Editor's note: U.S. California-based San Jose Mercury News published a feature report A CHINESE BATTLE ON U.S. SOIL on December 23, 2001 as the front page to describe Falun Gong how to use foreign politicians as his tool to propagandize themselves. The followings are some parts of the article.
The battle between the Chinese government and Falun Gong, the banned spiritual group, has spilled onto American soil, catching sympathetic but uninformed bystanders in the crossfire.
As Falun Gong's overseas followers have stepped up appeals for public support, often invoking the movement's principles of tolerance and compassion, hundreds of American politicians have responded with letters and proclamations, including the mayor of San Jose and members of California's congressional delegation. It is a chorus that the Chinese government has tried to mute. But in supporting Falun Gong as a victim of Chinese communist repression, U.S. politicians often have unwittingly endorsed a philosophy that is intolerant in many respects and in conflict with the values of a Western democracy.
Some critics say Falun Gong has deliberately obscured its teachings in the West so it can manipulate domestic and foreign policy.
"They know how to play politics with American elected officials," said Ming Xia, a political-science professor at the City University of New York onStaten Island.
He calls Falun Gong "Janus-faced," saying it presents itself in China as a moral-revival movement, but in the West as a movement for freedom of religion and thought.
"I think Falun Gong has been used as a tool by congressmen to extend pressure to the Chinese government, although some know it's a cult," said Wang Yunxiang, consul-general in San Francisco.
According to one veteran China-watcher, Orville Schell, the West's blind embrace of Falun Gong fits into a well-established pattern of viewing communist China in black-and-white terms, missing the complexities and nuances.
"This has been the tradition," said Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California-Berkeley. "Anyone the Chinese government opposes gets lionized as righteous."
Some scholars who study Falun Gong say Westerners are misled by its third principle. " 'Tolerance' suggests respecting other people's viewpoints," said David Ownby, a Chinese-history professor at the University of Montreal. "That's not what it means."
Ownby says Li "shares no common background with our Enlightenment heritage and its emphasis on the individual, on acceptance of difference."
There is a good reason most outsiders and even some Western practitioners do not know about Li Hongzhi's teachings on race or about homosexuality, which he views as perverse Many are available primarily in Chinese, and are not featured in Falun Gong's promotional materials.
Though Li is often vague about how to become a better person, he is specific on a few points. One is that homosexuality is perverse.
Li also regards mixed-race or "cross-bred" people as rootless and deviant, a sign of morally bankrupt times.
In Li's world view, mixed-race people are a plot by the evil extraterrestrials who populate his cosmology, which spills over with accounts of lost civilizations, higher realms and mysteries that science cannot grasp.
Li told followers that aliens came in droves during the Industrial Revolution and that they aim to take over human souls through science, monitoring people by assigning every computer a number.
Like scores of civic leaders, San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales didn't know any of this when he signed a letter commending Li.
"Your teachings and practices have impacted millions of people all over the world, encouraging truth, compassion and tolerance to improve individual lives and society as a whole," the 1999 letter said.
With those words, Gonzales became part of Falun Gong's Internet lobbying campaign.
His quote is featured on a flier, posted on a Web site for practitioners to download and distribute, as an example of "proclamations and other forms of recognition for the contributions Falun Dafa has made to local communities throughout the United States."
A press secretary for Gonzales, David Vossbrink, said such letters are routine "I don't think the mayor is very aware of the details of Falun Gong except what we've seen in press accounts of what's happening in China. We're familiar with Falun Gong here as a spiritual discipline with tai chi-like physical movements."
Gonzales was not the only person to wind up on the Internet as an accidental pawn in an intramural Chinese war. A political-science professor in the Midwest was stunned to find himself drawn into the fray after inviting Falun Gong followers to speak to his class.
Wesley Milner, who teaches at the University of Evansville in Indiana, was one of thousands of academics contacted by practitioners seeking to promote their cause. Milner thought the topic would interest his students.
He did not know that the practitioners would post an account of their visit on www.minghui.org, the Chinese-language Web site where Li's latest statements appear. It portrayed Milner as sympathetic to Falun Gong.
Two days later, Milner got e-mail from the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, giving the Chinese government's perspective. Then he was contacted by Deng Zixian, a Chinese doctoral student and ardent Falun Gong critic in Texas.
Milner was even more surprised to discover that Evansville had proclaimed Dec. 27, 2000, "Falun Dafa Day."
"These people here in middle America, they don't know anything about it," Milner said. Looking back, he said he felt used "I don't want to be out there trumpeting a cause I know nothing about."
Qing Liu, a Columbus, Ohio, practitioner who contacted Milner, said she should have asked permission to post his name. She acknowledged that U.S. proclamations do not reflect a true understanding of Falun Gong, but said they help counter Chinese government propaganda.
"If someone says that Falun Gong is banned in China, but it's not illegal in the U.S. and local governments give us this award, it helps people in China understand."
Falun Gong has also garnered high-visibility support for a loftier cause getting Li nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. In January, 2001, four Bay Area members of Congress, Democratic Reps. Tom Lantos, Anna Eshoo, Zoe Lofgren and Pete Stark, joined 41 other lawmakers in signing a letter that praised Li for promoting the "highest humanitarian values."
"Mr. Li believes that by consistently pursuing truth, showing compassion, and practicing tolerance, an oppressed people will embrace a morally and practically sound method to purify their own minds and to resolve conflicts in any kind of society," said the letter, which was circulated by Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.
When the Mercury News asked the Bay Area legislators whether they knew about Li's views on homosexuals and race before they signed the letter, three said no.
"Obviously I wouldn't recommend to the Nobel Institute someone who's anti-gay, because that's a human right," Eshoo said.
She subsequently rescinded her nomination, writing to the Nobel Institute that while practitioners deserve freedom of speech, belief and assembly, "Mr. Li has made statements that are offensive to me and are counter to many of my core beliefs."
Stark said he signed because of Falun Gong's principles and Li's efforts to advance freedom in China, adding, "If Mr. Li holds views which promote intolerance of any kind, I was not aware of it."
Neither was Lofgren. When she asked Falun Gong adherents about Li's beliefs on homosexuality and race, Allen Zeng, a San Jose follower, replied that Falun Gong's philosophy applies only to practitioners. "Falun Gong has no intention of promoting its own principles beyond its own circle of practitioners," he wrote.
Lofgren said that while she no longer considers Li to be Nobel Prize material, any publicity about Falun Gong may discourage its persecution.
"In addition to Falun Gong, there are other belief systems and religions we may find in some measure wrong, but that doesn't mean oppression of the believers is morally correct," she wrote in an e-mail to the Mercury News.
Lantos, one of Congress' toughest China critics, was unapologetic. He said he nominated Li to call attention to China's persecution "As with many human rights cases in which I have been involved, I do not agree with Li Hongzhi on all issues, and no one is a greater advocate for the rights of gays and lesbians at home and abroad than I."
The U.S. State Department gets occasional calls from cities asking whether they should sign pro-Falun Gong proclamations. It tells them to make their own decisions, a State Department official said. The U.S. government has said repeatedly that practitioners' rights should not be violated, but has not taken a position on their beliefs.
But human rights groups, particularly those run by Chinese activists, know what Li preaches and do not endorse it. "We stay away from what they're doing, the practice," said Ignatius Ding of Silicon Valley for Democracy in China. "We speak about human rights, which doesn't mean we believe a certain religion."
Similarly, Xiao Qiang, executive director of New York-based Human Rights in China, disagrees with Li's stance on homosexuality and his insistence that practitioners follow only his teachings. Personally, Human Rights in China supports Falun Gong members' rights, but I don't support Li Hongzhi's message," Xiao said.
(San Jose Mercury News December 23, 2001 http://www.rickross.com/reference/fa_lun_gong/falun249.html)
