How Jiang Zemin dealt with Falun Gong – Ian Johnson

 

Ian Johnson

Many stories emerged about former president Jiang Zemin after he passed away last week. But the way he dealt with Falun Gong, a mostly forgotten uprising against China’s leadership, has been left out in most reports, says journalist Ian Johnson who focused in his writings on this touchy part of China’s history, he writes at China File.

Ian Johnson:

In comparison to Xi Jinping, Jiang Zemin is often seen as a reformer, and in many ways he was. But a key part of his legacy is the sometimes forgotten or downplayed destruction of arguably the largest and most widespread post-Tiananmen political protest movement: Falun Gong.

Falun Gong was what the scholar David Palmer calls “militant qigong.” In other words, a hard-edged version of the mystic martial arts movement that rose up in the 1980s and ’90s when qigong became hugely popular, with tens of millions regularly practicing its exercises and following the many gurus who led numerous schools of thought around the movement. The government was eager to prevent qigong from becoming too popular and limited the groups’ media exposure. Most groups acquiesced, but Falun Gong pushed back. When an atheist agitator named He Zuoxiu defamed Falun Gong in the media, the group staged a silent sit-down strike of more than 10,000 people outside the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing.

Premier Zhu Rongji reportedly met the protesters and they dispersed quietly, but Jiang essentially freaked out. On June 10, 1999, he banned the group and set up offices named after that date: 610. Every level of government, from province to village, had to set up a 610 Office and stamp out Falun Gong. This became extremely difficult because Falun Gong staged protests for well over a year in many Chinese towns and cities, dwarfing the scale and geographic spread of the recent COVID protests.

Many Falun Gong adherents made their way straight to Beijing, where they held up placards calling for their group to be legalized. Forbidden by their faith to renounce it, they were rounded up, detained, and beaten. Jiang organized a meeting of provincial officials and read them the riot act: they had to prevent people from coming to Beijing. The buck was passed down the chain of command, with careers made or broken on their ability to stop Falun Gong adherents from reaching the capital. Local authorities set up illegal holding centers and beat people to death…

In hindsight, Jiang’s crackdown on Falun Gong set the stage for the state’s reassertion of control over the rest of religious life and civil society. Interestingly, the significance of Jiang’s crackdown was not lost on China’s human rights lawyers. Terence Halliday and Sida Liu have documented how Falun Gong became a litmus test for rights lawyers. More than a decade after the crackdown, only the lawyers most committed to free speech and freedom of association dared to take on their cases.

More at China File.

 Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Foreign involvement: the red line in China's spiritual revival - Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

Staying away from foreign involvement is key in the massive religious revival China is going through, author Ian Johnson of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao tells NPR. Religion is condoned as long as the new movements stick to a few unwritten rules in its sensitive relations with the Communist Party.

NPR:

President Xi Jinping has called on China's citizens to continue to be "unyielding Marxist atheists." He insists that the country's 85 million Communist Party members remain atheists. But increasingly, he's loosening the restrictions on religious organizations. These days, Chinese authorities even subsidize some religious practice under the guise of backing what the government calls "traditional culture." 

Johnson writes about the myriad ways religions of all sorts are practiced today in China. He describes walking in an elaborate Buddhist-inspired funeral procession in the Beijing neighborhood called the Temple of the Tolling Bell. He delves into the small sect, Eastern Lightning, a cultlike group that will remind some readers of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual practice. Eastern Lightning dared to attack China's Communist Party. 

"They feel it's them against what they call the 'Great Red Dragon,' which is the Communist Party," Johnson says. "They operate illegally, and they almost try to hijack church congregations. They sometimes resort to violence; and their very secretive nature, their proclivity for violence, in some ways, this also reflects how the Communist Party runs China," Johnson says. 

The "red line" for the faithful is foreign involvement. 

"If people are part of a religion that has a strong foreign component, if they're getting money from abroad, if they're getting training, this is a problem for the government," Johnson notes. 

But ultimately, all religions are global. And that may increasingly pose a problem for Chinese authorities. 

"It's a double-edged sword for the government," Johnson concludes. "They think religion can maybe provide some stability in a society that is racing forward and doesn't have a center of gravity. ... But religion creates values that are above any government values, ideas of justice, of righteousness, of truth and these are things can come back to haunt the party."

More (including a radio interview) at NPR.

Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you interested in more recent stories by Ian Johnson? Do check out this list.