A beauty pageant contestant onstage, a researcher in transnational repression offstage.

Cynthia Sun, senior researcher at the Falun Dafa Information Center and Miss NTD 2023, explained on EpochTV’s “Bay Area Innovators” program how she bridges human rights advocacy, national security research, and traditional values.

Raised in Texas, Sun started work in human rights and foreign policy at the Falun Dafa Information Center right after college. Despite being 5 feet 10 inches tall, she was never interested in participating in beauty pageants, as she felt they seemed superficial and perpetuated unhealthy stereotypes of young women.

But the Miss NTD beauty pageant intrigued her because the first thing she saw that was emphasized by the contest was inner beauty, and she wondered how that is scored. The application consisted of describing your family environment, naming your top three role models, and listing the top three traits you would want to develop as a woman.

“And I thought that was really interesting, and this theme really carried on throughout the pageant. So for the seven days that I was there, I was really able to reflect on my own values as a woman, the responsibilities I have toward society, the responsibilities I hold toward my family and toward the future version of myself,” she said.

Cross-National Threats

Offstage, Sun researches persecution trends inside China, particularly the religious persecution of Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa. The Falun Dafa Information Center also studies family separation and how political and socioeconomic trends affect religious persecution. Since 2022, the center has received many internal government documents from China, and many contacts providing them with information.

“One of the things that was brought up in this 2022 meeting, headed by [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping, was that the persecution against Falun Gong and especially the misinformation, the repression of Falun Gong worldwide, especially in America, has not been creative enough,” she said.

According to Sun, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not afraid to use America’s free democratic institutions to insert its own narrative through media, disinformation, government threats, and social media.

For the past year, she has been tracking threats of death, bombing, rape, and kidnapping targeting the Falun Dafa community.

“Last August, myself and my other colleagues and my boss, we received an email saying that, you know, they would kill us. And there was a photo of a gun barrel with it cocked, and you could see the inside of the gun barrel. And the subject heading of the email was, ‘You will meet God,'” said Sun, who also practices Falun Dafa. “The Chinese regime is afraid of God. The Chinese regime is so afraid that it basically bans, ostensibly bans, religion in China, and so for them to have a death threat that admits that God exists, that the creator’s out there, was an admission of guilt, in a sense. And it was quite hilarious, now that it’s over.”

The center has also been tracking threats aimed at the Shen Yun Performing Arts company, a group based in America with a mission to revive traditional Chinese culture. The group performs pieces about the persecution of Falun Dafa practitioners in China today.

“We’ve tracked over, in 2023, I believe it was over 135 incidents of violent threats, bomb threats, targeting theaters,” she said, noting that authorities were contacted to search the venues for explosives. “What we’ve learned from this is that the CCP wants to control ... what Americans get to learn about China and the narrative surrounding China.”

Sun said that, at its peak, they documented 30 to 40 threats per month when Shen Yun was touring worldwide, all of which were reported to federal and local authorities.

She said Taiwan launched an agency investigation into the threats and traced their IP address to a Huawei research institute in Wuhan, China.

“Individuals inside the Huawei Institute or affiliated with the CCP were paid to send these threatening messages. And by chance, a lot of these messages are in Chinese, and when you track their IP address, just from your Gmail server or your mail server, they go through multiple IP changes. So they are using a VPN. They are trying to hide their tracks,” Sun said.

Investigators found this pattern consistent with other groups who have spoken out against the CCP and have been targeted, which includes Tibetans, Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, and Uyghurs.

The center has also found harassment on college campuses. Sun and the center conducted a nationwide survey on universities with Falun Gong clubs, which total about 50. The clubs hosted events such as film screenings, documentary screenings, calligraphy brush painting, traditional Chinese dance, and dumpling making. Faculty and students who practice Falun Gong were surveyed, revealing disturbing incidents in California.

One student informed the center that after registering a Falun Dafa club and hosting some events on campus, her family members in China called her, asking about her whereabouts, her phone number, and where she was studying or working. With family members still in China, the public security agent assigned to the family’s location will often interrogate them and bribe them for the student’s information to attempt to silence the student in the United States.

“So it’s really cross-national—the way that the Chinese Communist Party uses family members in China to hold the strings over the students here in America is really disturbing, and we condemn that behavior entirely, because universities are supposed to be a safe haven,” Sun said.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Chinese students started a group chat to bully a Falun Gong student on campus because she was hosting a documentary about Confucius Institutes, Chinese educational and cultural programs backed by the CCP. The university’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association is also funded by the Chinese government.

Sun also sheds light on forced organ harvesting among Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience. Last summer, a man named Cheung was the first known survivor of forced organ harvesting to have come out of China. Multiple U.S. State Department representatives and U.S. House members got him out of China. He fled after parts of his lung and liver were taken from him.

The crime still takes place today, and China remains the No. 1 market for organs, which she attributed to China’s not having a culture of organ donation. Most Asian people believe in going to the afterlife with all organs intact, she said.

“And what the China Tribunal, an investigative tribunal, has stated is that Falun Gong practitioners are the main source of this organ bank. So the Chinese Communist Party essentially is killing two birds with one stone,” Sun said. “And they’re able to sell the bodies of these religious believers to tourists and patients who may really need an organ but don’t know where the source is coming from.”

Sun estimates that the Chinese government makes more than a billion dollars per year selling organs.

The Drive to Keep Going

Her dedication and motivation stem from personal experience growing up in Texas. Her parents emigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s and started to learn Falun Gong. They went to the Chinese consulate every weekend to appeal and meditate in front of the building, with a goal to raise awareness of the persecution in China and persuade others to sign a petition or letter.

Born in Houston in 1999, Sun grew up knowing that the persecution was going on and believed that it would end after high school, then later after college. When it didn’t, she decided to work with the Falun Dafa Information Center.

“We have successfully rescued multiple families in the past few years out of China who were detained, who were sentenced. But through advocacy with the State Department and advocacy with the U.S. citizens, representatives, or senators, here in the United States, we were able to get a few parents and a few family members out. And those small wins really make my day,” she said.

Sun explained that some of those individuals were in their 70s and 80s and had been detained for their faith for up to 20 years.

Introduced to the public in China in 1992, Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Practitioners have reported feeling physically and mentally healthier. The practice quickly spread by word of mouth to reach an estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners by 1999, when the CCP launched a brutal campaign to eradicate it. Since then, many have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death by forced organ harvesting for their faith.

One of the challenges Sun encountered was the emotional turmoil of persecuted individuals’ family members.

They had a case in 2022, a few days before the Beijing Winter Olympics, in which the mother of a New York City architect was suddenly detained in Inner Mongolia.

They immediately helped her son speak at panels in Washington to advocate for her release. But a month later, she passed away. No family members were allowed to visit while she was in detention, at the hospital, or at the crematorium. The son’s wife was pregnant during the ordeal, and their child was born during that time frame, so the family experienced a mix of joy and grief.

“Falun Gong practitioners aren’t treated like people or citizens even in these situations, and basically they had tortured her so badly that within 11 days of detention, she fell into a coma, and when she was in a coma, they sent her to the hospital,” Sun said, noting that the mother was shackled to her bed even while in a coma. “They had cremated her after she died without family consent, and there were nearly 50 police officers outside her crematorium because they refused to let the family in. So it’s just such a heartbreaking situation.”

They were unsuccessful, and she wasn’t saved, but they knew they had done their best, Sun said. She acknowledged the reality and moved on to work on the other 10 simultaneous family rescue cases.

“Even though that was so difficult, you still have to take that as motivation to work harder and get the other family cases out,” she said.

For Sun, growing up with Falun Dafa’s principles provided her a moral compass that kept her away from drugs and alcohol.

“I’ve had high school classmates that actually, when they got to college, they quit because they were failing so hard. They got into vaping. They got addicted to gaming. They got into harder and harder substances, and it was just to see it on the sidelines and not be able to do anything, I think it is a very helpless feeling,” she said, noting that reaching out to them helped only temporarily, as they fell back into addiction.

Sun said it is a blessing to let her faith guide her path in life so she can improve as a person and be the best version of herself.

“My whole journey has been really mental, I think, like building the mental fortitude and then going through life trying to make the best decisions I can,” she said.