TORTURED FOR THEIR FAITH
Despite brutal and sustained repression by the Chinese government, Falun Gong continues
to thrive, says James Strathern Beijing `THE police made me bare and then pushed water down me with a rubber pipe, and hit my face.' My Chinese friend Zhao told me this quite calmly. Her torturers, the Beijing police force, wanted to know her identity and address so that they could send her back to her home-town where the police will use all kinds of methods to `make me abandon my belief. Her belief? She is a member of the quasi-Buddhist spiritual group Falun Gong, which at pre- sent claims 100 million adherents in 30 countries, the majority of this multitude being mainland Chinese.
A year ago, on 22 July, the Chinese gov- ernment outlawed Falun Gong, denounc- ing it as an evil cult that seriously threatened the security of the country. Since that date, it has cracked down on the group's practitioners with shocking, sus- tained brutality. Numbers are hard to come by: Amnesty International estimates that tens of thousands have been detained. Thousands are currently being re-educated in detention centres, prisons and labour camps, and about 20 have died in police custody. The government is also deploying the forcible sixiang gaizao (thought- reform) techniques it perfected during the Cultural Revolution to reconvert follow- ers, who are being detained in mental hos- pitals and injected with re-educative drugs. `Let's see which is stronger, your Falun Gong or our medicine,' one government doctor is alleged to have proposed, prepar- ing to dose a follower with perphenazine.
The leader of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, is in hiding in the United States, from where he communicates with his followers via the Internet. Li defines Falun Gong as a traditional Chinese 'cultivation practice' which espouses the principles of truthful- ness, compassion and tolerance. He also preaches absolute pacifism (there is no record of a Falun Gong member using vio- lence in the face of violence) and claims the group to be apolitical. 'I love my coun- try,' declares Zhao, 'and I approve of the government; I just want to be free to prac- tise. Falun Gong.' Unfortunately, in China asserting your freedom to do something is an intensely political act. Followers practise slow-motion group exercises which strengthen gong (personal energy) and promote physical and spiritual renewal: a sort of decelerated callisthenics for the soul. Most are from the middle and older generations: the protesters who daily unfurl Falun Gong flags in Tiananmen Square tend to be middle-aged, working- class Chinese. They are swooped on by the young Public Security Bureau officers who patrol the immense square in their hun- dreds, and hustled into police vans.
On the face of it Falun Gong is harm- less, verging on the benevolent. But it has a long, lunatic fringe. Followers believe in extra-terrestrial life. The moon, one devo- tee proposes, `was constructed as an obser- vation post for moon-making beings who live inside the moon closer to the back, and often fly out to watch earthlings' activ- ities. Our theory perfectly solves each and every mystery surrounding the moon.' He concludes triumphantly, 'Who would argue that our approach is non-scientific?'
This sort of pseudo-science is tolerable nonsense. More serious is the conviction that Falun Gong exercises are valid substi- tutes for Western medicine. My friend told me that her chronic joint problems had dis- appeared, and how an acquaintance was able to defer her menopause just by concen- trating. Recoveries from advanced terminal cancers have been reported. But along with the miracles come the debacles — one of the Chinese government's main weapons in the propaganda war is its claim that 1,500 people have died unnecessarily as a result of spurning proper medical treatment.
The sect's theology is a woolly composite derived from Buddhism, Daoism and Chris- tianity. Li Hongzhi preaches a Manichaean vision of cosmic struggle which reads like a cross between the Book of Revelation and Star Wars. On one side are high-level beings who represent the sinister, old, malicious forces. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its henchmen have been employed by these beings to combat Dafa, the positive force represented terrestrially by Li and his followers. Dafa apparently has boundless inner meaning and has created everything at each level of the cosmos. Li, self-appointed messiah of the group, regu- larly proclaims the imminence of the Con- summation, an apocalypse that will cleanse the cosmos of vile forces and create a utopia for those who remain.
The last time an apocalyptic cult really took hold in China was during the Qing dynasty when a peasant, Hong Xiuquan, announced himself to be the younger brother of Jesus. He gathered an army of God-worshipping faithful bent on ridding China of the Manchu demon (i.e. the rul- ing Qing imperium) and founding an earth- ly paradise. The Taiping Rebellion, as it is now known, swept northwards and estab- lished a base for its putative New Jerusalem in Nanjing, on the Yangtze river. There the Taiping remained from 1853 to 1864 until they were overthrown by a com- bined force of Qing and foreign troops, by which time 20 million or more people in the regions under the Taiping sway had lost their lives through battle or starvation.
All of Falun Gong's nonsense would fade into the background babble of millenarian insanity were it not for the enormous popu- larity of the group, and its very public per- secution by the CCP. An article which appeared in China Society, a publication of the ministry of civil affairs, identified Falun Gong as the biggest challenge for China's ruling party since the founding of the Peo- ple's Republic of China. But why? Why such a sense of threat, and why such a sav- age reaction — one that has inevitably attracted international censure and caused disillusionment within the country?
A main reason is that Falun Gong (claimed membership 100 million) is sub- stantially bigger than the Chinese Commu- nist Party (claimed membership 63.5 million); the popularity of the sect brilliant- ly illuminates the bankruptcy of Marxism as a unifying philosophy for the country. Falun Gong has also infiltrated all levels of Chinese society, including the military, police force, academia, and even the gov- ernment itself. Yu Changxin, a 74-year-old air-force general, was sentenced to 17 years in a labour camp for practising Falun Gong. When 10,000 Falun Gong members famously staged a silent sit-down protest outside Zhongnanhai, the CCP headquar- ters, police who dispersed the protesters discovered a department chief from the ministry of security among them. There have been purges at Qinghua University, traditionally a training ground for CCP leaders, with students and teachers forced to write self-criticisms and attend re-edu- cation classes, or to leave the university.
That Falun Gong protests and meetings have been orchestrated via the Internet, pagers and mobile phones also demon- strates the extent to which new communica- tion technologies are loosening the Communist grip over the individual. A cyber-war is presently being waged between the numerous overseas Falun Gong web- sites and. Chinese governmental 'black guests' — hackers who try to disable them. China's well-maintained firewall allows it to block access to these websites (the CNN and BBC websites have been blocked in the past), but information frontiers have become far more porous since the Internet hit China about three years ago.
Reporting on the persecution is difficult because the government is harassing for- eign journalists within China who write about Falun Gong. Inquiries from other governments into what is happening are stonewalled. China files its abuse of Falun Gong members very firmly under internal affairs: i.e. nobody else's bloody business. And yet Jiang Zemin is worried enough about the evil cult that at an APEC sum- mit last year he personally pressed Li Hongzhi and his Falun Gong: Deceiving the Public and Ruining Lives, a CCP publica- tion, into the hands of Bill Clinton.
There is no foreseeable resolution: the government refuses to engage in dialogue with Li Hongzhi, and his followers are steadfast even in the face of horrific perse- cution. My friend Zhao is totally committed to Falun Gong — a set of ideas that she picked up two years ago — although her husband has lost his job, she has been stripped naked and force-fed salt water in an effort to make her recant, and her friend, also a believer, has had his back broken in three places by the police. She has lost any sense of self-preservation and is marching towards martyrdom. Chen Zixiu, a 58-year- old widow, was tortured by rural police with electric cattle-prods and truncheons for 48 hours until she died, but would not renounce her belief.
Other adherents describe the fierce joy they felt in being tested by torture. 'It is good for our cultivation,' writes one. 'A true cultivator should be in this kind of environ- ment. It would be my pleasure to be able to sacrifice myself for Falun Gong.' While the persecution continues, Falun Gong just keeps growing.
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