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and founded the Ming dynasty with himself as the first emperor. During the Ming (1368–
1644) alone, there were 41 sectarian disturbances16 and in the final dynasty, the Qing
(1644–1911), there was the famous Taiping rebellion and the Boxers movement.
In the modern era, the case of the Yi Guan Dao is an illustrative example. The imperial Qing
government, the Nationalist Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, all campaigned
against it. When the CCP first came to power, it initiated a campaign against the
‗counterrevolutionary forces of superstition‘ with particular focus on the Yi Guan Dao. It
enacted an intense mass campaign against the group for ten years before it finally claimed
success. And when the Yi Guan Dao fled to Taiwan in 1949 it had to go underground to
survive and was only finally recognized by the Taiwan government in 1987.17 Even so, the Yi
Guan Dao continues to exist today in Taiwan and other Southeast Asian countries and as
recently as the 1980s was listed once again as one of the active sects in China.18
The long-term campaign against the Yi Guan Dao may be the most recent modern-day
forerunner and possible model for the Falun Gong campaign.19 Ironically, Li Hongzhi has
called the Yi Guan Dao an ‗evil religion‘ predestined by history to be eradicated, perhaps
evidence of the success of the government‘s intense propaganda campaign against the Yi
Guan Dao,20 a campaign the likes of which Li would experience himself decades later. News
reports generally describe the Falun Gong as a qigong movement, and while it is true that Li
developed it during the 1980s qigong boom in China and began his teaching of it as a
qigong healing movement, I believe the development of the Falun Gong most closely
resembles a sectarian group including its role as contender to the Chinese state.
The Communist Party and the Paradigm. Many charges made against the Falun Gong by the
Chinese government are found in campaigns against earlier groups such as the Yi Guan
Dao. The following partial list from a 1985 report by the PRC Ministry of Public Security No.1
Bureau, titled ‗Main Activities of Sects and Societies in Recent Years‘,21 describes the
offending features of groups that moved them from acceptable to unacceptable in the eyes
of the CCP. These characteristics include: recruiting from within the ranks of the CCP,
organizing across provinces and counties, membership that proselytizes, making criticism of
the CCP, claims by the leader to be a god or emperor, spreading superstition and
heterodoxy and receiving support from ‗forces overseas‘. These were elements considered
common to potentially subversive groups, and, according to the Chinese government, the
Falun Gong met all the criteria.
The character of the government‘s response is connected, as Kluver points out, to whether
the conflict is seen as legitimate and ‗in-house‘ that is, a ‗contradiction from among the
people‘ in which case it may be dealt with gently, or whether the conflict is viewed as a
‗contradiction between the people and their enemies‘, in which case the group ‗must be
addressed ruthlessly and radically‘.22
Within this paradigm, ruthless and radical responses are seen as appropriate, necessary and
acceptable. The CCP sees the conflict with the FLG as one ‗between the people and their
enemies‘ for several reasons: 1) the government believes Li‘s teachings endanger people,
mainly due to the teachings regarding medicine 2) the government believes Li‘s teachings
were gaining enough adherents across China and specifically within the CCP to be a
potential rival ideologically 3) because Li moved to the US and has, according to the
government‘s view, linked up with those in the West who wish to see the fall of the CCP.
The conflict between the government and the FLG is, therefore, seen as being between ‗the
people and their enemies‘ and according to the crisis management style of the CCP, it is
appropriate, acceptable and necessary to utilize ruthless and radical responses.
At the end of this 1985 report by the PRC Ministry of Public Security, the concluding
comment states that ‗our struggle against the reactionary sects and societies is going to be
a long-term and protracted one‘,23 a comment echoed almost word for word decades later

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003, Page 187
regarding the Falun Gong campaign. For the Chinese historically, the struggle between the
government and sectarian groups has indeed been a long-term and protracted one. Perhaps
the main question to be raised is whether or not this paradigm remains viable. This question
will be addressed later. But first I will explain the contemporary qigong boom in China from
which the Falun Gong movement arose, and how it relates to the ruler-sectarian paradigm.
The Qigong Boom
Li Hongzhi‘s Falun Gong movement developed during a period in China known as the
‗Qigong Boom‘. Following the Cultural Revolution when China began reforms in the late
1970s, there was an opening up to religion which included not only the main religious
practices but also folk religion practices ‗packed away‘ during the Mao era. Hand in hand
with this revival of religious beliefs came the long-established conflict in China between
superstition and orthodoxy, or in the case of the CCP, superstition and science. In modern
China, to be scientific means to be legitimate, to be superstitious is to be feudal and in need
of education or eradication. Part of this cultural revival included the practice of qigong and it
was prime material to be caught up in this conflict of science and superstition.
While the revival of qigong was seen by some as ‗a forerunner of the scientific revolution of
the twenty-first century‘,24 it was seen by others as a marriage of qigong practice to strange
and marvelous tales of the paranormal found in traditional Chinese stories. The qigong
revival thus balanced precariously between the traditional gap between science and
superstition. On the one hand, there was the claim that the theory of qi was a distinctly
Chinese science, and the qigong boom since the 1980s has made explicit and enthusiastic
linkage between qigong and a scientific basis.25 On the other hand, there were claims,
beginning in the late 1970s, of paranormal and miraculous abilities connected to qigong
beginning with the well-publicized feat of a young boy said to be able to read with his ear.26
Lines were drawn between those who wanted to use scientific claims to legitimize
paranormal skills and those who wanted to use scientific claims to debunk superstition,
while both sides wanted to use science to investigate and legitimize the Chinese theory of
qi. ‗Science‘ now sat on both sides of the divide: orthodoxy and heterodoxy, science and
superstition. Which category a group fell into as a qigong teaching meant the difference
between registration and legitimacy or elimination. Important in this regard was the amount
of support your group had from those in high places and the accompanying official
sponsorship, one reason the Falun Gong and other qigong groups cultivated friendships,
clientele and members from within the CCP.
The qigong boom in China was massive. It began in the late 1970s and by 1986 there were
over 2,000 qigong organizations. To regulate these groups, the government established the
Chinese Qigong Scientific Research Organization. The year 1986 was a pivotal year because
it saw the emergence of a new type of qigong master and qigong movement. Up until the
mid-1980s qigong was taught by ‗orthodox Qigong masters, generally of a fairly
conservative tendency‘.27 In 1986 a new kind of teacher emerged who offered not only good
health but fast results, and their movements could number thousands. The most famous of
these new qigong masters was Yan Xin who, at the height of his teachings was referred to
as ‗the spiritual hope for the Chinese masses who feel they have lost their way‘. His
meetings drew up to as many as 30,000 at a time.28 Qigong had moved beyond the role of
health-care and now encompassed a mixture of benefits: it offered a form of spiritual
practice, a form of moral guidance, a form of social organization which sometimes included
civic-type activities,29 and it offered a sense of goodness and pride to people living in a time
of great insecurity and change. Some have suggested it even acted as a nationalistic
counterweight to anger at the Japanese and the West:
The shame our nation has experienced over the last hundred years, and in particular
the sense of helpless humiliation in the last ten years when we opened ourselves to