Do you remember those Chinese ladies around the UCSA building handing out chinese newspapers and flyers about the Falun Gong movement? Those that were ignorant of who they really were took them. They act as though they were doing good deeds and were pleading a "good" cause. However, here are some truths.
Below is a summary of clippings from a news article available on the internet. The link are provided below.
The gospel truth: Falun Gong
Followers of Falun Gong say it's a spiritual movement with no political motives. But the community's sometimes alienating methods of protesting their persecution, and their evasiveness over links to front organisations, don't help their cause, writes Tim Hume.
Falun Gong ("Law Wheel Cultivation") was unveiled in China in 1992 by its enigmatic creator, former police band trumpeter Li, and has spread rapidly since. Formally known as Falun Dafa ("Great Law of the Law Wheel"), the practice is essentially a revivification of qigong, an ancient Chinese tradition involving regulated breathing and movement, which draws on Buddhist and Taoist traditions. Practitioners seek to "cultivate" themselves through gentle, meditative exercises, improving their character according to the movement's guiding principles of "truthfulness, compassion and tolerance".
Li claims supernatural powers, developed through training with spiritual masters in the mountains from his youth; his book, Zhuan Falun ("Turning the Law Wheel"), posits that he can treat disease more effectively than medicine, and can telekinetically implant the falun, or law wheel, into the abdomens of his followers, where it absorbs and releases power as it spins (other beliefs attributed to Li are that he can fly, that Africa has a two billion-year-old nuclear reactor, and that aliens invaded Earth about a century ago, introducing modern technology; one type, he told Time magazine, "looks like a human, but has a nose that is made of bone").
Li has lived in exile in New York, the movement's base, since 1998; the China government's crackdown did not begin in earnest until a year later, when 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners protested outside the Communist Party's Beijing headquarters. Displeased by the challenge, the government responded with a brutal campaign, vilifying the movement as a dangerous, anti-Chinese doomsday cult.
Falun Gong claims 100 million adherents around the world (Victoria University religious studies head Paul Morris pegs the number "in the hundreds of thousands"). In New Zealand, the community numbers somewhere between 200 and 300, about 90% of whom are ethnically Chinese.
You've probably seen Falun Gong; they march in Christmas parades, demonstrate outside Chinese diplomatic offices, engage in macabre street theatre dramatising China's alleged organ harvesting of practitioners.
THE PARADES
"They've done little to help their own cause," says Michael Barnett, Auckland Santa Parade Trust chairman, who had to hire security when Falun Gong picketed his office last year in response to his banning the group's 70-piece marching band from the parade.
He had been warned by other parade organisers of issues with Falun Gong: in particular, their distribution of flyers depicting the mutilated bodies of allegedly organ-harvested practitioners.
"They totally lied," says parade trust chairman Malcolm Dodds. The group had marched under a banner bearing Chinese characters, telling organisers it was "a Chinese greeting for Christmas spirit". "We later discovered it was something to the effect of `Celebrating the end of years of persecution under the Chinese regime'.
But no invitation was made to participate in Wellington's Chinese New Year parade last month, which Falun Gong had gatecrashed the previous year, one zealous practitioner driving a van through the security cordon.
THE NEWSPAPER
Founded in New York in 2000 with the stated goal of providing uncensored coverage of China, The Epoch Times now claims a circulation of 1.4 million in 30 countries. The slim broadsheet began publishing a weekly Chinese-language version here in 2002; a fortnightly English version appeared in 2005. The paper now boasts a handful of local reporting staff, and distributes 17,000 copies for free on news stands in dairies and supermarkets around the country; they are routinely distributed by practitioners.
Along with local and international coverage, the latter often focusing on human rights in China, each issue invariably features an extract of the newspaper's Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, an indictment on the regime which it claims is "disintegrating communism in China".
The US views Epoch as "affiliated" with Falun Gong, and Li himself has been reported as saying the paper was founded by his followers; despite this, Epoch's advertising manager, Shelley Shao, insists the only connection between the newspaper and Falun Gong is that one reports on the other.
THE STAGE SHOW
A recent case of interference by the Chinese Embassy occurred last April, when Divine Performing Arts brought its musical roadshow to Auckland.
One Auckland journalist, who did not want to be named, attended last year with complimentary tickets. He had not realised the show's Falun Gong affiliation, but became aware of something unusual when he was welcomed by a camera crew, who harried him to agree to give his impressions after the show.
The man said he "felt used", and implicated into some sort of propaganda. He left during intermission.
The New York Times last month reported similar responses to a Divine performance in Manhattan with moments of heavy-handed propaganda. Epoch, a sponsor of the show, reacted angrily, saying the Times' "unwarranted criticisms... clearly reveal[ed] a darker side" of the newspaper; one Epoch article, under the headline "New York Times Parrots Communist Party Line", asserted "the response to the show, confirmed by The Epoch Times reporters in over 1000 interviews with audience members, was overwhelmingly positive".
As a movement, Falun Gong displays the paranoia of the genuinely persecuted. Sometimes its suspicions are justified; clearly some of its activities are subject to Chinese interference. Other times, it perceives threats that are not there.
In a year when China's appalling human rights practices should be squarely in the spotlight ahead of an Olympics which China's leaders had once hollowly promised would usher in a new era of political freedoms Falun Gong's misguided strategies may instead be turning off its potential audience.
Chang says that like many she sympathises with the movement's goals, particularly given the way China's human rights conduct has fallen off the West's agenda. "I just wish Falun Gong would use better tactics."
(Blogspot.com, March 2, 2008)
Original text from: http://imbrogliare.blogspot.com/2008/03/falun-gong-what-it-really-is.html
