Falun Gong's Challenge to China: Spiritual Practice or Evil Cult? by Danny SchechterMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
From my interview with the author archived as selection 298 at archive.org.
[…] I wanna say excellent job on the book Falun Gong's Challenge to China .
Danny Schechter: Thank you
I really enjoyed reading it and its sort of opened up a whole new world to me because I hadn't really noticed the issue a lot beforehand, but then after that, I started seeing it in newspaper headlines and stuff. It maybe was there all along, but this is where it made it stick in my mind.
DS: Well you know, we live in a world where news and information, particularly from other countries, often doesn't register with people because it's very hard to connect to and to relate to it, to really have any sense of background or context to who these people are, and what they're doing. In this case, we’re talking about as many as a hundred million people, starting in China, who basically took up what is called qi gong exercises, and a whole belief system called Falun Gong. This thing started 8 years ago. It was the most rapidly growing, fastest growing, spiritual practice in all of China. It got practically no press attention in America whatsoever, until 10,000 of these people surrounded the Chinese Communist Party leadership compound one day to challenge the Communist party's repression of police actions that were arresting and harassing their people. They're basically saying, "Look, leave us alone. We’d like to be legalized and we'd like to go on with our spiritual practice. We're not against the government. We're not political." At first this happened in April of '99 the Chinese government didn't say anything, and [was] kind of shocked by what happened. It made headlines around the world and then it sort of disappeared again. Then in July, China decided to crack down on this group, on the Falun Gong, and to ban it. Not only did they ban it, but they basically prohibited any discussion of it. They burned over a million books, and they began arresting practitioners, the people who were practicing this Falun Gong spiritual practice, which is really deeply rooted in Chinese traditions. It's kind of a fusion of Taoism and Buddhism. It's kind of a system of how you self-improvement. We might even consider it something like New Age spiritual practices. But in China, this was perceived by the government as a threat to the government. Since then, 53 people have died, 50,000 people have been detained, hundreds of people are in labor camps, and are in mental hospitals and being treated really badly, which has led to the denunciation of China by the US government, other governments, for the deterioration of human rights. But because the United States wants to do business with China, trade with China, American companies got this new trade bill through. Nobody's doing anything about it. They're really not talking about it very much, and so, people read about it, like you, but they don't really connect to it. This doesn't sort of makes sense to them: “Who are these people? What is this about?” As a consequence, one of the biggest stories of our time is being missed, and that's why I ended up writing this book, Falun Gong's Challenge to China which is just out from Akashic books, because I think it's really important for people to know more about this. This is a very big force, and we've just seen what happened in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where people non-violently challenged the government, basically overthrew a decision by the government to not recognize the elections. Well, in China, you have a situation where there are no elections whatsoever. There's no democracy, yet you have a movement with a hundred million people, which is immense. Not only is it in China, but it is in 40 countries now, including the United States.
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