Britannica gives probably the most concise possible summary of the origin and history of the Falun Gong movement (“Falun Gong”).
An “offshoot of gigong (Chinese: ‘discipline of the vital breath’) founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992,” the rapid prominence of the Falun Gong movement “became a concern to the Chinese government, which branded it a ‘heretical cult.’ ”
In early 1995 Li decided to resettle in the United States in the apparent hope of avoiding political problems caused by the continuing denunciation of qigong in the Chinese media. . . .
[D]espite Li’s absence and the generally falling fortunes of qigong and Falun Gong, most Falun Gong followers in China continued to believe that their practice was completely legal. . . . Accordingly, when faced with media criticism, Falun Gong followers reacted by peacefully demonstrating at the offices of newspapers and television stations. Finally, in a massive and unannounced gathering on April 25, 1999, some 20,000 Falun Gong adherents protested outside CCP headquarters in Beijing.
That demonstration, which took party leaders completely by surprise, marked the end of the qigong boom and largely sealed the fate of Falun Gong as a Chinese movement. The party soon declared Falun Gong to be the greatest danger to state security since the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and banned the movement as a ‘heretical cult.’ [But] China was not immediately successful in suppressing the movement. . . .
“Members of Falun Gong continued to resist what appeared to be an ongoing campaign of repression in China.”
One fault of the article, however, is the way it refers to “Chinese media” as if “Chinese media” were something outside of the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party. It is not the case that extensive denunciations “in the Chinese media” might “cause” political problems rather than simply constituting evidence that the targets already have a political problem.
In any case, history has a way of not ending, and the members of Falun Gong, who still number in the millions, doubtless disagree that the fate of their movement has been “largely sealed.”
