The Falun Gong: Threat or Challenge?

As part of its mandate to inform a broader audience of current developments in Asia, the IIAS supported an informal seminar concerning the Falun Gong movement in and outside China entitled 'Falun Gong: Threat or Challenge?' A wide variety of people attended, ranging from journalists to scholars and students, adherents as well as opponents of the Falun Gong.

* By BAREND J. TER HAAR

The violent persecution of the Falun Gong is not a fundamentally new phenomenon in the history of the People's Republic of China, as Robin Munro pointed out. Munro presented a long list of human rights incidents involving Falun Gong adherents, and the months which have past since the seminar have not seen any decrease in such incidents, even if the Falun Gong persecution is now receiving much less public attention in the West. Although this was not discussed at the seminar, several observers feel that the Falun Gong persecution is successful to a degree at least from the perspective of the PRC state and the Communist party. It will be interesting to observe whether the Falun Gong outside China will be able to maintain its place on the human rights agenda, especially given recent events in the United States.

A general introduction to various issues was given by Barend J. ter Haar, who also maintains an extensive webpage on the Falun Gong (see below). The Falun Gong, he stressed, was merely one among a number of a number of new religious and spiritual movements that have risen in the People's Republic of China (PRC) over the last two decades. Combating the Falun Gong does not solve people's underlying psychological and religious needs for answers to fundamental questions of life, death, and meaning, nor does it remove the marginalization of large parts of the urban population in the Chinese (Communist?) style modernization that is now taking place. On the other hand, Ter Haar also warned against demonizing the present regime, asserting continuity in approaches towards new religious and spiritual movement in China's past and present, as well as overlap of China's and other political systems (including our own).

Two aspects of the Falun Gong received special attention during the seminar. One was the relative success of the movement outside China itself, especially in North America. David Ownby just started a project on this dimension of the movement and reported at the seminar on some preliminary findings. He stressed the down-to-earth nature of the groups he saw, their high level of education (many have college and university backgrounds), the common aims of given meaning to life and solving problems that one encounters, and the informal nature of their networks. In this way, the survival of the Falun Gong movement and its leadership (including founder Li Hongzhi) is guaranteed.

The other aspect is that of networking. As everybody knows, the Falun Gong has been quite successful in using modern means of communication (mobile phones, e-mail, the WWW, etc.) to provide itself with internal cohesion. It is still an open issue as to what extent this structure of information exchange also represents structural organization (in the sense of a hierarchical command structure) and the participants in the seminar did not reach agreement on this. It is certainly the PRC view that a strict organization exists and Beatrice Leung did feel that a certain degree of organization within the Falun Gong existed in China. She pointed out that many members of the party apparatus and the army were joining the movement, providing important reasons for its persecution. Of all contributions, hers was the most advanced in analytical detail. A Roman Catholic nun and researcher on the Christian movement in China, she represents modern Christianity at its best: a lively religious movement that is able to show an interest in other religious and spiritual phenomena that extends above and beyond mere fear. We can only hope that this will be a model for future approaches to religious culture in mainland China, as well. We do not need to agree with what we see, but we do need to make an effort to understand and then to tolerate as much as humanly possible.

In the closing session, Falun Gong representative Zhang Erping joined the panel and he was able to present the movements in a most open and unbiased manner. As an attempt to maintain an open-minded scholarly approach when dealing with these much-contested issues, the seminar was a success. *

For more information, see:

http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/bth/falun.htm