Falun Gong and the Internet

Reprinted with permission from the Online Journalism Review.

In 1999, the Chinese government launched a campaign against superstitions and unauthorized spiritual groups. One group targeted was Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, which practices a form of Qi Gong, a slow-motion meditative exercise related to martial arts such as Tai Chi.

Members of the group reacted to the government offensive with a daring demonstration, staged in Beijing's Tiananmen Square--the site of the 1989 crackdown on the pro-democracy movement. The demonstration was peaceful, but involved 10,000 of the group's followers, making it the largest demonstration in recent Chinese history. In return, the Chinese government launched an all-out offensive specifically targeted against the group, branding it an "evil cult" and arresting and imprisoning its leaders and members.

Is this just another example of religious repression? Why should we care about the Chinese government's beef with a bunch of people who appear to be devoted to the practice of an ancient meditative exercise regime?

Before we dismiss what appears to be a marginal religious cult, we should remember that estimates of this group's size range from two million to 100 million. We might also recall the last time an unorthodox religious movement swept across China (as Jonathan Spence tells the story in "God's Chinese Son"), the result was a war, the Taiping Rebellion, that killed twenty million people. Imagine if Hong Xiuquan, the messianic leader of that nineteenth-century cultic crusade, had had access to twenty-first century technology-and you'll have a clue as to why the Chinese regime is so scared of this group.

A little Web surfing reveals that there's more to this story than meets the eye. Falun Gong's Internet savvy was a crucial factor in its ability to organize the unauthorized demonstration under the noses of Chinese intelligence. The group's secretive leader, Li Hongzhi, lives in New York and directs his movement from abroad with Internet, fax, and telephone. The group is thoroughly wired, with Falun Gong Web sites all over the world, including Asia, the USA, UK, Canada, Israel, and Australia.

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