Falun Gong

Falun Gong, controversial Chinese spiritual movement founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992. The movement’s sudden prominence in the late 1990s became a concern to the Chinese government, which branded it a “heretical cult.”

Background

Falun Gong is an offshoot of qigong (Chinese: “discipline of the vital breath”), an amalgam of traditional medical and self-cultivation practices developed in the early 1950s by members of the Chinese medical establishment as part of an effort to promote traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in modern socialist China. Although some members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attacked such practices for their “superstitious” nature as well as for their links to religion and spirituality, proponents of TCM managed to carve out a place for qigong and other similar therapies alongside biomedicine.

Qigong was available in some clinics and sanatoriums in the 1950s and early ’60s but was banned during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) for its “feudal” history. It received a new lease on life in the late 1970s, when a purported laboratory discovery of the material existence of qigong energy dovetailed with a fundamental change in state policy away from revolution and toward science and economic development. Overnight, qigong became “scientific,” a change in status that led to state approval for qigong activities.

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Rise in popularity

Out of this conjuncture developed the qigong boom, a roughly 20-year period, spanning the 1980s and ’90s, when hundreds of millions of Chinese were drawn to a wide variety of qigong schools and practices in the socially freer post-Mao Zedong era. The leading figures in the boom were charismatic qigong masters such as Yan Xin and Zhang Hongbao, who built nationwide organizations, sold qigong manuals, and gave talks in sports arenas and other large venues, which believers paid to attend. The masters were supported by qigong magazines and newspapers and by best-selling biographies of the masters themselves.

Behind the scenes were government and military figures who believed that the study of qigong could be the key to creating a “Chinese science” that would expand human potential and propel China to the forefront of the developed world. Although average practitioners were likely to have been drawn to qigong for health reasons, other currents in the qigong movement included experiments with alleged paranormal phenomena and extrasensory perception (ESP) as well as a wide variety of spiritual and cultural pursuits. It should be emphasized, however, that most advocates of qigong regarded it as a self-cultivation practice with a scientific basis and not as a religion, which is heavily regulated in China.

Although the qigong movement had high-level supporters, it also had detractors, who condemned qigong as superstition and chicanery. By the early 1990s such critics had gained the upper hand in swaying China’s political authorities. It was in an effort to restore the qigong movement’s flagging fortunes that Li Hongzhi in 1992 founded Falun Gong (“Discipline of the Dharma Wheel”), whose name referred to the revolving wheel that Li promised to install in his followers, purifying their bodies “in another dimension” and freeing them from bodily concerns.

Li’s original message sought to dispel qigong’s associations with fraud and faith healing by emphasizing “higher-level cultivation.” He also initially gave his lectures free of charge, relying instead on sales of his books and other Falun Gong paraphernalia. Whether it was the message or the man, Falun Gong grew rapidly in popularity, and Li followed the familiar path of other charismatic qigong masters, giving dozens of well-attended high-profile talks and building a large nationwide organization between 1992 and 1995. Estimates of the number of Falun Gong’s adherents during this period vary greatly, ranging from about 2 million to 60 million.

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Controversy and Falun Gong demonstration

However, the advent of Falun Gong did not end criticism of the qigong movement, whose revival turned out to be short-lived. Li eventually decided to resettle in the United States in the apparent hope of avoiding political problems caused by the continuing denunciation of qigong in the Chinese media. His departure in 1998 changed Falun Gong in a number of ways. First, upon leaving China, Li announced that his newly published text Zhuan falun (1994; “The Revolving Dharma Wheel”)—in fact a transcription of a nine-part lecture series—would henceforth serve as the focus of Falun Gong practice. Followers were to read and reread the sacred text, sustaining their relationship with Master Li as they did so. That change was important in the context of the broader qigong movement, in which manuals had traditionally served as how-to books and guides to cultivation but not as sacred texts (although Zhuan falun could be downloaded from the Internet for free, followers were not allowed to write on the pages of the work). The content of Zhuan falun also stressed demonic and apocalyptic themes that other qigong texts had only hinted at.

Second, despite Li’s absence and the generally falling fortunes of qigong and Falun Gong, most Falun Gong followers in China continued to believe that their practice was completely legal, as high-level debates on the subject within the government had been inconclusive. Accordingly, when faced with media criticism, Falun Gong followers reacted by peacefully demonstrating at the offices of newspapers and television stations. Finally, in a massive and unannounced gathering on April 25, 1999, some 20,000 Falun Gong adherents protested outside CCP headquarters in Beijing.

Falun Gong in the diaspora

That demonstration, which took party leaders completely by surprise, marked the end of the qigong boom and largely sealed the fate of Falun Gong as a Chinese movement. The party soon declared Falun Gong to be the greatest danger to state security since the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and banned the movement as a “heretical cult.” However, because of the surprising strength of Falun Gong in the Chinese diaspora—particularly in the United States and Canada—China was not immediately successful in suppressing the movement.

Falun Gong followers championed their cause in the Western media as an issue of freedom of religion, until a number of self-immolations by alleged Falun Gong adherents in Tiananmen Square in January 2001 convinced much of the Western media that the group was indeed a “cult” (Falun Gong followers insisted that the immolations were staged by the Chinese government). Falun Gong subsequently established its own media outlets—including the Epoch Times newspaper, the New Tang Dynasty television network, and the Sound of Hope radio network..

In 2006 Falun Gong followers established the Shen Yun performing arts group in New York. The non-profit organization, which describes itself as the “world’s premier classical Chinese dance company” has performed in 36 countries and more than 200 cities, and is known for its strongly anti-communist beliefs. The Chinese government actively warns against attending Shen Yun performances. The group received a bevy of negative attention in 2024, when the release of an investigation by The New York Times coincided with a lawsuit by a former performer and an inquiry from the New York State Department of Labor into Shen Yun’s labor practices.