Tony Liu became interested in Falun Gong when he was a high school student in China. But after attending a peaceful protest against the communist government for its crackdown on the movement in 1999, he says he spent two years in detention.
"They made me lay down on the ground, they just hit me repeatedly until I was out of breath," he said. Joey Huang is hopeful persecution against the Falun Gong movement will end.Both men gathered in Sydney this week to mark 20 years since Falun Gong was outlawed in China, on 20 July 1999.
"Falun Gong is traditional Buddhist school meditation, that has the principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance.For years, Falun Gong's leaders have also accused Chinese authorities of forcibly harvesting the organs of its members, a claim which has been repeatedly denied by Beijing. "I have found that there is overwhelming evidence that forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience is occurring in China, there is no evidence it has stopped," she said. The tribunal heard reports of extraction of kidneys from executed prisoners from as far back as the 1970s. Most of the evidence though came from 2000 onward.
China is an example of how oppressed people live on scale if we don’t protect democracy.