Fulan Gong Movement in China

This research paper discusses the origins, nature and appeal of the Falun Gong movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and its repression by the Chinese government. Since it assumed power in October 1949, the Chinese communist regime has committed many human rights abuses which have been a source of internal unrest and foreign disapproval. Since 1992, the Falun Gong movement spread rapidly within China and among overseas Chinese. It has appealed to many ordinary Chinese from all walks of life. A mixture of traditional Chinese religious, philosophic, martial and healing arts influences, Falun Gong has partially filled a spiritual void arising out of China's economic modernization and the decline of Communist ideology. The movement has been forcibly repressed by the PRC government since July 1999 which regards it (even though it is nonviolent and apolitical) as a dangerous threat to the monopoly of power enjoyed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1949. The all-pervasive nature of that repression has largely succeeded in eliminating the Falun Gong as a going concern within China but it has continued to surface as an irritant to the regime.

Since time immemorial, China's governing system has been characterized by authoritarian rule. Chinese rulers sought to achieved a proper balance during different periods between fang, letting go, and shou, tightening up. In oth

lled by the party" (p. K 9). Falun Gong filled, therefore, "the sense of spiritual emptiness" which characterizes modern Chinese society (2001, July 2, How, p. 32). Hilton (1999, September 6) said "the party has little to offer beyond nationalism and unevenly distributed prosperity as alternatives to compulsory faith in communism" (p. 15). Sin-Ming Shaw (2001, July 2) expressed much the same thought when she said that "the country's leaders no longer have any convictions to cling to and therefore are insecure about their legitimacy" (p. 25). The rapid economic development of China over the past 20 years has been a profoundly disorienting, as well as gratifying, change for China's tens of billions of people, most of whom came, directly or indirectly, from the peasantry where traditional customs, beliefs and ways of life helped provide social stability as well as to retard modernization. As industrialization produced a mass exodus of literally billions of peasants from the countryside into China's ramshackle and overcrowded cities. The process of alienation so characteristic of modern life has accelerated. One of the appeals of Falun Gong was its anti-modernity emphasis. It related to practices and beliefs which were thousands