Los Angeles Times: In Mrs. Chan's Apartment, China's Enemy No. 1 Hardly Seems It

Sunday, March 18, 2001

Practitioners of Falun Gong, the spiritual movement banned on mainland China, perform slow-motion exercises in Hong Kong's Kowloon Park.

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HONG KONG--As a meeting with China's public enemy No. 1, the evening with 40 Falun Gong followers clearly fell short.

There were no security checks or secret passwords at the door, no careful scrutiny or subtle glances. The fluorescent glare in Mrs. Chan's tiny second-floor apartment instead bounced off an array of receptive middle-class faces with the diversity of a supermarket checkout line--and about as much revolutionary zeal.

The group comprised men and women, young and old; the majority were middle-aged women.

Although the spiritual movement has been the focus of mainland China's biggest crackdown since the Tiananmen Square student uprising was crushed more than a decade ago, the gathering of Hong Kong Falun Gong practitioners for a routine meeting late last month was conspicuously light on political content.

There also was little to evoke Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's recent description of Falun Gong as [slanderous words] a comment that came in the context of a major debate in Hong Kong about whether to bend to pressure from Beijing and ban the movement here too.

Although the number of Falun Gong followers on the mainland is measured in the millions, there are only about 500 in Hong Kong, and they meet in groups such as the one that gathered in Mrs. Chan's apartment. Although Falun Gong has been banned on the mainland since July 1999 and its members frequently are subjected to harassment and torture, followers in Hong Kong can still practice freely--at least for now.

Most of the 2 1/2-hour session at Mrs. Chan's was consumed by a rapid-fire group recitation of texts dealing with personal self-improvement written by Falun Gong's founder, a onetime Chinese government worker named Li Hongzhi. About the most threatening things visible during the session were the thumbtacks holding two family photos to Mrs. Chan's bare living room wall.

As the meeting ended, followers seemed more interested in discussing their personal experiences than the Falun Gong's larger struggle against Beijing.

The hostess, a round-faced little woman in her mid-40s, explained how Falun Gong had cured her and her two young sons of chronic health problems, infused her with a new optimism and given her hope for the future.

"The whole family is better," she said, beaming.

It was a familiar theme.

Hui Kwok-hung, a suit-and-tie civil servant who heads a team of 12 to 16 civil engineers in the Hong Kong government's Buildings Department, told how he had picked up the practice from his wife. She had turned to it in desperation after spending several years and more than $12,000 on medications that did little to improve her health.

"When I came home at night, I noticed a change in her," Hui said. "She was more positive, she wasn't depressed, so I started reading [the movement's main texts] too."

In addition to spending each Tuesday and Thursday evening reciting and discussing "Master Li's" texts in Mrs. Chan's cramped apartment, he joins about 20 others each morning at 7 in a local park to carry out Falun Gong's physical program: a set of slow-motion exercises performed to a soothing kind of Chinese Muzak. He breaks off early because of demands at work but finishes the routine during his lunch break.

Like others, especially among the group's younger practitioners, Hui measures the benefits more in spiritual than physical gains.

"It gave me something I was looking for," he said. "It elevated me to a higher level."

Only briefly during the meeting did followers address the attacks on their movement. Why, one asked, had a newspaper dubbed Falun Gong a dangerous religion? After a short exchange, the discussion broke off with little resolved.

"We normally don't agree [with one another]," Hui explained. "We just express our thinking."

At an earlier meeting, an exchange about whether followers should sit outside Beijing's government liaison office in Hong Kong to appeal for an end to the persecution on the mainland also ended without consensus.

"The question isn't whether you sit or don't sit," Hui said. "It's what's in your heart. If you go with the idea that we'll stay until the Chinese government gives up, that's wrong, but if you go to further the truth, that is OK. The entire goal is to elevate yourself [morally]."

Small groups of Falun Gong protesters appear from time to time outside the liaison office.

Just why the Chinese government is so afraid of a spiritual movement with no apparent political agenda beyond the desire to practice freely is unclear. Those who have followed the crackdown say a Beijing protest nearly two years ago carried out by 10,000 followers without any warning from intelligence services unnerved the [party's name] hierarchy.

[...]

Although less than a decade old as a distinct movement, Falun Gong stems from the revival of the ancient practice of exercise, breathing and meditation known as qigong that swept through China during the 1980s after the Cultural Revolution.

"A sort of Chinese popular fundamentalism" is how David Ownby, a University of Montreal historian who studies the subject, describes the phenomenon.

When Li coupled his deeply moralistic writings with the physical exercises, Falun Gong took on a strong and separate following--one whose strength quickly unsettled [party's name] authorities.

[...]

The sense of community, the stress on respect for family and the quest for high moral values are not unlike traits found in deeply committed religious groups in other parts of the world. Unlike in many such groups, however, Falun Gong's hierarchy is vague and its organization ad hoc, according to those who have studied it.

"I spent a lot of time with these people and never had the sense they are waiting on a higher power [to order them to action]," Ownby said.

Xiao says many of the Hong Kong followers choose not to go public, and practitioners say they occasionally draw taunts. But passersby hardly bothered to look as about 20 Falun Gong followers went through the exercise routine recently in Hong Kong's Kowloon Park.

However, there are other pressures. A 33-year-old woman claimed that she was fired from her job because of links with the movement, and many of those interviewed for this article spoke on condition that there be no mention of their employers.

Calls by pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong to ban the movement or draft anti-subversion legislation have added to worries about an erosion of Hong Kong's freedoms guaranteed under the terms of the former British colony's return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

[...]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010318/t000023667.html