Falun Dafa march in Auckland

If you ever read any of the Falun Dafa books or watch the exercises, you will find that it has no concrete heirarchy or organisational structure that any other spiritual belief has. It is a bit like a loose group of individuals who come together once a week to exercise in parks and read the books.

Well-esteemed professors and human rights experts have examined Falun Dafa and determined that it is not at all a cult such as Benjamin Penny, David Owenby (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~tnchina/commentary/ownby1000.html), the Hon. David Kilgour and David Matas esq. (http://organharvestinvestigation.net/report0701/report20070131.htm#_Toc1...)

Why does the Chinese government denounce so viciously and repress so brutally this one group, more so than any other victim group? The standard Chinese refrain about the Falun Gong is that it is an evil cult.

Falun Gong has none of the characteristics of a cult. It has no memberships, no offices and no officers.

David Ownby, Director of the Centre of East Asian studies at the University of Montreal and a specialist in modern Chinese history, wrote about the Falun Gong in a paper prepared six years ago for the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. He stated that unlike cults, Falun Gong has no mandatory financial obligations, isolation of practitioners in communes or withdrawal from the world. He says:

"Falun Gong members remain within society. In a vast majority, they live within nuclear families. They go to work; they send their kids to school."

There is no penalty for leaving the Falun Gong, since there is nothing to leave. Practitioners are free to practice Falun Gong as little or as much as they see fit. They can start and stop at any time. They can engage in their exercises in groups or singly.

Li Hongzhi, the author of the books which inspired Falun Gong practitioners, is not worshipped by practitioners. Nor does he receive funds from practitioners. He is a private person who meets rarely with practitioners. His advice to practitioners is publicly available information - conference lectures and published books.

What you say before about atheism is only part of the reason. The answer lies in the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to enforce conformity. Historically Chinese exercise regimes or qigong in all their variations were suppressed in 1949 after the Party seized office. By the 1990s, the police state environment had become less oppressive for all forms of qigong, including Falun Gong.

Falun Gong includes elements of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. In essence, it teaches methods of meditation through exercises intended to improve physical and spiritual health and fitness. The movement has no political platform; its followers seek to promote truth, tolerance and forbearance across racial, national and cultural boundaries. Violence is anathema.

Li registered his movement with the government's Qigong Research Association. At a time when the movement was falling into official disfavour but before it was banned, in early 1998, Li moved to the United States. But Falun Gong continued to flourish. The Jiang government estimated in 1999 that there were 70 million adherents. That year, the Communist Party of China membership was an estimated 60 million.

Before Falun Gong was banned in July, 1999, its adherents gathered regularly throughout China to do their exercises. In Beijing alone there were more than 2000 practice stations.

The Communist Party, in April 1999, published an article in the magazine Science and Technology for Youth, which singled out Falun Gong as a superstition and a health risk because practitioners might refuse conventional medical treatments for serious illnesses. A large number of Falun Gong adherents demonstrated against the contents of the piece outside the Tianjin editor's office. Arrests and police beatings resulted.

To petition the Government Petition Office in Beijing about these arrests, on April 25th, 1999, 10,000‑15,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered from dawn until late at night outside the Communist Party headquarters at Zhongnanhai next to Beijing's Forbidden City. The gathering was silent, without posters. Then-Chinese communist leader Jiang Zemin was alarmed by the presence of these petitioners. The ideological supremacy of the Communist Party was, in his view, in danger and began a brutal crackdown.

The only reason that documentation of these crimes is possible, is because people managed to smuggle this information out of China. Each time they do this they are risking imprisonment, torture and death. The Party does not spare women or children, it is brutal with all who it deems to be a threat.