The number of people who currently follow Falun Gong is difficult to pin down with precision, largely because the movement’s main historical heartland, mainland China, has banned the practice and driven it underground. Before the ban, estimates within China ranged widely, with some sources speaking of tens of millions of adherents, while others suggested far fewer. After the prohibition, public practice in China was curtailed, and those who continue often do so privately, away from official scrutiny. As a result, any attempt to assign an exact figure to the number of practitioners inside China remains speculative and contested.

Outside China, Falun Gong has taken root across a broad geographical canvas, and here its presence is more visible, though still not formally counted. Practitioners can be found in North America and Europe, where communities gather in major cities for group exercises and study. In the Asia–Pacific region, there are notable communities in places such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and various Southeast Asian countries. Smaller groups also exist in South America, Africa, and the Middle East, reflecting a diffusion that follows both migration patterns and spiritual curiosity across cultures.

When observers attempt to describe the global scale of Falun Gong today, they typically speak in ranges rather than precise tallies. Falun Gong–affiliated organizations have at times claimed tens of millions of practitioners worldwide, figures that echo the higher estimates from the movement’s early years. Academic and independent assessments, by contrast, tend to suggest much lower numbers, often in the hundreds of thousands to the low millions. This wide divergence of estimates is not merely a statistical puzzle; it reflects the tension between a persecuted movement’s self-understanding and the methodological caution of outside researchers.

What can be said with some confidence is that Falun Gong persists as a transnational spiritual community, even if its exact size remains opaque. In many countries where it is legal, the practice is expressed openly in parks, cultural events, and meditation classes, while in mainland China it survives in more hidden forms. The movement thus occupies a liminal space: simultaneously public and underground, numerically uncertain yet clearly present in many corners of the world. For those who observe it as a spiritual phenomenon, this very elusiveness becomes part of its story, reminding seekers that not all realities of faith and practice can be neatly captured in statistics.