I often see news stories and the like online mentioning that the Communist Party of China has once again done horrible things to practitioners of something called Falun Gong or Falun Dafa- usually involving throwing them in prison or beating the crap out of them.
What I can’t work out is why- The limited reading I’ve done on Falun Dafa/Gong seems to suggest it’s some sort of spiritual group. So, why does the Chinese Government hate them so much? I assume they have their reasons, but they don’t seem entirely clear other than the usual Chinese Xinhua-brand “Threat to the Social Order and Peaceful Prosperity of Greater China”-type stuff.
The same problem they have with Tibetan followers of the Dalai Lama or Christians controlled by Pope Benedict XVI, you can’t be taking orders from some guy living in a foreign country rather than the state.
There was a previous thread on the subject and someone gave a really good answer.
Long story short, Falun Gong are a bunch of cultist nutjobs that make the Moonies look mainstream. Worse, is that 5-10,000 followers went into the heart of the Beijing government district and surrounded it with interlinking arms. That was a big bad throw down.
My wife briefly started to get involved with not Falung Gong but another and very similar group years and years ago in Hong Kong. Total cult action and thankfully she was able to see it for what it was.
A great deal of what drives the Chinese government is a mortal fear of “warlordism,” what we would call separatism. Mao was a Chinese Hitler & Stalin all rolled together. The one (maybe only) really good thing he did for China was reestablish a strong central government.
Anything and anybody who looks to be a potential threat to the CCP’s monopoly on power and the people’s affections touches this third rail and get a heck of an over-reaction.
I thought it might be something like that- I was having quite a bit of trouble coming up with “neutral source” information on the subject, which usually sets my :dubious: sensor off. Not that I’m trusting the CCP to only act with restraint and tolerance, as well as being completely and 100% without bias and agenda- but yeah, when religious extremists start rebellions that lead to casuality figures that can be mentioned in the same breath as WWI, I can see why, in their iron-fisted way, they might view Falun Dafa/Gong as being undesireable.
What amazes me is that China has Internal Conflicts and Rebellions that kill as many people as WWI, and yet almost no-one outside China notices (except for historians, and even then it’s not exactly mainstream history…)
Recently I was handed a free newspaper in London, it looked like one of the normal advertising-funded papers. I read it, drinking coffee, waiting for my train. This was no photocopied Chick Tract – it was professionally produced, had plenty of non-nutjob content. But I became suspicious, there were too many stories about China; some about official corruption, several about Tibet, many about the persecution of “spiritual” groups.
Only one page, IIRC, had a direct puff for the Falun Gong but it was obvious the whole thing had been produced by/for them
(Again IIRC) the Falun Gong has followers in several countries and may be growing fast among non-Chinese
I can see why the Chinese Government would worry about a well-organised well-funded organisation with international reach
China has had multiple cycles of decadence, collapse, feudalism, and reestablishment of the state during it’s millenia-long recorded history. One recurrent theme is that the appearence of cults is a signal that all is not well. It’s an “uh-oh!” marker almost as ominous as foreign nomads migrating across your border.
Ultimately, the Chinese government is pants-wetting terrified of anything they can’t control. The Falun Gong by definition is, at the least, uninterested in the government. At the most, it is actively hostile. The Chinese gov fears both. As with most totalitarian governments (they are changing slowly, it’s true), they have to shut off even the shadow of a doubt that another group could rule.
I think that’s overdoing it a bit. They are a religious cult, but I don’t see why they are nuttier than any other religion. What they are is a throwback to a lot of things the Communists have tried very hard to stamp out. And, more importantly, they represent an independent faction of power from the Party.
Among the incidents that directly led to the repression was the discovery that many members of the Chinese government itself were practitioners, including officials at the Ministry of Public Security.
The Amnesty International report on the subject is pretty well-documented and lays out important parts of the history. The footnotes to the wikipedia article also present a lot of pretty decent information.