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William Saunders: Welcome to another edition of the Barefoot Lawyer podcast. I’m William Saunders. I’m director of the Center for Human Rights at the Catholic University of America. The Barefoot Lawyer podcast is, of course, a reference to our distinguished fellow Chen Guangcheng at our center, but today I’ll be conducting the interview, and we have two guests, Cynthia Sun and Mark Yang, and we want to talk about their human rights advocacy and the issues concerning human rights and the Chinese Communist Party with which they are most familiar.
As we talk through this conversation, please feel free to share some of your background if I don’t specifically ask about it. I think our listeners will be a combination of people who know a lot about these issues and some people who probably don’t know anything. So I think we have to shoot for the middle and not assume everybody’s an expert.
So I thought it’d be nice to start with: Cynthia has given a talk – There was a recent Summit on International Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C. Our center was one of the sponsors, actually, for the summit, and my students attended it. So Cynthia was one of the people who spoke at it. So I thought we’d just start, Cynthia, tell us about what you spoke [about] at the summit.
Cynthia Sun: Sure. And thank you so much, Professor Saunders, for inviting me here. I’m a longtime listener of the podcast, and I follow you on Substack, so it’s really great to be with you today. And, at the International Religious Freedom Summit, we were talking about accountability, mainly, because a lot of authoritarian regimes, including China, have operated for decades without any proper accountability.
I know some independent groups like the China Tribunal have tried bringing about accountability in London and the International Criminal Court and also, you know, The Hague, U.S. Congress; there have been multiple avenues to try to bring about accountability for religious persecution, and so far there hasn’t been any real progress, aside from sanctions of specific Chinese officials involved in human rights violations against Falun Gong, Tibet, Uyghurs, and so what I really wanted to talk about was that accountability part because there are so many human victims.
I think as of this date right now, February 27th, there are 5,302 documented deaths according to one grassroots website called minghui.org. We’ve really tracked all of those deaths, and some of them are as young as 17 years old.
W: These deaths are—do you know what the reasons were for these deaths?
C: A majority are from direct abuse in custody, and we have videos. For example, I showed a video at the summit of this young 30-year-old radio host from China. He was from Hunan Province, and this was only two [or] three years ago when his death happened.
When his parents and his aunt visited the mortuary, he was obviously beaten. They saw his body, they took videos, and they exposed it on X where it went viral. It had at least 500,000 views in the first 24 hours of it being posted, but it was taken down.
We still have videos of that on our website, but a lot of the cases are from abuse in custody, including psychiatric abuse. They’re injected with unknown drugs, and so a lot of the healthy and mentally well practitioners who go into the prisons come out being unable to recognize their family or anyone around them because of the psychiatric abuse. There’s also, obviously, sexual torture. A lot of people die from that; a lot of women, a lot of men. And the elephant in the room is forced organ harvesting as well.
But that’s impossible to track the number of deaths. We just know that China is the largest black market in the world for organs.
W: Yeah, I just want to mention for our listeners, to remind them, you know, we have had the one documented survivor of organ harvesting has been a guest on this podcast, and you can find that podcast in our archives, as well as many of the things we’ll talk about today, we will have touched on them in some form before.
So this is just to remind people that if they want to follow up more, they can do that. By the way, I don’t think I said at the beginning, your two… each of your titles. Why don’t you just say what that is?
C: Sure. My name is Cynthia Sun. I’m a senior researcher at the Falun Dafa Information Center. I’m also a FORB Fellow—FORB meaning “Freedom of Religion or Belief”—at the First Freedom Foundation.
W: Yeah, I just want to say on FORB, I have another center at Catholic University that’s specifically on religious freedom, and it’s based on three what we call documents. One is the Catholic Church’s teaching on religious freedom called Dignitatis Humanae. The other is the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But the third is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and particularly the article on religious freedom.
So for those listening, this is a universal human right that’s been recognized by everybody everywhere. So, Mark, how about you?
Mark Yang: Hello, Professor Saunders. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m Mark Yang. I work as a researcher and also an advocacy officer at the Falun Dafa Information Center. I also work as a China analyst for a consultancy.
W: Why don’t you just tell us—again, most people will know this, but some will not—what is the Falun Dafa Information Center?
M: Yeah, so the Falun Dafa Information Center, we do a lot of this research on the persecution that is happening in China, where we document the persecution cases and then also we document the victims’ stories. So we actually give a platform, and a lot of these stories are oftentimes in Chinese. So we do the translation, we do the interviews, and we give a platform to let this to be more well-known.
And also some of our advocacy efforts include to bring these victims to our congressional offices where they often want to share their stories with the legislators. And we help with some of these interpretations and we help to bring these stories forth. And more recently, the Center focused a lot of its energy on the escalated transnational repression that is also coming from China, where there are a lot of these violent threats, a lot of these harassments, and even physical violence that has been targeting Falun Gong practitioners.
And so far we have documented over 243 violent threats that are targeting Falun Gong practitioners around the world, and this is from early 2024 until now. So around 2 years, already over 243. So it is a pretty intense, you know, campaign of transnational repression from the CCP.
The Center for Human Rights has published countless articles and reports on issues facing China, the U.S., and the world. In a 2023 report, Emily Burton examines the continuing influence of Confucius Institutes in American universities, exposing how many have rebranded rather than truly severing ties with the Chinese Communist Party. To read her report, go to our research and analysis page on humanrights.catholic.edu.