Frank Gaffney, former acting assistant secretary of defence under the Reagan administration, has advocated for decisive action to cut off financial flows to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in response to its intensifying transnational repression of Chinese dissidents, including Falun Gong practitioners and Shen Yun Performing Arts.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Gaffney described the CCP’s growing cross-border influence operations as a pressing national security concern that demands immediate attention.
“What we’re seeing is evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is probably both feeling emboldened and increasingly threatened,” he said. “That is why we’re seeing them become more aggressive in using all kinds of instruments inside America to suppress dissidents, their opponents, Americans, and any other threat that they perceive to the party and its control. We must try to expose that and challenge it wherever possible.”
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It rapidly gained popularity in China during the 1990s, with between 70 million and 100 million practitioners by the end of the decade.
However, in July 1999, the CCP launched a brutal campaign aiming to eradicate the faith. Since then, untold numbers of practitioners have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, torture, forced labor, and forced organ harvesting.
As the founder and executive chairman of the Center for Security Policy and vice chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, Gaffney emphasized the urgent need to counter the growing influence of the CCP.
“Our job is to make more accessible the abundant and growing information about the various ways in which the CCP is trying to destroy us from within,” he said.
However, he warned that enforcement efforts remain inadequate.
“What the President has enforced—as far as I can tell—none of the agencies that would be tasked with doing it have reported that they’re ready to go,” Gaffney said. “So we need some help lighting this up. I personally believe that if we cut off the cash flow to the CCP, we can bring them down.”
According to Chinese dissident Yuan Hongbing, who disclosed the details, Xi called for aggressive deployment of disinformation and lawfare to undermine Falun Gong globally, including by defaming the practice’s founder, Li Hongzhi.
Yuan, a former law professor at Peking University now living in exile in Australia, has maintained ties to senior figures in Beijing’s political establishment. He revealed that the operation is being directed by the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Public Security, under the supervision of the CCP’s top political-legal committee.
Li Chen contributed to this report.
