Why has the government become so frightened of Falun Gong?
They keep hammering these poor guys. They’ve really treated Falun Gong very badly. We know that they’ve tortured people. A: Because Falun Gong had an organization that they didn’t know about, and that was very, very large before they did know about it. I think that really scared the crap out of them. Q: And there were some pretty high-ranking military and security officers and government officials who were members. A: I can remember in the early 90s when qi gong became very stylish. And there were various kinds of qi gong, and at that point the government was encouraging qi gong, because it was a national thing. It was “our thing.” Fang Lizhi had a wonderful quip about how to stop qi gong. He said, “I could stop qi gong overnight. How do you do that? Put out the rumor that it was invented in Italy.” Because then it loses its nationalist panache. But the government liked it at first. Q: I have to ask you how you feel still being on a blacklist in China. Does it hurt you that you love th
