Two days before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Malaysia in April, police officers arrested more than 70 Falun Gong practitioners and allegedly held them until after Xi left the country, echoing a pattern of detention identified by ICIJ in its recent China Targets investigation.
Kuala Lumpur Police Chief Datuk Rusdi Mohd Isa told ICIJ partner Malaysiakini, which first reported the detentions, the group had been arrested under suspicion of being involved in an “illegal organization.” He refuted allegations that officers had received instructions to preemptively detain the practitioners ahead of Xi’s visit to the country and said he directed Kuala Lumpur’s criminal investigations chief to “take strong action against the group.”
As part of China Targets, which exposed Beijing’s tactics for silencing its critics worldwide, ICIJ found that during Xi’s overseas trips between 2019 and 2024 local law enforcement detained or arrested dozens of activists, often for spurious reasons. Those targeted by local police included Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, as well as members of the Falun Gong movement.
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China outlawed Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, in 1999, labeling the spiritual movement “an evil cult.”
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