NCF Honor's Thesis, BenGoodman

AT THE LIAISON’S GATES: SPIRIT AND SECURITY IN HONG KONG
BY
BENJAMIN GOODMAN
A Thesis
Submitted Jointly to the Division of Social Sciences and Division of Humanities
New College of Florida
In partial fulfillment for the degree
Bachelor of Arts
Under the sponsorship of Maria D. Vesperi
Sarasota, Florida
April, 2012

Goodman - At the Liaison's Gates ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………. iii
Timeline ………………………………………………………………………………. iv
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………… 1
Chapter 1: Cultural Background………………………………………………………. 6
Chapter 2: Historical Background………………………………………………………18
Chapter 3: Path, Impressions, and Politics…..……………………………………….... 33
Chapter 4: “Culturally Specific Spiritual Torture”….…………………………………. 68
Conclusion: Connections, Contributions, and What''s Next………………………….. 115
Appendix (Interview Transcriptions/Chinese Translations)…………………..……… 127
References...................................................................................................................... 144

Goodman – At the Liaison’s Gates iii
At the Liaison’s Gates: Spirit and Security in Hong Kong
Benjamin Goodman
New College of Florida, 2012
ABSTRACT
This thesis looks at the Falun Gong, a group who practice a religion known as
Falun Dafa. Falun Dafa ultimately grew into a cannonized religion, but it began as one of
China’s state-sponsored qigong schools - calisthenics and breathing meditation regiments
designed to promote heath and wellness.
The project looks at the Falun Gong as a threat the Chinese Communist Party
perceived to their hegemonic leadership. Instead of the revolutionary calls of college
youth or the revolts of peasant farmers, the organized protests in the 1990s by the Falun
Gong's membership came broadly from what anthropologist Nancy Chen calls “the
backbone of the nation”: all social strata ranging from the illiterate to ranking political
voices. Falun Gong was banned in China in 1999.
In Hong Kong, China in summer 2011 and South Florida in fall 2011, I
interviewed members of the group who self-identify as “activists” and “active
practitioners” – members who work for Falun Gong private media companies and other
members who spend much of their waking days spreading pro-Falun Gong materials over
the internet on a large scale.
In analyzing the common themes of these personal testimonies, religious texts,
and Falun Gong news media, I seek to explicate the multifaceted force that might account
for, based on the groups self-proclaimed spiritual torture, a culturally-specific spiritual
torture.
Advisor: Maria Vesperi
Division of Social Sciences and Division of Humanities

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TIMELINE:
For this timeline, I have included excerpts from an official Falun Gong timeline
(one that is shared across several main Falun Gong websites) as well as dates from
scholarly sources. The citations are noted for each bullet.
1980s
A fitness movement known as the “qigong wave” swept China. Millions took up
traditional, tai-chi-like health exercises known as “qigong,” filling parks across the
country by the break of dawn. Some 2,000 different qigong disciplines were reportedly
practiced by tens of millions. Books, magazines, and scientific research on qigong
abounded (from http://www.faluninfo.net/topic/24/).
May 13-22, 1992
Mr. Li Hongzhi gave first public teaching on Falun Gong in China’s northeastern city of
Changchun – then Li’s residence. An estimated 180 people attended. Public “practice
sites,” where adherents gathered to do Falun Gong’s exercises together, soon
followed (http://www.faluninfo.net/topic/24/).
1992-1994: Li taught 53 Falun Gong seminars in Changcun, Harbin, and Beijing
organized through local branches of the China Qigong Science Research Society. During
this time, 20,000 to 200,000 people learned Li’s qigong style (Tong 2009:8).

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April 1993
The first book teaching the practice, Zhonguo Falungong (中国法轮功, China Falun
Gong), was published by Military Yiwen Press (军事谊文出版社), making the practice
accessible to a much wider audience. A revised edition was released in December of the
same year (from http://www.faluninfo.net/topic/24/).
September 1994
Nationwide suppression of qigong inspired Li to take action. Li moved to New York
City and afterward notified the China Qigong Science Research Society that he would
“terminate training sessions in China.” Li then applied for official withdrawal from the
Qigong Science Research Society; his withdrawal was not formally accepted until 1996
(Tong 2009:9).
January 1995
Zhuan Falun (转法轮), the complete teachings of Falun Gong and focal book of the
practice, was published by Radio & Television Broadcasting Press of China (中国广播电
视出版社). A publication ceremony, held on January 4, took place in an auditorium of
the Ministry of Public Security (from http://www.faluninfo.net/topic/24/).
1997
China’s Public Security Bureau conducted an investigation into whether Falun Gong

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should be deemed a “heretical teaching” (邪教, i.e., “cult”). Investigators concluded, “No
evidence has appeared thus far” (from http://www.faluninfo.net/topic/24/).
April 19, 1999
Professor He Zuoxiu published an article in a Tianjin University science journal called
“Why Young People shouldn’t practice qigong” – the article was only slightly critical of
Li Hongzhi (Johnson 2004:246).
April 20-23, 1999
6,000 practitioners protested at Tianjin University to demand Professor He’s article be
retracted. Johnson notes that their efforts may have been “overzealous” (Johnson
2004:246).
April 25, 1999
Estimates ranging from 10,000 to 20,000 Falun Gong practitioners protested in Beijing in
front of the Letters and Appeals Office at the Zhongnanhai CCP (Chinese Communist
Party) Compound, the Chinese presidential residence.
July 22, 1999
Ninety days after Zhongnanhai, the CCP official banned Falun Gong, started making
arrests and launched a comprehensive anti-Falun Gong campaign (Tong 2009: 9).

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1999-Present:
While facts are hard to find, there are some generally agreed upon statistics. The
most important, as historian David Ownby identifies, suggest that hundreds of thousands
have been arrested, detained, beaten, and tortured (2008:3). And further: “According to
Falun Gong sources, which are generally accepted as accurate by international human
rights agencies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch some 3,000
practitioners have died while in police custody or in prison” (2008:162).
A range of 2000-3000 total deaths is what I have customarily seen listed, but these
predictions are not perfect when, as in the case of a Human Right Watch report cited by
Ownby, “Almost all the information available to Human Rights Watch comes from either
official Chinese government or Falungong sources, both of which obviously have a stake
in releasing data that supports their respective claims” (Human Rights Watch 2002) .
Independent investigations are few and hard to verify. And further, the CCP considers
the Falun Gong an issue of national security, so finding facts becomes even more difficult.
I believe, while maintaining that no violence here is justifiable, CCP sources and Falun
Gong sources alike have, most likely out of desperation, printed at least some accounts of
questionable authenticity

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INTRODUCTION
Defining exactly what constitutes religion in China is a complicated question.
Pulitzer Prize winner Ian Johnson (2005) writes that the source of this complexity lies in
ambiguity. In China it is said fairly widely that Chinese spiritual systems “happily
overlap” with each other, drawing on ancestor worship, Daoism, spirits, and world
religions such as Buddhism (2005:200). To regulate this “cacophony of beliefs,” the
Chinese Communist Party (or CCP), instituted a Soviet-style religious bureaucracy over
“folk religions” and “superstitions” (2005:200-201) As a result, since 1949 China has had
only five recognized religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism, and Daoism.
Focusing on Falun Dafa, a school of thought that merges traditional aspects of
Chinese fitness with Buddhist and Daoist religious thought, I will analyze interviews that
I conducted during 2011 with Chinese exiles in Hong Kong and the United States, in
Mandarin and English. I will also examine government propaganda and its effect on
China’s laobaixing, or everyday, ordinary people (Fallows, 2010). Further, I will
analyze the concerted efforts by religious activists to form counterpropaganda and
counternarratives as a form of justice. Falun Gong is enormously controversial in
contemporary China and involves tens of millions of people (see Zhao 2003:219, Yu
136:2009). It encompasses social networks that are outside government control (Chen,
N.N 2003) and, crucially, it involves practitioners who reject the norms of contemporary

Chinese society. For my purposes, I separate the terms Falun Dafa as religion from Falun
Gong as a group (much like the terms Islam from Muslim, respectfully).
For this entire project I have used pseudonyms. Even though some practitioners
have said they are not afraid to attach their names to the quotes in this project, they do
fear that their words could implicate others who are yet to be blacklisted; those who still
would like to return to Mainland China safely some time.
In this thesis I will attempt to situate Falun Dafa as China’s “sixth religion” -- as a
system of practices that attempts to work outside the narrow legal avenues of religious
practice allowed by the Chinese Communist Party. I will specifically analyze
practitioners' personal narratives of participation in Falun Gong and their narratives of
imprisonment due to their practice. I aim to better understand what I understand to be the
culturally-specific aspects of what the group calls the “spiritual torture” of their illegal
and suppressed group status in Mainland China.
From my conversations with practitioners and my analysis of the conflicting
narratives used by the group's advocates and adversaries, I have identified something I
will refer to as culturally-specific spiritual torture. In this thesis, I will show how the
measures taken against practitioners are uniquely connected to their religious devotion to
Falun Dafa; their stories tell of oppressions that carry a very different import for a
practitioner than they would for a layperson.

NARRATIVES
Falun Dafa's present form has been irrevocably shaped by government
propaganda that has been influencing Chinese people since the CCP banned the belief
system in 1999. Falun Gong, as a group, has been shaped by these propaganda efforts as
well. In addition, the movement has been reported by sometimes incomplete Western
journalism. And Falun Gong-owned media outlets have framed their own forms of
counter-propaganda. I view this interplay as a type of ongoing conversation; all the
while this conversation is affecting both Chinese and Western people. It is a phenomenon
that affects so many people in China that few who know anything about the movement
can escape forming some opinion of it and the violence that has arisen around it.
Historian David Ownby has a model that can be helpful in tandem with my
approach. Ownby maintains there are (at least) three sets of narratives available to help
make sense of the Falun Gong movement as it is covered in the news today. The first is
to see Falun Gong as part of a larger spiritual vacuum in 20th
Century Chinese history.
The second narrative involves “linking Falun Gong to rioting peasants and disgruntled
workers, to rising dissatisfaction with cadre corruption and abuse of political power…”
(Ownby 2008:5). This narrative connects Falun Gong to larger social and political
tensions of reform-era China. The third narrative views Falun Gong in terms of China’s
rich history of uprisings, protests, and various organized “redemptive societies” (2008:
33-53).

I can connect Ownby's model to my own experiences with Falun Gong
practitioners. The first narrative describes where practitioners see the movement coming
out of, the second shows the current status of the group, and the third narrative shows
(for some) the possible future.
The first of these narratives will be examined in Chapters 1 and 2 – that of Falun
Gong as qigong1
and health. Chapters 1 and 2 looks at the cultural and historical
background by examining the nature of qigong exercise groups in China (see figure 1.1)
and the nature of syncretic, or mixed, religious groups in Chinese history.
The second of Ownby's narratives, that of Falun Gong practitioners as watchdogs
for reform-era China's newfound corruptions and moral ills, will be examined closely in
Chapters 3-4. In those chapters I discuss the government ban, Falun Gong media, and
specific themes within practitioner narratives. I must note that the practitioners with
whom I spoke are directly involved in activism and media, and so they are directly
fueling this narrative perspective which challenges the CCP’s ability to provide for its
citizens.
The third of Ownby's narratives, the narrative of coming revolution, will be
examined in my thesis conclusion, Chapter 5. Much of this narrative is tricky because is
deals with the unspoken. The CCP, it seems to scholars (Chang 2004, Ownby 2008), is
1 Qigong (pronounced Chee-gong) is a system of slow-moving calisthenic exercises
that can be found in different forms across different schools of practice. Qi means breath
or energy and gong means “to work with.” Qigong then, means playing with and
manipulating qi energy. Though qigong has links to long-taught Daoist practices, its
current incarnation, and even the term “qigong,” are a product of the 20th
century (Ownby
2008:10; Palmer 2007: 18).

secretly afraid of political resistance from Falun Gong because of historical experiences
with other syncretic and/or mystical religious Chinese groups. But publicly the
government does not discuss this. Instead it uses arguments to defame the group that
deride its moral character and not its historical/political parallels to rebel groups and
toppled regimes. It is this derision of moral character that most distinguishes the stories I
was told. The government does not treat the group's members as petty criminals or as
troublemakers. Instead, from what I have seen, it treats the group as deeply misguided
and brainwashed citizens who have fallen astray. Practitioners told me the suppression
of their group is done through a spiritual torture that is more effective even than the
physical pain of incarceration and alleged tortures. I argue that this spiritual torture
occurs both inside and out of prisons due to the effects of anti-Falun Gong propaganda.
This constitutes part of my theory of “culturally-specific spiritual torture.
Figure 1.1: A pair outside the Beijing Language and Culture University Gymnasium doing qigong
exercise (taken January 2010).

CHAPTER 1 - CULTURAL BACKGROUND
Falun Dafa appeared to start out rather innocuously. The group was founded in
1992, when a man named Li Hongzhi began lecturing and holding seminars to introduce
the practice. Li's lectures drew from elements of homegrown Chinese Daoism, including
related qigong exercises similar to tijiquan (known common in the West as T’ai Chi), and
from what he calls the “Buddha School.” He claimed that Falun Dafa goes beyond
Buddhism's supposed limitations in the attainment of understanding, and distinguished
Falun Dafa as “Qigong of the Buddha School” instead of “Buddhism” because
“Buddhism is not concerned with exercises or practice of Qigong” (Li 1999:24).
Contemporary practitioners exercise in groups in public spaces, often parks,
where they do calisthenics and sitting meditations. When they are not doing cultivation
exercises in the parks, practitioners also spend time reading the works of Master Li. At
first, the group was focused only on outdoor group exercises and on personal interactions
with Li (Ownby 2008: 139). But Ownby notes a change over time: a shift in emphasis
toward written liturgy. This new emphasis truly separated Falun Gong from the scores of
other new qigong schools: for the first time among these new groups “the exercises
[became] clearly of lesser importance than the scriptures” (2008:92).
James Tong writes that “there was no Falun Gong before May 1992” (Tong 2002:
636) – the time when Li began making presentations in Changchun, Jilin, the area of
Manchuria in Northeast China, near his home town. The first followers came from this
region. Li began lecturing on larger and larger tours across China. From 1992 to 1999,

the movement’s membership skyrocketed. In 1992, there were no members and by 1999
there were either 2 million or 100 million members, depending on the source consulted.
Two million is the number the government posited (Tong 2009:9), while practitioners
themselves put that number at 100 million (Palmer 2007:260; faluninfo.net/article/356).
Scholars such as Ownby (2008) and Maria Chang (2004) have put this number nearer to
70 million. Tong adds, “Even by the regime's conservative enumeration, it was one of
the largest non-government organizations in the history of the People's Republic” (Tong
2002: 636).
In July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party began banning the practice of Falun
Dafa and started arresting practitioners. Since much of the practice was outdoors and in
public, and since practitioners choose never to lie (a moral imperative as part of the
tenets of Falun Dafa), it was easy for Chinese police to enforce the prohibition. Despite
the ban, many within China still try to practice clandestinely. Falun Dafa now has
practitioners all around the world, although reliable statistics are hard to find. There are,
however, online sites run by branches of the group which outline meeting times and
information for practitioners worldwide (see, for example http://falundafa-florida.org/#).
WHAT IS QIGONG?
Qigong has been translated as “playing and manipulating qi” (Jahnke 2002 1). It
has also been called “the power of qi” (Yang 2010:1) and “energy cultivation” (Chang
2004:31). This idea of qi held ancient weight and was no trivial concept. Author Dr.

Roger Jahnke notes that in traditional Chinese cosmology, qi was “a resource so essential
it is impossible to define or translate” and can be thought of as the “primordial” substance
that “existed before dichotomies of light and dark” (Jahnke 2002). Even if it is viewed
by many non-Chinese as folk superstition, it should not be discounted, since it had
astounding implications: By the mid-1990s, qigong schools had tens of millions of
practitioners. Whether practitioners were searching for health and “balance” (Jahnke
2002) or for spiritual/cosmological significance appears to have changed over time,
depending on the popularity of different celebrity teachers. The cosmological rhetoric
that qi was the all-encompassing “primordial stuff” of the nascent universe must also be
considered. In the 1980s and '90s, qigong grandmasters expanded as this rhetoric and
attracted truly astounding followings of devout zealots and testimonials of radical healing
transformations. These schools of practice were numerous and popped up en masse when,
according to Ownby, “in late 1970s the party relaxed control over society and volunteer
organizations” (2008:30).
A WORD ON RELIGION IN COMMUNIST CHINA
As Marxist ideology in China was replaced with a drive towards capitalism, and,
importantly, as the personality cult of Mao Zedong changed with his death in September,
1975 - becoming more abstract and deified - a spiritual crisis began to emerge. This was
one of the first things practitioner Edgar told me in interviews in Hong Kong – that there

was a spiritual vacuum. Chinese citizens began to become cynical about the idea that
their party leaders and the CCP were their de-facto god (Johnson 2005:201).
Author Peter Hessler used the same term in writing about a “spiritual vacuum.”
Many Chinese became caught among two “semi-faiths” -- materialism and nationalism
(Hessler 2006:125). Left with only the five officially recognized world religion churches
to choose from, many Chinese were drawn into the narrowly defined governmental
religious bureaucracy. Yang (2010) describes the “forced substitution” of religion in this
situation. The choice of religion, a choice that meant deciding which uniform church to
join, was neither coercive nor voluntary but somewhere in-between (Yang 2010:16).
The five so-called Patriotic Churches were problematic, however. Hessler
describes them as “compromises” on two levels. The first is the more obvious problem –
these churches have made negotiations and compromises with the CCP. This creates
situations where Chinese churches have acted on their own in ways that others have
found controversial. In July, 2011, for example, the Vatican excommunicated a bishop
who had been ordained in China without permission from Rome (Green 2011). This
development was but part of a larger rocky history between China and the Vatican.
Hessler also sees a deeper problem with the “compromised” legal churches. Their
resurgence has been both artificial and forced. Faiths faded for so long that people were
not used to the habit of worship. This made a fundamental difference, compared to
communities that have grown up with a church at the center of life. When a church
materializes through government decree, especially in the case of the non-native Chinese

religions Protestantism and Catholicism, the sense of community it brings for members is
welcomed, but at the same time forced and plastic (Hessler 2006:124). Additionally, the
state's controls over religion were very regimented and specific. “Amity Printing
Company holds a monopoly on printing bibles,” remarks Yang (2010). He notes that,
starting in 1979, the CCP controlled all the seminaries and the training of clergy,
ministers, imams and the like.
A WORD ON LANGUAGE AND MEANING
The terms “cultivation” and “religion” are more ambiguous in China than in some
other parts of the world. For example, according to Hessler, athletics in traditional
Chinese society had elements that “Westerners might describe as philosophical or even
religious. Competition wasn’t the primary goal of traditional athletics, and the ancient
Chinese never built coliseums” (Hessler 2006:263). Even the idea of qigong is
ambiguous by Western standards by being both exercise and religion. The term qigong
was only started in the 1950s and has come to represent a catch-all phrase for concepts,
philosophy, and exercises that are centuries old (Johnson 2004:202). This is related to
many of the elements of “folk-religion” that were, as decreed by the CCP in 1949,
lumped as Daoism. Containing these practices within Daoism meant they were still
subject to control under the ruling Communist Party religious bureaucracy, a strict set of
five systems: one for Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Daosim (Ownby
2008:7). Because traditional practices such as qigong exercise needed to be accounted

for someplace in the bureaucracy to remain legitimate, they were included within Daoism
because Daoism is not any one thing. Its very essence is a collection of varied Chinese
philosophies. I will explore this further in my section entitled “Daoism and Buddhism:
Syncretic China.” Qigong exercises are very connected to those “folk-religions” and
very connected to Daoism, yet their classification is tough to pin down. Classification is
central to everything within the Chinese religious bureaucracy – yet qigong, though
having a place in that bureaucracy, is not considered “religion.” Thus the term qigong is
ambiguous and requires parsing. To an extent, viewed historically, even the term Daoism
has ambiguous meanings and does not point to any one exact idea. It is impossible to
look at the Falun Gong movement without understanding the ambiguities and issues of
translation embedded in terms such as qigong, religion, and teaching.
The term religion is a neologism in Chinese. The idea of religion is complex
when it comes to spirituality in China. For centuries, Chinese used the term jiao,
meaning teaching. This idea of a teaching encompassed much of what many Western
cultures tend to subdivide into philosophy, social relations, and other subjects. The use
of the word jiao, for instance, explains how Confucianism could have stayed situated
firmly as an underlying encompassing philosophy while eluding precise analog
translation and not fitting into any one designation. The system covers the relationships
among family members, relationships in the workplace, political relationships between
ruler and ruled, and largely avoids talking about gods. One could call it a socio-political
system, and that only emphasizes the point here: Confucianism was designated this

semantic wider-reaching term, jiao, which broadly means “teaching.” Buddhism and
Daoism were given this same designation of jiao.
The idea of religion as distinct from philosophy or a system of healing is a term
that comes to China from Meiji Japan. Tracing that usage back one will find that it was
not even native Japanese who popularized the (roughly) equivalent term, shukyo. Instead
it was Christian missionaries who popularized the term.
The difference in the terms Falun Gong and Falun Dafa must also be addressed.
Falun Dafa roughly refers to the philosophy of a particular practice as taught by Li
Hongzhi. Practitioners often wave signs reading “Falun Dafa is Good,” referring to the
laws and teachings of Falun (the Buddha Wheel). Falun Gong specially refers to the
group involved in the movement who practice Falun Dafa.
The term Shifu (roughly meaning guide or spiritual master) is also particularly
important – it is the honorific used by practitioners to address Li Hongzhi. To them, he
is Master Li or Teacher Li. Only by understanding the nuances and implications this
term carries can one begin to understand the relationship between Li and practitioners,
and vice versa; this term carries connotations of a personal father figure.
Next, for the sake of context, I will look at Li’s first published book, China Falun
Gong, which is a primer or introduction to Falun Dafa. Published in China in 1992, the
work had its first English translation in in 1994.

CHINA FALUN GONG
China Falun Gong (alternatively called simply Falun Gong) begins with a picture
of Li (see figure 1.2), and a picture of the Falun Emblem– the symbol of Falun Dafa (see
figure 1.3). At first glance, the emblem looks to be picked and choosen from various
Eastern religions. The seal has ancient Buddhist and Daoist symbols, and my first
impression was that the symbol was a catch-all of Asian religion as a means of generating
a mass popular following. But after further research into religion in China, I could see it
has more in common with the Chinese concept of jiao, or teaching.
Figure 1.2: Teacher/Founder Li Hongzhi. From the Opening Pages of China Falun Gong

Figure 1.3: The Falun emblem. From the opening pages of China Falun Gong
Falun Dafa as a practice is rooted in what Li calls the “Buddha School” and the
“Daoist School” but he speaks of it somewhat vaguely. Li affirms that Falun Gong is
representative of the Hinayana Buddhist School within Theravada Buddhism (as opposed
to Mahayana Buddhism). But at the same time, Li only uses parts of this Buddhism
tradition – while he says that Falun Gong is of this “Buddha School” it is unequivocally
“not Buddhism” (Li 1999:22).

China Falun Gong outlines five types of eyesight, which are essentially analogous
to some of the Buddhist aggregates as ways of knowing. It also explains the cultivation
process of Tianmu, which is close to the Western translation of the third eye. Literally,
“Heaven’s Eye” -- or the celestial eye or Buddha’s eye – it takes different shape for
different practitioners. Li Hongzhi lays out how some new practitioners will find
cultivating this eye very easy; some people are inclined innately toward it. For others the
process demands more time and patience. Li claims to have had an easy cultivation of
tianmu. Children, it is written, have an easier time cultivating tianmu because, being
young, they are more pure of heart (Li 1999:13). They have not yet accumulated much
bad karma connected to a worldly existence. These children, and others who are inclined
toward cultivating tianmu, can access alternative dimensions and can one day attain
certain superpowers (Li 1999:88).
This promise of extraordinary superpowers, or teyigongneng in Chinese, is not
unique to Falun Gong and is a main reason for the qigong boom in the late 1970s. Li and
others have described these powers as very specific, such as “being able to read a letter
inside a sealed envelope” (Palmer 2007:161). A more general kind of power lies in the
claims of several practitioners and interviewees with whom I talked. Falun Gong, they
said, is exceptional for one’s health. Practitioners claimed to never get sick. They said a
population all doing Falun gong would be beneficial for the state budget: there would be
virtually no tax money spent on hospital visits. This idea of superhuman health through
cultivation proves to be, I argue, rife with the most twisted ironies. (In Chapter 3, I
explore this idea of health as a theme in Falun Gong testimonies and rhetoric. Subjects'

narratives will be supported by or juxtaposed with existing scholarship. In this way the
reader can see how Falun Gong narratives can function both as counterpropaganda and as
religious imagery).
Again, part of the appeal of Falun Gong and some other qigong schools is their
combination of referencing both tradition and modern science. Li writes that “Chinese
medicine was well aware of qigong and they were masters in it,” while also asserting that
qigong, after it receives more research, will be undisputedly considered a part of modern
science. Other parts of the book outline interpersonal powers such as “Assistant
Consciousness” and “Energy Borrowing,” and also outline the “Cosmic Language of the
Universe” (Li 1999:21).
China Falun Gong also lays out the incorrect ways to engage in cultivation
practice. As Li writes: “An evil way may be produced in a righteous practice.” For
example, one must keep one’s mind off greed and gain during the practice of the exercise.
One cannot be half-hearted or lazy -- what Li ridicules as “side-door, clumsy cultivation.”
The only way to progress with cultivation and continue opening one’s tianmu, or spiritual
third eye, is by doing the prescribed exercise outdoors (1999:26). All progress into
higher levels of cultivation is to be found through Falun Gong's five exercises, one of
which is a sitting mediation (1999:78).
The rest of China Falun Gong looks at the cultivation exercises in depth and
shows Master Li in yellow robes doing the poses and demonstrating breathing. The
exercises are not terribly complex but there is an emphasis on exact form. Sitting
meditation is carefully described – practitioners often do sitting meditations for an hour

or more. The sitting meditation in Lotus Position clearly resembles that of many
Buddhist schools. The calisthenic exercises are not unlike T’ai Chi and other qigong, but
some critics claim Li simply invented the poses based on Thai traditional dancing and
that they have no true Chinese origin (see Ownby 2008:85).
Li promises his teachings will develop a practitioner's xinxing, a term meaning the
acceptance of the “gain” and “loss” required to become a good person. In terms of
“gain,” he writes it is important to gain “conformity to characteristic of the universe”
which includes the cultivation of Zhen-Shan-Ren or “truthfulness-benevolence-
forbearance” (Li 1999:54). The other side of “gaining” these characteristics is “losing”
other unwanted ones. Unwanted characteristics hinder a practitioner from reaching his or
her potential. Li writes: “'Loss' is to give up those ill thoughts and conducts [behaviors]
of greed, personal gain lust, desire, killing, battering, stealing, robbing, deceiving,
jealously, etc.” (1999:54). It is through some of these “loss conducts” that I develop my
thesis: while in custody, practitioners must face conducts of greed and gain head-on --
conducts that, as they have told me, have come to represent the moral decay of Chinese
society. It is these conducts that comprise a “spiritual torture” for the group while they
are suppressed as a banned “evil cult” (xiejiao) in China. The narratives and testimonies
I have collected demonstrate how “culturally specific spiritual torture” can be understood
within propaganda and counter-propaganda.

Goodman - At the Liaison’s Gates 18
CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Qigong was developed in the 1950s. The reasons can be understood as economic
and nationalistic. After the Chinese civil war, the communists were left governing a
country that was “economically backward, predominantly agrarian and contained
considerable opposition to communist rule" (Saich 2011 34). They were also left with a
healthcare system in tatters. There was a deficit of modern physicians and a surplus of
traditional Chinese medicine doctors: 400,000 traditional doctors for the country, as
opposed to only 12,000 medical doctors. Left with few options, the CCP encouraged the
practice of Chinese medicine, also framing its support of traditional doctors as an end to
the “suffering under the imperialists” (Palmer 2007:33).
As the Sino-Soviet split worsened, the CCP became increasingly nationalistic.
Consequently “an unprecedented expansion of Chinese medicine” arrose, including a
wave of innovations. A key innovation was qigong. While the term was a neologism
invented in 1949, its developments was not recognized or lauded heavily until 1955.
Broadly speaking, qigong took elements of tradition Chinese folk wisdom and Chinese
medicinal approaches (holistic approaches, breathing) and applied it to experiments in the
more clinical environments of hospitals, institutes, and sanatoriums (Palmer 2007 37).
Reports were published citing remarkable cures. Party cadres became increasingly
involved in qigong's development. Historian David Palmer notes, for instance, that “Liu
Shaoqi [2nd
Chairman of the People's Republic] is reported to have personally intervened
to secure funding for the construction of new buildings and the purchase of equipment for
the [Beihai Qigong] Sanatorium” (Palmer 37). Qigong, and traditional Chinese medicine

as a whole were also supported in the Great Leap Forward. Western biomedicine was
seen as bourgeois and counter to the revolution (Palmer 41).
All of the scholarship points to two individuals whose involvement with qigong
cannot be ignored – Liu Guizhen and Guo Lin. Liu Guizhen coined the term qigong in an
article, “The Practice of Qigong Therapy,” published in 1953. He then opened the first
clinics for qigong while his personal story gained acclaim across China. He “claimed he
had cured himself of a life-threatening illness by using a special set of breathing exercises
he learned from a peasant” (Thornton 2011 220).
Guo Lin was a famous Beijing actress who highly endorsed qigong. She made a
circuit of lectures in which she attested that the exercises had “miraculously cured her of
cancer” (Thornton 2011 220) and went on to form her own brand of qigong. Much like
other teachers who would come after her, Guo Lin faced criticism that her method was
“fooling people” or dangerous. Yet she still received “support from Party Cadres,” was
invited to speak at many universities and “official units,” and eventually “thousands of
people began to learn her qigong method in parks and public spaces around the country”
(Palmer 2007 47-48). She is considered the first true qigong celebrity, and her fame and
success created other schools. The quick spread of her brand of qigong sparked others:
“Other qigong methods were also popularized and spread to all parts of China within less
than a year” (2007:49). As Ownby put it: “Guo Lin unwittingly created the model of the
public qigong master…” (2008 58).
Thus history shows that the modern “creation” of qigong -- while based on related
philosophies such as Tai Chi which was started some 5,000 years ago -- was a

government brainchild intended to be practical/scientific rather than retaining its
original mystical Daoist origins. However, as mentioned above, qigong as a reclaimed
conflation of traditional Chinese practices rebranded in the context of institutions and
reports served its nationalist function well -- until it was cast out in the Cultural
Revolution.
Beginning in 1964, Mao Zedong began specifically targeting party elite leaders
who were also the primary supporters of qigong. This may have been part of Mao’s
hostility to other prominent party members in the aftermath of the miscalculated Great
Leap Forward famines. At the same time as Mao’s personal attacks on colleagues, there
were accusations that certain “quacks” were taking advantage of qigong healing, which
was disparaged as as too mystical and called “rubbish” (Palmer 2007 43). Ian Johnson
characterizes this period as qigong going into “hibernation” (2004 201).
Yang (2010) characterizes the cult of personality surrounding Mao and some
other party leaders as a “major form of alternative spirituality” during the Cultural
Revolution (2010:18). It was a situation in which the zeal for communism as an
overarching ideology was replaced with a zeal for specific leaders. After Mao died, he
says, China was left with only “two major forms of alternative spirituality,” folk practice
and qigong (2008:18). Of these, qigong was promoted because it could be presented as a
scientific achievement that could propel China forward through development.
Yang notes that it may be helpful to view the government’s role in religion
through a political-economics analysis. He says religion has not always been in demand.
He cites the Cultural Revolution as a period in which demand for organized religion was

markedly low. During the current reform era, that level of demand has been
continually rising.
But the practice of qigong that had been suppressed during the Mao-era Cultural
Revolution was “reformulated in the post-Mao era” (Chen 2003:1). The government
supported qigong actively in a host of ways. By the 1980s, interested persons could
attain master’s degrees in qigong or attend state-sponsored academic conferences (Palmer
2011:80).
Why did state support qigong during the reform-era boom? One component
would seem to be the government's effort to mitigate the “spiritual vacuum” I mentioned
in Chapter 1 (see Hessler 2007:201). Practitioners I spoke with said that vacuum enabled
qigong to grow popular after the Cultural Revolution and more so after Mao's death. But
in order for the government to endorse qigong, qigong had to be packaged for the public
as scientific.
THE SPARK OF NEW SCIENCE – FUELING QIGONG AFTER MAO
I argue that the spiritual vacuum is but one component at work here. Qigong
came to serve a renewed spiritual function in people’s lives, one that the government
came to recognize while carefully monitoring. But at the same time, as I have established,
the origins of CCP-sponsored qigong, which is to say, the only form of qigong allowed
publicly in China, were strictly economic, medical, and nationalistic rather than spiritual.
Despite qi’s ancient roots and qigong's traditional links to some earlier breathing
exercises in Chinese medicine, it was scientific inquiry that sparked the resurgence of

qigong studies after the Cultural Revolution. At first, the rhetoric was much like that
of the 1950s. The cosmological and metaphysical components of qi and of longevity
were distilled and the practices were once again researched in state-sponsored institutes.
Qigong received the concrete scientific base it needed in 1978. That year, state-
endorsed scientist Gu Hansen claimed that he had discovered, through rigorous
experimentation, the “physical nature of ‘external qi’” (Palmer 2007:49). This qigong
was different than the qigong of the 1950s because, in theory, external qi could be
emitted from the hands and body “in the direction of a patient or an object” (2007:50).
The idea that qi could be a scientifically observable, and most importantly, material force
was exactly what the CCP had needed to hear. If qi was now framed as an actual
objective material, then the CCP could fund research grants investigating the properties
of qi and could simultaneously debunk the “superstitions” that qi was purely
metaphysical and awash in mysticism. Grounding qigong squarely within research
science would ensure that its dissemination into reform-era China would be monitored
and kept uncontroversial (Thornton 2010:220).
In titling his chapter, “Science: The Savior of Modern China,” Ownby frames
this historical moment. He writes that “Gu Hansen’s pioneering work allowed qigong to
enter fully into the spirit of post-Mao China” in terms of both scientific discovery and
political discourse (Ownby 2008 60). Soon research on qigong was covered in state-run
magazines (Palmer 2007), newly revived state-run book stores (Chen, 2003) and in a new
wave of journalism in China (Ownby 2008 24). These publications in themselves

embodied the spirit of post-Mao China, as many forms of books and media had been
prohibited for nearly a decade and pushed aside in favor of Mao’s personality cult.
These qigong studies were political in that they could be heralded as Chinese
scientific achievements. The China Qigong Research Society (CQRS) was founded in
1986 and received very strong political support. The CQRS was overseen by the
National Association for Science and Technology (NAST), which in turn was overseen
directly by the CCP state council. Palmer notes that, with atheism and scientism “at the
core” of CCP ideology, these scientific institutions held more sway in China than
comparable organizations would in other countries (Palmer 2007:119).
NAST Chairman Qian Xuesen was the most outspoken proponent of the
increasingly widespread qigong fever. Qian promoted qigong as more than a revival of
traditional practices, more even than a new form of scientific mastery. For him it was a
“holistic cosmology that could encompass the wisdom of the past and the discoveries of
the future” (Palmer 2007:111). The idea was that state-sponsored qigong could provide
the link between modern medical science and traditional holism.
Qian used the phrase a “second Renaissance” and compared some of the
prominent qigong researchers with Galileo (Palmer 2007:78). This grandiose rhetoric
would be echoed and inflated by the rise of qigong grandmasters, whose promises of
earthshaking impact, it could be argued, had the unintended effect of making qigong
more controversial.
But this new proposed scientific revolution, grounded in allegedly observable
external qi science and also heavily endorsed and funded by the CCP, soon crossed paths

with growing mystical philosophy movements. As political science professor Patricia
M. Thornton writes, once external qi was popularized as the new paradigm, “not
surprisingly, a procession of adepts who had mastered the art of manipulating 'external qi'
soon emerged…” (Thornton 2003:220). These so-called “grandmasters” (Palmer
2007:86) or “superstars” (Ownby 2008:65) claimed extraordinary powers and quickly
began amassing enormous followings.
The government started the Qigong Scientific Research Institute “on a
triumphant note” in 1986 to promote qigong to China's large population (Palmer
2007:75-76). This sponsored governmental body promoted often overlapping schools of
qigong as exercise and science – it downplayed some schools’ ambiguous religious or
meditative cultivation aspects that bordered on mysticism.
Portraying these qigong groups as a “physical exercise regime” meant that even
CCP members, expected to be atheists, could practice (Johnson 2005:203). Similarly, it
seems that the CCP promoted studying qigong in terms of modern science as a way to
make the practices more quantitatively practical. Their rhetoric reflected this. Treating
qigong as a “science" necessarily and dichotomously required that “unscientific things,
by contrast, are condemned to eternal damnation” (2005:203). From this same type of
rhetoric one can see the CCP labeling anything outside of its own sponsored China
Qigong Scientific Research Socitey as illegitimate “superstition” (2005:201). It must be
said that defining qigong as science was not just a government tactic to skirt the subject
of religion, nor was it a case of qigong groups misrepresenting themselves to stay on the
good side of the government. In fact, the idea of science is central to many qigong

schools, and Falun Gong was no exception. In China Falun Gong, Master Li devotes
much of the introduction to the idea of science. Primarily, Li discusses how qigong
utilizes types of energy and physical manifestations not found in modern Western science.
He maintains this is not because Falun Dafa is scientifically unsound, but because
modern science is insufficiently developed to encompass what qigong has tapped into.
THE QIGONG BOOM AND CCP SUPPORT
In conjunction with this resurgence of qigong in the context of science there was a
boom in qigong interest among the public, many of whom found qigong as a means to
mitigate some of the dramatic changes of the gaige kaifang (改革开放), Chinese for the
“reform and opening up” of the nation in the late 1970s.
The late 1970s were a critical period for China. With this era’s reforms, social
spheres including housing, marriage, mobility, and job placement moved from the hands
of bosses and governmental officials into the hands of the people. The changes did not
come without problems: having these newfound freedoms of choice also meant bearing
the crushing weight of a brutally competitive free marketplace with less of a social safety
net in times of desperation.
Ownby specifically states that “the Qigong boom was a major cultural moment in
post-Mao Chinese history, largely overlooked by western commentators” who were
focused more on GDP growth, political changes, and “dissent” (Ownby 2008).
It helps to frame the Qigong Boom alongside other cultural resurgences of the
time. These resurgences are often called “Cultural Waves” (wenbo 文波) or better still,

“fevers” (wenhuare 文化热) . Beginning in the late 1970s, many of these culture
fevers sprang up with tremendous speed and voracity. Some of these cultures were
musical or literary. Pop music stars and poets became famous. Some fevers were very
specific, such as “a fever about One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1984” (Wang
1996:264).
Government did not foresee that the qigong boom would be so pivotal and,
ultimately, threatening to the CCP-instituted values of political legitimacy. Ownby
suggests that qigong was embraced by the CCP because they did not count on the group's
becoming more religious -- which makes sense when considering the ambiguous nature
of the concept of religion in China (Ownby 2008:30). In China it is much more common
to have syncretic religious systems that draw heavily on multiple sources simultaneously.
Ownby also asserts that coverage of such issues as the treatment of Falun Gong
practitioners would be viewed differently in the media if more had been known in the
West about the qigong craze while it was going on (Ownby 2008:11).
FALUN GONG IN HISTORIAL CONTEXT
Li Hongzhi registered the movement in 1992 as the Falun Gong Research Society
(Porter 2003:178) and during its initial years of rise in popularity, this organization was
part of the China Qigong Scientific Research Society. Ownby outlines how the group
was not just a member of the association, but among its ornaments. Li Hongzhi received
special merits at the annual Beijing qigong fairs and was even asked to be an organizer of

subsequent fairs (Ownby 2008:86). The group even reportedly gained support from
government bureaus, especially the public security wing of the government.
I see the emergence of trust between the CCP and Falun Gong as two-fold. First a
sense of mutual trust came from monetary donations. Li Hongzhi began giving talks to
tens of thousands of practitioners at a time. At some of these talks, often at public
colleges and universities inside China, Li reportedly gave large donations to local
organizations (Ownby 2008: 89 outlines such donations). Another reason the
government supported the Falun Dafa movement was the makeup of membership.
Followers came from seemingly all social strata, including government officials. If
officials from the Ministry of Public Security were practitioners, for example, there was
less reason to crack down. This self-protection was invaluable for the group, but lasted
for only so long.
The reasons are unclear, but after a point Li had the Falun Gong Research
Society split off from the government’s China Qigong Research Society. It is possible Li
did this because he heard rumors of rising political pressure. From the research, I can
also picture the break from the qigong association as part of Li’s long-term master plan,
which included emigrating to the United States and composing liturgy which would allow
practitioners to receive guidance from Shifu remotely. This would expand his
membership base and his political clout.
Practitioners with whom I’ve spoken tend to characterize this split as a result of
“compromised” practices. Practitioner Edgar from Hong Kong told me that Li had the
group split off to escape the “greed” of the Research Society. According to Edgar, many

practitioners view the split on the part of Li in 1996 as a response to the increasing
emphasis on money-making that had spread through many of these new qigong schools.
Under the umbrella grouping of the Research Society, many spiritual leaders were
imposing fees to attend seminars and there was corruption. These drives of capitalism
and materialism, of course, ran exactly counter to the reflective meditative and religious
aspects of the qigong schools. Edgar told me Li Hongzhi saw the only way to continue
cultivating truthfulness, tolerance, and compassion would be to break from the Research
Society. This break was a very public act of rebellion by the group and its founder.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT: CONCLUSIONS
At the start of his 2008 work Qigong Fever, David Palmer writes that the
“creation of qigong was a political act” (2008:1). The practice was advocated as part of
the Chinese socialist medical system, but at the same time it fell cyclically into
government favor and disfavor. Much like the fates of so many Party cadres, qigong as
an institutionalized system was championed and then demonized, depending on the
revolutionary campaign of the time. First, qigong was developed during the 1950s, and
then wiped out as one of Mao’s “four olds.” Next it was promoted as part of Deng
Xiaoping’s “four modernizations” as a crucial component of modernization of science
and technology (Palmer 2007 50). Additionally, qigong fit well into the “agenda” of the
“patriotic health movement” launched in 1978 to “raise general sanitation and health
levels” through improved Chinese medicine (Ownby 2008 60). Finally, it fell into

disfavor as its popularity grew into perceived “quasi-religious” mobilizations in the
1990s (Thornton 2010 211).
What constitutes genuine qigong and “fake qigong” has been a subject of endless
debate. Chinese scholars, often at the behest of government officials, would toe the party
line and insist that the emerging “fake qigong” was an overly mystified way to produce
bad science. They further argued that the process of mystification was a purposeful ruse
propagated by qigong masters to establish followings and pursue capitalist money-
making. Ironically, in my own experience interviewing qigong practitioners, members
insisted that their master-teacher was the only one teaching true qigong -- those other
masters were the greedy capitalists.
On the other hand, there are some who view the idea of genuine qigong very
differently. This camp views qigong itself as not genuine. They say that, as a
government-endorsed campaign, its Daoist mystical elements and cosmological
connections removed, qigong was “compromised” from the very beginning.
I argue for combining these theories to understand exactly why the government
was an active participant in the qigong boom of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. That reform-
era period, as noted by David Palmer, witnessed a radical change in the rhetoric and form
of qigong from its ancient original Daoist roots. Medical therapies were “secularized”
and made to fit into Western models of the body. Terms such as “doctor” were used in
place of “qigong master.” Qigong was a field that involved conferences and clinical
research (Palmer 2007 44).

Yang (2006) has his own terminology for the alternative forms of religion in
China; these terms seem to recognize religion in terms of spiritual and community
functions. In his words, there exists a “grey market” of religion in China. The elements
in this grey market, which includes qigong, are neither prohibited (a “black” market), nor
painted “red” (Communist ideology). Thus, although qigong was created and promoted
by the CCP, much of it was still afforded leniency beyond the Red Markets of the five-
communist-church “oligopolies” (Yang 2006 4). This grey area for qigong had profound
implications. As Palmer notes, qigong fulfilled an important social function by providing
a “path for the regeneration of the individual (2007:87).
Nancy Chen has also written about this. She sees qigong groups practicing in city
parks as a way to subvert ordinary divisions in newly urban China. Qigong helped create
new spaces and carve out identities in new urban public settings. She connects this
emphasis on the individual with social policy. In reform-era China, as socialist
healthcare ended and was replaced with a “fee-for-service” plan (2003:45), “qigong
facilitated the shift to market medicine” (2003:47). With medical clinics crowded and
expensive, qigong as an alternative form of medicine became increasingly popular, given
the “deep concern of the disintegration of the existing medical system” (2003:46).
Wang Jing (1996), too, has linked the qigong fever to other cultural booms. All of
them , she said, involved a process of rediscovering identity. Tellingly, in her book on
Deng Xiaoping’s China, Culture Fever, the first chapter is entitled “Who am I?” and
explores how the reform period was an era of soul-searching and discovery of identity.
She notes that “for nearly half a decade, confessions and self-introspection not only

pervaded literary discourse but also emerged as the dominant trope in political
discourse” (1996:10).
Soon everything changed again. In the 1990s the grey market (Yang 2006)
became gradually redder. The discourse surrounding qigong split into two discreet
camps, one that leaned toward the “rational and scientific” and the other, the
“psychosomatic and metaphysical” (Xu 1999:963). This schism makes sense, given the
paradox surrounding qigong all along: a practice that promoted both modern scientific
mastery and traditional Chinese cosmology and philosophy (Wang 1996:64).
Moving from a grey market to a red, qigong came under the increasing control of
the Communist Party. Though the China Qigong Research Socitey had existed for
decades, new regulations were put forth that required masters to register their schools (Xu
1999:964). Meanwhile, government-approved masters worked ever closer with the CCP:
allegedly, “Party Secretary Jiang Zemin himself received personalized treatments for
arthritis and neck pain from qigong master Zhang Hongbao” (Thornton 2010:221).
Zhang was one of the qigong grandmasters with the largest and most devoted followings.
And Zhang’s group had heavily mystical elements within it. This itself seems a paradox;
CCP ideology was always on the “rational and scientific” side of the schism. The
government became more and more wary as the qigong fever “gradually became more
spiritual in focus, incorporating religious themes and texts” (Thornton 2010:221).
By invoking ancient Daoist and Buddhist influences, the qigong groups were
fitting squarely within a uniquely Chinese tradition of syncretism. They were syncretic
“in that traditions have borrowed from each other” and that “they draw from more than

one religious tradition, always including Buddhism, together with Daoism” and
combine aspects of both Confucianism and folk religion (Harrel and Perry 1982:286).
The scholarship suggests that the government became less and less comfortable with the
rise of this traditional syncretic rhetoric. To the CCP's ears, this kind of rhetoric could be
“a new post-revolutionary variant in the modern history of quasi-religious mobilization in
China” (Thornton 2010:221).

CHAPTER 3 – PATH, IMPRESSIONS. AND POLITICS
MY PATH AND FIRST FRAMES
On my first trip to China, in a study abroad program in spring 2010, my friend
Chelsea and I took a walk early in the morning through part of our college campus at East
China Normal University in Shanghai. The weather was a cold gray and everyone was
wearing scarves. We heard muffled, tinny Chinese classical music piping from a small
portable stereo just across the campus’ central dividing river. We looked over, following
the sound, and saw a group of more than 50 elderly Chinese gathered together doing Tai
chi exercises. This was not an uncommon sight. Chelsea turned to me and mentioned
how only a few years ago, one would see just as many, if not more, Chinese people in
these parks doing Falun Gong. How amazing it was, she noted, that all of that could be
wiped out. I told her I knew nothing of the group.
This was my first exposure to the Falun Gong. It was framed as a parallel to Tai
Chi, and framed only in terms of a tragedy, in the way one might speak of a ghost town
and say, “Imagine what it was like when all these people still lived here.”
I paid the group little mind for the next few months. In China, there was nothing
reported on the group. It was then 11 years since the ban on Falun Gong, and no longer
was propaganda printed every day against the practice. During my stay I didn't hear of
any scientists publishing about the dangers of the group. Instead, my experience in China
in winter and spring 2010, in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively, was absolutely silent on
the issue of the Falun Gong. People may have been practicing in my neighboring
apartments but it would have been clandestine.

In China it is much more common than in the U.S. for university campuses to
be largely intermixed with the public. There are fenced off parameters surrounding the
school, but within them one might find compounds of local citizens, families, children,
the elderly, restaurants, dormitories, school offices, and classrooms, all in close quarters
in the same neighborhood.
I did not think about the group again until the summertime when I took a trip with
my parents. My father was still stationed in Shanghai as an editor for print news
publications. Journalism was being sucked dry in the United States but burgeoning in
East Asia. His one-year contract in Shanghai was ending and he was investigating the
prospect of a second year living abroad, this time south in Hong Kong.
The territory of Hong Kong, though now owned by China, has historically been
separated from Chinese politics. Practicing Falun Dafa is legal in Hong Kong even
though the city has received pressure over the years from Mainland China. Thus many
Falun Gong refugees have emigrated over the border to Hong Kong. While there, we
saw a parade of Falun Gong protesting the Chinese government (see figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2: Hong Kong Falun Gong parade (taken July 2010).
This was the second set of frames I had about the group: they were highly
organized, hurt and wounded, seeking redress of grievances, and directly opposed to the
leadership of the Communist Party. Watching this parade without any background,
would not know that the group was a qigong group or a movement for health and
wellness, or for that matter, a religion. It came across as wholly political. All one would
know is that practitioners were being allegedly tortured, their beliefs were “good” and the
CCP “evil.”
One of my only experiences intersecting with Falun Gong in the United States
was through a tabloid magazine. This formed my third frame. I was in Seattle visiting
my brother at his graduate school. He and his wife and I walked to a bar in their
neighborhood; when we got there we saw a thought-provoking headline in one of the
newspaper boxes lining the sidewalk: “Falun Gong Organ Harvesting Investigations.”
The paper was free so we grabbed two copies out of the case and took them inside. Over

beer, we sat at the wooden table of the Irish Pub and opened the pages. Inside were
gory pictures of torture and spreads of bodies lined up on tables. I was a bit skeptical at
the claims in this story. They seemed too gruesome to be true and the scale of the
allegations was enormous, even for a country as populous as China. But my brother was
more of a believer (see figure 3.3).
Figure 3.3: My brother Michael (left) and I found a newspaper headline about Falun Gong while in Seattle
(March 2011).
As I recall, we each regarded the other as naïve: I thought he was believing in
this sensational tabloid report, and he he might have seen me as an apologist for the CCP.
We talked about it. He saw himself as a realist and someone who understands that kind
of inhumanity is entirely possible. As a caveat, I can not neglect mentioning that my
brother also has a tendency to give credence to some conspiracy theories (those regarding
9/11 and the banking industry for example) and has in the past endorsed political
candidates whom I have viewed as highly radical. Given this history, when I saw him on
board with that newspaper report, I was actually inclined to be more skeptical of its

information. When the time came to choose a topic for my thesis, I decided it would
be a good fit for me to investigate Falun Gong by finding members to talk to about their
personal experiences.
BACK TO HONG KONG: FIRST FIELDWORK, SECOND PARADE
Setting out from Florida to Hong Kong in June 2011, my research plan was to
begin by attending the anniversary parade commemorating the ban on Falun Gong - the
same parade I had stumbled upon when I went to Hong Kong with my parents the
summer before. The parade was an annual event held every July 20. Members of Falun
Gong from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and other nearby countries gathered first in
Cheung Sha Wan Park. They would then set out on a parade route with police escort
down Nathan Road moving towards the southern point of Kowloon Island and ending at
Victoria Harbour.
I came up the subway stairs into bright sunlight. Along the crowded sidewalk,
marching band members in matching blue and yellow uniforms were putting together
their clarinets and horns on the curb. I learned they were the Divine Land Marching Band,
composed completely of Falun Gong practitioners from across East Asia.
Next to me was a gate to the park. The park's north side was filled with a couple
hundred Falun Gong members, most dressed in white or yellow clothes. Some were
holding signs. Others were propping up massive flags. Others still were in pairs, banging
Chinese drums and practicing dances. Members were beginning to line up in groups,
positioned for the parade. Announcements from organizers spoke over what sounded like

loud, rousing Chinese marches from a PA system at the far side of the park (see figures
3.4, 3.5, 3.6).
Figure 3.4: Setting up for the 2011 Parade. (Photo: Howard Goodman, July 2011).
Figure 3.5: At the Hong Kong Falun Gong Parade 2011. I am standing in the left part of
the frame, taking notes and audio by the side of the road. (Photo: Howard
Goodman July 2011).

Figure 3.6: Part of the parade included drummers and flag waver. One flag waver is cut
off on the rightmost part of the frame. (Photo: Howard Goodman July 2011).
My research goal for this event was to do on-site informal interviews with
practitioners, asking only two questions (In Chinese): “Why is everyone gathered here
today, what are they commemorating?” and, “What happened in July 1999?”
These questions were meant to be fairly open-ended, but I expected a certain type
of answer. I’d heard ahead of time that the purpose of the parade was to commemorate
the 12th anniversary of the ban of the Falun Gong in mainland China and the
crackdown’s subsequent arrests and imprisonments. I explained that to practitioners that
I was a college senior in America who was writing a thesis to graduate. Several

practitionerss still asked me what newspaper I was with and why I was so young for a
journalist.
To my question of “what happened?” that led to a ban on the Falun Gong, most
respondents spoke vaguely about issues concerning the group’s size and its rapid growth.
“The CCP is scared of the growth of Falun Gong” said one practitioner. “At that time
[1999], the Falun Gong began to outnumber the CCP” said another. These were the types
of responses I was expecting, pointing to the general trends over time leading to conflict.
What I had not been prepared for, since I had chosen to save the bulk of my
background reading for later in my fieldwork, was that a major source of contention
between the Falun Gong and the Communist Party could be condensed into a single event:
Zhongnanhai.
ZHONGNANHAI
My most detailed responses from these interviews that day pointed to the
Zhongnanhai protest on April 25, 1999. It was a key moment in the campaign against
the Falun Gong (or, to critics, the campaign of the Falun Gong) which would eventually
escalate into banned status and violence. It is impossible to analyze the Falun Gong
without looking at the events surrounding the protest at the Zhongnanhai compound in
central Beijing.
The compound is adjacent to the Forbidden City, the palace where the emperors
once lived. With the ascension of the Communist Party in 1949 a new palace, an
administrative compound, was built next door as the new center of power. The

Zhongnanhai, meaning “Central and South Lakes” is the party’s administrative
headquarters. It is “China’s equivalent to the White House” (Lieberthal 2004:118). In
this location at the center of Beijing, leaders have ruled China for six centuries. The scene
evokes great power for the Chinese. Thus, images of protest actions in front of
Zhongnanhai are powerful as well.
On April 25, 1999, a throng of Falun Gong practitioners engaged in a sit-in
protest at Zhongnanhai. By most accounts, there were anywhere from 1,000 to 16,000
protesters, although Tong places the number as high as 20,000 (2009:1). The immediate
catalyst for the protest was an article printed in a student magazine at Tianjin Normal
University outside Beijing. The commentary was written by He Zuoxin, who, according
to journalist Ian Johnson, had been searching for publishing opportunities to slander the
group for years. Mr. He was a strong atheist and one of the few remaining active
members of the Chinese Atheist Association. While he had previously spoken out
against practicing all forms of qigong, in this article he referred to Falun Gong founder Li
Hongzhi with the “mildly derisive” term of toutou, or boss, and He entitled the article,
“Why Young People Shouldn’t Practice Qigong” (Johnson 2000).
After the release of that article, as many as 6,000 practitioners sat in protest
outside the journal’s office to ask the editors to retract the published piece (Johnson
2000). The Falun Gong had at that point engaged in this form of protest, meeting en
masse outside administrative offices, multiple times. In fact, the group’s repeated
successes at peaceful protests were a reason the article was written in the first place. He
Zuoxin was “incensed at the acquiescence” of CCP media in accommodating Falun

Gong's complaints of unfair representations. Mr. He was angry that Falun Gong
practitioners had protested outside the gates of a Beijing TV station after a report was
aired that the group considered disparaging. More than 2,000 practitioners converged
outside the television station and convinced the producers to retract their statements and
air a second, more laudatory, story (Johnson 2000). These sorts of protests were not
immediately suppressed by the Chinese government because, according to Ownby, “It
bears repeating that China has become a much more openly contentious society in the
post-Mao period. Falun Gong practitioners were not necessarily pioneers in this sense”
(2008: 15).
In an article that became part of his 2001 Pulitzer-Prize winning reporting for the
Wall Street Journal, Johnson continues:
Mr. He Zuoxiu did more research and found out that the party had regularly
yielded to Falun Dafa protesters. Several media outlets – estimates range as high
as 14 -- had been besieged by Falun Dafa adherents angry at reports casting doubt
on its claim to foster good health through exercise. In almost every case, the
media had backed down, printing or airing apologies to Falun Dafa. Mr. He was a
famous academic researcher and government loyalist, he was a member of a top-
level consultative committee that advises the Communist Party on policy.
Although largely powerless, the committee provided Mr. He with some cover to
step up his criticism of Falun Dafa” (Johnson 2000).
Mr. He used this opportunity to pen an article in the Science Journal. Practitioners, again,
protested. Their protest at the Journal's offices was “met with police brutality” (Ownby
2008:15) and led directly to a next step, demonstrating at Zhongnanhai against the
brutality.
But Mr. He's article was only the precipitating cause; it was a symbol for the
wider field of injustices the group was claiming. More broadly, the group met at Beijing’s

Zhongnanhai to “ask govt. to accord legal recognition to their sect, lift the ban on sect
publication, and release their colleagues who had been arrested the previous day for
demonstrating in Tianjin” (Chen 2004:2). That second point is crucial to my thesis –
before the group had been officially banned as a superstitious “evil cult,” its publications
already had been banned. The group was without a legal avenue within Chinese media to
counter the propaganda against them.
This is why I see individual narratives as so important and, equally, so
problematic – the group was not legally allowed to print materials in China. And later,
when the group itself was banned, members had to look to media in other countries to
report their individual stories and experiences with the hope of garnering legitimacy and
sympathy.
Peter Hessler and his boss, Ian Johnson, were both on the scene that day at the
April 25, 1999 Zhongnanhai Protest. Johnson's accounts made it into his 2004 book,
Wild Grass, and Hessler's accounts became a part of his 2006 book, Oracle Bones.
Looking specifically at Zhongnanhai, Johnson reported in the Wall Street Journal, “The
protest was like a mirage” with “10,000 people quietly challenging the government."
Much of it was silent sitting meditation. (Johnson 2005:247) (see figures 3.7 and 3.8)

Figure 3.7 Pracitioners at Zhongnanhai April 25, 1999 (courtesy of http://4.bp.blogspot.com/)
Figure 3.8 Practitioners at Zhongnanhai April 25, 1999 (courtesy of theepochtimes.com)
Johnson wrote that the practitioners acted in a “peaceful and polite way,” and
“There were no placards, no shouting, no disturbances (Johnson 2005:247).
Practitioners were silent and respectful and even picked up trash when they left the
square. In direct contrast, the police officers, gathered in their own section of the square,

left the area littered with “food wraps, cigarette cases, and patches of phlegm,”
according to political science professor James Tong (2009:6). Passersby were
“confused” and when Beijing locals got off their bikes to speak to protesters. Hessler
watched as a Beijing local spoke to a practitioner: “One man becomes angry, saying,
'You know what will happen? This is only going to cause trouble for everyone'” (Hessler
2006:123).
Practitioners remained completely silent, except for a few. Some, when asked
direct questions, said their concern was that the group had “been criticized in some
newspaper. We think it’s going to be banned” (Johnson 2005:250). The idea was the
group was trying to be as proactive. Hessler writes, “For a spell I'm so wrapped up in the
numbers that I notice nothing else, but then the silence strikes me” (2006:123). And
Johnson, too, remarks that “…the quietness only made it odder, even unnerving”
(2005:247-8).
While the protesters' massive numbers garnered attention, it was not just the size
of the protest, but its form that most shocked the Communist Party. Maria Chang has
framed the event as a “Political Earthquake” because the group had gathered, supposedly,
without anyone knowing beforehand and had organized extremely quickly and efficiently
(Chang 2004:2). Johnson adds, “Although Falun Gong would later say that the protest
was spontaneous, a fair degree of planning had clearly gone into it” (Johnson 2005:248).
This had all been done outside of central state control. So clearly there is debate whether
the group was organized in a hierarchical fashion, but there is also debate over whether or

not the protest was a surprise to the CCP. Hu Ping (2007) and David Ownby
(2008:170) challenge the idea that the government knew nothing about the protest before
it happened.
Its apparent secrecy and high level of organization seem to be one way the
government justified suppression of the group. The government claimed to have no
knowledge of the impending protest; if the story was that the protest happened secretly
and suddenly, it gave the government credence to claim that Falun Gong was a very well-
organized group whose underground organizing was a potential threat to the state.
Author Hu Ping challenges this, saying he had a friend who was visiting in Beijing at the
time and this friend “heard in advance that Falungong members would petition the State
Security Council, even though he had no connections with Falungong or China’s security
apparatus. This suggests that there was no great secrecy attached to the plans for the
mass petition” (Hu 2003:3). The argument that the CCP truly did not know about the
protest suggests that either the government had weak intelligence (and should/could have
known) or the Falun Gong were excellent at planning an underground action.
There are others who present a third perspective: that the government only
feigned surprise and unpreparedness when 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners converged
that morning outside Zhongnanhai and the Appeals Office. This perspective holds that
the CCP actually knew and calculated everything. This conspiracy theory was one of the
first things I heard on the ground in Hong Kong. My key informant, Edgar, told me that
CCP’s involvement at the Zhongnanhai protest was vile because strategic photo-ops
“make it look like the Falun Gong surrounded the building.” He told me that

practitioners were just trying to cooperate with Public Security Officers, and those
officers corralled them into appearing as aggressors.
Palmer weighs in on this version of the story. He writes that since 2005, there has
been a “conspiracy theory propagated on Falun gong websites” about the Zhongnanhai
protest in which “the entire incident, from the Tianjin demonstration to Beijing was a plot
or trap” (Palmer 2007:270). Ownby, too, writes, “Many Falun Gong practitioners believe
that they were led to Zhongnanhai by public security personnel as part of a plot to
incriminate Falun Gong” (2008:172).
In my experience, a large part of the discourse of this conspiracy theory deals
with the spatial organization of the assembly. One of the practitioners I spoke with said
that the group was not meaning to protest in front of the Zhongnanhai compound but in
front of the adjacent Central Appeals Office. Palmer has voiced the day's demonstration
as the event where practitioners “converged at the Letters and Appeals Office” of Beijing.
This requires some knowledge of Xinfang, the Chinese official petitioning system.2
In
his article “Collective Petition and Institutional Conversion” (2008), Xi Chen notes,
“Xinfang are one of the primary institutions the regime uses to handle state-society
relations.” Before the mid-1990s, the system ensured “controlled participation” and
worked as designed. But after the mid-1990s, “this system began to create strong
2 This process of Letter-Writing and Visits (As it is also called) has been in use
since the 1949 revolution to address citizen’s grievances. Xinfang even grew out of Mao
Zedong’s idea of Mass Line; using a gauge of popular opinion to justify Communist
campaigns. Mass Line’s slogan was “From the masses, to the masses.”

incentives for collective action” and citizens began using the system in ways not
originally intended by the state that would better serve those citizens’ needs (2008:56).
The composition of the group at the Zhongnanhai protest was extraordinary. “The
demonstrators included intellectuals, government officials, and even members of the
Communist Party” (Chang 2004: 3). It’s as if the group was both tightly embedded in the
society and in the government – they were not a fringe group. Thus, the CCP not only
knew practitioners, but in fact was partly comprised of practitioners.
Again I turn to Xi Chen. Writing in 2008, Chen invokes ideas from X.L. Ding:
“The dichotomous conception of civil society versus the state, when used to explain
nonconformity and opposition in communist systems, is applicable only in rare, extreme
cases and misleading in most cases” (Chen 2008:59). Instead, Ding posits an alternative
called “institutional amphibiousness” which, using the Oxford Dictionary, he defines as
an institution that is “leading a double life.” He notes first that a type of “institutional
amphibiousness” was present in many aspects of the collapse of communism throughout
the Soviet bloc (Ding 1994:298). A key example is seen in the five representatives of the
Zhongnanhai protest who were invited into the Zhongnanhai that day to speak on behalf
of the group: they all came from key governmental agencies. During the meetings, Prime
Minster Zhu Rongji and Public Security Minister Luo Gan learned that the five Falun
Gong representatives from the mass protest outside worked for the Ministry of Railroads
in the Ministry of Supervision, Beijing University, the Peoples Liberation Army Chief of
Staff Department and the Ministry of Public Security. These were all key parts of the
CCP regime (Tong 2009:6).

So to say the CCP did not see this coming might not be completely accurate,
but has elements of truth. It may be that only the most elite officials, those least in touch
with the average citizen, failed to see it coming. Tong writes that Jiang Zemin, when saw
at least 10,000 protesters sitting outside the compound, supposedly asked his aides,
“What is Falun Gong?” It's possible Jiang knew of the group but knew little about it. It
is hard for me to imagine that he was not alerted that the protest might happen. It may be
that certain parts of the CCP had knowledge of the group, beyond the fact that there was
overlap between practitioners and party members. And likewise, certain practitioners
knew about it, but others, whether in the government or not, did not know about it.
Using the idea of institutional ambiguity, I think Palmer manages to debunk both
the conspiracy theory of CCP orchestration and the opposite idea of complete CCP
surprise and bewilderment by pointing out: “If it can be claimed that Luo Gan of the
Ministry of Public Security, an inveterate enemy of Falun Gong, was aware of the
demonstrators and may have had a hand in how it proceeded, it can just as easily be
argued that Falun Gong’s supporters with the highest levels of the CCP were also
informed and involved” (Palmer 2007:271). On one hand, then, this overlap between
CCP members and Falun Gong members casts doubt on the idea that either group was
taken completely by surprise or fully manipulated. At the same time, it must be stressed
that these are two large groups of tens of millions each. These large groups have
members who individually may have been more privy to knowledge of the protest and the

CCP counteractions than other members. Individuals in both camps had individual
levels of information and involvement.3
RESULTS OF ZHONGNANHAI
While officials met inside with those five key representatives (who came from
key branches of the government), a notice circulated in the crowd. It was printed by the
Beijing Public Security Bureau and the Beijing Petitions and Appeals Office, and read,
“The government has no intention of banning Falun Gong. Appeals should be made
through the usual channels” (Johnson 2005:251). With regard to this circulating notice,
Ian Johnson states bluntly, “That promise turned out to be false... By the end of 1999,
Falun Gong adherents were dying in custody” (2005:251). The protest on April 22nd
was “declared illegal” and further protests yielded arrests from police. By April 30 the
Public Security Bureau was issuing warnings for further arrests.
Practitioners were persistent and arrests were made easily because “practitioners
refused to lie about their faith” (Hessler 2006:125). Furthermore, practitioners continued
going out in public to practice Falun Gong because, as Palmer notes on the nature of the
group: “Although some disciples practice spiritual discipline to the exclusion of all other
activity, Li Hongzhi does not encourage monasticism” (Fever 235). To practice Falun
Gong in secret and in isolation would be counter to proper cultivation.
3 CCP membership in 1999 was around 80 million. Exact numbers for Falun Gong
range from 70 million to 100 million. The CCP claims that number of Falun Gong should
only be 2 million. In fact the first thing my Chinese professor at New College, Aijun
Zhu, told me about the Falun Gong was that the CCP has found it effective in rhetoric to
minimize the size and influence of the group and frame them as a minority.

Ownby writes: “The rest of the tragic story is better known. Unsurprisingly,
China’s premier leader, Jiang Zemin, took the Falun Gong demonstration as a challenge
to Communist Party authority and vowed to crush Li and his followers. A series of
miscalculations on both sides quickly raised the stakes to the point where no compromise
was possible, and a long, costly, and useless campaign of suppression and martyrdom
ensured – indeed, the campaign continues to this day” (2008:15).
USUAL CHANNELS?
Looking again at that notice from the day of Zhongnanhai, the statement,
“Appeals should be made through the usual channels” is strange. Under the system of
xinfang, practitioners insisted to me that they were going through usual channels and
doing the proper thing. They were meeting in front of the appeals office making petitions.
I will explore in Chapter 4 through personal narratives how the careful manipulation of
the “usual channels” helped control the suppression of the Falun Gong and how it
affected individuals with whom I spoke.
With regard to the “usual channels” idea, I am reminded how one US-based
practitioner-interviewee spoke to me of Falun Gong petitioning in front of Zhongnanhai
as if it were more akin to a routine trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) than
a radical protest. This seems to me to ignore a history of in-person appeals at the
Zhongnanhai (or of the same place and function, the Forbidden City) that were symbolic
affronts to leadership. And, based on my observations, given the already distrustful
opinions of qigong at large by 1999, this makes the casualness of the DMV analogy seem

not only hyperbolic but misguided. And as Maria Chang notes on the Zhongnanhai
action, in China “All protest is “illegal without Permits”’ (2004:70).
LI HONGZHI’s INVOLVEMENT IN ZHONGNANHAI
After the Zhongnanhai protest in April 1999, Li started making statements that
David Palmer has called “threatening.” He notes that Li posted a sermon online on June 2
in which he stated, “10,000 Zhongnanhai demonstrations were nothing compared to the
100 million Falungong cultivators” (Palmer 272). It is hard for me not to read this as
directly confrontational to the CCP - confrontational enough to label it dangerous on Li
Hongzhi's part by being careless with his followers' lives.
Ownby, trying for a moment to give the Falun Gong the benefit of the doubt,
writes that founder Li Hongzhi, who “undoubtedly gave at least tacit consent to bringing
the [Tianjin] protest to Beijing,” might not have seen the Zhongnanhai action as very rash.
He, too, might have viewed it more like my interviewee’s DMV analogy because Li was
“perhaps believing that he still enjoyed enough support from high-level officials –
particularly in the national Public Security Bureau – to weather the storm” (Ownby
2008:171).
When looking at the eventual crackdown and persecution of the group, it is
important to consider how much of the protest was Li Hongzhi's idea, and how involved
he was. Li's connection to the movement fundamentally changed the embodiment of
martyrdom and “militancy” (Palmer 2007:220). After Zhongnanhai, Li wrote to online
message boards, “I’m happy for those who have stepped forward” (Ownby 2008:15).

Likewise, in the past, Li had called out those who failed to engage in similar public
protests: After an article critical of Falun Gong was published in 1998, Li wrote online
that he was disappointed in those who did nothing. Li asked, “Is this affair not a test for
the spiritual nature of the Dafa disciples?” (Palmer 2007:250). For the Zhongnanhai
protest, Li came back to Beijing for 24 hours, supposedly only to make a connecting
flight to Australia for a lecture. This was on the day immediately before the April 25
protest. It is impossible to believe he did not discuss the following day’s action with
practitioners. Ownby writes that at this time Li probably “authorized” the Zhongnanhai
protest (2008:188).
CONNECTIONS TO THE PAST
In the evening after that morning's protest, Jiang Zemin penned a letter to the
CCP's top leaders “expressing his bewilderment on the mobilization capacity of the Falun
Gong and its disciples,” calling it the “boldest public challenge to regime authority since
the founding of the Republic.” He asserted that it was “largest collective action since the
1989 student protests” (Tong 2009:33).
David Ownby echoes this, telling readers: “Think of it like the biggest protest
since Tiananmen...nobody would have suspected it came out of the Qigong boom”
(2008:3). Parallels between this action and those at Tiananmen Square in the 1980s are
often made. As anthropologist Nancy Chen notes, images of the Zhongnanhai protest
“resonated with coverage of student demonstrations a decade before. It appeared that
foreign press and Falun practitioners were equally eager to demonstrate similarities

between the protests of 1989 and 1999” (Chen 2003:175). These parallels ring
especially true because they were held at the same location and the Falun Gong protest
fell – many believe purposely – extremely close to the 10-year anniversary of those
student protests.
POST-ZHONGNAHAI: BUILDING A CASE FOR CRACKDOWN
An official ban came three months after the protest. In order for the ban to truly
work, the government had to make a case against the Falun Gong and create public
distrust of the group. But this campaign took time to formulate. Thus, from April 1999
(Zhongnanhai Protest) to July 1999 (Official Government Ban), the government went
into a period of silence regarding new official measures. The protest was not even
covered in the Chinese press. This silent government response is, as Hessler says,
“always a bad sign in China” (2007:125).
On July 20 there was rumor that Falun Gong practice was going to be outlawed
imminently. To forestall the ban, practitioners attempted a last-ditch effort to protest
publicly in Beijing. But as these protests were underway the state made “mass
arrests...before the official ban was announced” so as to “decapitate the Falun Gong
leadership in a surprise move.” Then, “in a national televised broadcast at 3PM on July
22, 1999, the Falun Gong was officially banned” (Tong 2009:52). The government
began a full-fledged anti-Falun Gong campaign that day.
In tandem with this, the state unleashed a barrage of material demoning the group.
James Tong has done truly impressive work looking at the government’s media campaign

of propaganda against the Falun Gong. He also looks specifically at the volume of
propaganda churned out after that three-month period of silence. His 2009 book Revenge
at the Forbidden City is very thorough. According to his analysis, the government
produced a massive body of 1,650 newswire press releases, 780 news stories in the
Renmin Ribao4
newspaper and 1,722 news items “that totaled 100 programming hours”
of programming on China Central Television. This was all released within the first “4
weeks of the official ban” (2009:185).
WHO SHOT FIRST? PERCEIVED THREATS FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE
FENCE
Zhongnanhai represents a single day: the straw that broke the camel’s back and
challenged CCP authority. In the eyes of the CCP, Falun Gong was now overtly political.
And so this story, which in a sense ends at Zhongnanhai (before it branched off into new
stories of propaganda, banned status, and a worldwide campaign to release imprisoned
and tortured practitioners), has a beginning that occurred a few years earlier. For this
reason I must analyze some additional perspectives.
Contextually it is important to know whether the crackdown on the Falun Gong
was only the result of CCP aggression (as proclaimed by practitioners), or whether there
was at least some aggression on both sides from explicit actions and events. Further, it is
4 Called The People's Daily. This is the official newspaper of the Central
Committee of the CCP.

important to explore if there was a veiled antagonism on both sides all along and what
Falun Gong came to represent for modern China.
ONE VIEW: 100 Percent CCP
Some have argued that the CCP was (almost completely) the only aggressor in the
lead up to the crackdown against the Falun Gong. These sources indicate that even if the
Falun Gong made petitions and appeals, held protests, or engaged in other sorts of dissent,
these came was only after the CCP’s initial aggressive actions. In these accounts, the key
idea is not that, in light of Falun Gong’s growth, the CCP reacted, but that they
overreacted.
Author Hu Ping puts this opinion rather bluntly through allusion: “If Jiang Zemin
were clever, he would have swallowed his pride and declared that whether it’s a black cat
or a white cat, as long as it doesn’t cause trouble it’s a good cat. But Jiang Zemin is not
clever” (Hu 2003: 3).5
For a time, the CCP was clever in this regard, as in 1993 when
Falun Gong was accredited as a “direct affiliate branch” of the state’s official China
Qigong Scientific Research Society (Zhongguo Qigong Kexue Yanjiu Shehui 中国气功
科学研究社会) and enjoyed a legal status. But the CCP’s attitude changed over time,
and it is hard to tell if its reactions changed first or if Falun Gong changed first.
Several authors have written about the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy,
wherein this idea of overreaction is central to the narrative. Journalist James Seymour
5 Hu is alluding, of course, to Deng Xiaoping’s famous statement that not matter
the color of the cat, it is a good cat if it catches mice. Deng was justifying more active
land reform policies for China.

sees the Communist Party’s reaction, banning the group as an evil cult, as misguided:
“But the authorities overreaction in April was counterproductive, and the protests only
intensified.” And further, “The Falun Gong movement was not originally political, and
probably still isn’t political, but it has taken on a political character simply because the
government has decided to perceive it as political, and that has become a self-fulfilling
prophecy” (in Schechter 2001: 72). The Economist echoes this in a 1999 article entitled
“Worried in Beijing.”
It is clear that Communists are afraid of the Falun Gong, and its other
contemporary new Chinese social movements, because they resemble some of the
groups that played a part in the upheavals that racked Imperial China. Yet if
anything is likely to bring that about, it is their own reaction. It may yet turn out
that the seeds of Chinese communism’s eventual collapse will have been sown,
not by market economists or human-rights activists in the West, but by weird
millenarians, inspired by Chinese traditions, in China itself.
Weighing in on this idea, Ownby has written, “State hostility serves once again as
a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing redemptive societies away from the center and toward
the periphery” (2008:42). Finally, Thornton takes this self-fulfilling prophecy into a
larger discussion of other banned groups, saying that only after government aggression
and anti-cult legislation, a “handful of the banned and exiled groups launched media wars
against the current regime” (2010:217).
ANOTHER VIEW: FALUN GONG and CCP AS ANTAGONISTIC ACTORS
David Ownby also sets out another way of looking at the events leading to the
crackdown. In this view both sides made “critical missteps” that provoked the other. It is
useful at this juncture to examine these “missteps” that became so inflammatory. Overall,

it would appear that the CCP missteps were overreaction and the Falun Gong missteps
were brash, perhaps carelessly, bold – perhaps carelessly so. Change over time is a key
here.
Consider the changes experienced by Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi. Li
decided to leave China in 1995 because the government and the public was becoming
suspicious of qigong masters in general. As he left, Li began to develop an international
ministry (Ownby 2008:14) and “online bulletin boards were set up” to spread the new
gospels electronically (Palmer 2007:252). Through this process, Li introduced subtle
changes to Falun Gong practice in China which may have unintentionally directed the
movement toward an eventual confrontation with the state (Ownby 2008:14). These
changes in 1994-1995 profoundly changed the nature of Falun Gong, placing ideology in
the foreground, above all else (Palmer 2007:224). This included a declaration from Li
that his recently published opus, Zhuan Falun, would be the bible of the movement. A
pronouncement therein that the group was no longer a qigong group; it was to be thought
of as religion (Li 2000:20). He said the Dafa was now not a simple path for the shallow
goals of “keeping fit” but a practice for the “salvation of humankind” (Li 2000:19).
Although a while later he attempted to retract or downplay the fact, in the work Li does
overtly claim divine status and direct lineage as the reincarnation of Sakyamuni Buddha.
Li even changed his birthday to align with Sakyamuni's (Palmer 2007:224).
Li's publishing Zhuan Falun was extremely important. Its popularity spurred a
backlash; In 1996, Rotating the Law Wheel (its English title) sold nearly a million copies,

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