Virtual China: Information Technology - Perspectives, July 30, 1999


	Perspectives Falun Dafa and the Internet: A Marriage Made in Web Heaven July 30, 1999 Li Hongzhi: "We have no organizational structure." Reporter: "Can you explain that? How did 10,000 people know how to go to Zhongnanhai?" Li Hongzhi: "You know there is the Internet. They learned it from the Internet." When 10,000 or more followers of the Chinese exercise cult Falun Dafa suddenly appeared on April 25 at the gates of Zhongnanhai, the Beijing compound that houses the Communist Party's highest leaders, it seemed like a magic trick, a rabbit suddenly pulled from a black silk top hat. The mystery was in the quickness of it: a large and disciplined spiritual exercise community had instantaneously - poof! - appeared overnight. Who were these people? Where had they come from? How had they organized themselves so efficiently, extensively, and without notice? Yet Falun Dafa had existed as a very large group for several years before the protest at Zhongnanhai. It had established a significant presence on the Internet, connecting millions of followers through an extensive and highly organized system of global websites, bulletin board services and e-mail. "For all the disparaging remarks they make about science and technology, Falun Dafa has thrived primarily because it relies on the Internet," said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The group's bilingual, frequently-updated, well-organized website (www.falundafa.org) contains messages from the group's leader, Li Hongzhi; a primer on the group's beliefs; links to 26 local Falun Dafa websites around the world; calendars of conferences and events; news items; and audio downloads allowing followers to listen to "Master Li's" lectures from anyplace in the world. Also at the site are advertisements for Li's books, including his most popular compendium, Zhuan Falun, which is said by the group to have sold in the millions of copies. Li, who lives in exile in Queens, New York, says that he makes his living mainly from the Internet sales of the book. The day that Falun Dafa materialized as an actual group encircling the Zhongnanhai compound was like the day two lovers, who meet by e-mail, meet for real over a cup of coffee. In so doing the group took Beijing's Communist leadership by complete surprise and sparked the harshest campaign of mass repression in China since the Tiananmen student massacre of 1989. The story of Falun Dafa - from its rise in rural China in 1992, to the growth of its vast global following, to the brutal crackdown on the group by the Chinese government in the past week - is more than a story about China. It is also the story of how the explosive growth of a new communications technology intertwined the fates of an eccentric new spiritual movement and an entire country, holding clues about how Beijing will attempt to control and guide that technology, itself a potential powerful engine to a sputtering economy. Internet usage in China has exploded in recent years, growing from a few thousand users in 1995 to an officially estimated 2.1 million at the end of 1998. And that number had doubled to 4 million by July. How many of these users are also adherents of Falun Dafa? The Chinese government puts the number of Falun Dafa followers in China in the tens of millions. Many of these followers use the Internet to follow Li Hongzhi's teachings and communicate with one another. Here is a new technology giving a new religion the means to grow, with a spiritual movement, in turn, fertilizing the new technology. "There's a long history of religions using the very latest technology as a means to spread and disseminate," said Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California. "The Gutenberg press was put into service by the church for that purpose." While living in France during the 1970's, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni kept in touch with his followers in Iran by means of smuggled audiotapes recording his speeches and sermons. According to a bulletin board notice published on the Falun Dafa's main website, the Internet played a central role in the development of the religion, especially in its middle and later stages. But the group also encountered problems with the Internet, as highlighted by the notice, particularly the spread of unauthorized interpretations of Li's teachings through individual websites. Founded by a former government office clerk, Li Hongzhi, in 1992, Falun Dafa was originally not much more than another of the hundreds of groups in China that practice qi gong, a traditional system of exercise and healing. What distinguished Falun Dafa, sometimes known as Falun Gong, from other such groups was its leader, Li Hongzhi, who claimed to have received knowledge of a spiritual system from '20 masters' who sought him out as a child to educate him in its ways. To the traditional qi gong, which holds that certain physical exercises can channel human energies in healing ways, Li added his own supernaturally received wisdom. These tenets included teaching far more potent healing exercises than are typically associated with qi gong, frequently including the healing of terminally ill patients; various cosmological and moral precepts; and the teaching that very accomplished practitioners of Falun Dafa attain 'supernormal' powers such as teleportation and flying. Responding to Chinese government charges that Li is a charlatan, a swindler, and a menace to society, a document on the Falun Dafa website states that Li is always very careful to keep his most powerful teachings away from criminal types. "For example," the document reads, "if a person has the bad mindset of ordinary people, once he attains the ability of teleportation he could conduct all kinds of crimes, such as stealing state secrets and money in the banks. Such things are absolutely not allowed." By the middle 1990's, Li had gathered notes on his teaching into pamphlets and books that he sold at his classes and lectures. After repeated clashes with the authorities, including, notably, one that arose from a dispute with three followers who had opened a for-profit clinic using Falun Dafa healing techniques, Li left China with his wife and daughter to live in the United States. It was here, after meeting with other overseas Chinese who were both followers of Falun Dafa and highly expert at website design, that the group's fortunes really took off. The website was posted, and e-mailing lists were started both between followers in the U.S. and, more notably, between followers in the U.S. and China. As hits on the website grew, so did word-of-mouth both in the U.S. and China, and so did the ranks of Falun Dafa followers. Conferences and events, especially in the U.S., Europe and Australia were held. Li frequently says his group is not formally organized, but a glimpse at the website suggests otherwise. Moreover he claims the group has 100 million followers worldwide. The Chinese government puts that number at around 10 million, while independent observers say around 40 million is possible. The sit-down protest at Zhongnanhai was sparked by an incident in the northeast Chinese city of Tianjin, where a local Falun Dafa group became outraged when the local office of the Police Security Bureau harassed some of its members and forbade them to practice publicly. Partly through the Internet, especially via e-mail, word spread throughout China. Organized and mobilized, members from Beijing, Tianjin, and other cities in China converged on the capital. Chinese officials say that Li Hongzhi visited Beijing a few days before the Zhongnanhai sit-in, and suggest that he personally orchestrated the protest. Now that the government has outlawed Falun Dafa, it has attempted to crush the group's credibility with followers with a lengthy television documentary meant to reveal Li as a criminal. Fighting fire with fire, it has also published its own website (ppflg.china.com.cn), answering and attempting to demolish each of Falun Dafa's claims in detail. In recent days, the battle between the Falun Dafa and the government has shifted even more to cyberspace, with the Falun Dafa claiming that some of its websites worldwide have been hacked, apparently by pro-Chinese government parties or perhaps even government agencies themselves. In China, the government has blocked access to Falun Dafa websites through the use of filters, and impeded e-mail traffic among followers, in some cases by shutting down servers altogether. Falun Dafa followers in the United States also say their e-mail to fellow members in China has largely gone unanswered in recent weeks. Falunusa.net (www.falunusa.net), a site that mirrors other Falun Dafa sites, claims to have traced attacks on its server back to the Multimedia Communication Division of China Telecom, the giant state-run telecommunications company in China. Also known as the '169 network' (the access number's prefix), the Multimedia Communications Division runs the Chinese-language network that connects Chinese government ministries and agencies. Other attacks apparently came from an entity identified only as the Information Service Center of XinAn Building but whose street address belongs to the Public Security Bureau. Falun Dafa representatives also claim that similar attacks have taken down one of the group's North American servers and placed anti-Falun Dafa statements on the group's website in England. And editors and webmasters of the Falun Dafa's many websites say their e-mail accounts have been 'bombed' with paralzying volumes of message traffic. According to a Falun Dafa webmaster, several of the group's servers had even been used to mount probes of U.S. government computers, including at least one computer belonging to the U.S. Department of Transportation. For now, the Chinese government's crackdown on Falun Dafa appears to have worked. The long documentary programs attacking the group, together with staged press events at which thousands of Li's books are pulped and thrown in dumpsters, have been especially effective, Dali Yang says. "Never underestimate the power of the 7 o'clock news," Yang says. Still the Internet has shown its ability to surprise a government as never before, which may in the end be the lasting legacy of Falun Dafa. New technology is indistinguishable from magic, a sage of the modern media once said. For the Chinese government, and all those watching how the Internet develops in that country, the lingering question is will it be black magic or white magic?	Archive

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