By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-09-25 17:26:43 | Updated at 2026-09-25 18:36:59
1 hour ago
As Chinese leader Xi Jinping makes his first state visit to the United States in a decade, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a resolution to remind Americans of the countless lives lost at the hands of China’s communist regime.
Xi is set to depart from Washington following final meetings with President Donald Trump on Sept. 25.
The last time Xi visited the White House was in 2015 during the Obama administration, though he traveled to San Francisco in 2023 for a working visit to attend the APEC summit.
Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Angus King (I-Maine) unveiled the resolution on Sept. 23, the day Xi landed at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.
The resolution noted that there are people currently living in fear of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) “tyrannical ambitions.”
“As the United States engages with Beijing, we cannot forget the millions who have suffered under the CCP or those who continue to live under its repression today,” Lankford said in a statement accompanying the resolution.
“The United States must continue to stand for religious freedom, human rights, and the dignity of every person.”
In the CCP’s quest for power, “untold millions of Chinese citizens” have become casualties, and the resulting loss and suffering amounted to “humanity’s worst atrocities since World War II,” the resolution stated.
The killings started before the CCP took full control of China in 1949.
In 1942, then-Party leader Mao Zedong launched a major purge campaign that cemented his absolute grip over the Party from Yan’an, then the CCP’s headquarters in northern China. More than 10,000 people were killed in the three years of political cleansing, the resolution said.
Shortly after winning the Chinese Civil War and coming to power in 1949, the CCP launched a political cleansing initiative against so-called counterrevolutionaries, targeting anyone with ties to the former Nationalist government or deemed a potential threat to communist rule. According to the resolution, an estimated 712,000 people were executed for their political views, and 1.3 million more were sent to labor camps in remote rural areas.
Over the next seven years, the CCP’s various political campaigns targeted groups ranging from potential enemies to private-sector business owners and, later, intellectuals and academics, the resolution noted.
In 1959, the CCP’s policy to prioritize industrialization over agriculture led to an estimated 30 million people starving to death over three years, according to the resolution. It described the Great Chinese Famine as “one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history.”
The resolution highlighted the CCP repression campaigns that continue to this day.
The nationwide suppression of Falun Gong led to “millions subjected to persecution, arbitrary detention, torture, forced organ harvesting, or death,” it stated.
Falun Gong is a spiritual practice consisting of moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, along with meditative exercises. At least 70 million people had taken up the practice in 1999, when the regime ordered it to be eradicated.
Falun Dafa practitioners take part in a march calling for the end of the Chinese Communist Party’s 27 years of persecution of Falun Gong in China, in Washington on July 23, 2026. Larry Dye/The Epoch Times
In 2019, an independent tribunal in London concluded that the regime had killed prisoners of conscience for their organs to supply its transplant market “on a significant scale” for years, with no evidence that the practice had stopped. The main victims, the tribunal said, were detained Falun Gong practitioners.
In recent years, other persecuted religious and ethnic minority groups were also targeted by the CCP for state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, including house Christians and Uyghur Muslims.
The resolution noted that an estimated 1 million Uyghurs were placed in a sprawling network of internment camps and other detention facilities in the far-western region of Xinjiang. The U.S. government has referred to the CCP’s repression in Xinjiang as “genocide.”
The resolution also cited the CCP’s growing erosion of freedom and judicial independence in Hong Kong, which it said has led to “a series of deadly protests and demonstrations.”
The CCP poured billions of dollars every year to “either control or exterminate people of all faiths,” the resolution stated.
It noted that such repression has extended beyond China’s borders.
The CCP “continues to harass, surveil, threaten family members of, and pursue the deportation of religious minorities and dissidents living outside China as part of its transnational repression efforts, including through high-tech and emerging technologies,” the resolution says.
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) walks in the U.S. Capitol during a vote in Washington on July 21, 2021. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
King, who led the resolution, said, while Americans hold differing views on policy, “we all believe that freedom and democracy are at the core of our country’s values.”
“That’s why we have chosen to highlight the immeasurable consequences that the Chinese communist party has done to its own people—and the global community—since it came to power more than 100 years ago,” he added.
