Wednesday 11/07/01

In the United States, supporters of the Falun Gong movement are on a 250-mile march from New York to Washington, DC. The march began last week, and it's essentially a protest against the continuing repression of the Falun Gong in China. Meanwhile the Falun Gong in Australia will also march. Practitioners plan to set out today at 10am from Melbourne and Sydney and they'll walk to Canberra, in what's clearly part of a global campaign to focus attention on events in China.

It's a big week for China. Early Saturday morning our time, the world will find out whether or not Beijing is going to host the 2008 Olympic Games. So this very public human rights protest couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time. Next week marks the second anniversary of the Communist Party's crackdown on Falun Gong. The Falun Gong allege that 252 of their followers have now died in custody, and that another 50,000 are languishing in Chinese jails. Their latest reports concern the horrific death of a 32-year-old woman, Zhou Fenglin, in the Xilin detention centre in Changzhou. She was allegedly hung by chains for ten days before being tortured for another eight, and died in agony.

Falun Gong members, along with their charismatic leader Li Hongzhi, say that they're doing nothing more than meditation, yet two years on the official party line in China still [Jiang Zemin government's slanderous terms omitted].

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David Rutledge: Well outlawed it may be, but is Falun Gong in fact a xx, or is it a legitimate religion - or is it something else altogether?

Matt Kutolowski: I wouldn't call Falun Gong a religion myself, although like religions, Falun Gong does have its spiritual beliefs.

David Rutledge: Matt Kutolowski, a spokesman for Falun Gong, based at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He says that Falun Gong isn't so much a belief system as an ancient form of self-cultivation practice, or Qi Gong, that involves meditation and exercise, without the trappings of religion as we tend to think of it.

Matt Kutolowski: There isn't anything like devotional activity or worship, there's no set doctrine or canon, and we also don't have any membership or an organisation and leadership, it's just a very loose network of individuals who enjoy the practice.

David Rutledge: What about the figure of Li Hongzhi, the leader (for want of a better word). You say that Falun Gong has no set doctrine or canon, but the writings and the sayings of Li Hongzhi seem to assume quite significant importance in Falun Gong practice.

Matt Kutolowski: Yes, they're significant, but not in the way that some people might think or portray them. Mr Li has written a couple of books that set forth the principles and the teachings of Falun Gong, which are really pretty simple. They boil down to three principles of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance (or you could translate it as tolerance as well). And he's always been very clear, reminding people that it's the principles that should serve as the guide or your teacher, rather than he himself, so he's resisted attempts by people who kind of make him a celebrity or a charismatic figure, and instead direct people back to the teaching.

David Rutledge: So when you take some of his more 'out there' pronouncements about alien civilisations and the end of all humanity except for Falun Gong practitioners, this kind of thing, you're saying that these are private statements, or privately held beliefs of his own?

Matt Kutolowski: Actually a lot of people have taken some of the statements out of context, and been confused by some of the teachings. So some of the things that are talked about seem to us - how shall I say - a little bit perhaps mystical or arcane, but these are things pretty basic actually to traditional Taoism or Buddhism, from which the Qi Gong practices in China derive.

David Rutledge: What about organisation? I've heard that Falun Gong has no formal organisational structure or has, as you say, a very loose structure with no office holders, no membership lists, this kind of thing - and yet what started the whole crackdown in China was, of course, this silent protest outside of the Party headquarters in Beijing two years ago. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people turning up for a silent protest; I mean this would seem to indicate some kind of very well run organisation. Can you comment on that?

Matt Kutolowski: Yes. In China, the Chinese government itself estimated in early 1999 in a survey that was reported in The New York Times, that between 70-million and 100-million people were actually practicing, so that's a very large number of people who took up the practice in just seven years since it came to the public. I lived in China in the summer of 1999, before and during and then a little way into when the crackdown was taking place, and it was really remarkable to see how many people were practicing, what that really looks like. If you went to a park in the morning in China before July 20 of 1999 you would see hundreds, or even thousands of people gathered together doing these exercises. So when I saw that, what that looked like, I got a sense that 10,000 outside the Communist leadership headquarters making an appeal probably actually isn't even that many people, because in a lot of these parks and practice sites throughout China and in Beijing, it's estimated there might even be hundreds of thousands of people practicing. So for them to have 10,000 it really actually isn't that large a gathering, and I think it was largely just by word of mouth.

David Rutledge: So you were in Beijing during the early months of the crackdown you said?

Matt Kutolowski: Yes that's correct. I was studying on a scholarship at Tsinghua University in Beijing at the time.

David Rutledge: What was it like to be practicing Falun Gong at that time? Was there a palpable air of menace?

Matt Kutolowski: There was. It was a really frightening climate. There were many people at my university who practiced and we would gather together in the morning to practice, do the meditation, and some exercises. It was very public and visible, but once the crackdown began, literally overnight everything changed. People were no longer in the parks, instead they were being driven out of the parks and out of the campus and even driven or pulled out of the dormitory rooms. I had classmates who were Chinese students there who were quite literally, yes, dragged out of their dorm rooms during the night and taken off to jail. Many of them have been sent to labour camps and several of them have been tortured, and every one of them who hasn't renounced his or her beliefs has now been expelled from the university.

David Rutledge: Yes, it's quite extraordinary, and to ask a sort of obvious question, maybe the central question: why has the Chinese government gone in so hard against Falun Gong; I mean are they in any sense a destabilising political force?

Matt Kutolowski: Yes it's a good question. I'll answer the latter part of that first. Falun Gong was actually praised by the Chinese government during its early years for being a positive force, you could even say a stabilising force in China. Between 1992 and 1996 it was very actively promoted and patronised by the Chinese government. That was part of its rapid growth perhaps. The Chinese government gave several awards to the founder of Falun Gong Mr Li Hongzhi, and praised him for saving medical costs by having people practice his exercises and become healthier. In 1994 the Chinese government went so far as to try to set up what they call Falun Dafa or Falun Gong Scholastic Organisations throughout China. And this is kind of a significant moment I think in the development of the crackdown, before the crackdown, in that the government was attempting to institutionalise the practice. And this is something it had done and has continued to do with other large groups of people who practice something like a traditional Qi Gong or Tai Chi or even religion. There's an attempt to institutionalise them, and thereby control their development by having a hand in it. The teacher of Falun Gong, Mr Li, declined that offer, preferring to keep it free of different entanglements - political, monetary and other things. And that represented sort of a turn in attitude: that if this is something they couldn't control, it was something they were going to have to regulate by other means.

David Rutledge: Falun Gong spokesman, Matt Kutolowski.

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But can we dismiss these kinds of sentiments as pure propaganda, or is there something in the charge that Falun Gong is a politically destabilising force? It's a question that I put to Nina Shea, who's a human rights lawyer and Director of the Centre for Religions Freedom in Washington, DC.

Nina Shea: I think that any religious group is seen by the Chinese regime, which bases its political philosophy on communism, as a destabilising force. The Chinese government, the regime there, sees the Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals as destabilising forces; these are not separatist movements, like Falun Gong is not a separatist movement, but they use different excuses for different groups. The Moslems, the Tibetan Buddhists, they're separatist groups so they're bad; the Catholics, well they're loyal to Rome, so they're bad; the Protestants, they're American, so they're bad. So a government that places itself firmly in opposition to religion it cannot control, then of course any religion that's independent it's going to find destabilising. Religion is a powerful force that threatens totalitarian regimes, or those that aspire to be like the Chinese government.

David Rutledge: So why is the Chinese government going so hard after the Falun Gong and not after, say, Catholics or Protestants, or any other religious group?

Nina Shea: Well I think that they do go hard after other religious groups that operate outside of their purview and control. So if they have a say in who the Bishop's going to be, or who the priests are going to be who are ordained, or the ministers in the Protestant world, then they can tolerate it. So I think in the case of Falun Gong, they find the problem is Li Hongzhi and because they cannot control him, and he's gone into exile and they see this vast national organisation that is very well co-ordinated, that dares to stage a sit-in, then they get upset. They put up with it for years before the sit-in two years ago, and it's really when there was this civil disobedience that was obviously well-co-ordinated, a vast communication network, that they then became extremely nervous. So there is a dimension of civil disobedience I think, which the other churches, the Christian churches, especially have avoided, or try to avoid; that's made a difference. But there is suppression and arrests and even deaths under suspicious circumstances or maybe beatings, of Christian leaders as well.

David Rutledge: Well sometimes we find that these kinds of crackdowns and forms of persecution can actually strengthen a group, strengthen their resistance. I mean we can see this sort of thing in the early history of the Christian church, just as one example. Do you think this is happening with Falun Gong, or do you think that the Chinese government has actually done them a lot of damage?

Nina Shea: I don't know, and I don't really think anyone can assess this. Certainly the Chinese government has been saying that they're suppressing them and hurting the numbers, but who knows? I mean the Chinese government cannot be relied on for truth-telling, that's for sure - that's part of their propaganda message, that they're winning. Now it's true what you said, that the Christian churches have been watered by the blood of the martyrs in certain circumstances. Bit in other places they've been wiped out. So we shall see.

David Rutledge: Nina Shea of the Centre for Religious Freedom in Washington, DC.

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