Memo #25
Stephen Noakes
More than a decade has elapsed since some 21,000 adherents of the spiritual movement known as Falun Gong gathered in peaceful protest outside Beijing’s Zhongnanhai complex. The demonstration, which came amid a rising tide of controversy over the group’s meaning and message, was China’s largest since the Tiananmen uprising of 1989. Like that incident, the Falun Gong demonstration was violently suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Nearly everyone documenting Falun Gong’s rise and fall, including scholars, journalists, politicians, human rights groups, and even the CCP itself, overestimated its significance for China’s political future. Drawing parallels to millenarian movements in China’s past, many envisioned Falun Gong as a genuine threat to CCP rule. The Falun Gong was seen as a harbinger of change to a regime wrought by modernization. Many thought it had the potential to fundamentally remake China’s political landscape.
But these predictions were uniformly misplaced, as the so-called threat Falun Gong represented turned out to be little more than smoke and mirrors. By September of 1999, the Jiang administration had all but eradicated Falun Gong from Chinese soil. This was barely two months after the campaign against the movement began. There was little resistance. In the end, CCP’s easy and predictable victory over the movement offers more insight into authoritarianism’s durability than its demise.
A rethinking of Falun Gong and what it means is vital for understanding the political trajectory of post-Mao China. It is especially important to ask why the CCP overreacted to the alleged threat. If Falun Gong reflects bubbling social tensions brought on by modernization, then why have challenges of equal or greater magnitude not arisen in the years since China’s development has accelerated?
Rooted out of China, Falun Gong has spread across the globe and morphed from a strictly religious movement to a political one. Indeed, it survives today as perhaps the single largest and most cohesive opposition to CCP rule. Yet it poses no danger. Nor is it an obstacle to improved relations between China and other nations. In fact, China has received the most legislative support from the United States and Canada.
More than anything else, the CCP’s responses to Falun Gong, then and now, are telling of its hyper-sensitivity to even the remotest of destabilizing factors, as well as its determination to retain power.
About the Author:
Stephen Noakes is a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University. Specialist on social organizations in mainland China. His forthcoming dissertation is entitled “Advocacy Under Authoritarianism: Transnational Networks in China.”
Links:
- Stephen Noakes, Falun Gong, Ten Years On, Pacific Affairs, Volume 83, June 2010
- Memoranda on Falun Gong from Chinese embassies in Canada and the United States
- English-language version of Minghui.org, a website of the Falun Gong movement
- The Epoch Times’ “9 Commentaries on the Communist Party of China”
- Evidence of support for Falun Gong from elected officials in Canada and the United States
Related Memos:
- Our other Memos about China
- Our collection of Memos on the Origins of Social Protests in China