Rep. Tom Emmer stands with Chinese people: Letter

Rep. Tom Emmer recently co-sponsored a bipartisan resolution condemning the Chinese Communist Party for 100 years of human rights violations.

The resolution includes a long list of the CCP’s abuses, from 1930 to the present. One of them really hit home for me:

“The Chinese Communist Party has enacted a widespread campaign to eliminate the practice of the Falun Gong religious movement... utilizing methods of suppression including arbitrary detention, forced labor, physical torture, nonconsensual organ harvesting and in some instances even death.”

I have a number of friends from China who practice Falun Gong — it’s a meditation practice based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. It was extremely popular in the 1990s. Even state media praised it for its health benefits.

A government survey found that more people were practicing Falun Gong than were members of the Communist Party. Some CCP leaders viewed its popularity as a threat and in 1999 the CCP launched a brutal persecution and propaganda campaign, which continues to this day.

I think it’s hard, as an American, to understand what it’s like to live under communism, but I’ve gotten glimpses of it from my Chinese friends. Some were brutally tortured and sent to labor camps because they refused to give up their faith, and most know at least one person who was persecuted to death.

Freedom of belief is central to our American way of life, and supporting human rights is something we can all get behind.

Even the Biden and Trump administrations agree on this. In March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared the CCP’s actions in Xinjiang to be genocide, affirming former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s determination.

I applaud Rep. Emmer and all of the Democrats and Republicans who are supporting this resolution. Thank you all!

Jess Beatty

St. Cloud