# Falun Gong **Falun Gong** (also Falun Dafa) is a Chinese spiritual movement founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, blending qigong meditation exercises with moral teachings built around truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. It grew explosively in 1990s China, and in 1999 the [[Chinese Communist Party]] — alarmed by a large, disciplined, peaceful movement it did not control — banned it as an "evil cult" and launched a sweeping persecution campaign, with credible reports of mass detention, torture, and forced organ harvesting. Li relocated to the United States, where the movement is now headquartered. Falun Gong matters to this vault because of where its diaspora landed in American politics. The movement runs **The [[Epoch Times]]** and the **Shen Yun** performing-arts tour, and over the 2010s its media arm transformed from an anti-CCP outlet into one of the most aggressive pro-[[Donald Trump]] operations in conservative media — a striking case of a persecuted religious diaspora plugging directly into the American right's anticommunism. The Epoch Times' explosive growth, and later scrutiny of its finances (a senior executive was charged in a money-laundering case reported in 2024) and Shen Yun's labor practices, are tracked on the outlet's own page. It belongs to the [[Chinese History Hub]] as the human residue of CCP repression that became an American media force. > [!note] Stub > Phase 2 RWKB-layer stub. Expand: the 1999 Zhongnanhai protest and the "610 Office," the organ-harvesting allegations, the Epoch Times/Shen Yun apparatus, Dragon Springs, the MAGA-media pivot.