The Rise and Resilience of Falun Gong

The remarkable and largely untold story of how practitioners of Falun Gong went from being the pride of a nation to "public enemy number one" -- all in the span of several months. And how all this was just the beginning of a global struggle for the conscience of the world.

Originally embraced by the government and civil society alike, Falun Gong was widely popular in the 1990s with an estimated 100 million people practicing by early 1999. Its popularity, however, provide too much for some Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders. In July 1999, they launched a nationwide campaign to stamp out Falun Gong.

Despite its brutality and death toll, the campaign, in many ways, backfired on the CCP, giving rise to the largest civil disobedience movement in the world, and launching a global effort to systematically expose the crimes of the CCP on the world stage.