The sect that scares China's leaders

Falun Gong has 100 million members. Has the Communist Party, with 60 million, at last met its match?

It was one Friday evening in late spring in New York and I was walking across the Upper East Side toward one of the world's most elite and privileged academic institutions, Rockefeller University. The fellows of Rockefeller University are hand-picked from around the world and it boasts more Nobel Laureates than most universities could dream of in a hundred years. The people here are seriously clever, and many of them are also young and Chinese. I was headed there because I had been told that a group of brilliant young Chinese scholars devoted each Friday evening to the practice of a strange new set of beliefs called Falun Gong.

I was walking with a young man who had left China after the Tiananmen massacre and was resigned, for now, to the difficult life of the emigre activist. But a year ago he had encountered Falun Gong, and now his enthusiasm and proselytising zeal could hardly be contained. It had reduced his weight, he said, restored his peace of mind, given him a new outlook on life and made him healthy and happy.

"Just try it," he said. "I know you will like it and you will begin to feel the benefits immediately."

I have not been given, so far, to sudden conversions, but I did want to take a closer look at an organisation that had alarmed the Chinese government and intrigued the outside world two weeks earlier when 10,000 of its members had staged a surprise demonstration around Zhongnanhai, the high-walled compound next to the Forbidden City where China's leaders live. Premier Zhu Rongji himself was roused from his bed to attend to them. They were complaining, he discovered, about an article that had been published in a Tianjin magazine. They thought it "disrespectful" and wanted the editor sacked. Having failed to win satisfaction in Tianjin, they had come to the top.

Premier Zhu was not best pleased. Chinese leaders do not expect to be bothered in the morning by the masses.

When my companion and I arrived at Rockefeller University, we found rows of chairs set out and more than 100 devotees already seated, waiting for the session to begin. In one room, a cassette player was loaded with a recording of the teachings of Master Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong's founder and master, who now claims 100 million followers worldwide. Eighty Chinese men and women of all ages were gathered there. In the other room, Master Li's voice was overlaid by a translator's, for the benefit of the non-Chinese speakers. We took our places, the room was darkened and for an hour we followed the instructions on hand position, breathing, concentration and visualisation of the central message of Master Li: a lotus-shaped source of light in the lower abdomen which concentrates and stores energy. It did not transform my life, but it was not unpleasant.

There was no mistaking, though, the passion of the regular practitioners. One Rockefeller research fellow - engaged, he said, in advanced Aids research - assured me that the benefits of Falun Gong were scientifically irrefutable. "This is Chinese science," he insisted, "very ancient and of immense value to the entire world."

Another practitioner, a political exile, described it as a movement of revolutionary importance despite its non-political nature. By the end of the evening, I was more than convinced that, whatever Falun Gong was, it was both widespread and tenacious.

Two months later, the Chinese government attempted to crush it, arresting up to 5,000 practitioners and banning Master Li's books. Falun Gong responded with demonstrations in 30 Chinese cities. The Chinese government asked Interpol to arrest Master Li, but Interpol declined. Since then the war of words has continued.

What had Falun Gong done to persuade the Chinese government that it poses a serious threat to public order and to the rule of the Communist Party? And why do so many analysts remain convinced that a quasi-religious movement that preaches benevolence, virtue and the cultivation of health may yet offer the biggest threat the Communist Party has faced in 50 years?

The past offers some clues. The history of China is studded with episodes of extraordinary religious fervour and dangerous millenarian movements. The largest in the 19th century was the Taiping (Heavenly Peace) rebellion, led by a failed candidate for the imperial exams who, as an unforeseen consequence of reading a missionary pamphlet, emerged from a bout of fever believing himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. In the 19 years (1845-64) that the rebellion lasted, 20 million people died. It was finally suppressed after a long siege of the Nanjing, the movement's last headquarters, in which 100,000 people were killed.

Seventy years before the Taiping, the White Lotus Society, led by a master of martial arts and herbal medicine, Wang Lun, raised a rebellion against the Qing Dynasty; and 40 years after the Taiping, the Boxer movement raised a rebellion that ended in the siege of Beijing.

The Chinese Communist Party began as a secret society with a millenarian vision, and nobody knows better that the combination of self-cultivation (the cultivation of "qi", or inner essence) and righteousness is potentially an explosive one.

There are some curious parallels between the conditions that gave birth to the Taiping and today's China that suggest that the ground is highly fertile for new movements. In the mid-19th century, as today, the weak central government was widely regarded as illegitimate. Unable to defend itself against western imperial aggression and weakened by internal rebellions, the Qing's mandate of Heaven - its moral right to rule - was clearly shop-soiled.

The moral right to rule of today's government is equally questioned. It still describes itself as communist, though it has long since ditched the commitment to public ownership and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Battered for four decades by Mao's millenarian dreams, worked and starved to death in large numbers and finally disregarded as a corrupt elite grows rich, few Chinese have mourned the passing of Marxism-Leninism. In the 20 years since Deng Xiaoping opened China to the outside and began to embrace the market, there has been a remarkable growth in religious practice, some of it in the revived traditions of Buddhism and Taoism, some of it Christian and much from the wilder shores of belief.

The party has little to offer beyond nationalism and unevenly distributed prosperity as alternatives to compulsory faith in communism. For decades party propaganda proclaimed the moral and political superiority of party leadership and, by extension, of the nation it led. Now that claim has been ditched in favour of a materialism in which greed, corruption and inequality have blossomed. After decades of assault by communism, Chinese culture is now under attack from global capitalism.

What is there now to hang on to for a people whose traditions have been under such sustained assault?

Millions have found the answer in the teachings of 47-year-old Li Hongzhi, a former security guard from the north-eastern city of Changchun. Li left his job in 1991 to start the Falun Gong movement and, after enjoying the kind of success that attracts unwelcome attention from the government, prudently left China just over a year ago. He now lives in New York.

Li blames science for many of the world's evils and preaches against homosexuality, drugs and rock'n'roll. He also claims that Falun Gong is an ancient teaching whose time has come again.

"Our Falun Dafa," he has written, "is one of the 84,000 Law cultivation schools. It has never been made public and taught in the history of this cycle of human civilisation. But it was popularised to offer salvation to people during a prehistoric period of time . . . I have brought it into the open once again during the last days of Last Havoc."

Master Li has been careful to distance himself from the wilder claims made in his name, but his followers continue to attribute supernormal powers to him. For them, the answer to the ethical and spiritual void that is the Last Havoc of contemporary China is Falun Gong, this curious mix of breathing practices, Buddhist terminology and a socially conservative message, with the promise of boundless health thrown in. Falun Gong proclaims a high standard of ethics, it is free to the user, it preaches universal compassion and, its devotees believe, is of tangible benefit to mind and body.

None of the above is true of the Chinese Communist Party. The party claims 60 million members, many of whom joined to advance their careers. Falun Gong claim 100 million members, all of whom are there because they want to be there.

Since the crackdown in late July, thousands of Falun Gong followers in China have been arrested, around 1,500 of them reportedly government - and therefore party - figures. The two men accused of organising the April demonstration are, respectively, a retired Railways Ministry official and a deputy division chief with the Ministry of Supervision. The movement will be hard to eradicate, not least because it has penetrated all social strata, including the urban professional class, where the highest concentration of China's four million Internet users is to be found.

For Falun Gong is the first manifestation of another phenomenon that challenges Beijing: with modernisation, the party's monopoly of propaganda is unsustainable. For nearly five decades, the Chinese Communist Party has held to the principle that to make and sustain a revolution you need to control both the gun and the pen. The party still has a lot of guns, but the penetration of information technology into China has fatally weakened the party's capacity to control the pen. As Falun Gong has shown, the party can no longer hope to keep lateral communications in Chinese society under surveillance.

Falun Gong's demonstrations were organised by e-mail. Master Li's books are on the net, free to download for all. Since the crackdown, Falun Gong's case has been put forth for anyone who cares to visit any of the Falun Gong sites. In China those sites are blocked, but proxy servers take determined practitioners easily through the firewall. Falun Gong has shown that, with the Internet, even the Chinese can organise unnoticed.

Master Li has asked Beijing not to treat his followers as enemies. His intentions, he insists, are benign. Perhaps they are. But to a morally bankrupt government with mounting social problems, anything that inspires such devotion is a threat.

The writer's "The Search for the Panchen Lama" is published by Viking, £20

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