Two sisters in southern China have been sentenced to prison for their belief in Falun Gong, amid a broader persecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that’s increasingly fueled by big data and digital surveillance.
According to Minghui.org, a clearinghouse for first-hand information about the spiritual practice and the persecution it suffers in its home country, Luo Suling, a 67-year-old resident of Meizhou City in Guangdong Province, was sentenced to 21 months in prison and fined $3,500 after being detained for possessing Falun Gong materials.
Her case highlights how the CCP’s surveillance apparatus is being used to identify and target practitioners of the spiritual group, also known as Falun Dafa.
Luo Suling was detained on July 18, 2024, at Meizhou West Railway Station while preparing to travel by train to Zhuhai, approximately 300 miles away. She was flagged at the security checkpoint as a Falun Gong practitioner, and railway police searched her belongings, finding materials related to the practice.
Later that day, police raided her home, seizing additional personal items and Falun Gong books.
Her younger sister, Luo Shiya, 61, also a Falun Gong practitioner from Meizhou, was taken from her home on July 30, 2024, by local police and officers from the Guangzhou Railway Police Bureau. Authorities confiscated a Falun Gong book, a multimedia player, and roughly $200 in cash.
Luo Shiya was later sentenced to two years in prison and fined more than $4,000 by the Meixian District Court—the same court that sentenced her sister.
Massive Surveillance
The Luo sisters are among the many Falun Gong practitioners under stringent surveillance in China by the communist regime.To control its nationals, the CCP has installed as many as 600 million surveillance cameras across China.
The report highlights how the CCP uses a combination of various technology projects, such as Skynet, a surveillance network used in China’s cities, and Dazzling Snow, a monitoring system in rural areas, to monitor and identify Falun Gong practitioners. The Falun Dafa Information Center reports that the CCP has arrested many Falun Gong practitioners through the use of these technologies and systems.
“Falun Gong practitioners known to police have long been considered targets of detailed surveillance. Their biometrics and other data has been collected and stored in ‘key individual’ databases for over a decade. This facilitates cross-referencing and identification,” the report says.
In addition to the massive surveillance networks, the CCP implemented a real-name identification system, effective from June 2011, for train ticket purchases and station entry, which enables Chinese railway police to identify Falun Gong practitioners easily by leveraging ID cards and personal information from big data systems. Since then, incidents of persecution of Falun Gong practitioners by railway police have been reported across the country.
Seventeen Falun Gong practitioners have been harassed or arrested by Shanghai railway police at railway stations in Shanghai between 2014 and 2024, according to Minghui.org.
Some Falun Gong practitioners were detained for up to one month in detention facilities. Minghui has been able to obtain the names of these Falun Gong practitioners.
Minghui has also recorded several instances of Falun Gong practitioners being persecuted by railway police in China’s eastern Zhejiang Province. Since March 2021, police at several major train stations in the province—including Hangzhou East, Jiaxing South, Shaoxing North, and Ningbo—have used ID-linked data to target Falun Gong practitioners. Police have searched their luggage, forced them to reveal phone contents, photographed their IDs and faces, and demanded personal information such as phone numbers and workplaces, often threatening to block travel or detention if they refused.
Falun Gong practitioners are subjected to severe sentences if they are found to carry materials related to their faith.
Decades-Long Peaceful Protests
Falun Gong is a traditional meditative spiritual practice that teaches moral tenets based on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice was introduced to the public in 1992, and it spread quickly across China because of its moral teachings and health benefits. By 1999, Chinese official data estimated that 70 million to 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong, outnumbering the number of CCP members.Fearing the potential loss of control of the Chinese populace, then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin personally decided to “eradicate” Falun Gong and launched a nationwide campaign to persecute the faith in July 1999.
For their part, Falun Gong practitioners have engaged in various peaceful ways in and out of China to raise public awareness of the persecution.
According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, Falun Gong practitioners in China have set up around 200,000 underground printing houses to produce leaflets, DVDs, and other materials aimed at exposing authorities’ actions and countering the CCP’s anti-Falun Gong propaganda.
They have also devised ways to spread information beyond traditional flyers. In some provinces, they stamp messages such as “Falun Gong is good” on Chinese banknotes. In cities, they use AirDrop and Bluetooth to share digital materials with public transit riders.
As of April 29, more than 445 million Chinese have quit the CCP and its affiliated organizations.
To support the people who have quit the organizations, Wei Libin, New York director of the China Democracy and Human Rights Alliance, participated in a rally held by Falun Gong practitioners in the Flushing neighborhood of New York City on April 19.
“It’s the most practical path of redemption for the Chinese people,” he said at the rally.
“Only by doing this can the evil CCP regime collapse, allowing Falun Gong to return to China, the land of the divine. Then, the Chinese people will finally be able to live happy, free, and dignified lives.”
