On December 10, 2025, Wang Shanshan (Lydia Wang) and Wang Xuan (Steven Wang) (right) attended World Human Rights Day events at the Rayburn House Office Building of the U.S. House of Representatives, calling on the U.S. government to rescue their mother, Falun Gong practitioner Liu Aihua. (Li Chen / The Dajiyuan)
[People News] On December 10, 2025, the first-floor lobby of the Rayburn House Office Building of the U.S. House of Representatives. The turquoise-veined marble walls and floor-to-ceiling glass windows made the entire hall spacious, bright, grand, and imposing.
According to Li Chen, a reporter for The Dajiyuan in Washington, D.C., a crowd gathered on the blue velvet carpet. Standing in the center was a pair of Chinese siblings. Tall and slender, with resolute expressions, they were describing their family’s ordeal to a distinguished member of Congress and accompanying staff. Behind them was a photograph of their mother, Liu Aihua.
Liu Aihua is currently imprisoned in Changsha Women’s Prison in Hunan Province, mainland China. In order to rescue their mother, the elder sister Wang Shanshan (Lydia Wang) and younger brother Wang Xuan (Steven Wang) came to the U.S. Capitol for the second time. That day, they participated in World Human Rights Day events held there.
The family’s experience is a microcosm of the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal persecution of Falun Gong and its attempts to sabotage the U.S.-based Shen Yun Performing Arts. For 26 years, the siblings have walked an unyielding path of peaceful resistance to persecution.
The Whole Family Practices Falun Gong
Wang Xuan (second from right) with his family in China, photographed in 1996. His mother Liu Aihua (center) was sentenced to four years in prison in March 2023 for her faith. (Provided by Wang Xuan)
In 1996, the siblings’ father, Wang Guanghui, began practicing Falun Gong. After benefiting physically and mentally, the rest of the family soon joined the practice.
Falun Gong is a peaceful spiritual practice based on the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. It includes five sets of exercises and has remarkable effects in healing illness and improving health. Genuine practitioners experience moral elevation and physical and mental well-being. Prior to 1999, the number of Falun Gong practitioners in mainland China reached between 70 million and 100 million.
As a child, Wang Xuan was very mischievous and was often beaten by his parents—sometimes lightly, sometimes severely. After practicing Falun Gong, his parents’ tempers improved greatly, and Wang Xuan himself often took the initiative to communicate with them. The family lived in harmony and happiness.
This happy life was soon interrupted by sudden persecution. In 1999, then–CCP leader Jiang Zemin, fearing that the number of Falun Gong practitioners exceeded the number of Communist Party members, ordered an extermination-style persecution.
Father Wang Guanghui Persecuted to Death
Wang Shanshan told The Dajiyuan that she still clearly remembers: “At the beginning, the police broke into our home, beat my father in front of us, and dragged him away. My father was detained in our local detention center… Soon after, my mother was also taken away.”
In the detention center, “we were separated by glass and couldn’t speak. My father wrote on the blackboard on his side with chalk, and we wrote on our side of the glass.”
“My father wrote: Go find your mother, tell her that Master has been framed; tell her to find the police and get me released…”
“But at that time, we didn’t dare tell my father that our mother had also been arrested.”
Wang Guanghui was arrested at least four times. In the end, he was tortured until he was skin and bones and suffered from kidney failure and other illnesses.
After an unknown period of time, “one day, a prison doctor called our home. The doctor told the police: if this person is not released, tomorrow he will be a corpse.”
Wang Shanshan remembers the day her father was released: he had great difficulty walking and was extremely weak. “My father said: I was beaten by the police inside and forced to do hard labor…”
Due to severe torture, Wang Guanghui never recovered. On September 22, 2009, he died unjustly.
Wang Xuan Joins Shen Yun Performing Arts
On March 31, 2023, Shen Yun principal dancer Wang Xuan at his home in New York State. (Samira Bouaou / English Dajiyuan)
At age 12, Wang Xuan was admitted to a professional dance school in China. In 2008, he left China for the United States and joined Shen Yun Performing Arts. Because of the persecution, he was unable to return to China when his father passed away.
Founded in New York in 2006, Shen Yun Performing Arts aims to revive traditional Chinese culture and “present China before communism.” Shen Yun tours globally every year, bringing performances of purity, goodness, and beauty to millions of audience members, which greatly alarms the CCP.
A Shen Yun performance includes about 20 programs, depicting scenes from the Han and Tang golden ages to Ming and Qing imperial courts. On stage, legendary stories unfold one after another. Through superb technique and expressive power, Shen Yun dancers portray tales of loyalty, filial piety, integrity, and righteousness across 5,000 years of history, including both ancient heroes and the real suffering in present-day China.
To awaken conscience and kindness, Wang Xuan chose to use dance on the Shen Yun stage to present the beauty of traditional Chinese culture and the brutal persecution endured by Falun Gong practitioners in mainland China. In recent years, he has served as a dance instructor with Shen Yun.
Since leaving China, Wang Xuan has never again had the opportunity to speak face to face with his mother.
Mother Liu Aihua Repeatedly Arrested and Imprisoned
Over the past 26 years, Liu Aihua has spent more than ten years in prison.
“She has been repeatedly arrested by the CCP. After being arrested, she was sentenced. After serving her sentence, she would be released for a short time, and then arrested again,” Wang Shanshan told The Dajiyuan. “My mother has long been under CCP surveillance.”
One reason Liu Aihua was repeatedly arrested was her identity as a Falun Gong practitioner; another important reason was that her son, Wang Xuan, is a dancer with the U.S.-based Shen Yun Performing Arts.
“Because I performed a lot, they tracked me down,” Wang Xuan told The Dajiyuan. They continuously harassed his mother, telling her: “We don’t know what your son is doing outside. Tell him to come back quickly!” “Your son is with Shen Yun now—do you know that?”
State Security Kidnaps Wang Shanshan, Interrogates Her About Her Brother
One day in 2011, under the direction of the CCP Ministry of State Security, state security police in Changsha, Hunan, found Wang Xuan’s elder sister Wang Shanshan. In an office at the school where she worked, they placed her under de facto house arrest for an entire day.
“They kept threatening me, asking about my younger brother.”
“At that time, a police officer threatened me, saying: Aren’t you afraid your child will lose his mother?”
Wang Shanshan’s child was less than six months old at the time. She said, “I was really scared inside.” But she insisted on saying nothing.
The state security agents detained her all day and got nothing.
To Prevent Wang Xuan From Participating in Shen Yun, CCP Arrests Liu Aihua Again
In August 2011, Liu Aihua was at her second daughter’s home, helping care for her daughter who was about to give birth. On August 20, the morning after her daughter underwent a cesarean section, Liu Aihua was kidnapped in the hospital by Shaoyang City state security police and Yiyang City Ziyang District state security police, who had already been lying in wait near her daughter’s home.
Three days later, when her eldest daughter went to the local “610 Office” (an extralegal CCP agency created specifically to persecute Falun Gong) and state security authorities to demand information, they not only refused to disclose Liu Aihua’s whereabouts but also forced the eldest daughter to sign a notice of her mother’s illegal forced labor sentence and falsified the date of her mother’s abduction. When the daughter refused to sign, police would not allow her to go home.
Wang Shanshan called the local “610 Office” and questioned them: “Why did you arrest my mother?”
The “610 Office” replied: “It’s because of your brother’s work” (referring to Wang Xuan being a Shen Yun dancer).
Wang Shanshan called every day for an entire month and finally told them: “If you don’t release my mother, I will post everything—how you came to my home, how you arrested my mother, how you monitored our family—on the Minghui website and expose your crimes to the whole world!”
Liu Aihua was released in November 2011. After that, police harassment never ceased.
Wang Shanshan Forced to Flee to the United States
In the summer of 2012, Wang Shanshan became pregnant with her second child. To protect his government civil service position, her husband forced her to have an abortion. To protect the unborn child, Wang Shanshan was forced to go to the United States.
After arriving in the U.S., Wang Shanshan received a call from her second sister, warning her not to return to China because their mother had been arrested again.
At 2:00 a.m. on November 10, 2012, Liu Aihua, who was staying temporarily in Zhuhai, Guangdong, was kidnapped from her sleep by dozens of CCP police officers. The next day, police confiscated more than 80,000 yuan in cash and over 10,000 U.S. dollars from her luggage.
This time, Liu Aihua was sentenced to four years in prison and incarcerated at Guangdong Women’s Prison.
From that point on, Wang Shanshan and Wang Xuan began a long journey in the United States to rescue their mother.
Calling on the International Community to Lend a Hand
Over the years, the siblings have appealed to the U.S. president, U.S. Congress, European Parliament, Canadian Parliament, the United Nations, international human rights organizations, and many other institutions to speak out and participate in efforts to rescue their mother.
The persecution suffered by Liu Aihua has never ceased—imprisonment, release, and re-imprisonment…
In 2017, Wang Xuan married in the United States and invited his mother, Liu Aihua, to attend the wedding.
Hunan authorities not only refused to issue her a passport but also attempted to诱导 her into persuading her son to return to China.
“They said, ‘Don’t go watch your son get married. Tell your son to come back and get married!’ At that time, they were trying to lure my mother—it was clearly an attempt to trick me into returning to China,” Wang Xuan said.
Liu Aihua’s most recent arrest occurred in 2022, because she distributed materials on the persecution of Falun Gong on the street.
On December 10, 2025, Cynthia Sun, a senior researcher at the Falun Dafa Information Center, attended World Human Rights Day events at the Rayburn House Office Building of the U.S. House of Representatives. (Li Chen / The Dajiyuan)
At the World Human Rights Day event held on December 10, 2025, at the Rayburn House Office Building of the U.S. Congress, Falun Dafa Information Center researcher Cynthia Sun told The Dajiyuan that the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Falun Gong has further intensified.
She said, “It’s like a completely pitch-black black hole that keeps deepening.”
“In this persecution, tens of thousands of people have died. No one knows how many more will die…”
“Wang Shanshan and Wang Xuan came here today not only on behalf of their own family, but also on behalf of relatives and friends in their city… Their friends were persecuted to death during detention…”
“Their mother, Liu Aihua, because her husband was persecuted to death, has intensified her rights-defense efforts—telling the story of her husband’s suffering and continuing the unfinished mission he left behind,” Cynthia Sun said.
The Chair of the Indo-Pacific Subcommittee of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Young Kim, also made a special trip to the World Human Rights Day event.
At the Falun Gong booth, Representative Young Kim spoke with Wang Shanshan and Wang Xuan, listening to the account of their mother Liu Aihua’s ordeal. Representative Kim also asked on the spot what kind of help she could provide.
On December 10, 2025, Representative Young Kim (fourth from left) posed for a photo with Wang Xuan (second from left) and Wang Shanshan (third from left) at the Rayburn House Office Building of the U.S. House of Representatives. (The Dajiyuan)
Representative Young Kim accepts a media interview at the event site. (English NTD image)
When accepting a media interview at the event, Representative Young Kim said: “I have known Falun Gong practitioners for a long time. They are persecuted simply for exercising their right to religious freedom. The Chinese (CCP) government fears them because there are so many people practicing. When the CCP cracks down, we must continue to apply pressure with the same intensity. We need to speak out to protect their rights, freedoms, and dignity.”
Young Kim said that whether through legislation or roundtable discussions, she hopes that more people can hear experiences like those of Wang Xuan and Wang Shanshan’s mother.
“I believe that listening to their experiences is critically important. It also allows them to see hope and to know that Congress is paying attention to this issue. The more we hear, the more likely we are to find solutions and take corresponding legislative action. This is something we have been doing all along.”
Young Kim said, “Human rights and freedom are non-negotiable; these are fundamental values.”
An aide to Representative Young Kim recorded a video of Wang Shanshan at the event and asked her to express in the video what she hoped President Trump would do for them.
In the video, Wang Shanshan said: “I hope the president can pay attention to my mother, rescue my mother, and allow our family to reunite in the United States.” △
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