I’m always unsure how I feel about the Epoch Times. In one hand. They’re a Chinese organization ran and operated by a cult. On the other hand, China genuinely hates their cult and has criminalized them, so they aren’t CCP affiliated. On Ike hand, they fund the majority of their stuff with the touring acrobatic show Shen Yun, which is feels like a Scientology convention with flips, on the other hand it’s the most anti-communist performance you can see in the modern day.
They are a perplexing organization.
Falun Gong is the modern-day Chinese equivalent to the Unification Church in Korea - basically a cult based around exploitation of its constituent members while taking advantage of general anti-Communist sentiments in the West for good publicity and influence among world leaders. This parallel runs even deeper when you realise that both Falun Gong and the Unification Church have their own right-leaning news publications (Epoch Times for Falun Gong, Washington Times for Unification Church).
It's important to remember that bad actors can
and will exploit the old adage of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Are the writers for both Epoch Times and Washington Times beholden to the will of the cults who own them at all times? Not necessarily, but both outlets can
and will shill talking points that their upper echelons want to promote, whether the journalists on the ground want to or not. You know you're watching a Falun Gong outlet when, at some point, the flow of journalism is interrupted by claims of organ harvesting targeted at Falun Gong practitioners along with references to "traditional Chinese culture" out of left field.
Falun Gong, at least in my opinion, is much more insidious than appearances let on because they have a stranglehold on seemingly legitimate anti-CPC news outlets. The news that Falun Gong outlets report on aren't necessarily fake news; many of the happenings within China that they report on
are true. What often gets lost on foreign consumers of their media (i.e. anyone in the West) is that the CPC's tight controls on information means anything that makes its way to the foreign press is already commentated upon a thousand times over domestically before a draft's submitted to the editor. The language barrier also makes it easier to take things at face value, but that's a tangent for a different day.
Obviously, the CPC gets what it fucking deserves for not allowing freedom of the press: we're basically limited to state-run outlets like Xinhua, People's Daily, CGTN, and China News Service, Falun Gong-sponsored outlets like China Uncensored, China Observer, China Insights (from 2020-2024, anyway), and China Vision Times (among others), USAID-funded outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, once-free outlets from Hong Kong that now toe the party line like South China Morning Post, and what I like to call "foreign Chinese press" from outlets like United Daily News in Taiwan and Channel News Asia in Singapore.
Having said all of that: the opacity that the CPC forces the entire mainland to endure makes it
immensely difficult to get a proper "feel" for what the true state of affairs is. This is an environment that doesn't just benefit the CPC, but also benefits cults who want to take advantage of the gullible and stupid. Never forget that
no one is immune to propaganda, be it state-funded, cultist-funded, funded by USAID, or otherwise.
