Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2005 Student Work

New York’s Falun Gong Exiles Go Through the Motions But Have Scant Hope for Return to China

By Wendy Leung

The eight supermarket carts that make Jiang Fangfang’s cramped apartment look like a parking lot serve a fervent purpose. Every day, regardless of rain, sleet or snow, Jiang uses them to haul Falun Gong literature across the street to the Kissena Corridor Park in Flushing, Queens where practitioners meet at 6 a.m. Jiang enjoys living so close to the open field where she and about three dozen others practice Falun Gong. But there is one other place this 82-year-old woman would rather practice her slow-moving exercises: her native China.

“That is my home and where I belong,” said Jiang, who is from Zhejiang province. But it’s unlikely she will head home anytime soon.

Jiang belongs to a spiritual sect that China has deemed an “evil cult.” Six years after the group was banned in China, there are millions who are forced to practice in secret or like Jiang, are in exile. Prior to the ban, the Chinese government conducted a survey that estimated there were between 70 to 100 million practitioners in China. The group now claims there are at least 100 million in 60 countries but admits it’s impossible to count them because Falun Gong keeps no membership records and there isn’t a central organization.

In 1999, the group was banned and followers who once practiced freely in public places were driven away and sometimes persecuted. That year, the U.S. State Department released a report stating that tens of thousands of Falun Gong members were forced to sign statements disavowing their beliefs. “An unknown number of members who refuse to recant their beliefs remain detained; others are serving prison or re-education-through-labor sentences,” said the report.

Falun Gong is part meditation and part calisthenics. Its movements are inspired by the ancient Chinese practice of qi gong. Practitioners also adhere to the teachings of group founder Li Hongzhi whose book, “Zhuan Falun,” asks its followers to uphold truth, compassion and forbearance.

These three words guide Jiang through her life in Flushing, which began in 1999 when she came to visit her daughter. That year, Jiang’s daughter was studying in New York and had just given birth to a baby girl.

When she got on the plane with her husband to see their first granddaughter, Jiang would never have guessed that the government would crack down on her meditation group in China. During her stay in Flushing, Jiang joined local practitioners in their daily routine. One day, during a mass meditation in May 1999, a journalist took a picture of the Flushing park filled with practitioners. That picture, with Jiang visible in the foreground, was picked up by news agencies.

The world was beginning to pay heed to the once inconspicuous group after a mass rally in April of 1999 outside of Zhongnanhai, Beijing’s former imperial compound. That rally drew an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 followers and was the event that later sparked the ban. Many scholars, like Donald Gibbs, professor emeritus at University of California at Davis’ Chinese department, believe that the sheer number of Falun Gong practitioners made Beijing nervous.

“The Chinese Communist Party knows very well that secret societies in Chinese history have overthrown governments. It knows very well that it came to power itself by stealth and organization,” he said, referring to Mao Zedong’s tactics of overpowering the Nationalist Party in the 1940s.

The Falun Gong members also chose a symbolic protest site: Zhongnanhai is the location of repeated protests in Chinese history. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards gathered there calling for then-President Liu Shaoqi to step down. In 1989, before the Tiananmen protests became violent, democracy activists attempted to storm the compound’s entrance but were unsuccessful.

A decade after the Tiananmen massacre, Beijing showed its might once again, and that was when Jiang’s fate took a drastic turn. Shortly after the ban on Falun Gong, Jiang’s danwei, or work unit, immediately contacted her and asked her to return. “If I went back, I’d just be giving myself as a gift to the government,” she said in Mandarin.

In China, the danwei is an organization that the Communist Party and government officials use to track the behavior of residents, including where they live, what their employment situation is and even who they marry. Jiang had to apply to her danwei to visit her daughter in the United States and it knew exactly how to contact her. She realized she couldn’t return and has stayed in Flushing ever since.

The fate of Jiang and her husband – along with millions of other Falun Gong practitioners – rests in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, so any changes within the party make practitioners pay heed. Last September, Chinese President and Communist Party leader Hu Jintao gained another title, that of military chief. This finalized the transfer of power from former President Jiang Zemin, the leader who ordered the ban on Falun Gong. Some couldn’t help but wonder whether Hu, a leader of a younger generation with perhaps a less repressive ideology, could spell change for the troubled group.

Jiang, the Falun Gong practitioner, is hopeful that Hu might be the key to her homecoming. Her optimism and passion belie her soft-spoken demeanor.

“I will definitely return to China,” she said. “Now that Jiang Zemin has stepped down, hopefully I can return. This was just a place to rest and wait.”

But there have been no signs from Hu or any other government officials that indicate a shift in Beijing’s stance on Falun Gong. Gibbs said he doesn’t expect any change for the time being.

“It is part of the Confucian ethic that is the bedrock conscience in every Chinese person that one does not deviate quickly or greatly from one’s predecessor,” he said. “Regardless of what China’s current leaders may personally think, I believe they will not feel themselves free to change the verdict from ‘riot’ to patriotic movement until the leaders of that era are deceased. And even then, it won't come right away. I don’t think Falun Gong stands a chance of government acceptance until Jiang Zemin dies.”

Until then, Jiang the Flushing practitioner, will wait. She has done exactly that for six years and has no other choice. Everyday, Jiang makes it to the daily exercise sessions dragging her trolley full of newsletters for others to take. Falun Gong is not just a big part of her life – according to Jiang, it has saved her life.

Jiang claims that before she discovered Falun Gong, her health was breaking down with series of dizzy spells and blood pressure that was “through the roof.” After practicing Falun Gong for three days, she said, her health improved dramatically. In “Zhuan Falun,” Li, the group founder, writes that practicing Falun Gong can even slow down the aging process because the right cultivation of mind and body will transform human cells into high-energy matter. Extraordinary claims that Falun Gong can cure illness or make one obtain happiness are hard to believe. But for devout followers, Falun Gong is a welcomed deliverance.

“Falun Gong doesn't seem to draw the rowdy or raucous person,” said Gibbs. “They seem devout, however, and I assume much of that devotion stems from the need to believe in something. Religion, organized or un- has been devalued by the government for over half a century. People need to have faith, need to believe in something.”