Inside The Falun Gong

By Terry McCarthy/Shanghai

What does it take to become an outlaw in China? Promote democracy, organize an illicit labor union--or spend an early-morning hour in a park moving your hands around the shape of an imaginary wheel.

It was so easy to get pulled in. A friend might have mentioned that a new group was gathering in the local park to do a form of traditional qigong exercises. One morning you found them, 20 or 30 people, under the yellow-and-red banner of Falun Gong--the Law of the Wheel Breathing Exercise--doing the slow-motion exercises to music from a tape recorder. There was no fee, no formal teaching--they just invited you to join in and copy their movements.

It was gentle and somehow calming, and not suspecting anything, you went back the next morning. After several sessions, you were offered the book written by their "master," Li Hongzhi. It was about self-control and Buddhist enlightenment, written in a chatty style that was not hard to understand, and it cost only $2. The group would read and discuss parts of it after the exercises, so you bought a copy. What you didn't know was that you were being watched--that you and millions like you were already caught in the net of China's biggest internal security operation since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. One of the other members in your group may have sent you an e-mail about how some 10,000 Falun Gong members had gathered in Beijing in April to protest being called a cult. But nobody had been arrested, and you thought little of it. The exercises got your circulation going, and meditation afterward helped dissipate frustrations from work and your crowded apartment block. China began to seem livable again.

Then came the big shock.

On July 22 the Chinese government announced that Falun Gong was banned--for practicing "evil thinking" and threatening social stability. All over China police began rounding up thousands of Falun Gong practitioners and driving them off to sports stadiums. There they were interrogated, sometimes for hours, and forced to sign letters disavowing the group. In scenes reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, more than 2 million books and instructional tapes were pulped or crushed by steam rollers last week. And there was also the astonishing news that some of the arrested Falun Gong members were top Communist Party officials. On Thursday, Beijing put Li, 48, on a wanted list and requested Interpol's help in apprehending him. Li has lived in the New York City area since February 1998; a spokesperson for Falun Gong said the State Department assured them Li was safe as long as he stayed in the U.S.

But if Li is out of reach of the Chinese police, millions of his acolytes are running scared. Nobody dares go to the parks to exercise anymore. Many Falun Gong members have temporarily left home, and others are waiting for a knock on the door. "My mother was detained for 44 hours," says Sophie Xiao, a Beijing-born investment analyst now living in Hong Kong. "I was very worried. She is stubborn and wouldn't sign the letter of confession. She had to go to two police stations for questioning." Her mother is also a Communist Party member, which singled her out for special treatment. The authorities repeatedly asked her about Falun Gong's organizational structure. Finally, she recanted so she could go home. "The security forces can lock up their bodies but not their hearts," says Xiao.

The crackdown came after a secret three-month investigation of the sect by China's security services, during which agents infiltrated Falun Gong activities and clandestinely videotaped exercise sessions. The investigation was reportedly ordered by President Jiang Zemin himself after the silent demonstration by 10,000 members of Falun Gong on April 25 outside Zhongnanhai, the Beijing compound where China's top leaders live. At that time the group said it was protesting magazine articles labeling it a superstitious cult, a charge that could have led to its being banned. Instead it wanted to be recognized as a legitimate religious group.

What scared the leadership was that so many people could assemble without the normally vigilant security services' finding out. Some Westerners were comparing it to the flight of German Mathias Rust, who landed his small plane in Red Square in 1987, an audacious act that showed up the limits of what was supposed to be a formidable Soviet air-defense system. The Falun Gong gatherings were more than a worry for China's security services; they were also an embarrassment. The police discovered that the protest was planned in large part by e-mail and that Falun Gong had a "virtual" organization, which it claimed linked 39 provincial branches with 1,900 lower-level "guidance stations" and 23,000 practice sites.

Beijing estimates that Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) has acquired 2 million adherents since it was founded in 1992; the group claims 100 million practitioners. Official paranoia about this invisible force reaches as high as President Jiang. The 72-year-old leader, not known for late-night Web surfing, has reportedly become obsessed with the sect and its ability to organize its activities in cyberspace. Apparently Jiang frequently brings up Falun Gong in conversations with high-level foreign visitors, and Western diplomatic sources say he was driven outside Zhongnanhai in a car with tinted windows to observe for himself the group's silent protest in April.

Nervous people jump at shadows. If the leadership looks through its colored glass and sees a potentially threatening mass organization, the view from ground level is very different. Falun Gong is, for instance, an organization not of militant students but of housewives, retirees and administrators. Practitioners make Falun Gong sound like a sort of Buddhism Lite with quaintly named breathing exercises and a clean-scrubbed ethic that disapproves of smoking, drinking and the crass materialism of today's China. Sophie Xiao has been practicing Falun Gong for two years and says it has given her "answers to things I had been looking for all my life. I smile all the time, have no trouble in my life anymore."

Xiao, 32, had a tough, if typical upbringing in China during the mania of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. Her father was driven "mentally crazy" after he was denounced at work as disloyal to Mao, and at home he expressed his anger by beating Xiao and her mother.

He is dead now, but Xiao says that for years she was "grumpy, self-centered, stubborn, doing things that were bad for me." Xiao came into contact with Falun Gong through her mother, who gave her Li's book. "My mother was always so sick, but when she started going to Falun Gong sessions, she seemed to get better. She seemed much happier, taking things much more lightly. So I thought I would look into it myself." Xiao found a Falun Gong group close to where she lives, and exercises most mornings. "It changes you. You let go of a lot of human desires and become very peaceful, and then you don't fear anything. That's probably what the Chinese government is afraid of."

Even more terrifying for the government is the possibility that Falun Gong could morph into a political organization, as has happened with other sects in Chinese history--most famously during the 19th century Taiping rebellion, when a martial-arts cult triggered a civil war that left more than a million dead. But so far police have found no evidence of a political conspiracy, and the official media have accused Li of being a cult leader who promotes superstition and witchcraft. "We are not a cult," counters a middle-aged Falun Gong member in Beijing. "We are simply trying to learn how to be better individuals and how to prepare for our deaths. We're not attached to this world."

Precisely what Falun Gong is attached to, and how it is organized, is still something of a mystery. In an interview with TIME in April, Li spoke about the joys of levitating and claimed that aliens have been invading humanity since the beginning of this century. Li fends off questions about how his followers are organized and denies that he had anything to do with the "spontaneous" protest in Beijing on April 25. But last week the government produced immigration documents to show that he visited Beijing from April 22 to April 24. Li claims he was simply in transit to Australia.

The battle between the cult and the commissars has moved to the Internet. Falun Gong websites are blocked from Chinese Internet servers, and several sites reported being hacked into. At least one hacking attempt against a site in Maryland has apparently been traced to a police office in Beijing. The Falun Gong Research Society, which is based in New York, has been putting out regular bulletins on its own site about the ongoing crackdown in cities across China, and some of this material is getting back to the mainland through e-mail. Last week the website issued a warning to government officials to "stop their brutal persecution" or the situation could develop "into another June 4-like [the date of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989] tragedy."

For the time being, the government has prevailed. Most Chinese have been scared by the government's harsh crackdown; few have offered any support for the beleaguered movement. But in the longer run, with the economy set to worsen, the leadership may regret its heavy-handed tactics. "The government is turning it into an anticommunist cause," says an academic in Beijing who did not want his name used. "It's a stupid policy. It is creating enemies where there were no enemies." Which is precisely the definition of paranoia.

--With reporting by Mia Turner/Beijing

With reporting by Mia Turner/Beijing