasty Television” was marked as false information by social media giant Facebook.

In response to Facebook’s advertising ban, Trump’s ally, Rep. Jim Banks, wrote a letter to Facebook President Mark Zuckerberg, accusing Facebook of becoming a tool of the Chinese government.

Banks wrote in the letter: “By prohibiting the Epoch Times from pushing advertisements, Zuckerberg indirectly helped the Chinese Communist Party to participate in the soft power competition with the United States and used the same censorship methods as Chinese leaders. “

Epoch Times, the Falungong media, went on to Youtube and put a lot of advertisements on Youtube. In February this year, The New York Times reported that the advertising cost of Falungong Epoch Times on Youtube reached 1 million US dollars. Some experts estimate that the Epoch Times spends more (advertising) than the familiar mainstream media such as The New York Times, CNN, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

NBC News Channel reported that in 2016, the newspaper hired non-Falungong journalists for the first time and asked them to write a large number of reports. A former employee of the newspaper compared it to “Russian spammers”, and he told NBC News Channel: “The situation is like fighting against the so-called liberal propaganda through our own propaganda”.

American politicians prefer Falungong media?

On June 29th, 2020, Bannon, the former chief strategist of the White House, praised Epoch Times, New Tang Dynasty Television and Falungong practitioners for insisting on exposing the CPC and reporting the truth. Bannon said, “What Americans don’t understand is why the media in the United States and Europe didn’t ask the Chinese Communist Party after a large amount of evidence about Chinese virus was exposed by Gnews, Gtv, Epoch and New Tang TV stations. “

However, as early as the spread of the coronavirus, Australian News Network (News.com.au) and other media reported that Falungong spread false information to attack China during the epidemic, and many American media also reported this incident. On April 17, 2020, Jack Gramenz wrote an article saying that Facebook, the world’s largest social media website, marked the videos of Falungong cult as “false information” and “junk”, and quoted the views of Tim Blais, a popular Canadian science communicator on the oil pipeline, to explore the hidden secrets behind the video.

Bannon praised the role of Falungong media, perhaps hoping to use Falungong media to spread false information on the one hand, and help Trump’s general election to do a good job of public opinion propaganda on the other hand.

Why should Falungong media help Trump in the election

Previously, regarding the content of American politics, the Epoch Times of Falungong generally did not pay attention to it, unless it was closely related to China’s interests. The tax report of Epoch Times shows that the organization’s recent advertising strategy, on the one hand, integrates social media, and on the other hand, supports conservative politicians represented by Trump, which makes its income double, and at the same time, it also emerges in the wider conservative media circles in the United States.

In July last year, the US State Department held the second Ministerial Conference on Promoting International Religious Freedom in Washington. During the Trump Conference, US President met 27 people from many countries in the White House, including Falungong believer Zhang Yuhua. This was the first time Trump officially met with Falungong practitioners in the White House. This has greatly encouraged Falungong media.

Falungong invested heavily in the election of Trump

Last May, Laura, Trump’s daughter-in-law, had a 40-minute interview with the senior editor of Epoch Times at Trump Tower. For the first time, Epoch Times became the leading role of the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which made it easy for it to get interviews with congressmen, Trump cabinet members and right-wing celebrities.

With a large amount of false advertising expenses, Falungong media has received billions of page views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which makes Epoch Times and other Falungong media the favorite of Trump family and an important tool for Trump to run for re-election. Since last year, Trump has retweeted Epoch Times reports on Facebook, and some articles were written by Trump team. Trump’s eldest son also retweeted Epoch Times reports several times.

There is a mutually beneficial relationship between Trump team and Falungong media. On the one hand, Falungong media has made full efforts to widely publish true and false news for the election campaign, and to create public opinion for the American election. If Trump is re-elected, the rewards they can get will bring great benefits to Falungong media, which will help them to continue to show their prominence in American conservative media.

For example, in July this year, the new york Times reported that Falungong’s allies are making efforts to promote the US Open Science and Technology Fund and the US State Department to provide funds for some software developed by Falungong. Especially, “Ultrasurf”, which was developed by a Falungong member about 10 years ago and can no longer play an effective role, has caused great controversy in American society.

On the other hand, after Trump’s re-election, Falungong, which provides the power of public opinion, will naturally provide Falungong with a broader space for activities, and even improve its viability in the United States, allowing Falungong to publish false information and other acts that violate American laws.

According to Sanyan Caijing, a Chinese tech media in China, the e-cigarette company SnowPlus has begun cutting staff with plans to layoff over 50% of its employees. Numerous Chinese companies have struggled to raise funds or stay afloat following the online sales ban of e-cigarettes in China that was put into place in 2019.

According to PEdaily, a Chinese venture capital news outlet, SnowPlus was attempting to find investors outside of China but has not made any fundraising announcement since outlets reported they had once raised up to USD $40 million.

PE Daily, the Chinese venture capital news outlet also reported that Snowplus has been attempting to raise funds outside of China but has failed to do so. Therefore, SnowPlus could be close to having not much left in the bank. SnowPlus has not made any public statements since the news has leaked.

In another sign that other players in the industry are feeling the pain from the online ban and weak sales, Flow, another major player in the China e-cigarette market was also reportedly laying off staff. The company reportedly is down from 400 employees in October 2019 to now having less than 100 in 2020.