Falun Gong and the CCP?

Question

So the CCP(Chinese Communist Party) is torturing these falun gong practioners. Well, anybody think they're right in trying to stop people from practicing Falun Gong? I mean, I know torture and violence is not the way, but are they right in their cause even if they did it peacefully? Falun Gong to me seems like a boot-leg practice but it's freedom of religon, and i guess even if it's a stupid one...

Answer 1

I live in China, I am not Chinese, so I am not subject to the local government point of view. I was here when all the mess of Falun Gong initially happened.

Some people I met (just acquaintances and neighbors, not friends) were involved in

Some of them just calmed down during the crack down and had no consequences. They continue to believe that Qi Gong is good for their health and they practice qi gong exercises instead of Tai ji in the park in the morning. They avoid medicines but they follow a quite healthy lifestyle, and believing that a dongbei scoundrel is a reincarnation of Buddha let them forget their daily problems.

They are mainly old people, laid off by state companies, low education, with a big loneliness problem because they were abandoned by child focused on career . Their retirement often doesn't allow a decent health care, or, may be, in their rural area there is NOT a decent health care.

So , qi gong (and not Falun gong itself) could be a way to keep alive ancient traditions and also a good anti pain and a substitute of what, in the western world , is the analyst or the counsellor

To these people, nothing serious happened.

Other people were bloody used by the gangster behind Falun Gong: used to make pressure on the power, which is  the most dangerous thing you can make in China.

They paid for all, and only them paid, and not the people sending them against the state: these gangster fled, the boss in the USA , and they continue to exploit suffering and ignorance elsewhere.

I do not justify the Chinese government for re-education through labour or similar practices: meanwhile any modern state will have had to eradicate a structure like Falun Gong before it was too late.

In a more democratic way, that is sure, but it had to be done

Falun gong followers try to mix things confusing Falun gong with qi gong practice. It is not the same thing

Falun gong is a sect , established in 1992 by Li Hongzhi in Changchun.

Initially the sect pushed on the qigong practice and refuse of all medicine and modern supports. This was organic to many local powers. A way to keep calm people impoverished by economic reforms.

If you are laid off and without health care, and someone arrives convincing you that you do not really need medicine, nor a job, that is a big gift to those willing to keep the social control tight.

By the end of nineties, Mr Li was probably suffering of a grandeur mania due to personality cult . In 1999 a famous physicist and professor of Tianjin university, published an article by the title “I Do Not Agree with Youth Practicing qigong,” and criticised Falun Gong.  Falun gong organized an horrible and threatening march in Tianjin against him (a proof of their love for freedom ?) I was there and it was horrible, something more and more similar to old fanatics like some sects of the boxers period.

A whole university under siege by thousands of haters, books burning... horrible.

Police dispersed it after several days, in the common brutal way of Chinese police, and this show of road force for sure worried the party. Road rallies and university siege are not religion: they are politics.

Then Falung Gong, counting too much on the strenght of numbers, made its capital mistake: they made a non authorized rally around Zhongnanhai, the area where the leaders of the party live in Beijing.

This escalation was too big to be accepted and was the beginning of the real crack down: Falun Gong leaders had not considered that many Chinese were too busy in improving their quality of life to have time following a self declared new Buddha

Now you have a school teacher who says to be a new Buddha, asks to renounce to science and to completely detach by things of life, but also asks  his followers to stalk opponents. Declares officially that his qigong exercises (based on breathing techniques) are enough to solve any problem. Sells an huge number of books and owns magazines (Epoch times), radio and tv station.

In my opinion this is a close description of a sect