Never mind that at the end of the day the protesters left as quietly as they had arrived. The massive demonstration at the gates of communist power, organized with impressive discipline, shocked and amazed just about everybody in Beijing. As the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen uprising approaches in June, the government has been keeping close watch on intellectuals, students, laid-off workers and other possible sources of instability. Religious cults were included on that list, but few had reckoned on problems from Falun Gong practitioners. The group, which follows a spiritual discipline called Falun Dafa, includes some government officials and academics but draws most of its members in China from the ranks of retirees–predominantly women. Their power comes mostly from their numbers. Police estimate that Falun Dafa has 30 million adherents. The group itself claims twice that number in China and 100 million worldwide.
Its growth has been explosive. Like many new spiritual movements in China, Falun Dafa is rooted in Qigong, a traditional form of meditation and breathing exercises intended to harness the body’s flow of qi–often translated as “life force.” By performing these exercises and adhering to Buddhist and Taoist teachings, Falun Dafa’s followers hope to reverse aging, rid themselves of disease and master supernatural feats, such as seeing across dimensions with a third eye. Falun Dafa believers say they follow only one master, Li Hongzhi, who founded the group in 1992. Coming under pressure from the government as his ranks grew, Li immigrated to the United States in 1996 but retains influence.
Li’s followers have little patience for the media. They respond to just about any coverage with letters, phone calls and visits to editors, who are told that Falun Dafa is not a religion, but rather fosters the “cultivation” of “moral qualities” and the practice of truthfulness, benevolence and forbearance. After a BBC report on the group, the reaction was “quite extraordinary,” says correspondent James Miles, “more response than to any article I’ve ever written in my entire career.” A Chinese newspaper, after publishing a report on a Falun Gong practitioner who went mad, received “endless” phone calls and “harassment,” says an editor.
The shock of last week’s protest had many Chinese academics flipping through their history books for uncomfortable precedents. In the last century the Taiping Rebellion, led by a Christian who believed he was the brother of Jesus, captured Nanjing and threatened the government. Warriors of the Boxer Rebellion, a revolt against foreign influence, thought their martial art and mystical rituals made them invincible to swords and bullets.
Most cults, secret societies and folk sects were suppressed after the communists came to power in 1949. But the ban was lifted in the late 1970s. In 1985, the Ministry of Public Security reported secretly to higher party officials that the popularity of traditional sects was on the rise. Fourteen years later, the government still seems uncertain how to respond. It has cracked down swiftly against small, marginal political organizations like the China Democratic Party. But it has been wary of taking on large, grass-roots movements.
Beijing seems to have unwritten rules for protests of any kind: keep the gathering peaceful, have a specific–usually economic–complaint that can be negotiated and go home as soon as you’ve made your point. Last week’s protest generally followed those rules; the demonstrators insisted that their complaint against the Tianjin magazine was apolitical. Still, the sheer number of protesters and the boldness of their demonstration have put Falun Dafa prominently on China’s political map.
Now the question is what Beijing will do about the amorphous group. It was unclear who had called last week’s protest or whether Li Hongzhi still exercises control from the United States; demonstrators who were interviewed said they showed up spontaneously. They nonetheless have inspired others. It was no coincidence that one day after the protest, 50 people gathered in the same spot to complain that they had been forced out of their homes in southern Beijing to make way for a new hospital. Whether or not Falun Dafa followers choose to display their might again, they have already changed China’s political landscape. “They’ve shown their power,” says a Beijing academic, “and it’s huge.”
