Falun Gong

The Chinese state's designation for this movement is xie jiao, two characters usually translated as evil cult and rendered more literally as heterodox teaching. The term is far older than the movement. Imperial legal codes used it against sects a dynasty judged unorthodox, and the People's Republic revived it in the legal framework assembled in 1999 for the suppression that followed the Zhongnanhai petition of that April.

That sequence is the reason the word needs care in this instance. The classification was not reached by researchers who studied the group and drew a conclusion. It is a category applied by a government, with criminal penalties attached, at the moment it decided to act. A ban and a description are not the same kind of statement, and here they arrived together.

The two standard book-length treatments in English, by David Ownby and by Benjamin Penny, both proceed on that basis. Neither presents the movement as beyond criticism, and Penny in particular is direct about the more unusual claims in its teaching and about the founder's cosmology. But both treat the state's designation as an object of study rather than as evidence, and both classify the movement in the ordinary way: a qigong-derived new religious movement that grew inside a state-sanctioned health-exercise boom and then outgrew the space allowed to it.

What is documented on the other side is substantial. United Nations special rapporteurs, and human rights organisations working independently of the movement, have recorded detention without trial, coerced renunciation, and torture of practitioners over more than two decades.

The allegation of forced organ harvesting occupies a different evidential position and should not be merged with the rest. It has been advanced by campaigners associated with the movement and by a non-governmental tribunal convened in London in 2019, which issued a finding against the Chinese state. It is rejected by that state. It has not been established by any court of competent jurisdiction, and researchers in the field disagree about the strength of the evidence. It is a serious and unresolved allegation, and that is the accurate description of it.

Falun Gong presents itself as a cultivation practice rather than a religion, and what it asks of a practitioner falls into two parts that its own teaching ranks in a definite order.

Five sets of movements

Four standing exercises and one seated meditation, taught free of charge and performed in public parks where that is possible. They are slow, repetitive and drawn from the qigong forms that were widespread in China in the 1980s and 1990s, and this is the part that most outside observers see. Within the teaching the exercises are explicitly secondary.

Xinxing

The primary work is on xinxing, which the tradition renders as heart-mind nature or moral character, organised around truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. Advancement is held to depend on this rather than on the exercises, and includes giving up attachments, accepting hardship as the working off of karma, and abstaining from the ordinary pursuit of status. The founder's teaching also sets out an account of the cosmos, of karma as a substance, and of a coming reckoning, and the movement's own literature does not treat these as metaphor.

Nineteen ninety-nine

On 25 April 1999 some ten thousand practitioners assembled outside Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing, to petition after arrests in Tianjin. It was silent and orderly and it was the largest unauthorised gathering in the capital since 1989. A suppression campaign began in July of that year and has continued since. The atlas records what the practice consists of and what has been done to those who follow it, and does not instruct in either.