85 Facts About Falun Gong

Falun Gong or Falun Dafa is a new religious movement.

Falun Gong was founded by its leader Li Hongzhi in China in the early 1990s.

Falun Gong has its global headquarters in Dragon Springs, a 400-acre compound around Cuddebackville in Deerpark, New York, near the current residence of Li Hongzhi.

Falun Gong emerged toward the end of China's "qigong boom"—a period that saw a proliferation of similar practices of meditation, slow-moving energy exercises and regulated breathing.

Falun Gong combines meditation and qigong exercises with a moral philosophy.

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Falun Gong extensions include The Epoch Times, a politically far-right media entity that has received significant attention for promoting conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation, and producing advertisements for former U S President Donald Trump.

Falun Gong is most frequently identified with the qigong movement in China.

Falun Gong Dafa is said to be the result of his reorganizing and writing down the teachings that were passed to him.

Falun Gong is distinct from other qigong schools in that its teachings cover a wide range of spiritual and metaphysical topics, placing emphasis on morality and virtue and elaborating a complete cosmology.

Falun Gong aspires to enable the practitioner to ascend spiritually through moral rectitude and the practice of a set of exercises and meditation.

Falun Gong's teachings posit that human beings are originally and innately good—even divine—but that they descended into a realm of delusion and suffering after developing selfishness and accruing karma.

The second exercise, "Falun Gong Standing Stance", involves holding four static poses—each of which resembles holding a wheel—for an extended period.

Porter writes that practitioners of Falun Gong are encouraged to read Falun Gong books and practice its exercises on a regular basis, preferably daily.

Falun Gong exercises are practiced in group settings in parks, university campuses, and other public spaces in over 70 countries worldwide, and are taught for free by volunteers.

Falun Gong's teachings hold that practitioners can acquire supernatural skills through a combination of moral cultivation, meditation and exercises.

However, Falun Gong stresses that these powers can be developed only as a result of moral practice, and should not be pursued or casually displayed.

Falun Gong practitioners are required to maintain regular jobs and family lives, to observe the laws of their respective governments, and are instructed not to distance themselves from society.

Practitioners of Falun Gong are forbidden to kill living things—including animals for the purpose of obtaining food—though they are not required to adopt a vegetarian diet.

Li's teachings repeatedly emphasize the emptiness of material pursuits; although practitioners of Falun Gong are not encouraged to leave their jobs or eschew money, they are expected to give up the psychological attachments to these things.

Falun Gong taught that, "disgusting homosexuality shows the dirty abnormal psychology of the gay who has lost his ability of reasoning".

Falun Gong's cosmology includes the belief that different ethnicities each have a correspondence to their own heavens, and that individuals of mixed race lose some aspect of this connection.

Falun Gong texts have since been translated into an additional 40 languages.

Falun Gong is a multifaceted discipline that means different things to different people, ranging from a set of physical exercises for the attainment of better health and a praxis of self-transformation, to a moral philosophy and a new knowledge system.

Falun Gong lacks these features, having no temples, rituals of worship, clergy or formal hierarchy.

Cheris Shun-ching Chan likewise writes that Falun Gong is "categorically not a sect": its practitioners do not sever ties with secular society, it is "loosely structured with a fluctuating membership and tolerant of other organizations and faiths", and it is more concerned with personal, rather than collective worship.

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Practitioners of Falun Gong cannot collect money or charge fees, conduct healings, or teach or interpret doctrine for others.

Falun Gong practitioners have little to no contact with Li, except through the study of his teachings.

In most mid- to large-sized cities, Falun Gong practitioners organize regular group meditation or study sessions in which they practice Falun Gong exercises and read Li Hongzhi's writings.

Falun Gong assistants were self-selecting volunteers who taught the exercises, organized events, and disseminated new writings from Li Hongzhi.

Falun Gong operates out of Dragon Springs, a 400-acre compound located in Deerpark, New York.

Falun Gong's later learned that her visa had not expired when she was told to leave the country.

In 2019, Falun Gong requested to expand the site, wishing to add a 920-seat concert hall, a new parking garage, a wastewater treatment plant and a conversion of meditation space into residential space large enough to bring the total residential capacity to 500 people.

Falun Gong adherents living in the area have claimed that they have experienced discrimination from local residents.

Falun Gong attracted a range of other individuals, from young college students to bureaucrats, intellectuals and Party officials.

Falun Gong is practiced by tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands outside China, with the largest communities found in Taiwan and North American cities with large Chinese populations, such as New York and Toronto.

Non-Chinese Falun Gong practitioners tend to fit the profile of "spiritual seekers"—people who had tried a variety of qigong, yoga, or religious practices before finding Falun Gong.

Several months later, in September 1992, Falun Gong was admitted as a branch of qigong under the administration of the state-run China Qigong Scientific Research Society .

Falun Gong was granted a number of awards by PRC governmental organizations.

Falun Gong had differentiated itself from other qigong groups in its emphasis on morality, low cost, and health benefits.

Zhuan Falun Gong, published in January 1995 at an unveiling ceremony held in the auditorium of the Ministry of Public Security, became a best-seller in China.

In March 1996, Falun Gong withdrew from the CQRS in response to mounting disagreements, after which time it operated outside the official sanction of the state.

Falun Gong representatives attempted to register with other government entities, but were rebuffed.

Li and Falun Gong were then outside the circuit of personal relations and financial exchanges through which masters and their qigong organizations could find a place within the state system, and the protections this afforded.

Falun Gong was initially shielded from the mounting criticism, but following its withdrawal from the CQRS in March 1996, it lost this protection.

Thousands of Falun Gong followers wrote to Guangming Daily and to the CQRS to complain against the measures, claiming that they violated Hu Yaobang's 1982 'Triple No' directive, which prohibited the media from either encouraging or criticizing qigong practices.

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In other instances, Falun Gong practitioners staged peaceful demonstrations outside media or local government offices to request retractions of perceived unfair coverage.

Polemics against Falun Gong were part of a larger movement opposing qigong organizations in the state-run media.

Falun Gong practitioners responded with peaceful protests and by lobbying the station for a retraction.

Falun Gong practitioners mounted demonstrations at 14 other media outlets.

The document asserted that Falun Gong is a "heretical teaching", and mandated that another investigation be launched to seek evidence in support of the conclusion.

Falun Gong practitioners reported having phone lines tapped, homes ransacked and raided, and Falun Gong exercise sites disrupted by public security agents.

Reports of discrimination and surveillance by the Public Security Bureau were escalating, and Falun Gong practitioners were routinely organizing sit-in demonstrations responding to media articles they deemed to be unfair.

Falun Gong practitioners responded by picketing the offices of the newspaper requesting a retraction of the article.

Five Falun Gong representatives met with Premier Zhu Rongji and other senior officials to negotiate a resolution.

The Falun Gong representatives were assured that the regime supported physical exercises for health improvements and did not consider the Falun Gong to be anti-government.

Falun Gong believed it possible foreign forces were behind Falun Gong's protests, and expressed concern about their use of the internet to coordinate a large-scale demonstration.

Jiang is held by Falun Gong to be personally responsible for this decision to persecute Falun Gong.

Willy Wo-Lap Lam suggests Jiang's decision to suppress Falun Gong was related to a desire to consolidate his power within the Politburo.

Hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners are estimated to have been extrajudicially imprisoned, and practitioners who are currently in detention are reportedly subjected to forced labor, psychiatric abuse, torture, and other coercive methods of thought reform at the hands of Chinese authorities.

Researcher Ethan Gutmann estimates that Falun Gong practitioners represent an average of 15 to 20 percent of the total "laogai" population, a population which includes practitioners who are currently being held in re-education through labor camps as well as practitioners who are currently being held in prisons and other forms of administrative detention.

Former detainees of the labor camp system have reported that Falun Gong practitioners comprise one of the largest groups of prisoners; in some labor camp and prison facilities, they comprise the majority of the detainees, and they are often said to receive the longest sentences and the worst treatment.

Human Rights Watch commented that the crackdown on Falun Gong reflects historical efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to eradicate religion, which the government believes is inherently subversive.

Falun Gong [wished] to purge the government and the military of such beliefs.

Vivienne Shue similarly writes that Falun Gong presented a comprehensive challenge to the Communist Party's legitimacy.

Falun Gong challenged the Marxist–Leninism paradigm, reviving an understanding which is based on more traditionally Buddhist or Daoist conceptions.

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Much of the conversion program relied on Mao-style techniques of indoctrination and thought reform, where Falun Gong practitioners were organized to view anti-Falun Gong television programs and enroll in Marxism and materialism study sessions.

Amnesty International said at least 100 Falun Gong practitioners had reportedly died in the 2008 calendar year, either in custody or shortly after their release.

In 2006, allegations emerged that a large number of Falun Gong practitioners had been killed to supply China's organ transplant industry.

Falun Gong reported that organ harvesting from political prisoners likely began in Xinjiang province in the 1990s, and then spread nationwide.

In June 2019, the China Tribunal—an independent tribunal set up by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China—concluded that detainees including imprisoned followers of the Falun Gong movement are still being killed for organ harvesting.

Chinese government's campaign against Falun Gong was driven by large-scale propaganda through television, newspapers, radio and internet.

China scholars Daniel Wright and Joseph Fewsmith stated that for several months after Falun Gong was outlawed, China Central Television's evening news contained little but anti-Falun Gong rhetoric; the government operation was "a study in all-out demonization", they wrote.

State propaganda initially used the appeal of scientific rationalism to argue that Falun Gong's worldview was in "complete opposition to science" and communism.

Time reported that prior to the self-immolation incident, many Chinese had felt that Falun Gong posed no real threat, and that the state's crackdown had gone too far.

Under Jiang's leadership, the crackdown on Falun Gong became part of the Chinese political ethos of "upholding stability"—much the same rhetoric employed by the party during 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

All six of the Falun Gong practitioners involved were captured over the next few months.

Outside China, Falun Gong practitioners established international media organizations to gain wider exposure for their cause and challenge narratives of the Chinese state-run media.

Falun Gong's first stop was in Paris where, at the invitation of the Chinese ambassador, he held a lecture seminar at the PRC embassy.

In 2010, U S House of Representatives Resolution 605 called for "an immediate end to the campaign to persecute, intimidate, imprison, and torture Falun Gong practitioners", condemned the Chinese authorities' efforts to distribute "false propaganda" about the practice worldwide, and expressed sympathy to persecuted Falun Gong practitioners and their families.

Ethan Gutmann, a journalist reporting on China since the early 1990s, has attempted to explain this apparent dearth of public sympathy for Falun Gong as stemming, in part, from the group's shortcomings in public relations.

Richard Madsen writes that Falun Gong lacks robust backing from the American constituencies that usually support religious freedom.

Falun Gong melds traditional Taoist principles with occasionally bizarre pronouncements from its Chinese-born founder and leader, Li Hongzhi.

Falun Gong has denounced feminism and homosexuality and claimed he can walk through walls and levitate.

Falun Gong extensions have been active in promoting the European alt-right.

Falun Gong's founder has referred to Epoch Media Group as "our media", and the group's practice heavily informs The Epoch Times coverage, according to former employees who spoke with NBC News.

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