The Far Eastern Economic Review: China's Showdown With Falun Gong Has No Winners

THE CHARRED FACE of a 12-year-old girl splashed across newspapers last week and shown repeatedly on television shocked many people. "Mama, Mama," she cried, as she lay in Beijing's Tiananmen Square after she and four other apparent members of the banned Falun Gong movement set themselves alight. For state media, blackened and bandaged Liu Siying was the poster girl they needed for a massive new propaganda blitz demonizing the movement that won't go away.

Sixteen months after declaring Falun Gong an "[Chinese government's slanderous word]," Beijing pounced on the burnings to drum home that it was right: Falun Gong is outlawed because [Chinese government's slanderous word]. In the days after the burnings were first broadcast, that message seemed to win support among a public usually cynical of official campaigns. But Falun Gong will not go quietly and its tenacity in producing the most widespread civil disobedience campaign since the pro-democracy movement in 1989 even serves as a mirror for weaknesses in the [name omitted] Party.

The government's determination to rid itself of an enemy that it fears is entrenched in the party establishment is spreading outside mainland China. Just as the new U.S. administration was formulating its China policy, Beijing left itself open to charges of interfering in Hong Kong by pressuring its administration to ban Falun Gong. The new campaign is bound to trigger scrutiny of human-rights abuses ahead of a March meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva and a visit this month by an Olympic committee to review Beijing's suitability for the 2008 games.

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Since banning it on July 22, 1999, the [name omitted] Party has relied on a loud and often brutal campaign to crush the [...] movement, with some success. "The government has succeeded in breaking up the key organizers, the people at the top," says a Beijing-based analyst, "but that leaves an amorphous movement that the rigid structure of the [name omitted] Party is ill-equipped to deal with."

Falun Gong retains the strength for a nonviolent guerrilla-style campaign. Followers protest on Tiananmen Square almost daily, stuff the mailboxes of Beijing citizens with pamphlets denouncing the government and send out mass e-mails for support. Bound together by an ideal but not burdened by an orthodox structure, Falun Gong is eerily familiar for some communists with long memories. Says one senior party official: "They are like the underground [name omitted] Party before the revolution, that's why they are hard to control."

More worrying for the party, Falun Gong has raised its profile in the military. In recent weeks, residents of the Haidian district of Beijing say a Falun Gong banner flew for nearly an hour at the headquarters of the People's Armed Police. Supporters also painted slogans inside the tightly guarded air force headquarters in the same district. An internal estimate says there are 4,000-5,000 Falun Gong sympathizers in the 200,000-strong air force, according to a source close to the headquarters. All headquarters personnel now have to spend days at anti-Falun Gong lectures and study sessions.

The government has extended responsibility for controlling individual Falun Gong members outward to low-level party structures such as neighbourhood committees and workplace party cells. In the days before the Chinese New Year holiday, known Falun Gong practitioners in some large state companies were asked to sign an agreement that they would stop doing their exercises, which are the staple of all members.

In at least one Beijing district, neighbourhood committee personnel and local police were assigned to 24-hour surveillance of known practitioners, in a bid to stop them going to Tiananmen Square to protest. Meanwhile, special anti-Falun Gong classes are scheduled for high-school students, and large-scale petitions are being organized at some universities. But while party diehards may relish a return of mass action, it makes many more people uneasy. "This campaign reminds people of the Cultural Revolution when everybody was forced to take sides. We don't want to get involved in that sort of thing again," says a Beijing academic. [...]

Spreading the burden of responsibility is not confined to the party. Provincial towns and cities with heavy concentrations of Falun Gong followers now have a rotating police presence in the capital. Their job is to intercept activists from home who come to Beijing to protest. Local governments in the provinces are given quotas for the number of practitioners from their areas detained in Beijing, says one activist. If the number rises above a handful, local officials are punished. Seeking to preserve their quotas, some officials have pulled strings with police to transfer to their custody Falun Gong followers arrested in Beijing, says the Beijing-based analyst.

Although their belief is impossible to verify, Falun Gong practitioners are convinced that certain leaders, including Politburo Standing Committee member Li Ruihuan, are sympathetic. Analysts also note that certain politburo members speak forthrightly against Falun Gong, while others offer relatively perfunctory condemnation.

The burnings and the government campaign have upped the stakes in the battle with Falun Gong. Beijing looks set to emphasize the movement's overseas links. Domestically the crackdown is likely to intensify even more in the short term [...].

But most diplomats and analysts believe the stalemate of crude government treatment and stubborn resistance will continue. [...].