Sect’s Extent Caught China Off Guard

Luo Shao spent a year crying in the wilderness.

In May 1998, the religion professor dashed off a letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin warning of the rise of a mystical sect that he believed had the potential of becoming a dangerous cult. He sent the same message to the Communist Party Central Committee, advising members to watch out for the group, called Falun Gong. Its disciples, he cautioned, seemed highly organized and blindly devoted to their leader.

He never received a reply.

Three months ago, however, China’s rulers got a warning they could not ignore, in the form of 10,000 Falun Gong adherents who seemed to come out of nowhere to surround the central government compound here and demand official recognition for their group. Communist leaders, including Jiang himself, were caught unprepared by the protest--and left badly shaken.

“It serves them right,” Luo fumed afterward. “The government is reaping the fruits of its actions. I warned the Beijing government, but they paid no heed.”

They are now. Last week, authorities launched an aggressive nationwide crackdown, banning the sect, detaining thousands of followers, arresting suspected ringleaders and seizing books and videotapes in China’s biggest ideological crusade in a decade.

Beijing views Falun Gong as a social and political menace headed by a scam artist who now lives in New York. Followers scoff at that characterization, describing themselves as gentle, morally upright citizens who want only to practice their beliefs in peace.

Whatever the group’s true nature, the controversy has posed intriguing questions. How did an obscure group with zero devotees seven years ago turn into a thriving organization with tens of millions of members today, rivaling the Communist Party in size? Who are its followers? And how did the Beijing regime, normally so watchful of--even paranoid about--potential challenges to its rule, manage to overlook Falun Gong until the sect literally turned up on its doorstep?

Interviews with adherents and critics show that Falun Gong and other groups have rushed in to fill a growing spiritual and moral void left by the decline of communism. Aided by modern technology and the Internet, the rapid spread of such groups has sent the government scrambling to maintain order, even within its own house, where some influential figures are said to be Falun Gong disciples who have helped shield the group from harm.

Many of the facts about the sect are in dispute, caught in the furious rhetorical battle between its promoters and the government.

Both sides agree that Falun Gong was founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, a baby-faced former grain clerk and soldier, in the gritty city of Changchun, about 500 miles northeast of Beijing.

Li, 47, claimed to have studied with established masters of qigong before coming up with his own form of the ancient Chinese practice of channeling energy within the body. Li’s version blended Buddhist and Taoist beliefs with the yoga-like meditation exercises espoused by qigong fans to foster good health.

But beyond the physical exercises was a growing moral dimension that set Falun Gong off from other qigong schools. Practice “truthfulness, benevolence and tolerance,” the sect’s credo proclaimed. Cultivate the “wheel of law” (in Chinese, falun gong), a spinning orb of energy inside a person’s abdomen vested with supernatural powers. Avoid drugs, sex outside of marriage and other manifestations of what Li describes as an increasingly wicked age.

Devotees insist that their group is not a religion, a label that would put it at odds with Chinese law, which recognizes only five official religions. But the religious overtones to Falun Gong’s teachings, its embrace of “universal principles” and the so-called Great Way, are unmistakable.

“It presented itself as more than just qigong,” said Nancy Chen, an expert on qigong practices at UC Santa Cruz. “It’s not just about healing chronic illnesses. It’s a spiritual, moral practice as well.”

“Master Li,” as his followers refer to him, first preached his gospel in local parks in Changchun, a city hard hit by China’s capitalist reforms.

A close associate of Li from those early days, who asked not to be identified, said that the group relied on word of mouth for publicity--an effective tool in densely packed China. Building on the concept of qi, a centuries-old element of traditional Chinese cosmology, Li quickly developed a sizable following and traveled throughout northeastern China, including Beijing, giving lectures.

At the same time, qigong schools in general were exploding in popularity across the country, as was membership in traditional religions such as Buddhism and Christianity. That allowed Falun Gong to blend into the woodwork; so did the support of local officials drawn in by Li’s charisma and teachings.

Li was credited with superhuman powers, ranging from miraculous healing to the ability to levitate and become invisible. Soon, Falun Gong practitioners were recounting stories of being spared injury in bad accidents, cured of diseases such as cancer and visited by radiant visions, sometimes of Master Li himself, floating on air in the cross-legged lotus position.

Between 1992 and 1994, according to the sect, 54 lecture series on Falun Gong were held across the country, attracting up to 5,000 listeners a shot and raking in thousands of dollars for Li and his Research Society of Falun Dafa (another name for Falun Gong). Sales of books and videotapes brought in more money.

In a move that vastly increased the group’s reach and effectiveness, the research society set up its own Web site (https://www.falundafa.org) to publicize events, communicate with chapters in different cities, promulgate Li’s theories internationally and make materials freely available to those interested.

Easy access to instruction has been crucial to Falun Gong’s success in recruiting devotees. Fees to attend lectures are low, and anybody could join in at one of the 28,000 exercise spots throughout China where until last week followers gathered to practice their slow-motion martial-arts-style moves.

“They’ve tried to make it capital-investment-free, where you don’t have to put out a lot of money right away,” Chen said. “Eventually people will want to buy the book, [but in the beginning] there are very low-pressure sales tactics. What they’re trying to sell is not the products but the ideology behind it.”

Zhang Ling turned to Falun Gong for relief from despair over her son’s death in a traffic accident eight years ago.

Hospital visits did little to alleviate the chronic medical problems induced by her grief. Finally, a teacher at nearby Jiaotong University introduced her to Falun Gong.

“The group at the university was full of professors and students, intellectuals and engineers. I thought it must be good,” said Zhang, a retired state worker in Shanghai. “And it was. It’s the only thing that has worked for me.”

Zhang, 52, now belongs to a study group that met weekly to watch Master Li’s videotapes and study his books. She meditates for two hours a day and concentrates on being “a good person.”

Many of the devout are like Zhang: retirees in their 50s and 60s who grew up subscribing to Communist ideology but “now feel that it was all a fraud,” said religion expert Luo. Practitioners also include a large number of unemployed laborers.

But the group also boasts scientists, academics and, to the government’s dismay, Communist Party cadres.

Falun Gong’s followers, estimated at up to 60 million, developed into a tightly knit, well-organized community united by a fierce devotion to their leader and a readiness to defend their beliefs against opponents, even the government.

“It’s very dangerous for any country to tell its people not to follow the path of truth, benevolence and forbearance,” warned one practitioner, a college physics professor. “I feel I can talk to anyone on this subject, including Jiang Zemin.”

One of the first signs of the sect’s fervor and influence came in June 1998, after a Beijing TV station broadcast an unflattering segment on Falun Gong.

Hundreds of believers turned out to protest the station, which fired the reporter involved and ran a positive piece on the group.

Sources say the station officials who ordered the about-face are Falun Gong disciples. Other reputed friends in high places include former public security officers, members of China’s rubber-stamp legislature, officials at the central propaganda ministry and members of the National Sports Commission, the body charged with overseeing qigong schools.

The central government generally seemed to pay little attention to Falun Gong, apparently regarding it as just one of an estimated 2,000 schools of qigong, albeit the largest. In today’s freewheeling cultural and social scene, Beijing has been content to tolerate limited personal freedoms of belief and behavior as long as they do not directly challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. Until recently, Falun Gong seemed to fall in that category.

All that changed April 25 with the mass protest outside the central government compound--masterminded, some say, by two retired high-ranking officials. The government calls the incident the most serious political disturbance since the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Followers deny that the demonstration was planned in any disciplined, organized fashion, but the tight network of adherents allowed word to spread swiftly by phone and on the Internet.

Sect members declared success when they were invited to speak with Premier Zhu Rongji to demand official recognition of their group. But the overt challenge to the Communist regime sealed Falun Gong’s fate, despite the group’s insistence that it has no political designs.

“Through this incident, we can see very clearly that Li Hongzhi’s real motives are to develop the Falun Gong organization into a political power to contend with the government,” the People’s Daily said Wednesday.

The question now is how successful the government’s current campaign against Falun Gong will be among the many believers who say they are willing to suffer the consequences of sticking with their beliefs.

“I’ll practice till the end,” said one man surnamed Yang, the determination in his voice belying his mild manner.

Yang is a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and wants to stay that way. But if asked to pick between the government and Falun Gong, there is no doubt in Yang’s mind: Falun Gong wins.

Researcher Anthony Kuhn in Beijing and Times staff writer Maggie Farley in Shanghai contributed to this report.