From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where we are constantly striving to penetrate
the two cosmic extremes.
We are your spiritually enlightened host, Taylor and Chelsea.
That will pay off later in the episode, I promise.
And today, we take a look at a group that has a lot to do with the world.
We currently inhabit it, as well as some of the fringy topics.
It's on the edge of a few episodes that we've done already.
This will be a two-parter episode.
If you only have time for one of the two, I would highly recommend the second half.
Just because if you only listen to the first half, you're going to get a very bad idea
of what this whole topic is, because I'm doing the two extremes in the episodes.
Should I just meet you back in the second episode?
For those of you who are listening now, you are obligated yes to listen to this episode
and the next episode.
For those of you who have not started listening to it and somehow can foresee this part of
it, please only listen to the second episode.
But Chelsea, today our topic is the Falun Gong.
Have you ever heard of this?
Nope.
Okay.
Not one sweet idea.
I actually have, because you said it, but I specifically didn't look into it and just
ignored what you said completely.
Well, that's good, because it left this episode completely open as a surprise.
Chelsea, you've seen in parks groups of Chinese people doing their little flowy dances, very
nice and slowly.
Okay, hold on.
There's a guy that does it like literally out in my courtyard every day.
So what they're practicing there is some sort of Chi exercise, which at the end of the
day is what the Falun Gong is all about.
I'm going to start this off in a strange place, but I think this is backstory that needs to
be included so that we can connect it to episodes that I've talked about something along these
lines in the past.
There is foreshadowing way back there in another episode, but I don't expect you to
know it.
For those of you who do catch on, it's really good payoff at the end here.
Okay.
Can I just ask a quick question?
Yeah.
When do I find out if I need to be suspicious of the guy that I see practicing these flowy
movements?
Next week.
Oh no.
Is it good or bad?
I really couldn't tell you on this specific guy.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to be suspicious of him until I figure it out.
And that's the weird thing because that form of exercise is not just part of this group.
It has an entire cultural significance to Chinese people.
Okay.
Tai Chi is a thing Asians in general will practice, which is a form of exercises and
movements to help the flow of Chi throughout the body.
Okay.
And the entire grouping in itself is called Chi Gong, or I believe that's the flow of
energy is what it like directly translates to or the wheel of energy.
Okay.
We're going to start in the late seventies.
This article comes from a website called MadeInChinaJournal.com.
I thought it gave a good summary and the article is called on ufology with Chinese characteristics
and the fate of Chinese socialism.
I will begin by noting a specific discontinuity whose reality is absolutely indisputable.
There was no public ufology in China before the reform period and Chinese ufology and
the reform period began at almost the exact same time.
Chelsea, I don't expect you to know what the reform period is.
Basically there was the Chinese revolution after World War II.
There was a lot of cultural destruction because they basically got rid of the entire upper
class of China.
The reform period is bringing four modernizations industry, agriculture, military and science.
And this is brought up out by Deng Xiaoping.
It's usually called Dengism, what Deng Xiaoping did during his time.
And it's D-E-N-G dot D-U-N-G.
Dengism.
Okay.
Basically, we need to push these things forward.
They also really like to push Chinese characteristics.
They talk about socialism with Chinese characteristics a lot.
The science that they're looking at sometimes is science with ancient Chinese attachments
as well.
So during the first wave of the major reforms and the deepening distribution of the problems
associated with the four modernizations, the China UFO enthusiast liaison office was
established at Wuhan University on September 20th, 1979.
And by 1980, it had grown considerably and became the China UFO Research Association
with branch organizations in several major cities.
The following February began publishing the Journal of UFO Research and by the mid 1980s
had more than 40 branch organizations around the country and thousands of members.
In and at this point, unrelated development.
In 1981, the All China Qigong Science Research Association, which is this movement of Qi
through the body that we were just talking about, was established under the All China
Association of Chinese Medicine for research and Qigong practice with hundreds of member
organizations.
They called the Qigong Science Research Association the QSRA.
It immediately became the central locus for paranormal research in China.
Extrasensory perception, telekinesis, ghosts, and so on.
Like it all ended up falling under the idea of the Qigong Research Center.
That's very interesting.
Yeah.
Basically, everything that you would consider like just kind of outside science falls under
the idea of Qi flowing energy.
The extraordinary powers that Qigong practice was supposed to engender according to the
QSRA were not exactly coexistent with the domain of the paranormal, but in seeking to
develop and theorize these powers, continuous reference was made to these fields of study
and especially to scientific experiments in these areas in western countries.
Between 1986 and the early 1990s, the organization changed its name in minor ways and fell from
time to time under the supervision of different ministries.
And by 1993, it operated as a state-level social organization under the Ministry of
Health and Civil Affairs.
All of this occurred in exactly the period where the previously uncommon phrase with
Chinese characteristics was driven into public discourse.
After Deng Xiaoping had used the phrase socialism with Chinese characteristics in his opening
speech at the 12th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party on September 1, 1982,
it quickly became a central element in the discursive rearrangements that occurred through
the 1980s around the problems associated with the dismantling of many of the social and
economic modes of organization that had characterized the socialist development period, opening
social life to new forms of knowledge and culture from the advanced capitalist countries,
developing an advanced culture and economy and so on.
There's little doubt that this had a great deal to do with the end of official Chinese
socialist internationalism and the redirecting of attention and desire towards the capitalist
world but the problem of Chinese characteristics also became an important site in which struggles
over the legacy and worth of Chinese socialism would take place.
By the early 1990s, then, the period immediately following the crushing of the 1989 social movement
and the subsequent dismantling of the institutional and discursive resources that pertained to
certain forms of protest against the process of reform, the broad project of combining
Chinese traditions like Qigong and high level science and technology in the interest of
economic development was well established.
And Chelsea, I don't know if you know what the 1989 social movement is talking about,
it's the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Okay, I do know that.
I didn't know that it would by that other name though.
Especially in China, you really can't talk about it in specific terms.
Because it's a significant movement against the government and it's something they don't
want to talk about.
It intersected with and developed alongside the popular mass movement known as the Qigong
Fever, which among other things, charismatic Taoist masters would distribute their healing
Qi to their followers via electronically mediated speeches at rallies of thousands or even
tens of thousands of people, many of whom fell into collective trances or healed injuries
or ailments, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, moxibustion, which I don't know
what that is, and others had occupied a fairly stable and prestigious place in the apparatus
of socialist public health since the 1950s, but recuperating the religious discourse it
had developed with historically and bringing it into relation with the fourth modernization
as the QSRA did, created all kinds of new possibilities under the general problem of
the organic combustion combination of Eastern Qi Gong culture with Western modern science.
The condensation of previously and perhaps properly separate vocabularies and commsets
and those single texts would not in and of itself have seemed very strange within the
terms of Qi Gong discourse in the 1990s, and the China UFO Research Association had
been affiliated with the QSRA since 1988 as a second level study society, and by this
route had acquired legal standing as an organization, but this led to all kinds of internal contradictions
between the materialist ufologists and the Qi Gong tendency.
This came to a head in the Cura's fourth national chondrous in Beijing in May 1992,
at which time many members became frustrated by the infiltration of pseudoscience leading
to the organization to reiterate his commitment to the dialectical materialist guiding principles.
I really just wanted to bring in the idea of Qi Gong, Tai Chi, the movement of Qi,
is inexorably linked to ufology in Chinese history because it began being studied at
the same time, and because of this, there's much more intermingling in Chinese cultural
significance and its study between these two topics than you would see in most of the
rest of the world.
And I just ask, is it because they're both technically fringy ideas?
Well, it's not only that they're linked because of that, they both began getting studied at
the exact same time, so inexorably you're going to end up with a different link than,
say, something that's always been studied and something else popping up later on.
Within a two-year period, these things are both being studied and they're put into the
same faculty to be studied, like it's all under the top of the QSRA, the Qi Gong Research
Society.
Okay, and so it's because they're just like not, they're kinda outskirts of things that
they're kinda thrown into the same thing?
I wouldn't say it's because they're outskirts, I think the big difference here is this is
something that neither of these could be studied for a long time because they were outside
of progression and specifically, Chinese culture up until the 1970s had a real conflict with
this past culture because they were always worried about an overthrow of the Communist
Party of China.
The cultural significance is that wealthy people have a connection to these things to
the past and especially when you see a push for a conservative movement against socialism,
it's usually a push to tradition.
This being tradition, it was kinda forbidden even to be looked at and when it was opened
up, science was opened up to something that could be looked at in the 70s.
UFOs and Qi Gong are just allowed to be looked at and then therefore connected.
Okay, I was gonna say it's not because they're actually like connected, connected.
Not necessarily, you could say there's a connection just because it's like the spiritual side of
it or the parrot.
Yeah.
The above normal top.
It's not because like a UFO beamed down and gave us Tai Chi.
I would say yes.
It did?
No, I would say that you're right, nobody did that.
Some Qi Gong groups definitely are not of that opinion.
Okay, I just wanted to make sure the barrier of what we're looking at here with their connection.
With that all done, we need to take a look now at a man who we're going to be talking
a lot about.
His name is Li Hongzhi.
You'll see a lot of people pronounce his name Li Hongzhi, but that is because most people
who are saying his name don't have a background in reading Pinyin.
When you see a Chinese word, if you see a Z and an H, it makes a J sound.
If you see an I after that, it makes an R sound or an O sound.
So okay.
So Li Hongzhi is how we're going to say it from here on out, okay?
There, we all learned a little something about Chinese.
Oh good.
I just probably won't say it.
You can just call him Li because I call him Li basically.
Okay, okay, I can do that.
I can pronounce Li correctly.
Li is born in the 50s.
There's a bit of dispute about that.
We will talk about it in the next episode.
He comes on the scene.
He claims to be tutored by a variety of Buddhist and Taoist masters who, according to his
spiritual biography, imparted with him practice methods and moral philosophies that become,
as we know it, Falun Gong.
But that's not where we're going to start.
We're not starting with Falun Gong.
We're starting with just Li Hongzhi and his movement through life.
1970, Li is working for the military on a horse farm in northeast China.
In 1972, he works as a trumpet player with a division of the provincial forestry police.
He kind of disagrees with this.
This is what the actual government's history of him is.
That is a super strange history with the government.
In the early 1980s, because he was born during the Cultural Revolution, he didn't actually
complete high school.
So he completes high school through correspondence just because that was the way to do it.
And then Li begins studying and observing a variety of Qigong disciplines.
Only in preparation for establishing and publicizing his own Qigong system.
This is the mid-1980s.
By 1985, the Chinese authorities created the national organization to oversee the great
variety of Qigong disciplines that were proliferating across the country.
And the China Qigong Scientific Research Society was established in 1985 and convened its first
meeting in Beijing in 1986.
The organization counted among its leadership several eminent members of the former members
and former members of the Politburo and National People's Congress, as well as former ministries
of health and education.
And in 1989, Li begins private instruction of what becomes known as Falun Gong to very
select students.
In 1982, he officially found what he calls Falun Gong.
Now Falun Gong in Chinese means the wheel of law.
You will also see it called the Falun Dafa.
I'm not really sure the significance between the two names.
I also don't know the translation of Falun Dafa.
It's something to do with law because Gong means wheel.
I don't know what Falun means.
Falun Dafa, Falun Gong are interchangeable in my mind for what we're talking about here,
okay?
So Falun Gong publicly founded in spring of 1992.
And it's near the end of what's known as China's Qigong Bu.
It's a period which saw the proliferation of thousands of disciplines.
Li Hongzhi and his Falun Gong became an instant star of the Qigong movement and were welcomed
into the government-administered China Qigong Scientific Research Society.
From 1992 to 1994, Li travels throughout China giving 54 lectures and seminars on the practices
and beliefs of Falun Gong.
Seminars typically lasted 8 to 10 days and attracted as many as 6,000 participants per
class.
The practice group rapidly based on its purportive efficacies and improving health and its moral
and philosophical elements, which were more developed than those of other Qigong schools.
And these are part of the teachings that I want to talk about in the first half of this
two-part series.
What are the teachings?
So Falun Gong differentiates itself from Buddhist monistic traditions in that it places great
importance on participants in the secular world.
Falun Gong practitioners are required to maintain regular jobs and family lives and to observe
the laws of the respective governments and are instructed to not distance themselves
from society.
An exception is made of course for Buddhists who are permitted to continue a monastic lifestyle
while practicing Falun Gong.
As a part of its emphasis on ethical behavior, Falun Gong's teachings prescribe a strict
personal morality for practitioners with three key principles.
They are Zhen, Shan, and Ren, which are truth, compassion, and forbearance.
Those are the three fundamental words of Falun Gong.
What was the last one?
Forbearance.
Kind of like an internal strictness.
Okay, thank you.
They are expected to do good deeds and conduct themselves with patience when encountering
difficulties.
For instance, Li stipulates that a practitioner of Falun Gong must quote, not hit back when
attacked, not talk back when insulted, end quote.
In addition, they must also abandon negative thoughts and behaviors such as greed, deception,
jealousy, and the teachings contained in junctions against smoking and the consumption of alcohol
as these are considered addictions that are detrimental to health and mental clarity.
Doctors are also forbidden to kill living things, including animals for the purposes
of obtaining food.
Though strangely enough, they are not required to adopt a vegetarian diet.
I'm not quite sure how that works.
It just means they can't actually hunt for it, maybe?
No, this is one of the contradictions we'll talk about later on, but I think it's one
of those things that we're not going to tell you to do something, but the rules don't really
allow you to do other things.
Basically like we're not going to say you can't eat meat, but you can't have things
die to eat it.
In addition to these things, practitioners of Falun Gong must abandon a variety of worldly
attachments and desires.
In the course of cultivating your practice, the students of Falun Gong aim to relinquish
the pursuit of fame, monetary gain, sentimentality, and other entanglements.
Lee's teachings repeatedly emphasize the emptiness of material pursuits, although practitioners
of Falun Gong are not encouraged to leave their jobs or rescue money.
They are expected to give up the psychological attachment to these things, not the things
themselves.
Falun Gong doctrine also cancels against participation in political or social issues.
We'll talk about that again later.
Excessive interest in politics is viewed as an attachment to worldly power and influence,
and Falun Gong aims for transcendence of such pursuits.
According to Hu Ping, quote, Falun Gong deals only with purifying the individual through
exercise and does not touch on social or national concerns.
It has not suggested or even intimated a model for social change.
Many religions pursue social reform to some extent, but there is no such tendency evident
in Falun Gong.
End quote.
Okay.
That's just to give you a little idea of the philosophy behind all.
At the end of the day, it is just movements, but there are technically it spreads a little
more to kind of the overall lifestyle of somebody who's in Falun Gong.
Does that make sense so far?
I mean, yeah, I'm curious to see where this is going.
Okay.
With that, we're going to kind of continue on that timeline.
May 13th of 1992, Li begins public teachings of these philosophies of Falun Gong at the
number five middle school in Chengchun, Jilin Province, lecturing to a crowd of several
hundred.
The seminar ran for nine days at a cost of 30 yuan per person.
In June, Li is invited by the Chinese Qigong Scientific Research Society to lecture in Beijing.
In September, Falun Gong is recognized as a Qigong branch under the administration of
the state run China Qigong Scientific Research Society, and Li has formally declared a master
of Qigong by the CQRS, the China Qigong Research Society.
Right.
And he receives a permit to teach Qigong nationwide.
Li and several Falun Gong students participate in the 1992 Asia Health Expo in Beijing from
December 12th to 21st, and the organizer of the health fair remark that Falun Gong and
Li, quote, received the most praise of any Qigong school at the fair and received very
good therapeutic results, end quote.
The event helped cement Li's popularity in the Qigong world and journalistic reports
of Falun Gong's healing powers spread.
By the end of the year, Li had given five week-long lecture seminars in Beijing, four
in Chengchun, and one in Taiyun and one in Shandong.
In 1993, the first major instructional text by Li Hongzhe is published by Military Yuan
Press in April.
The book sets forth an explanation of Falun Gong's basic cosmology, moral system, and
exercises.
The highest edition is released in December of the same year.
In the spring and summer of 1993, a series of glowing articles appear in Qigong magazine's
nationwide, lauding the benefits of Falun Gong.
Several feature images of Li Hongzhe on the cover and argued the superiority of the Falun
Gong system.
The Falun Xiong Lian, DAFA Research Society, is established as a branch of the Chinese
Qigong Research Society on July 30th of this year.
In August, an organization under the Ministry of Public Security sends a letter to the CQRS
thanking Li Hongzhe for providing his teachings to police officers injured in the line of
duty.
The letter claimed that of the hundreds of officers treated by Li, only one failed to
experience obvious improvement in their health.
So there's a real big link between the government as a whole and Falun Gong.
I'm noticing that.
Like Li is literally helping the police in this, and they are pushing it hard.
Not only that, but they gave him a permit, correct?
Yeah, to practice this as a whole.
Yeah, I mean, everything seems on the up and up for Li right now.
Everything seems like it's on the up and up for Li.
There's a real good relationship between him and the government, like they're pushing
it, everything is going great.
They're putting him in with the police precincts to help people who are injured in the job.
On September 21st of 1993, the People's Public Security Daily of Publication of the Ministry
of Public Security commenced Falun Gong for, quote, promoting the traditional crime fighting
virtues of the Chinese people, in safeguarding social orders and security, and in promoting
rectitude in society, end quote.
Li again participates in the Asia Health Expo in Beijing from December 11th to 20th.
This time is a member of the organization committee.
He wins several awards at the event and is proclaimed as, quote, the most acclaimed Qi
Gong master.
Falun Gong also received the, quote, special gold award and award for advancing frontier
science, end quote.
In 1994, the Jilin Province of Qi Gong Science Research Association proclaims Li Hongjue
as a grandmaster of Qi Gong, and Li gives two lectures of on Falun Gong at the Public
Security University in Beijing and contributes profits from the seminars to a foundation
for injured police officers.
On August 3rd, the city of Houston, Texas, declares Li Hongjue as an honorary citizen
for his unselfish public service for the benefit and welfare of mankind.
And as revenue from his sales of his publications grew, Li ceased to charge fees for his classes
and thereafter insists that Falun Gong must be taught free of charge.
The last full seminar Falun Gong practice and philosophy takes place from December 21st
to 29th to December in the city of Guangzhou in 1994.
In 1995, the complete teaches of Falun Gong is published in January by the China Television
Broadcasting Agency Publishing Company.
A publication ceremony is held in the Ministry of Public Security auditorium on January 4th.
In February, Li is approached by the Chinese National Sports Committee, Ministry of Public
Health and the CQSRA to jointly establish a Falun Gong Association.
However, Li declines this offer.
This is where things start to change.
Official attitudes towards the Qi Gong movement within some segments of the government began
to change as criticism of the Qi Gong begin to appear in the state-run press.
From here, Li announces that he was finished teaching his practices in China and Li Hongjue
begins teaching his practices in Europe, Oceania, North America, and Southeast Asia.
In 1998, Li relocates permanently to the United States.
As the practice continues to grow within China, tensions emerge between Falun Gong and Chinese
authorities.
In 1996, Falun Gong withdraws from the China Qi Gong Scientific Research Society and thereafter
finds itself the subject of growing scrutiny and criticism in the state-run press.
Their practice becomes a subject of high-level debates within the government and CCP, with
some ministries and government authorities expressing continued support for the practices
and others becoming increasingly wary of the group.
There were criticisms before the withdrawal, and I'm going to be perfectly honest, we'll
never get a full answer as to what happens between him being asked to start a Qi Gong
Sports Research Facility and their withdrawal from Chinese life.
Neither party will give you a straight answer.
The tension also plays out in the media as some outlets continue to laud the effects
of Falun Gong while others criticize it as pseudo-size.
Tensions continue to escalate over this period, culminating in a demonstration, which we'll
talk about later on here.
So that's just to give you an overview of this next little bit.
In 1996, the book Zhuang Falun is listed as a bestseller by Beijing Youth Daily in January,
March and April.
Falun Gong files for withdrawal from the China Qi Gong Research Society in March of 1996
and Lee later explains that he had found the state-run CQRS to be more concerned with profiting
from Qi Gong than engaging in genuine research.
They had also apparently rejected a new CQRS policy that mandated all Qi Gong practices
created CCP branches within their organization.
Falun Gong is left entirely without government oversight or sanctions at this point.
At least direction, administrators of the Falun Gong Research Association of China apply
for registration with three other government organizations, including the Buddhist Association
of China and the United Front Work Department.
All applications are denied though.
The first major state-run media article criticizing Falun Gong appears in the Guangming Daily
newspaper on June 17th of 1996.
The article writes that Falun Gong represents a manifestation of feudal superstition and
that its core text, Zhuang Falun, is a work of quote, pseudo-science that swindles the
masses.
Falun Gong practitioners responded to the article's publication with a letter writing
campaign to the newspaper and the National Qi Gong Association.
Several Buddhist journals and magazines start to write articles criticizing Falun Gong as
a heretical sect as well at this time.
And on July 24, Falun Gong books are banned from further publication by the China News
Publishing Bureau, a branch of the CCP Party.
The reason cited for the ban is that Falun Gong is spreading superstition.
Hired in copy versions, however, of the Falun Gong books proliferate with Li Hongjue's
approval.
Li begins another lecture tour in the summer of 1996 traveling to Hong Kong, Sydney, Bangkok,
Houston, New York, and Beijing.
And the China Qi Gong Scientific Research Society issues a resolution on the cancellation
of Falun Gong's membership with the society.
The resolution stated that although practitioners of Falun Gong had, quote, attained unparalleled
results in terms of fitness and disease prevention, end quote, Li Hongjue propagated theology and
superstition and failed to attend association meetings and departed from the association's
procedure.
That's 96.
97 comes around.
I love that statement.
I know you guys are getting excellent results, but the guy is not good.
But he's not showing up.
Yeah, excellent results aside.
The Ministry of Public Security launches an investigation in 1997 into whether Falun
Gong should be deemed Xi'e Jia, which is a theoretical religion.
The report concludes that no evidence has appeared thus far.
From 1997 to 1999, criticism of Falun Gong escalates in state-run media.
With the encouragement of Li, Falun Gong practitioners respond to criticism by peacefully
petitioning outside media offices, seeking redress against the perceived unfair reporting.
The tactic succeeds frequently, often resulting in the retraction of critical articles and
apologies from the news organizations.
Not all media coverage, however, was negative in this period, and articles continue to appear
highlighting Falun Gong's health benefits.
And this is a weird little middle area where there's a little bit of criticism that's
starting to come out in the media, and Li tells people, go protest outside of these places.
Do it peacefully, but you'll have tens of thousands of people sitting outside of a
new station, just sitting there for a day's on end, because they wrote something bad about
this group.
On January 13th of 1998, the Chinese Buddhist Association held a meeting on how to react
to Falun Gong, and on July 21st of the same year, the Ministry of Public Security issues
document number 555, which is, quote, notice of the investigation of Falun Gong, end quote.
The document asserts that Falun Gong is an evil religion and mandates that another investigation
be launched to seek evidence of this conclusion.
Security agencies began monitoring and collecting personal information on practitioners.
Falun Gong sources reported authorities were tapping, phone lines harassing and tailing
practitioners and ransacking homes and closing down Falun Gong meditation sessions.
According to Falun Gong sources, Chao Shui, the former chairman of the National People's
Congress, led his own investigation to Falun Gong, and concluded that Falun Gong has hundreds
of benefits for the Chinese people and China and does not have one single bad effect.
I would really like to stress the beginning of that sentence though.
According to Falun Gong sources, Chao Shui said this.
The Chinese government also said that it had excellent results.
China's National Sports Commission launches its own investigation of May 98, and the Commission's
medical professionals conduct interviews of over 12,000 Falun Gong practitioners in Guangdong
province.
97.9% of respondents say Falun Gong improved their health.
I don't understand what the problem is here right now.
Everyone's saying it's excellent.
I would also like to emphasize the question is, do you think Falun Gong has improved your
health?
Yeah.
There's not actually like any research into it.
It's just them asking them.
Yeah.
They're as good as judges any.
And by October, the investigation concludes noting, quote, work in Vince, the exercises
and effects of Falun Gong are excellent.
It has done an extraordinary amount to improve society's stability and ethics.
And this should be duly affirmed, end quote.
I'm convinced.
At this time, the State Sports Commission suggests that upwards of 60 to 70 million
people are practicing Falun Gong in China.
Holy crap.
Wow.
He already has China.
That's why he leaves.
I'm going to go find more.
Well, and there's plenty of people that will spread it on his behalf there as well.
Yeah.
1999, Lee Hongjue continues to teach Falun Gong internationally with occasional stops
in China.
And by early 1999, Lee had lectured in Sydney, Bangkok, San Francisco, LA, Hong Kong, Taipei,
Frankfurt, Toronto, Singapore, Geneva, Houston in New York, as well as in Changchun in Beijing.
Wu Xiaozhu, an official from China's National Sports Commission, says in an interview with
US and World Reports on February 14 that as many as 100 million people may have taken
up Falun Gong in other forms of Qigong.
Wu notes that the popularity of Falun Gong dramatically reduces health care costs and
quote, premier Zhu Rongzhu is very happy about that end quote.
Yeah.
That's just another tick in the column for good.
How great.
Falun Gong.
It's doing pretty good things.
Yeah.
In April, physicist Hedzuo Xu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences publishes an article in
Tianjin Normal Universities, you three.
That's a great name for university.
You gotta love translations.
Yeah.
The Tianjin Normal University.
Okay.
I love that.
He publishes an article criticizing Falun Gong as superstitious and potentially harmful
for youth and stating he knew someone who died because of it.
At that time, some countries near China had people practicing like Vietnam.
Tianjin Falun Gong practitioners respond to this article by peacefully petitioning in
front of the editorial offices and the editors initially agreed to publish a retraction of
this article.
Wait.
Okay.
First of all, they're publishing a retraction because there's a protest there, right?
Yeah.
There's probably just so many people there.
Second, someone died.
He says somebody died practicing it.
Yes.
Okay.
In TV.
On April 23rd, some 300 security forces are called in to break up the ongoing Falun Gong
demonstrations.
45 Falun Gong practitioners are beaten and detained, which at the end of the day is actually
a fairly, I don't want to downplay it, but this is a controlled response, like, compared
to what happened 10 years prior to people protesting.
Huh.
Okay.
Yeah.
And you know, I was just thinking the same thing.
If they wanted to shut it down like proper, they probably could have.
They had the power to.
They called in 300 security forces.
It was a peaceful protest.
So was Tianjin Square at the time, though.
They're probably thinking how many people are in this thing now if they're wanting to
shut it down and they're protesting everything.
In response to this, Falun Gong practitioners petition Tianjin City Hall for the release
of the detained practitioners.
They are reportedly told that the order to break up the crowd and detain protesters came
from the central authorities in Beijing and that further appeals should be directed at
Beijing.
April 25th, somewhere between 10 and 20,000 Falun Gong practitioners quietly assemble
outside the central appeals office.
They are now adjacent to the Zhongnan High leadership compound in Beijing.
Five Falun Gong representatives meet with Premier Zhu Rongji to request official recognition
and an end to the escalating harassment against the group.
Zhu agrees to release the Tianjin practitioners and assures the representatives that the government
does not oppose Falun Gong.
The same day, however, Jin Zemin issues a letter stating his intentions to suppress
the practice.
On April 26, Jin Zemin convenes a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee to discuss
the Falun Gong demonstration.
Some Politburo members reportedly favor to conciliatory position towards Falun Gong,
while others, such as Jiang and the security leader Luoguan, favor to decisive suppression
of the group.
Authorities start to increase the surveillance of Falun Gong from here, tapping telephones
of practitioners and monitoring practitioners in several cities.
I would like to emphasize this information provided by Falun Gong.
One party in this, not the Chinese Communist Party.
May I please interject and ask a question?
Yes.
Am I missing something?
Like what happened here that they want to shut it down so much?
We will never get a straight answer.
Both parties will have to answer.
I did ask that, didn't I?
You already told me this.
I'm very confused as to why this is happening.
We will never know for sure why this happens.
We can only speculate and the speculation will happen in the second episode.
Okay, okay.
I just keep coming around to why do we hate the Falun Gong and we just don't know.
It seems like out of nowhere, right?
It's just like, yeah, everybody's getting along great.
And then, nope, nope, some bad articles, protests.
We're going to crack down on the protests.
The leader leaves the country.
I really feel like I'm missing some sort of information, but I'm not.
I might ask it again because I did ask it already.
It just makes me more curious about it.
Do they not know that?
Okay, okay, okay.
That's not satisfying, but okay.
May 2nd, 1999, Lee Hong-Jue gives a press conference to journalists in Sydney, Australia.
When asked by a reporter whether he believed the government would kill or imprison his
disciples to maintain social order, Lee responds that, quote, Falun Gong practitioners will
never go against the law.
In terms of the scenario you described, I don't think it will happen since the economic
reform and opening up of the Chinese government has been quite tolerant in this respect, end
quote.
Right, that's what they're known for.
May and June of this year, just as preparations are quietly underway for a crackdown, Falun
Gong practitioners continue their public meditation sessions.
The Far Eastern Economic Review wrote, quote, in a park in Western Beijing, 100 or so Falun
Gong practitioners exercise under a bold yellow banner proclaiming their affiliation.
They are far from running scared, end quote.
On June 2nd, Lee purchased space in several Hong Kong newspapers to publish an article
defending Falun Gong and urging Chinese leaders not to, quote, risk universal condemnation
and waste manpower and capital, end quote, by antagonizing the group.
On the 3rd of June, 70,000 practitioners from Jilin and Liaoning traveled to Beijing in
an attempt to appeal to authorities.
They are intercepted by security forces sent home and placed under surveillance.
On June 7th, 1999, Jiang Zemin convened a meeting of the Politburo to address the Falun Gong
issue.
In the meeting, Jiang described Falun Gong as a grave threat to CCP authorities, quote,
something unprecedented in the country since its founding 50 years ago, end quote, and
ordered the creation of a special leading group within the party's central committee
to, quote, get fully prepared for the work of disintegrating the Falun Gong, end quote.
On June 10th, the 6-10 office was formed to handle day-to-day coordination of anti-Falun
Gong campaign, and Luo Gan was selected to helm the office, whose mission at the time
was described as studying, investigating, and developing a unified approach to resolve
the Falun Gong problem.
The office was not created with any legislation, and there are no provisions describing its
precise mandate.
On June 17th, 1999, Jiang Zemin declared in a Politburo meeting that Falun Gong is, quote,
the most serious political incident since the June 4th political disturbance in 1989.
The 6-10 office came under the newly created central leading group for dealing with Falun
Gong, headed by Li Lanqing.
Both Li and Luo were members of the Politburo Standing Committee, and the four other deputy
directors of the central leading group also held high-level positions in the CCP, including
ministers of the Ganon Department.
On June 26th of 1999, 13 Falun Gong exercise sites in public parks are shut down by Beijing
Security Council, and that's basically where it's outlawed.
From here onwards, I'm going to go to a description of what takes place.
This comes from a website called the Friends of Falun Gong, so I just want to emphasize
this is going to be a very one-sided view of what takes place from June 26th onwards
to today.
The CCP's persecution of Falun Gong is a comprehensive nationwide effort that encompasses
many different forms of cruelty in humanity.
Whether in an attempt to get Falun Gong practitioners to renounce their beliefs or to simply intimidate
and attack them, the harshest and most painful forms of torture have been employed.
The scope of the torture is very large, and the number of cases documented by the government
of human rights organizations is well into the tens of thousands.
The US Department of State, Amnesty International, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and
other sources and investigations all corroborate the basic facts about the CCP's widespread
torture of Falun Gong practitioners.
Countless first-hand accounts of torture have also been recorded.
Some of the most common forms of torture involve beating, shocking with electric batons, piercing
with sharp objects often under fingernails, sleep deprivation, injections with toxic substances
being physically restrained in painful positions, and being submerged in sewage in a dark chamber.
What?
Is Falun Gong the bad guys in the story?
So far as this episode has led us to believe?
No, they are without reason being personified.
That makes me think we might learn new information on the next one.
Okay, I'm just trying to figure out what to do with my thoughts.
They're not organizing well here.
I get that, and to be fair, this first episode is to give one particular viewpoint of what
the Falun Gong is in its history.
And to give it history.
Financial incentives are used to extract confessions and encourage the renunciation of the practices
from Falun Gong prisoners.
When the torture of Falun Gong practitioners is taken too far, it can lead to the death
of the victim.
The communist regime will often involve family members as part of the torture.
Sometimes they will get family members to cooperate by getting them to beg and plead
with the victims to sign confessions or to give up their beliefs.
It can also involve threatening and attacking loved ones or even torturing them in the presence
of the victim.
The CCP has killed numerous Falun Gong practitioners.
It is very difficult to access the information needed to determine how many have been killed
because the information is highly protected by the CCP regime and people responsible for
the killing try and keep it a secret.
Frequently, relatives are told that their loved ones have committed suicide or died from
an accidental illness, but that bodies of the victims are cremated before they can be examined
for evidence.
Of the cases that have been verified, an unusually high percentage are people who died of their
injuries shortly after being released from prison.
As of May 2015, there are over 3500 cases of this confirmed.
Two separate independent investigations about organ harvesting of Falun Gong prisoners
concluded that over 60,000 Falun Gong practitioners were killed in the process of extracting their
organs for transplants and that only encompass the period between 2000 and 2008.
These numbers are including the number of confirmed deaths since the bodies are not
available for examination.
One of the most common forms of persecution is putting practitioners in prison.
The CCP does not follow any rule of law and it can simply imprison Falun Gong practitioners
at will without trial.
Practitioners are routinely denied access to lawyers or the lawyers may face their own
persecution if they have the courage to represent the practitioners.
Whether it is prisons, labor camps, or brainwashing centers, hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong
practitioners are estimated to be imprisoned at any given time and millions have faced
prison over the course of their persecution.
Various forms of detention facilities are used to hold and carry out abuses against
practitioners and these are the locations where the torture brainwashing rate, forced
slave labor, and other forms of abuse have been carried out.
One of the apparent goals of the CCP in their persecution of Falun Gong practitioners is
to give up their beliefs.
This put the practitioners in a dilemma where they are greatly encouraged to either give
up their beliefs or lie and say that they have given up their beliefs.
However, lying goes against the principles of Falun Gong so many practitioners resist
to give in.
If they are forced under pressure to sign a statement slandering Falun Gong and promising
not to practice, they can be rewarded by reducing their sentence, receiving better treatment,
or better treatment for their families as examples.
The prisoners who sign the statements are then often forced to transform other prisoners.
If the prisoners refuse to sign the statement, then they can be threatened with additional
punishment such as extended sentences, torture, or mistreatment of their family members.
The method of brainwashing range from threats and cruelty to slander and forced study sessions.
The prisoners are forced to watch videos or listen to recordings of material produced
by the CCP intended to slander the Falun Gong, using any means of lying and deception to
make their points.
This is similar to the propaganda produced by the state-controlled media that is designed
to attack Falun Gong with lies and slander and co-opt the general populace into supporting
their vicious campaign.
Another form of abuse the CCP carries out against Falun Gong practitioners is to fire
them from their jobs, refuse to pay them for their work or pensions, or simply steal from
them.
Many times when the Falun Gong practitioners are arrested, the police simply take and keep
their belongings, including very expensive or difficult to replace items such as computers,
printers, bank cards, and IDs.
Other times practitioners are fired from their jobs simply because of their beliefs, or their
companies refuse to pay their salaries or their pensions.
Frequently practitioners become homeless and destitute because they fled from their homes
in an attempt to escape persecution.
The CCP has integrated this slander and propaganda into all levels of school curricula so that
children are indoctrinated with hatred towards Falun Gong.
In addition, students are forced to agree with the slanderous answers in order to pass exams,
including exams required to get into college.
Therefore students who refuse to answer questions in a way that violates their beliefs can be
denied the chance to advance in schools or receive the education they would otherwise
have access to.
Everyone taking the exam is forced to choose to agree with the CCP propaganda against Falun
Gong in writing or lose points on their exam.
The majority of citizens in western nations think of China as a nation that supplies cheap
labor for a myriad of manufactured products.
This narrative about China takes up more of the attention of the mainstream media.
People who know more about the history of the CCP remember that they are carrying out brutal
genocidal campaigns since they took control of the nation in 1949.
Whether it was by the landowners, the business owners, religious leaders, intellectuals,
or democracy activists, the CCP has engaged in systematic assaults on its own people that
result in the murders of tens of millions of people as a matter of state policy.
Just because this tendency has become less active since its peak in the 70s during the
Great Cultural Revolution does not mean it had left the DNA of the CCP.
The regime's capacity for suppression and violence came alive again during the Student
Democracy protests in 1989 and it remains a threatening, subliminal, undercurrent hidden
in the minds and hearts of the Chinese people.
Many of whom witnessed the violence or heard stories of it from their family members.
Indeed, Jiang Zemin, the main architect of the persecution against Falun Gong, was one
of the leaders that directly ran the campaign in 1989.
Since the CCP came to power through a revolution rather than an election, it always has to
face the fact that it does not have the support, approval, or legitimacy of mainland China.
This undercurrent can be found throughout the propaganda efforts of the CCP.
The CCP uses censorship and its great firewall to make sure Chinese citizens don't have
access to any information that it cannot control.
This alone proves that the CCP fears its own citizens and it knows that it is not legitimate.
Therefore, no powerful group or groups that could potentially become powerful are allowed
to exist inside of China that are not directly overseen by the CCP.
To this day, the CCP does not allow any larger powerful group to exist within China without
being directly in control of it and it has never allowed anything close to a political
competitor.
And that is why it says Falun Gong believes it became too powerful and the CCP perceived
it as a threat.
Yeah, that's what I gathered from that very last sentence.
And that's I think where I'm going to kind of cut it off here.
It is still very persecuted in China.
Li Hongjue, still very much so alive, he lives in New York State.
Falun Gong is practiced worldwide.
And in the next episode, we're going to talk about some of the things that got a little
overlooked in this episode.
Yeah, I'm excited to see where it goes because I'm assuming you took the viewpoint of Falun
Gong on this.
A little bit of the viewpoint of Falun Gong and we're going to take a look at the negative
side of Falun Gong in the next episode.
Okay, I feel like that's what I'm missing.
So I'm looking forward to that, especially since this episode was not required because
people were going to skip to the next one.
Unless they started this episode.
Yeah, in which goes why would they even know to skip to the next one?
Okay, I'm excited because I feel a little lost right now.
And I should also say because the Qigong Institute also had the interaction of the
UFO group, like it's under the same heading of the government, banning of Falun Gong also
leads to basically a banning of ufology.
Didn't they leave that group?
They did and we're going to get into why Falun Gong being persecuted in the next episode
led to a banning of UFO research.
Okay, I'm assuming it'll all come together for me.
It will make a lot more sense in the next episode.
Yes, that's okay, I'm begging on it.
But for now, do not take this all as there's nothing wrong with the Falun Gong, they're
being persecuted for no reason.
The next episode will make a lot of sense of the things that are missing from this episode.
No, I feel like there's definitely some gaps.
Okay, until that time, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea.
We are a journey to the fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
Oh, no, there's one more thing I wanted to add before we end this episode.
Chelsea, I need you to go to the general chat because remember Falun Gong is based off
of Qigong and Falun Gong has five specific movements for Qigong.
So they're there.
And Chelsea, I want you to look at them and I want you to tell me the names of them starting
in the bottom middle.
Falun standing stance.
Let's go up to the top left.
Falun heavenly circulation.
The bottom left.
Buddha showing a thousand hands.
The top right, which is the only sitting position.
Strengthening divine powers.
And the bottom right.
Penetrating the two cosmic extremes.
Yes.
Wow, that's a powerful dance.
And those last two movements with very strange names are definitely going to allude to a
lot of the things that get talked about in the next episode.
Okay, good.
So I think this is a good way to leave it off just because this starts to show some
of the things.
And also I got the payoff of my intro with that.
Exactly.
And now we just actually end it right here.
Okay, sounds good.
Bye.
Thank you for listening to Journey to the Fringe.
If you have liked what you have listened to, please like, share, subscribe or follow,
depending on what venue you are listening to us through.
Also please, if possible, leave a five star review as that really helps us in the algorithms.
Should you wish to interact with us, please check us out on your social media of choice.
I bet you we are there.
And if you really want to communicate with us and give us ideas for new episodes or tell
us that we're wrong and terrible, either way, please send us an email at journeytothefringe.com.
For now, I'll see you in the next episode.