“Eternal Spring.” In 2002, Falun Gong activists took over a Chinese state news broadcast “to rebut what they saw as a slander by the authorities”; the takeover and its consequences are the subject of a 2022 documentary, “Eternal Spring,” recently featured on BBC Four.
“Two decades later, the comic-book artist Daxiong has painstakingly researched the guerilla operation that changed his life. Featuring striking animation, this gripping film dramatizes the hijack and its aftermath, including police raids that forced Daxiong—a blacklisted Falun Gong follower—to flee the country” (“TV tonight: the wild story of how Falun Gong hacked Chinese news,” The Guardian, March 11, 2025).
Daxiong used to blame the caper for making China’s repression of Falun Gong even worse. A Wall Street Journal report published in 2000 had shown that the Chinese government was already by then torturing and murdering Falun Gong practitioners. In any case, he changed his mind after meeting the lone survivor of the escapade, and in this documentary Daxiong’s art helps tell the story.
You can learn more about the film at the “Eternal Spring” website.
At the United Nations, a Falun Gong practitioner, Ding Lebin, spoke about how the Chinese Communist Party has persecuted Falun Gong even though a CCP functionary in the room tried to stop him (The Epoch Times, March 10, 2025).
“Ding’s speech was briefly interrupted when the Chinese delegation raised a procedural motion. In a brief remark, a Chinese diplomat accused Ding of abusing the council’s forum to ‘attack’ the CCP and asked the council’s presiding vice president, Tareq Md Ariful Islam, to stop Ding from speaking.
“According to the U.N. website, Song Changqing, the Chinese diplomat, holds the position of minister-counsellor with China’s permanent mission to the U.N. Office in Geneva.”
The presiding officer rejected Song’s motion and allowed Ding to finish what he had to say. Ding concluded by calling on the council to “appoint a special rapporteur to investigate the Chinese regime’s practice of forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for sale and transplant.”
Bots attack Falun Gong, Shen Yun. Twitter-X removed “thousands of accounts…after they were suspected of being linked to the Chinese Communist Party and posting attacks against the spiritual group Falun Gong and New York-based dance company Shen Yun. One Chinese-language article from The New York Times attacking Shen Yun was shared over 28,000 times, but 80 percent of the accounts that reposted the article were believed to be bots. Experts are now highlighting the growth of the CCP’s online influence operations, including the use of artificial intelligence to create fake accounts and amplify anti-Falun Gong propaganda” (The Epoch Times, March 10, 2025).
A bill to fight forced organ harvesting. In the U.S. Congress, Senators Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, and others have reintroduced legislation that would impose sanctions on “those who participate in the horrors of forced organ harvesting, especially those targeting Falun Gong practitioners in China.”
Also see:
Wall Street Journal: “Practicing Falun Gong Was a Right, Ms. Chen Said, up to Her Last Day” (April 20, 2020)
“ ‘All she had to do was say she renounced Falun Gong and they would have let her go,’ said Zhang Xueling, Ms. Chen’s 32-year-old daughter. ‘But she refused.’ ”
Lofty Sky Pictures: The website of the animated documentary “Eternal Spring”
True Story Documentary Channel: “Eternal Spring,” the complete film
