4/22/2001

The Falun Gong movement, which grew up as an avowedly nonpolitical spiritual organization, has launched a pointed, sophisticated effort to document human rights abuses and to challenge Chinese government propaganda targeting the movement.

The face that adherents turn to the public remains serenely focused on healthful exercise and "truthfulness, benevolence, and forbearance" advocated by founder Li Hongzhi, all of which are on display regularly in practitioners' silent meditation and exercise sessions around the world.

But in reaction to China's harsh campaign of repression, which the movement says has led to nearly 200 practitioners' deaths and tens of thousands of arrests, public demonstrations of technique, such as one held Tuesday in Harvard Square, now are accompanied by color pictures of wounds inflicted by Chinese police, testimony of victims, and petitions calling on "all kind-hearted people and governments to help stop this persecution."

Last week, the organization also released an analysis of a film produced by the Chinese Central Television, which appeared to poke gaping holes in government reports that Falun Gong was behind a group suicide in central Beijing in January.

Even as the United Nations Human Rights Commission declined for the eighth time Wednesday to criticize China, Falun Gong members and China scholars were showing their potential to revive international interest in abuses of human rights in China.

Adherents are typical of human rights campaigners who have put China on the spot over abuses of Tibetans and repression of pro-democracy students in recent decades: Teachers, scientists, students, artists. Young, middle-aged, elderly. Intense and committed.

China's leaders are so alarmed by the Falun Gong movement that they have vowed to wipe out the organization, which by some estimates has more than 100 million adherents on the mainland. In addition to the deaths, thousands have been sent to forced labor camps and hundreds more forced into psychiatric facilities, according to the US State Department and international human rights organizations.

The movement's central aim is "cultivating mind and nature to increase moral standards," says Falun Gong activist Tianlun Jian, an economist who holds a doctorate and who works as a financial analyst in Boston. "Truthfulness, benevolence, and forbearance are most important. Secondly is exercise, because by exercise you can feel peaceful."

There is no mystery, scholars and political analysts say, about why the Chinese leadership has singled out Falun Gong from among the many movements in China that claim they can produce health benefits from new syntheses of Buddhism, Taoism, and ancient martial arts exercises.

Falun Gong is growing very rapidly, and its membership within China may now surpass that of the [party name omitted] Party. It is well organized. Its members are willing to stand up for it in the face of beatings and imprisonment. It is filling a spiritual void that the government has been unable to address.

Perhaps most worrisome to the geriatric [party name omitted] who have dominated China for the past 20 years, Falun Gong bears striking similarities to movements that have arisen often in Chinese history when a tired, deteriorating regime nears its end.

After the failure of the Cultural Revolution, the radical movement of 1966-76 during which the founders of Chinese [party name omitted] tried but failed to preserve their Maoist ideology, China lurched toward the more materialistic world view of senior leader Deng Xiaoping, a view captured in the Dengist slogan "To get rich is glorious."

Hardly were the old communal values laid to rest than deep social and economic fissures opened in society between those who coped readily with the new order and those who could not - or were revolted by the widespread corruption that accompanied it.

"China experienced spiritual directionlessness," said Chai-sik Cheng, professor of the sociology of religion at Boston University. "Something was needed to fill in the emptiness."

...

Falun Gong was initially praised by Chinese officials, but officialdom soured as the organization grew and showed its broad appeal at demonstrations in major cities. Li moved to New York in 1998, then went underground - moves that a source within the movement said reflected a fear of assassination.

On April 25, 1999, 10,000 Falun Gong followers sat in at the entrance to the Chinese leadership's residential complex in Beijing to protest the treatment of their organization, shocking [party name omitted] officials who had not believed such a demonstration could be staged on their doorstep without their foreknowledge.

The organization was outlawed July 22, 1999, and the campaign against it intensified, with the government asserting - but offering no proof - that 1,400 people had died as a result of a Falun Gong opposition to modern medical science.

Despite the drum beat of negative propaganda from Beijing, Falun Gong fits none of the broadly accepted criteria used to differentiate cults from other religions and spiritual practices. Members are not asked to give up money or possessions or to separate themselves from nonpractitioners. They are not asked to declare personal loyalty to Li or to Falun Gong. Instruction is free.

Falun Gong does focus on the limitations of Western medicine, but not to the extent that seriously ill people are discouraged from getting treatment.

"People in the sciences are very interested in Falun Gong," says Merle Goldman, professor of Chinese intellectual history at Boston University. "All the people I've met who believe in it are scientists, engineers, quantitative economists.... The most important part to them is the exercises. They feel it gives them good health and a good mental state."

Charles A. Radin can be reached at [email protected]

This story ran on page A06 of the Boston Globe on 4/22/2001.

?Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

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