(Minghui.org) The Lunar New Year celebration is the most important event of the year in the Vietnamese community of South Australia. Several thousand locals and tourists gathered to celebrate the traditional festival.

Falun Gong practitioners in South Australia were invited to participate in the celebration on February 9, 2018, to introduce Falun Gong to the attendees.

Practitioners set up posters and demonstrate the Falun Gong exercises.A local woman learns Falun Gong.A Vietnamese-Australian woman talks with a practitioner.

The practitioners set up posters on the lawn and demonstrated the exercises. Vietnamese practitioner Ahong brought paper lotus flowers and Falun Gong flyers in Vietnamese language to distribute to the visitors.

Some said they had learned about Falun Gong from Facebook and that they felt Falun Gong was a good practice. Some locals were drawn by the gentle exercises and wanted to learn them on the spot.

Background

Falun Gong was first taught to the public in 1992. Nearly 100 million people across China were soon practicing Falun Gong after experiencing improvements in their health and character. Jiang Zemin, former head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), perceived the spiritual discipline's growing popularity as a threat to the CCP's atheistic ideology and issued an order to ban Falun Gong on July 20, 1999.

Minghui.org has confirmed the deaths of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in the persecution over the past 18 years; the actual number is suspected to be much higher. More have been imprisoned and tortured for their faith. Evidence shows that the CCP harvests organs from detained practitioners, who are killed in the process, to supply its organ transplantation industry.

Under Jiang's personal direction, the CCP established the 610 Office, an extralegal security organization with the power to override the police and judicial systems, and whose sole function is to carry out the persecution of Falun Gong.