China syndrome: the persecution of Falun Gong

Christian Century, August 10, 2004 by Dean Peerman

And if Master Li's "good people" can, as he says, become godlike, what does that make him? It is no mere surmise that Li sees himself as not only a holy man but a divine savior. For example, he has said: "If I cannot save you, nobody else can.... I am the only one in this entire world who ... is teaching ... the Great Law." He claims that he has "paid back all the sins committed by all sentient beings." And he actually considers himself superior to both Jesus and the Buddha, because they operated only "within a small arena," in contrast to his being "not of the universe."

Do Li's millions of followers really believe all this stuff? I would like to think that many of them have not delved very deeply into his abstruse, gaseous-cosmic prose. The few I have met seem fairly rational and sensible people. (Some practitioners have defected from the ranks after becoming fully cognizant of Li's pretensions to divinity.)

IN ANY CASE, bizarre beliefs and megalomania are not crimes--or shouldn't be. What is happening in China is a calamity of increasingly appalling proportions, a calamity that has received too little attention in the West. As Danny Schechter notes (in Falun Gong's Challenge to China), the initial response from official Washington, the UN and even some human rights organizations was slow and tepid. And because the crackdown came in 1999--at a time when lucrative trade deals were in the works and China was negotiating to enter the World Trade Organization--Schechter was prompted to comment: "It appears that money, not morality, remains the central concern of governments on both sides of the globe."

In May 2000 the guiding heads of the European Economic Community elected to remove the issue of human rights in China from the bargaining table. The trade-off: "China agreed to open up the incalculable potential of its financial and telecommunications markets to multinational corporations" (Power of the Wheel). Shortly thereafter the U.S. Congress voted to grant China permanent favored-nation status.

The evidence indicates that the decision to eliminate Falun Gong was largely that of one man--then President Jiang Zemin. What sparked the suppression was a remarkable demonstration on April 25, 1999, in which more than 10,000 Falun Gong followers stood quietly in front of the Communist Party compound adjacent to Beijing's Tiananmen Square--the largest demonstration in the People's Republic since the pro-democracy movement of ten years before. They were protesting the arrest of a few of their number who six days earlier had gone to a magazine's editorial office to complain about the publication of an article that had termed Falun Gong a superstitious cult and a health hazard. The regime was unnerved by the sight of thousands, peaceable or not, gathered outside party headquarters--and by the fact that the staging of such a huge event had eluded its security apparatus. In the eyes of the demonstrators, however, they were not engaging in an act of defiance but were simply pleading with the government to accept their spiritual movement.