At the request of Andreaswald about a month ago I have looked closely at the Falun Gong, using both Chinese and Western sources. It is a very interesting organisation and one of the strangest stories of modern China: a once-obscure spiritual discipline, practiced in public parks by elderly Chinese seeking health and moral clarity, is now transformed into a multimedia empire, a potent force in the global anti-Communist movement, and a topic of suspicion among those wary of foreign meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations.
For Falun Gong practitioners, July 20 marks a solemn anniversary: the date in 1999 when the Chinese Communist Party launched its full-scale campaign of suppression, turning a peaceful spiritual practice into a flashpoint of global human rights contention. Today, it’s adherents will turn out world-wide to mark the occasion, and the CCP will be on the alert. I will let you know if anything happens.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa (the term is hard to translate, but roughly it can be ‘The Wheel of Law’) emerged in the 1990s in China and swiftly grew into a national phenomenon. Today, it is banned and persecuted within China, but thrives in exile, commanding significant influence through its media platforms, performance art, and political lobbying. For those of us who find totalitarianism caught between the twin dangers of Chinese Communist Party authoritarianism and Western geopolitical opportunism, Falun Gong poses an intellectual and ethical conundrum.
Is it merely a spiritual practice, cruelly suppressed by a paranoid regime? Or is it something more complex, a movement whose trajectory has been hijacked by the very global power games it claims to transcend perhaps? And where does its money come from?
Falun Gong was founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, just as China was opening up economically but facing a profound moral and spiritual vacuum. Drawing upon elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and traditional Chinese qigong, Li introduced a system of exercises and a moral philosophy based on three tenets: Zhen, Shan, Ren (真善忍): truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
Unlike more secular forms of qigong, Falun Gong emphasised not only physical health but spiritual salvation. Practitioners were expected to cultivate moral purity, abstain from addictions, and distance themselves from modern degeneracy. The practice attracted millions. By some estimates, there were upwards of 70 million followers by the late 1990s, a number that alarmed the Communist Party. After a peaceful protest in April 1999 outside Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party's central compound in Beijing near where I grew up, the regime struck back. In July of that year, Falun Gong was officially banned, its practitioners labelled members of an "evil, heretical, cult."
What followed was a ruthless campaign of repression: arrests, forced re-education, public denunciations, torture, and allegations of organ harvesting that, while shocking, have been corroborated by some independent investigations. That Falun Gong was brutally persecuted by Beijing is not in serious dispute. What has caused greater debate is what Falun Gong became after its exile.
To understand Falun Gong, one must look not only at its political battles but its cosmology (I hope that’s the right word, translating form Chinese!). Li Hongzhi teaches that the universe is governed by the laws of Zhen-Shan-Ren, and that moral decay leads to physical and spiritual illness. Practitioners believe in karma as a literal substance, accumulated through bad deeds, which causes suffering and can only be burned away through moral living and meditation.
Li has also spoken about supernatural powers, extraterrestrial beings corrupting humanity, and the coming end times. He discourages interracial marriage, condemns homosexuality, and teaches that moral laxity is a sign of societal decay. While defenders argue these are common beliefs in certain traditionalist circles, critics, especially in the West, find them retrograde, cult-like and, inevitably, racist and ‘far-Right’.
In the CCP’s narrative, Falun Gong is a dangerous sect exploiting the weak. In the Western media, its metaphysical doctrines are often glossed over in favour of highlighting human rights abuses. A balanced view requires acknowledging both: Falun Gong’s theology is somewhat bizarre to modern secular sensibilities, but that does not justify persecution. Driven underground in China, Falun Gong reorganized outside its borders, particularly in North America. Here, its identity evolved. What began as a meditative discipline turned into a full-blown political movement with the CCP in its sights. Nowhere is this more evident than in Falun Gong’s extensive media empire. Its flagship publication, The Epoch Times, launched in 2000, started as a modest newspaper documenting abuses in China. It has since grown into a global operation, publishing in dozens of languages and covering a wide range of issues far beyond China.
The Epoch Times is unrelentingly anti-CCP. So far so good. But more than that. It has aligned itself with ‘populist’ right-wing politics in the West, particularly in the United States and the publication gained attention for its unwavering support for Donald Trump and its dissemination of controversial theories around COVID-19, vaccines that many in the Establishment wished to see suppressed, and the 2020 U.S. election.
Then there is Shen Yun Performing Arts, a touring troupe that bills itself as a showcase of traditional Chinese culture. In reality, Shen Yun is Falun Gong in theatrical form. And very good it is too. I have been to see two of their shows and have been very impressed. The dazzling costumes and spectacular ancient dances are punctuated by overtly political vignettes about religious persecution, government oppression, and the moral rot of atheism. Some, drawn by the promise of cultural spectacle, leave puzzled, or even unsettled, by the performance’s polemical undertones but they are no surprise to anyone with any knowledge of Falun Gong.
New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television, another Falun Gong-linked media platform, reinforces these themes. From news programming to cooking shows, it presents a worldview saturated with anti-Communist rhetoric and conservative cultural values. In a media environment increasingly fragmented and partisan, Falun Gong’s media arms have found a niche—though not without controversy.
Falun Gong claims that its operations are supported by practitioner donations and volunteer labour. Shen Yun says its lavish productions are funded by ticket sales. The Epoch Times insists it does not accept state or corporate funding.
But perhaps this doesn’t tell the whole story. Investigative reports, mostly by Left-leaning journals such as those by NBC News and The New York Times, have reported financial and strategic overlaps between Falun Gong outlets and conservative political operatives in the United States. The Epoch Times has poured millions into social media advertising, particularly on Facebook, often outspending major political parties.
While there is no hard evidence of direct funding from U.S. government agencies such as the CIA, the alignment of interests has been noted by some. During the Cold War, the CIA supported exile newspapers, radio stations, and cultural initiatives in Eastern Europe as part of its soft power strategy. It would be naïve to assume similar interest doesn’t exist today vis-à-vis China. Falun Gong’s consistent criticism of the CCP, and its presence in Western right-wing discourse make it an ideal candidate for covert or informal backing, these sources claim.
Even if true, this does not mean that Falun Gong is a puppet. It may simply be a willing participant in a shared project: to weaken and delegitimise the Chinese Communist Party. For some, this makes it a hero; for others, a tool. For those like my husband who distrust both Beijing and Washington, neither interpretation is satisfying.
The CCP paints Falun Gong as an existential threat—a cult, a virus, an arm of hostile foreign forces. Western human rights organisations portray it as a martyr of conscience. Both are probably exaggerations.
The truth is likely to be both more mundane and more troubling. Falun Gong is a sincere spiritual movement for many of its adherents. It is also a media-savvy actor, deeply ideological, and increasingly partisan. It speaks to a moral yearning that is not easily dismissed, but its esoteric beliefs, political entanglements, and involvement in American culture wars make it difficult to view as a purely spiritual group to some degree at least.
And what of China? The Falun Gong saga underscores the CCP’s deep insecurity. That a group of retirees practicing slow-motion exercises in a Beijing park could come to be seen as a threat to national stability reveals as much about the Party’s paranoia as it does about Falun Gong’s ambitions.
The Falun Gong story is not, I think, one of good versus evil. It is instead the story of a movement caught between an authoritarian regime and a Western power structure eager for anti-China narratives. It is the story of how spirituality can become politicised, and how the pursuit of truth can be co-opted by those with power to gain.
For those of us who believe in the right to spiritual freedom and who oppose the authoritarian tendencies of both the CCP and the Western security state, Falun Gong remains a case study in complexity. It deserves neither blanket endorsement nor unthinking condemnation. It deserves, instead, the one thing both Beijing and Washington too often withhold: scrutiny.