Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003, Page 184
The Chinese Government’s Response
Cultural Context
Randy Kluver advises that ‗[p]olitical conflict must be considered within a larger context of
cultural meaning, something that is critically missing from most political analysis‘.2 He
explains that when diplomats, politicians and reporters ‗do not understand cultural cues and
issues involved‘, events tend to be focused on in isolation from cultural context and
interpreted from a ‗radically dissimilar worldview‘.
One brief example is the difference between placing primary importance on the right of the
individual over the collective right as in the United States, or the reverse of placing primary
importance on the good of the collective over the right of the individual as in China. Seeing
from a ‗radically dissimilar worldview‘ not only makes it difficult for outsiders to ‗understand
why certain strategic choices are made‘3 but can also create a frustrating pattern of
miscommunication that only increases distrust and tension.
A word of caution here: I do not mean that by understanding the cultural cues and issues
one thereby accepts non-critically the strategic choices made by the Chinese government.
The point is that by including the Chinese frame of reference on an issue, one can discuss,
debate, and dialogue without the immediate mishap of being at cultural loggerheads. In
relation to the government‘s response to the Falun Gong, this paper argues that the Chinese
government‘s response to the FLG is not a style of response unique to the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) rather, the government‘s response and its subsequent actions are
part of a cultural paradigm that has been a feature of Chinese history and now continues
under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.
While news reports about the Falun Gong have sometimes referred to earlier religiously-
inspired groups that confronted China‘s rulers, most often mentioned is the mid-nineteenth
century Taiping rebellion, the history of sects and their potential threat to the Chinese state
(imagined and real) has an extensive and intensive history in China. This pattern of ruling
power in conflict with sectarian groups may have first developed as early as the second
century.
For the purpose of this paper, sectarian refers to groups that China‘s rulers considered to be
heterodox because their belief systems had branched off from larger, traditional systems of
belief. One common feature among these groups, as Robin Munro points out, is that
‗virtually all the sects and societies (even the Triads) evolved quite complex religious belief
systems. These were generally highly syncretic in nature and drew freely and sometimes
indiscriminately from Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (and later from Christianity and
Islam as well)‘.4
This religious syncretism is characteristic of sectarian groups in China, including the Falun
Gong. This is not to suggest that throughout Chinese history these groups had similar
teachings, but rather that a paradigm was developed based on the interplay of the ruling
power with these groups, that is, the ‗ruler-sectarian‘ paradigm.5 I suggest that the Chinese
government‘s campaign methods and justifications in use against the Falun Gong are
indigenously Chinese and part of this historical paradigm.
The Creation of a Paradigm
The Pattern. The pattern of ruling power keeping a watchful eye on sectarian groups, at
times being threatened by them, at times raising campaigns against them, began as early
as the second century and continued throughout the dynastic period, through the Mao era
and into the present. The collapse of the Han dynasty in the second century produced a
period of profound political and cultural crisis. The development of popular movements at
this time ‗marked an important development in the history of Chinese religions, [namely]

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003, Page 185
the beginning of religious sects, with their own gods, beliefs, scriptures, rituals, leaders, and
organizations, separate from the state and family‘.6 According to David Ownby it was at the
end of the Han dynasty that millennial elements from Buddhism and messianic elements
from Daoism mixed with popular religion to form the first Chinese sectarian movements.7
The millennial Buddhist elements included the belief in a cyclical pattern of kalpas, a period
of time which would end in calamities and destruction as one cycle ended and a new one
began, and the Daoist millennial elements included the belief in a messianic figure who
would appear to lead a select group to survive the calamities of a purged world. During this
period (following the fall of the Han dynasty), the ‗apocalyptic undertones‘ of one strain of
Daoism8 characterized their followers as ‗seed people‘, a group of elect who would
‗repopulate a new world purged by disasters‘. The texts speak of ‗mysterious beings‘ who
intervene to judge and save humankind, or more precisely, a select few.
According to Frederick Wakeman, this millenarian belief of a new kalpa, accompanied by
calamities from which one could find salvation by belief in a sect‘s teachings, would at times
‗call for a popular rebellion against the dark forces of secular government that held back the
victory of light‘.9 It was thought that although ‗[e]ach successive rebel group might be
destroyed, ...a new one would arise in its place‘.10 ‗This apocalyptic amalgam of Buddhist
chiliasm, Manicheanism, and messianic Taoism repeatedly inspired a pursuit of the
millennial in China‘.
Whether or not it was intentional on the part of Li Hongzhi when he created Falun Gong, his
teachings owe a great deal to this legacy. He too, teaches that the ‗Ending Period of
Catastrophe‘ is here, that the current age is degenerate and will be purged and only those
who are FLG practitioners will be saved.11 He too, speaks of ‗mysterious beings who
intervene‘ and calls Jiang Zemin, the president of China, ‗the highest representative of the
evil force in the human world‘ who is being used by higher beings to persecute the FLG.
Only when the evil is eliminated can FLG practitioners ‗return home‘ through Consummation
to the Falun Dafa paradise (Falun Dafa is another name for the movement. It means the
Great Law of the Law of the Wheel).
Regarding the response of the state to such groups: Judith Berling comments that ‗[a]s far
back as the Han dynasty, and increasingly from the Sung on [960-1279], millenarian cults
and secret societies had been linked with uprisings and rebellions. Nervous scholar-officials
came to see a potential rebellion in every religious gathering‘.12 Since the state assumed
‗the right to control religious institutions and to define acceptable religious practices... [a]
religion whose adherents offended the government might be legally proscribed and its books
burned‘.13 According to David Ownby, ‗The Chinese government has suppressed movements
like the Falun Gong hundred of times over the course of Chinese history‘, adding that the
Chinese Communist government did ‗the same thing the imperial state had always done,
which was to arrest and generally, not always, execute the leaders and pretend to
reeducate the others and send them back home and hope that they would be good people
from there on‘.14
While many sectarian groups in Chinese history did not foment revolt or cause the state
problems, the ones that did formed the basis for the state‘s fear and the ruler-sectarian
paradigm. At the end of the Han dynasty in 184 there was the messianic rebellion of the
Yellow Turbans, and according to Ownby, in the fifth and sixth centuries in northern China
there were ‗ten ―Buddhist-inspired uprisings‖ [which] led believers to rise up against both
church and state‘. Ownby mentions one instance in 445 when an emperor ‗ordered that all
Buddhist monks in the empire be killed and all Buddhist buildings, images, and books
destroyed‘. He comments that ‗[t]he decree was not carried out on this scale, but it
suggests nonetheless the fear such incidents evoked‘.15 The most successful of all sectarian
leaders was Zhu Yuanzhang who, in 1368, led a rebellion that overthrew the Yuan dynasty