(Minghui.org) Falun Dafa practitioners held a peaceful protest in front of the Chinese Embassy in Bucharest, Romania on April 24 and 25, 2021, to commemorate the April 25^th Appeal. They protested the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 22-year-long persecution of the spiritual practice in China and called for an end to the brutality.

Practitioners protest in front of the Chinese Embassy in Bucharest, Romania on April 24 and 25, 2021.

Practitioners demonstrate the exercises.

Practitioners hung large banners across from the embassy, and some practitioners demonstrated the exercises. Others distributed fliers and told people about the CCP’s persecution.

Some passers-by asked what was going on. Practitioners explained about the CCP’s persecution and state-sanctioned organ harvesting from living practitioners for profit. Many said the persecution must be stopped.

Background

Falun Dafa (also known as Falun Gong) was first taught to the public in 1992. Nearly 100 million people across China were soon practicing after experiencing improvements in their health and morals.

On April 23 and 24, 1999, police officials in Tianjin, a city near Beijing, assaulted and arrested dozens of practitioners who had gathered outside a magazine office to discuss errors in a recently-published article attacking Falun Dafa. As word spread of the arrests and more practitioners inquired with officials, they were told they had to take their appeal to Beijing.

The following day, April 25, some 10,000 Falun Dafa practitioners spontaneously gathered at the Central Appeals office in Beijing, as they had been instructed by Tianjin officials. The gathering was peaceful and orderly. Several Falun Dafa representatives were called in to meet with Chinese Premier, Zhu Rongji, and members of his staff. That evening, practitioners' concerns were answered. The arrested practitioners in Tianjin were released and everyone went home.

Jiang Zemin, former head of the CCP, perceived the spiritual discipline's growing popularity as a threat to the CCP's atheistic ideology and issued an order to ban Falun Dafa on July 20, 1999.

Minghui.org has confirmed the deaths of thousands of Falun Dafa practitioners due to the persecution over the past 22 years; the actual number is suspected to be much higher. More have been imprisoned and tortured for their faith.

There is concrete evidence that the CCP sanctions the harvesting of organs from detained practitioners, who are murdered to supply the organ transplant industry.