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There are several reasons why the Falung Gong must now be viewed as a more ominous threat to party hegemony than any of the protest movements that have preceded it, even the student movements of the 1980s. First, because it has such deeply traditional and nativist roots, its message cannot be branded as an imported and inappropriate foreign ideology for China the way notions of Western democracy have been dismissed by nationalists and xenophobes.

Second, because the destruction of traditional Confucian values during the revolution and then the implosion of Marxist ideology as a belief system during Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms have left China bereft of any coherent belief system, Chinese are susceptible to any group that seems to offer basic answers to questions about the meaning of life.

Third, unlike student protesters, who were basically rationalists and usually had clearly delineated demands to which the party could have responded if it wished, there is no quick and easy response for Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi's critique of contemporary life as having fallen into a morass of immorality and venality.

Fourth, this curiously diffuse but mass-based sect has managed to communicate with its members by word of mouth and over the Internet rather than by conventional means, making it virtually impossible for the party to disrupt its nerve center. In this sense it is a paradox -- the first traditionalistic but cyber-savvy Chinese protest movement to confront the party.

But what may be the most ominous aspect of this sudden upwelling of nativistic superstitiousness that has so suddenly and enigmatically managed to knit itself together into a movement is not simply its demands to be left alone, but its symbolic significance. For Chinese, such a millennarian movement evokes an indelible association with the idea of dynastic decay and collapse. There is hardly a Chinese citizen alive who does not know the legends and stories from history that have been passed down in novels, operas, plays, films, comic books and even TV series of how the Han Dynasty's (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) end was presaged by the mystical Yellow Turban Rebellion or how the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), China's last, ran afoul of the equally mystically inclined White Lotus and Boxer rebellions.

Such cult-animated uprisings against unjust authority -- with which Falun Gong will now be unalterably identified -- have always been viewed by Chinese as portents that the legitimacy -- or the "mandate of heaven" -- of a ruling dynasty has been withdrawn. And for a government such as the one that presently rules China, which does not derive its legitimacy from the will of the people, the deeply rooted cultural presumption of ordinary people that the cosmic forces of heaven no longer shines kindly on it could deal it a potentially devastating psychological blow. Nothing in China ever happens quite the way "the experts" predict. Virtually no expert foresaw the events of 1989, and no expert I know imagined that China's next wave of destabilizing protest might come from a mass movement of middle-aged, middle-class citizens dedicated to recycled notions of Buddhist and Taoist clean living, health through meditation and breathing exercises.

But by detaining thousands of sect followers, which has sent tens of thousands more into the streets in protest all across China, the party may have unalterably transformed a spiritual movement into a dangerous political force. And when people take to the streets in China, it raises the specter of another tragedy like Tiananmen Square. "Take another look: Isn't the act of imperiously pushing 100 million good people into opposition producing another 'June 4th' incident?" the sect's Web site has recently warned. "The authorities should quickly sober up to avoid an even more severe consequence."
salon.com | July 27, 1999

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