Falun Gong Sparks Debate Here New California Media, Aug. 13, 1999 By Song Xiang "Why haven't people learned anything?" wondered Wei Liu, a computer engineer in the Silicon Valley. To Liu, who grew up in China, the Falun Gong movement signals the revival of a fanaticism that back in the 1960's led to the personality cult of Mao Zedong and the ten-year devastation called the Cultural Revolution. Now Liu is afraid that another personality cult may emerge in the country he left behind 14 years ago. Last April Falun Gong captured international attention when more than 10,000 practitioners quietly surrounded Zhong Nai Hai, the Chinese leadership compound in Beijing and Communist equivalent of the imperial palace, and touched off the biggest political crackdown and crisis in China since the 1989 student democracy movement. It was an extraordinarily bold action on the part of the Falun Gong as the Chinese government had executed more people last year than the rest of the world combined according to Amnesty International. Authorities arrested Falun Gong organizers nationwide, bombarded the airwaves with propaganda, scoured and burned books written by Li Hong Zhi, the movemen't founder, and shut down all Falun Gong Websites and millions of E-mail accounts. But Li's followers-they prefer to call themselves practitioners- stepped up their protests, mobilizing hundreds even thousands. Eyewitness accounts said truckloads of arrested protesters were driven off to makeshift detention centers in stadiums as the police failed to disperse them. They were heard shouting: "We'll defend the Great Dharma with our lives!" Their sheer numbers and uncanny fearlessness have inspired comparisons to previous cult uprisings in Chinese history that nearly toppled dynasties. Far from China, the crackdown pitted Falun Gong's North American practitioners against other Chinese whose passion Liu's reaction typifies. It is a testament to Falun Gong's wide-ranging impact that attacks come from all sides. Political scientists share Liu's worries. Scientists take offense at Li's calling the theory of evolution "shameful." Buddhists want to take back what they feel Li has usurped from Buddhism. Health Miracles To the practitioners, however, critics have simply missed the point. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area alone, there are more than 30 "practicing stations" where practitioners go for their daily exercises as early as 5:30 in the morning. They say that Falun Gong has taught them to be good people. Moreover, nine out of ten practitioners will also tell you that Falun Gong, considered a combination of religion and qigong, a branch of Chinese martial arts believed by many to have healing power, has worked miracles on their health. Lin Fei, a 28-eight-year-old computer engineer in the Silicon Valley, claimed that Falun Gong had cured a debilitating stomach ailment he had suffered for years. Telling his story via his cell-phone while he sat with other practitioners in a shopping mall, Lin said the illness had become so bad that at one point doctors even predicted cancer. But now he is fully recovered, only two years after he first read Turning of Falun , the bible of Falun Gong. "I tried every kind of medication and treatment I could get my hands on, and nothing worked," recalled Lin. He also tried all sorts of qigong exercises. In fact, Lin considered himself an old hand in practicing qigong-he had his first lesson when he was only 11 years old. But apparently he had not come across the right type until Falun Gong came along. What makes Falun Gong's qigong exercises so special? According to Lin, the power is in Falun Gong's moral teachings: "Falun Gong has taught me that for the qigong part to work, I must first be a good person and relinquish all my evil thoughts." When he accepted that condition, Lin said, he experienced no less than enlightenment. His new belief lifted a block that had rendered his previous qigong useless. Bad Karma According to practitioners, what ordinary people call diseases are really "ye," or bad karma one accumulates by doing bad things. Since we cannot avoid doing bad things when we are ordinary people, we accumulate enough "ye" which gets us sick. But practicing Falun Gong helps one get rid of "ye" and, therefore, cure sicknesses. Now not only is his stomach ailment cured, Lin said, but he can go for a month with only three hours of sleep and one meal a day and never feel worn out. "To summarize it all, how enlightened you are is how well the qigong will work on you," said Lin. Such miracle stories abound, and the touch of Falun Gong seems to be able to cure what modern medical science despairs of-cancer, paralysis and so on. Even the staunchest critics of Falun Gong have had to grapple with this apparent power. "Even though our own investigations have shown that some of 'miracle' stories put out in Falun Gong propaganda materials are fake, we can't deny that these firsthand accounts are probably true," said Fang Zhouzi, a biologist and creator of a Website that has become a bastion of anti-Falun Gong forces. Dismissing Li's concept of sickness, critics nonetheless are willing to speculate that Falun Gong may have unwittingly hit on some hidden connection between the mind and body and utilized the power of suggestion. Power of Suggestion "In our own lab experiments, about 20 percent of the patients got better after taking what they thought were medication but in reality were nothing but sugar pills," said Fang. Also according to him, one of the telltale signs is that practitioners are asked to do the exercises together, and the group atmosphere may have the effect of increasing the hypnotic power of suggestion. Other and more sinister explanations have been offered as well. Buddhists believe that if the claims of sudden recovery were true, the practitioners could have been possessed by evil. "Evil has a way of feigning good health so it can hang on to you," said Jing An, a Ju Shi-a type of Buddhist monk that does not dwell in a monastery-and a physicist at University of North Carolina. According to Jing An, one of the active contributors to Fang's Website, Li Hong Zhi himself is possessed by greatest evil of all. One grave charge that critics shared above all is that Li has explicitly dissuaded practitioners to seek medical help when they are sick, even in serious cases like cancer and heart disease. "It is horrifying. People have died because of it," said Jing An. Official government figures say that some 700 practitioners have died from refusing medical help. According to Li's own account, perplexed practitioners themselves have raised this question to the "Master." Why, asked one woman practitioners, did her husband die of a heart attack even though he had been practicing Falun Gong? Why did he not get better as you taught us? Li's answer was that he died because he did not believe in Falun Gong whole-heartedly. "As long as you are not totally convinced that sickness is not sickness, we say you haven't arrived at the level of a true Falun Gong practitioner. In that case, Falun Gong will not work for you. Then we beseech you to go to a hospital," explained Chi Hua, a woman practitioners in her fifties. Wavering Is Dangerous The Zen-riddle-like suggestion is what Chi offered one new member when she consulted her about a lump in her body and asked whether she should go to the hospital and have it checked. According to Chi, everything is in the mind, and Falun Gong will work only when no doubt is left in there-to the degree that even a momentary wavering is dangerous. "An old lady suddenly said one day during an exercise session, 'Oh, maybe I should just go to a hospital and make sure.' We immediately understood that her faith was broken, and we asked her children to please take her to a hospital right away," said Chi. "Li is laying the blame on practitioners for failures," said Deng Zixian, a political scientist at the University of North Texas, a prolific contributor to Fang's Website, a tactic that adds potency to Li's hold on practitioners. This combined with other methods has made Li's spell hard to break. "They want you to watch his 'sermon' tapes and do the exercises together. They want you to read and re-read books by Li Hong Zhi and nothing else. They even want you to read the books in one sitting. All that is calculated to make sure that the brainwash works," said Deng. Universal Appeal Despite demonization by the Chinese government, practitioners remained calm and serenely assured of the truth of their faith. Even when they protested, either before the Chinese embassy in Washington DC or the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, there was no shouting or violence. All they did was sit doing the Falun Gong exercises or reading books by Li Hong Zhi. "The persecution phenomenon could be working here," said Deng. Researchers have detected a tendency among fringe religious groups where "people who would normally quickly leave a group may refuse to do so because other people are persuading them to." On the other hand, they may have simply found what they had always been looking for. "The most important appeal to overseas Chinese may be that Falun Gong claims to be universal while retaining these Chinese undertones," said Deng. Especially to many who have tried Christianity but had a hard time hanging onto a Western faith, Falun Gong may prove especially attractive. Huang Yun, also a computer engineer based in the Valley, said that Falun Gong gave him a sense of moral certainty he could not obtain anywhere else. Formerly a Christian, Huang was not unfamiliar with such Christian teachings typified by "turn the other cheek." But he was unconvinced. "What am I to gain from that?" questioned Huang. To him, preserving one's own skin seemed the only sensible answer to this unjust world. But Falun Gong changed his view. According to Falun Gong, one gets sick because of an imbalance of 'ye' and 'te'-virtue-in one's body. When you do bad things, a chunk of your 'te' will fly out and go to the people you harm, so while they become healthier, you become sick-and vice versa. "Now I'm no longer afraid of being a good person because I know I'll always benefit," said Huang.