SouthernWorldwide.com – Wang Chunyan held a photograph towards the camera, her hands trembling slightly as she pointed to each of the 21 smiling faces: a husband and wife, a university lecturer, a young engineer, and friends she met in prison.
Some died in detention, she said. Others succumbed after years of abuse. Still others vanished into China’s vast security system and never returned the same. “More than 25 of my friends have died in this persecution. I only have photos of 21 of them,” Chunyan stated, her voice breaking.
For over two decades, the 70-year-old Falun Gong practitioner explained, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) systematically dismantled her life. It stripped away the business she had built, the home she once shared with her family, and ultimately, seven years of her freedom.
However, the most painful loss for her is the belief that her husband was also taken by the persecution. “My beloved husband died due to the persecution,” Chunyan claimed during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.
Her account emerges as President Donald Trump prepares to visit China for meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Trade, security, and regional tensions are expected to dominate the agenda. Yet, beneath the geopolitical rivalry lies another conflict: Beijing’s long-standing campaign against religious and spiritual groups that the Communist Party perceives as a threat to its authority.
Sam Brownback, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, believes Wang’s story reflects a much larger struggle occurring within China. “Either the world changes China or China will change the world,” Brownback told Fox News Digital.
Brownback recently documented Chunyan’s story and the experiences of other survivors in his book, “China’s War on Faith.” He argues that personal testimonies can often reveal the reality of persecution more powerfully than statistics alone. “Stories are more powerful than data,” he stated.
The book delves into what Brownback describes as an increasingly sophisticated system of surveillance and repression targeting Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners. He contends that the Chinese Communist Party views independent faith communities as a direct threat to its authority.
“They fear religious freedom more than anything else,” Brownback explained. “More than our aircraft carriers, more than our nuclear weapons, more than anything else because they think it is the biggest threat to the regime.”
Read more : Sunday Morning 5/10
Chunyan’s narrative began in the late 1990s when she suffered from severe insomnia, sometimes sleeping only two or three hours a night. Her older sister then introduced her to Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa. She describes it as a spiritual practice centered on meditation exercises and teachings rooted in “truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.”
The movement spread rapidly across China during the 1990s, attracting tens of millions of followers. However, Beijing banned it in 1999, portraying it as a threat to Communist Party control.
Chunyan asserts that Falun Gong helped improve her “physical condition.” She added, “My business was booming. My family was happy. My life was perfect.”
Chunyan became convinced the practice had saved her life. She owned a successful company selling chemical production equipment and had become wealthy by Chinese standards. But after the crackdown began, she felt compelled to publicly defend Falun Gong against what she believed were government lies.
She purchased a printing press and began distributing leaflets. Soon afterward, she reported that surveillance followed her everywhere.
“The buildings where I worked were under constant surveillance,” Chunyan recalled. “I left to escape and was afraid to come home.”
For years, she lived in hiding, using prepaid calling cards and public telephones to secretly arrange meetings with her husband, Yu Yefu, in restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels across the city. The couple attempted, briefly, to maintain some semblance of normalcy.
Yu himself never practiced Falun Gong, but police repeatedly pressured him to reveal his wife’s whereabouts. He consistently refused. Then, in 2002, Wang stopped hearing from him.
When she finally returned home, she found him unconscious. Doctors were unable to save him. “He protected me,” she said tearfully.
He was 49 years old when he died. Their daughter was still in college at the time.
The devastation spread through the family afterward, Chunyan recounted. Her mother-in-law stopped eating and later became paralyzed. Her father-in-law died from grief. Her sisters were also imprisoned and tortured.
Then came Chunyan’s own imprisonment.
She described years of forced labor, sleep deprivation, and physical abuse. At one point, she said, the torture became so severe that she fainted three times in a single day.
One memory continues to haunt her. Shortly before her release from prison, Wang stated that authorities conducted unexplained blood tests and medical examinations. At the time, fellow inmates told her the government was simply checking on Falun Gong prisoners before release. Only later, after learning about allegations of forced organ harvesting involving detained Falun Gong practitioners, did she begin to fear why the testing might have occurred. “I was horrified,” Chunyan said.
Today, Chunyan resides in the United States, having left China in 2013. She eventually made her way through Thailand before arriving in America in 2015.
Yet, decades later, the losses remain acutely present for her.
“There are millions of families in China like ours,” Chunyan wants the world to know. “Persecuted by the CCP.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu rejected the allegations and defended Beijing’s actions against Falun Gong. “The aforementioned remarks are nothing but malicious fabrications and sensational lies,” Liu stated. “Falun Gong is a cult organization that is anti-humanity, anti-science and anti-society. It is hostile toward religion, endangers the public, and serves as a malignant tumor within society.” Liu argued that “the Chinese government outlawed the Falun Gong cult in accordance with the law, thereby safeguarding the fundamental human rights and freedoms of the vast majority of the Chinese people.”
