404 Object Not Found

TALK TO several local practitioners, and certain patterns emerge. No one knows much about Master Li’s past or present, and followers are reluctant to discuss even what little they do know about him. Moon responds quickly to a question about his whereabouts: “I’d rather not talk about him,” she says. “His life is his own ... I just don’t try to find out. I don’t need to know his life story. I’m just appreciative that he wrote this book.” That no one knows where he is, where he came from, or what makes him a Master (for example, who was his Master?) does not seem to trouble his followers. Instead, many defensively change the subject after noting that, after all, he has nothing to gain from the movement. All Falun Gong activities are free, and the book, which costs around $12 depending where you buy it, can be downloaded free from the Internet. (No one interviewed for this article used this free technology, choosing instead to purchase the books, tapes, and videos.)

Practitioners’ stories of how they were led to the movement are almost identical: they say they were introduced by a friend, family member, or co-worker after a long and unfruitful search for answers either to spiritual questions (like Moon’s) or to health woes (like Wang’s). Among practitioners, this grassroots quality is a matter of special pride, further testament to the movement’s truth. See, we’re just sharing information and helping each other. After Moon was introduced to Falun Gong in her sophomore year of college by a teaching assistant in one of her science labs, she headed to the Tufts bookstore to buy the book. A few months later, she put in an order at Amazon.com to purchase it for several of her friends. “It’s a very special book,” she says. “It’s important to me to get the true message across. And now, a lot of my friends are doing really helpful things.”

Within the context of modern Chinese history, this movement makes perfect sense, says professor Goldman from her second office, at Harvard’s John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. “With economic reforms, workers have lost health care in China and medical treatment has become expensive,” she explains. “They look upon the fact that they do these exercises as a form of health care, and that’s a positive aspect.” In addition, Goldman adds, “there’s a vacuum of values and beliefs. People are looking for something to believe in. There is a hunger for something to fill the vacuum.”

At the same time, an eerie — almost creepy — fervor emerges when you talk to followers like Harvard Medical School researcher Haiying He. All five of He’s family members are being persecuted in China right now. His mother has been detained in a drug-rehabilitation center for the past six months, his father was carted away for a couple of weeks to an unknown location, and his brother and his sister-in-law — both physicians — are being held indefinitely in a secret spot for “transforming class.” Unless they agree to give up practicing Falun Gong, He says, they may be permanently imprisoned. “No one can see them,” he says. “Every day they are forced to watch brainwashing TV — something like ‘Falun is bad, Falun is bad’ — and they were told if they didn’t give up they would be discharged from the hospital. They were let out at one point and they were told by the authorities in the hospital, ‘Either give up Falun Gong or you give up the job,’ and they said, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong. We talk with you about why it’s so good.’” To date, He has no idea where his brother and sister-in-law are being detained or, for that matter, if they’re still alive.

Still, to He and all of his family members, it’s worth it. Asked whether he thinks they should give it up, or consider practicing it privately in exchange for their freedom, He momentarily looses his cool. “No! Because I know Falun Dafa is good, and I think what they are doing is right.... A lot of young educated people are doing it because they know the principle. It’s really right. It’s really good.”

These moralistic words — “right,” “wrong,” “good,” “bad” — are repeated ad nauseam throughout his story. It’s dizzying and somewhat Pavlovian — he sounds like a kid who had his hand slapped enough times to know Bad from Good, but not exactly why. This type of language is precisely what concerns Steven Hassan, the director of the Resource Center for the Freedom of Mind, a cult-watchdog organization.

“This is a very questionable group,” says Hassan, a former Moonie who wrested himself away from the Unification Church in the late ’70s. “There’s a real hunger for spirituality, but one of the problems is that people haven’t been educated about how to be a good consumer. They’ll hear a story: ‘I went to 20 doctors and no one could help me and then I started to do this and I went off my medication. I haven’t been sick in five years.’ And people say, ‘Wow, I need to try that.’ They don’t know to ask questions like when was the group formed, who’s the leader, what is his background, is there deception?”

Not only are Master Li’s whereabouts unknown, but a simple search for the publisher of Zhuan Falun — Universe Publishing Company — led to disconnected phone numbers and untraceable records. The Falun Dafa Web site (www.falundafa.org) lists the company in Gillette, New Jersey. But the only Universe Publishing Company in New Jersey is a tiny Hungarian publisher, the head of which says he fields calls all the time about the elusive other Universe Publishing company, which he knows nothing about. Stuart Weinberg, the owner of the Seven Star Bookstore in Cambridge, which stocks Zhuan Falun, says he gets the books from a distributor in New York. But the phone number he supplied, which others corroborated, led to a Chinese woman who said it was an accounting firm, and she provided the same disconnected 888 number as the next link in the chain. Falun Dafa’s New England coordinator, Michael Tsang, had a ready — if unsatisfying — answer to questions about the publishing labyrinth: “There has been a lot of changing over of the publishing companies. It was the bestseller in China in 1996, and there were many counterfeit books on the market. There have been many different distributors — in China, in Hong Kong, in the US.” Later, he called back with the same 888 number. “I just called it. It works,” he said. Try it yourself: (888) 353-2288.

Also questionable is members’ insistence that the movement’s growth and structure is organic. Elizabeth Wang, who is married to Haiying He and serves as the informal public-relations person for the New England chapter of Falun Gong, boasts that groups gather without phone lists, e-mail reminders, or prodding of any sort. Her husband adds: “If you want to come, you come. If you want to go, you go. We don’t have a phone book. Everybody would like to share with you because they know this is really good. We want to share good news, good things with people.” Sounds good. But how was it that news of a call placed on Thursday afternoon to the point person for the Falun Gong session in Room 110 managed to make its way around to every person who wandered into the room on Friday evening? “Oh, you’re the reporter.” Without a phone or e-mail list, disseminating the message that quickly would have been impossible.

FOR HASSAN, these are all signs of cult-like behavior. “If a group is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny,” he says. But for many, criticizing a movement that is already being persecuted is distasteful. As much as people may question Falun Gong — or call it, as Hassan does, a “mind-altering cult” — the fact remains that its practices are less questionable than those of most other extremist groups — and certainly those of the Chinese government. The bottom line is that it is not harming anyone, and for Goldman, that’s the only criterion by which a movement’s danger level should be judged. “There’s no evidence that [Master Li] has exploited his followers, either for money or for sex,” says Goldman. “The other aspect of it is when you talk about a cult, it’s usually associated with destructive acts, and I have yet to find clear acts of destructive activities.” There was the matter of the five members who set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square in January, but the motives of these self-immolators — one of whom died — were unclear, and movement leaders are now disputing whether they were even Falun Gong practitioners.

In fact, Falun Gong leaders argue that the only destructive acts associated with the group have been committed against members, not by them. Human-rights organizations are quick to underscore the point. “You can buy it or not,” says Joshua Rubenstein, the Northeast regional director of Amnesty International, “but we feel that people have the right to pursue their own religious or spiritual needs. It’s one thing to supervise them. It’s another to make mass arrests.”

Even mass arrests haven’t merited censure from the international community, if the UN’s recent vote for non-action is any measure. “The US supports the resolution but it doesn’t really push for it,” says Rubenstein, explaining that diplomatic and economic ties often prove stronger than human-rights concerns. Sure enough, James Murdoch (Rupert’s son), the chairman and chief executive of Star TV, is one media mogul who’s publicly endorsed the persecution of Falun Gong, explaining at a California business conference that the movement “clearly does not have the success of China at heart.” And Dad’s of the same mind. According to the New Republic, Murdoch booted the BBC off his Hong Kong–based satellite TV service and barred his publishing house from taking on a book project critical of China, actions surely meant to curry favor with a country poised to put a great deal of cash in his pocket.

Yet for the local Falun Gong faithful, the crackdown has created a rallying point — a cause that’s an end in itself, transcending even the question of the Chinese movement’s survival. The fight has won these followers popularity and visibility. Even after losing the UN-resolution vote, for which local practitioners lobbied hard, Falun Gong members claim they came out on top. “We were able to hold a lot of meetings and press conferences,” says Tsang, who flew to Geneva to participate in a candlelight vigil across the street from UN headquarters. “We raised enough awareness in terms of the persecution.”

Whether Falun Gong is a cult or not — and whether or not it wins its battle with the Chinese government — this sense of underdog urgency has sent people like Christine Moon on the social, spiritual, and political ride of their lives. More than $600 poorer, Moon is happy with her decision to forgo a trip to Jamaica or Palm Beach and to instead spend her spring break in wintry Geneva. “We had to go show support for Falun Gong,” she says, “and stand up and say, ‘Okay China, you have to stop persecuting people.’”

Nina Willdorf can be reached at nwilldorf[a]phx.com.