The Economist explains

What is Falun Gong?

China’s government calls it an “evil cult”

The Economist explains

Sep 5th 2018

by J.Y. | HONG KONG

WALK into Chinatown in any big Western city, and on the main street you are likely to find a row of seated meditators, their legs crossed and backs straight. Seemingly innocuous, they could easily pass for participants in a yoga class. In fact, the meditators are practising a prescribed set of exercises from Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline which China banned in 1999 and calls an “evil cult”. Along with Tibetans, Uighur Muslims, democracy activists and pro-independence Taiwanese, Falun Gong practitioners round off the “five poisons”—risks which the Chinese government has acknowledged as posing the biggest threat to its rule. What is Falun Gong?

Falun Gong, which means “law wheel practice” in Chinese, is a set of meditation exercises and texts that preach the virtues of truth, benevolence and forbearance. It was founded in north-east China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, a former trumpet player. Falun Gong draws on China’s long tradition of qigong, a regimen of controlled breathing and gentle physical movements. But unlike other qigong-inspired disciplines that sprouted up in the 1990s, typically claiming nothing more than health benefits for practitioners, Falun Gong avows a path to salvation for the faithful.  Adherents would try to gain enlightenment by reading the works of “Master Li”, who is said to be able to walk through walls and levitate. By the late 1990s millions of Chinese from all walks of life had taken up Falun Gong. Practitioners could be seen meditating in parks and public squares in every city.

Falun Gong’s growing appeal spooked the ruling Communist Party. The party wants the undivided loyalty of China’s people, and Mr Li, a living leader, competed for that loyalty. Officials would have felt threatened by what they saw as a powerful “competing ideology”, as one Falun Gong practitioner puts it, and by the incredible growth in the number of practitioners between 1992 and 1999. In 1996 the government banned public sales of “Zhuan Falun”, the spiritual movement’s main text. Soon afterwards newspaper editorials began attacking Falun Gong, claiming it drives adherents to commit suicide. In April 1999 more than 10,000 aggrieved Falun Gong practitioners protested outside Zhongnanhai, the party’s headquarters in Beijing. In response to the provocation Jiang Zemin, China’s then president, vowed to eradicate the sect. In June 1999 he set up Office 610 (named after the date of its creation), a secretive extra-judicial party organisation tasked with suppressing Falun Gong, and the following month the government declared the sect illegal. Within months thousands of practitioners were rounded up, sent to jail or “re-education” centres.

Yet despite a relentless 20-year crackdown, Falun Gong has survived. It is a much-weakened force, whose current following in China is probably only 5% of what it was at its peak, reckons Massimo Introvigne of the Centre for Studies on New Religions, a think-tank in Italy. Public meditation sessions in China have all but disappeared. But every few weeks Chinese-language media still report on newly nabbed Falun Gong practitioners, perhaps indicating a surprising resilience. And Mr Li, now in exile in America, remains active. In June he gave a speech to thousands of followers at a stadium in Washington, DC, praising practitioners in China for keeping their faith despite repression by the “evil” party. Little wonder, then, that Falun Gong is placed first on the Chinese government’s latest list of 24 proscribed evil cults.

筆者是這麼回覆的：

Falun Gong (FG), founded by an enthusiast called Li Hong-zhi, is a long-time eccentric organization (OR) inside and outside China, where FG rallies a large quantity of practitioners (PRs). At its start, it had been the loyalty of China Communist Party (CCP), its PRs encompassed the branch of CCP’s higher rung, professionals, state-run firm’s staffs (CCTV, Xinhua and China Telecom), the entrepreneurs, and ordinaries people. Since July in 1999, China President Jiang Ze-min who had ever appreciated Li in public due to his support on CCP’s positive image labeled FG as the renegade OR. Indeed, the order was initially questioned of the lack of evidence and legitimacy. Many PRs from China’s local officials from all levels and many scholars, including then premier Zhu Rong-ji, domestically had Jiang repeal the reprimand. Regretfully, FG turned itself from a chaste leisure Qigong association to the vehement political group surrounded by satellite OR and companies, like Epochtimes, and New Tang Dynasty Television, also founded by Li or his followers.

FG metamorphoses into a purely political group, that shifts to a group that loves to malign the innocent men and women, twist CCP’s official words and worst of all assist gangsters to sneak the drug. Recently, the dispute of whether the CCP authority orders polices authority to eviscerate the PRs after the PR suffered extortion once again attracts common sense in Britain and Taiwan (T). Taipei mayor Dr. Ke Wen-je accuses Ethan Gutmann of the statement on “The Slaughter”, which once more becomes a serious subject in T concerning election. FG’s PRs, as EG’s description, suffered inhumane treatment until CCP banned any transaction of organ transplantation (OT) earlier this year. Dr. Ke is said to have found the donor Ke appeared to attain in a certain surreptitiously venal pipeline; from a contingent angle, EG and his attorney, Brian Wu Xian-hui, indicted the CCP authority for the squalid offering of FG PR death row’s organ. It is sensitive to obfuscate the stigma of decades ago in a putrid and indigent immorality, regarding today’s arduously worsening cross-Strait relation and the reshuffling of KMT-DPP PO wax and wane. Besides, the quagmire locates on whether FG impinges on a spurious claim of the OT’s proceedings in the prison, that made many West pro-democratic supporters embarrassed.

The FG’s PRs always rallied in the palpable tourist spot in T. Besides Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall & Shilin Residence and Ximending Walk Street, in Taipei 101 building’s front plaza, the FG’s PRs often “shows” the co-photographing during the last decade with arrays of Councilors from at least 8 counties and municipalities (MU), like New Taipei City and Taitung County, ever appealed to CCP’s core to release all the “victim” CCP incarcerates. In fact, in 2004, T’s Legislative Yuan passed the bill denouncing the CCP’s infringement concerning the FG’s sufferings. Satirically, a majority of the legislator that agreed with the resolution is KMT membership, and it contravenes the general image of “One China: 1992 consensus” that conjoin KMT and CCP in a congruous action.

In China, FG’s PRs memberships are the public secret in both underground and noticeable occupation. Last year, the investigation of Tianjin (TI) Party Secretary Li Hong-jong in July shocked the provincial (PR) level of CCP officials, as the Chongqing party chief Chen Min‘er and Vice PM Hu Chun-hua know and would like to provoke a storm of protest in case the China President Xi Jin-ping lost further Marxist economic rules’ control. No wonder TI has the least economic growth among China’s PR and MU. Alas, I was once shocking. However, Li remains on duty. Another is Hong Lei who was ever China Council Foreign Affairs’ Spokesman. The penetration is widely successful inside and outside CCP, whilst Xi yet promulgated a tangible ban at a larger scale since Xi took over the CCP leadership.

FG’s “3 tenets” and the derivatives isn’t the solution to intransigence of West democracy and Marxism in China that already singularly becomes another Mao Ze-dong’s Little Red Book (many thinks so in China and T), as if Bo Xi-lai is not the attorney of modern Chinese politics who cannot be the like of Ma Ying-jeou in terms of reputation. What a good link I create! Li convenes merely parasitic rally that had no humane regularity except for the muster. When I touch the matter for a decade, sometimes I refer to this group as another kind of “White Lotus” since Southern Soong dynasty in China’s history and “Donghak Peasant Revolution” of Yi’s Chosen in the late 19th century’s Korea Peninsula, because FG intends to criticize the CCP’s wrongdoings by the irrational measures and their aim is along no specific road. Their only fun is mutually to raid and oppose the contemporary authority, with no tax systems concept, holding the propinquity of anarchism.

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For a decade, CCP during Jiang and Hu Jing-tao’s term had promoted the officials by the capability to oppress the FG. It is the best performance among the local CCP officials when it comes to the capture of FG PRs that Bo depended on winning the Jiang and the elder CCP’s panegyric. For meritorious “service”, Bo ascended to the Liaoning Provincial governor besides the dealings of Ma Xiang-dong case. Yet after Beijing Olympic 2008, for nearly 5 years Bo enjoyed the international celebrity of “Marxist Democracy” guardian who remain to take hostility against the slogan of “Falun Dafa” many Western medias see as the hope of West “universal suffrage” democracy and the humanitarian value.

Due to their switch of main business, the FG may as well be still listed as the gangsters at weird “full blast” instead of the so-called “social parity” or “political positive” momentum, nevertheless in another name of prohibition. As far as I concerned, FG has the “indomitable” will to separate from the society who has yet the consistency in the political OR seething as a juggernaut.

Although the PRs are able to propagate in an abundance, the FG seminal thoughts, by the rational measurement, are mostly quixotic temperament confining their subject of regularity or business to the content and volition. Li’s hyperbole derived of “Qigong” is the cause making Li’s ideas spread worldwide, which results in the paucity of quality leader or the successor.

法輪功在中國大陸1992年5月成立，1980年代初期透過黨政要員對氣功的鼓勵應運而升，一開始是與世無爭的養生團體，但是後來被冠上不只是搞老鼠會，為共產黨當局認為會威脅到黨的絕對參政權，因此中共下令禁教。在江澤民決定開設610辦公室後，中共一連串的反對和取締法輪功的行為，讓法輪功幾乎成為純粹的政治團體，長年在海外和國內各地「流竄」。這種受壓力後在國內外集會時常作出偏激行為，或是變成以虛幻的言語要求反共，無可厚非地被「落人口實」，而法輪功就這麼成為精神病集中營的一種。組織上已經變質，成為很反社會和反政治的一群，既孤立又無謀生能力，又喜歡內鬥。

法輪功在台北的活動，大部份以李洪志的支持者在美國開設的「大紀元時報」作掩護，筆者家裡附近的新北新莊幸福中港路口的便利商店樓上，曾經是該報台灣北區的總部。一般在台北市的鬧區及觀光景點，有時候有各國語言，說是要維權，控訴中共的所謂暴行，筆者半年前參加微軟的Taipei Computex發表大會時路經101大樓，還看了看有八個格子說有縣市議員和「台灣總部」的合影聲援，至少筆者認得出新北市議會的議長蔣根煌和台東縣議會議長饒慶玲，而且大部份是藍營的議員。

法輪功的組織演化的決定性轉折於1999年的「北京上訪事件」，在之前數年就因江澤民的疑慮而被大肆搜捕，雖然得到當時中國總理朱鎔基的接見答覆，但是中共中央此後更雷厲於查緝，對中央來說沒有任何容許合法的空間。法輪功的學員常常以被刑求至死和強迫割器官的問題獲得歐美各國的同情和捐助。筆者就在這篇寫到最近，柯文哲因為4年前一本討論器官買賣的爭議書《屠殺》的中文版要問市，又惹了一些爭議的問題，而順便提到國際上有聲音對法輪功的控訴。

其實中共內部還有法輪功學員在這幾年升遷後，在當高官的，就是去年七月被約談的天津市委書記李鴻忠。真是不說還不知道，有時候在各大一線或二線城市，有「快閃族」履履跑出來講真善忍，一定是有很有力的金主或大官爺，一般的公司行號沒有這種能耐。跑出來之後又被抓，然後再有人集結再搞一批。

最後筆者根據聽過中共中央的說明，這個組織沒有像伊斯蘭國或是蓋達組織的順序畫分，所謂高層的說法不一定存在或是變動頻仍，所以這個組織若要延續，基本上這組織大概就和李洪志共存亡，如果李某死了，大概就灰飛煙滅了，大抵上還是一人社團，要說什麼有多系統或多元的發展，在法輪功內是不會有被接受的可能，每個人都是螞蟻，組起來叫螞蟻雄兵罷了，也滿法西斯的。