Wed, 11 Oct 2000 11:10:00

If you were in Beijing on October 1, and happened to stroll by Tiananmen Square early-ish, this is what you might have seen: groups of Falun Gong members - sometimes as many as 200 - quietly stepping out from among the crowds of tourists before beginning to meditate or perform quiet qigong breathing exercises. Shortly afterwards, policemen - some of the dozens of plain clothes cops lining the square - would have stepped in. The protesters, if that is not too strong a word, are told to leave, but few do. The recalcitrant ones are then arrested and taken away in waiting vans.

This is the latest incident of silent protest against Beijing's crackdown on the group. In July 1999, Beijing decided to ban the group as [...]. But Falun Gong still evades Beijing's snare, prompting the government to raise the volume of its campaign. An article carried by most of the main state-run newspapers denounced the group as a "reactionary political force" whose aim is to "overthrow the People's Republic of China and the socialist system."

It's fairly clear why Falun Gong members are protesting - they want the group un-banned. What's less obvious is how. After all, this is China, practically home of the human rights abuse. We're led to believe that phone and email tapping are rife, as are plain-clothes spies. Yet every day hundreds of Falun Gong members are able to protest in Tiananmen Square, Beijing's most emotive and closely guarded gathering place.

There are two possibilities. First is that, as Falun Gong supporters claim, these protests are spontaneous. Small groups of supporters simply hop on the bus, go downtown for the day, and do their thing. Said Xiaobing Deng, a UK student and Falun Gong practitioner, "This is China - its impossible to organize things. People simply feel from their hearts that they want to reveal the truth, to show people that the authorities are cheating them." It's not that implausible. After all, the 1989 Tiananmen protests started as informal gatherings that simply escalated.

Yet there are signs that some organization is at work. During the last wave of protests in July, marking the anniversary of the group's banning, Reuters reported that many of those detained refused to give their names and places of origin, making it impossible for them to be sent home for trial. They were herded into a local sports ground while the authorities tried to figure out what to do with them. Is this spontaneous too, or is Falun Gong able to communicate with its followers, advising them on new tactics? After all, the trouble started in April last year when some 10,000 Falun Gong members turned up at the same time outside Zhongnanhai, the closely guarded compound that is home to China's ruling elite. That doesn't just happen by accident.

This leads us to the possibility that Falun Gong has friends in high places. Or at least, among local officials. That's what really frightens Beijing, which has clamped down particularly hard on Falun Gong supporters among the party, police and military. Another factor, as eCountries has pointed out before, is that Falun Gong is hard to target, with few formal structures or offices.

Contrast that with the fate of the China Democracy Party (CDP). Founded in mid-1998, the CDP's leaders set up provincial party offices and put in a formal application to be registered as a legal party. Appalled, Beijing cracked down hard. The top leaders were rounded up, given long jail terms, and little has been heard from the CDP since. Another two CDP members have just been thrown in jail.

So far, Falun Gong has not made any political demands, and has certainly not mentioned the D-word. Beijing has still been harsh; Amnesty International estimates that thousands of Falun Gong members were detained in 12 months that following the decision to ban the group. Hundreds, possibly thousands, more have been sent to labor camps, while a few key leaders have been tried and give jail terms up to 18 years. There are allegations of beatings and torture.

Yet the gatherings continue, and China is having to fall back on feeble efforts to galvanize public anti-Falun Gong sentiment. Acknowledging that stamping out the [...] will be an uphill struggle, a July article in the People's Daily said that Falun Gong was a "political tool in the influential hands of Western hostile forces," linking the group with independence movements in Taiwan and Tibet. An article on October 10 added that "they don't want to see a strong China or a China with a stable environment for economic development." Perhaps the government hopes that stirring up patriotic sentiment will persuade people to turn in neighbors, friends, relatives. Some hope. The majority of Falun Gong practitioners, inside China at least, are elderly women. Respect for the elderly is still a strong force in China - and anyway, who's going to turn in their granny?