FoFG’s Executive Director Speaks at 2026 Rally on Capitol Hill
Photo caption: Alan Adler, executive director of Friends of Falun Gong, speaks at the 2026 Falun Gong rally on Capitol Hill. Screenshot/NTD
Twenty-seven years ago, a campaign of persecution began in China targeting people whose only transgression was living by the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. Today we stand here, at one of the great symbols of human freedom, to say, again, that it must end.
The Chinese Communist Party launched this persecution believing it would be over quickly. It was not. It has not been. What the CCP did not calculate was that people who have genuinely internalized Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance do not simply yield. They persist. They tell the truth. They endure.
Twenty-seven years. That number should stop us. When most campaigns of repression fade through indifference, or surrender, or the simple attrition of exhausted people, Falun Dafa practitioners are still here. Still practicing. Still speaking. The persistence itself is the message.
But this is not a moment only for reflection. The CCP’s reach has extended well beyond China’s borders. Practitioners who fled to safety in the United States have found themselves still tracked, their families in China still threatened, still pressured. The question that raises for every American is not abstract: if people lawfully on our shores are subject to a foreign government’s harassment, what exactly are the limits of that government’s ambition?
The answer, historically, is that there are no self-imposed limits. Since taking power in 1949, the CCP has followed a consistent pattern for 77 years: identify a group, manufacture a threat, and use that manufactured threat to eliminate their target. Falun Dafa has been on that list for 27 of those years. Power is maintained by fear, and fear requires a target.
The antidote is what brings us here. Not anger, not politics in the conventional sense, but truth, spoken clearly, in public, year after year. That is what this rally has represented since the year 2000. That is what it represents today.
To the practitioners who are here, who have kept this vigil for more than a quarter century: your forbearance has not gone unnoticed. It is documented. It is known. And it will be part of the historical record of how this persecution ends; because it will end.
To everyone listening: learn the history. Share it. In an age when information is both more available and more suppressed than at any prior moment, telling the truth is an act of consequence.
We will keep telling it.
Thank you.