The Epoch Times — launched by Falun Gong as a free propaganda newsletter more than two decades ago to oppose the Chinese Communist Party — now boasts to be the US’s fourth-largest newspaper by subscriber count:
The nonprofit has amassed a fortune, growing its revenue by a staggering 685% in two years, to $122 million in 2021, according to the group’s most recent tax records.
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Epoch Times representatives also deny an affiliation with Falun Gong, despite the two groups’ clear financial and organizational ties: The Epoch Times board members and most staff are Falun Gong practitioners. The nonprofits behind The Epoch Times and Friends of Falun Gong, the movement’s advocacy organization, share executives and provide grants and services to each other, according to tax filings. And the newspaper, along with a digital production company and the heavily advertised dance troupe Shen Yun, make up a nonprofit network that the leader of the religious movement calls “our media.”
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Started in Georgia in 2000 by John Tang, a Falun Gong practitioner who remains its CEO, in essence it was a Chinese-language public relations newsletter. The group’s long-term goals were ambitious: to expose the Chinese Communist Party and to save the world in a supernatural war against communism.
Through the early aughts, The Epoch Times grew from an online effort to a weekly physical newspaper, with a home base in New York and a TV production company, New Tang Dynasty Television. It raised money from followers and was staffed by unpaid volunteers. It ran aggregated articles on international issues from Voice of America next to Thanksgiving Day explainers, dispatches from Falun Gong parades, and exposés on atrocities alleged to have been committed by the Chinese Communist Party.
By 2019, it had gone mostly digital and was spending millions of dollars on creating a network of Facebook pages and groups and running aggressive pro-Trump ad campaigns. The move toward explicit support of Republicans, despite Li’s teachings to stay away from U.S. politics, was foreshadowed by Li’s comments at a Falun Gong conference a year before.
Li said that Falun Gong’s media ought to put a “constructive” spin on the news, to advance the group’s aims. It wasn’t wrong, he said, to favorably cover a politician who shared Falun Gong’s conservative values and whose goals aligned with their own.
“If someone comes along now who can help to halt the downward spiral that the world is in, then he is truly someone extraordinary!” Li said. “He would in effect be helping us! Wouldn’t he be helping us to save people?”
The Chinese Communist Party never threatened to force-vax me with an untrialled genetic modification technology or attempted to humiliate me by claiming that a piece of cloth strapped to my face would serve as a medical device or succeeded to humiliate me by erecting clear plastic barriers at public office desks and such. I’m fairly certain that the implacable enemy is much closer to home. Someone honestly fill out a threat matrix, I dare you.
“The Chinese Communist Party never threatened to force-vax me”
What do you really think happened to Chinese?
I would assume that the Han state politely asked the Han hordes to jump and the Han hordes shouted, shrieked, screamed, squealed, and screeched, “HOW HIGH?!”
“What do you really think happened to Chinese?”
I think it’s not our problem. Our problem is WHO did what to us, and how we can stop being WHOM.
WHOM being a polite Leninist term for Bitch.
Many such cases, VXXC. So true.