Why is Falun Dafa persecuted in China?
Falun Gong or Falun Dafa is persecuted in China can be broken down into two factors.
Falun Gong itself has a low tolerance for criticism. From its founding in 1992, Falun Gong was initially on favorable terms with the Chinese Government. In 1996, Falun Gong publication Zhuan Falun II received a scathing reviewed in Guangming Daily, prompting 20 other publications to post similar articles. Under suspicion that the book was published illegally addressed in the articles, the Chinese government to ban its publication. Li Hongzhi requested that the China Qigong Research Society to support Falun Gong, which it did not. Following this, at the behest of Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi, thousands of followers wrote to the newspapers and the CQRS in protest.
In 1996, Buddhist publications also criticized Falun Gong for deviating from traditional Buddhism, labeling it an "evil cult" prompting Falun Gong members to again write to Chinese government officials and lay sieges to Buddhist temples in protest.
In 1998, Chinese Academy of Science Physicist He Zuoxiu denounced Falun Gong as unscientific in a TV interview, again prompting Falun Gong members to write letters to the TV station in protest. About 2000 Falun Gong members also laid siege to the Beijing Television Station for a month. Under this pressure, the reporter who conducted the interview was fired, and the station was forced to broadcast a report in favor of Falun Gong.
in 1999, He Zuoxiu again voiced his criticism of Falun Gong in Tianjin Normal University’s Youth Reader magazine citing a student who developed mental illness from excessive practice. In response, 6000 Falun Gong members besieged the municipal government and the magazine editorial office demanding that the government office publicize that Falun Gong was "healthy and is good for the nation". However, this time, Falun Gong’s demands were rebuffed, and the protest was broken up.
The failure of this protest led to a much larger protest where 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners besieged the central government offices in Zhongnan Hai, Beijing. This final act put a very political tone on the protest, and made the Chinese government realize the extend of Falun’s influence and threat. Thus the movement was outlawed.
Falun Gong itself is also a very easy target to pick on. Falun Gong’s founder Li Hongzhi made wildly inaccurate and unscientific claims in his public lectures and books, such as using "light year" as a unit of time, or claiming humans evolved from aquatic animals and plants, then to trees, then to ape. Falun Gong also claims that it is an ancient religion when it is in fact founded in 1992, and claims godlike powers by Li.
Falun Gong initially also taught its followers that modern medicine is harmful and should be avoided and that illnesses can be healed by cultivating in Falun Gong. This prompted dozens of practioners to die of their illnesses due to lack of treatment.
The fact that Li Hongzhi was initially treated as a deity by practitioners, that the only way to be saved by master Li from the impending apocalypse is to join the Falun Gong movement, and the distrust of modern science and medicine in favor of cultivation and faith-healing sessions made it very easy for the Chinese government to brand Falun Gong as a cult.
So, Falun Gong miscalculated and presented itself as a threat for the Chinese government, and thus a target for persecution. It also made itself a very easy target due to its initial unscientific, unhealthy, and cult-like bent.
Of course, after the sect was outlawed in China, it went on to become a anti-China group based overseas funded by foreign governments and affiliated with other anti-China groups which reports factual or falsified negative reports on China, which makes it very obvious why the Chinese government would want to persecute it now.
The complex rationale behind the persecution can be broken into four elements: a paranoid dictator’s fear of Falun Gong’s meteoric growth and soaring popularity; that same dictator’s intense jealousy of Falun Dafa’s popularity; the inherent conflict between the communist regime’s savage political ideology and its polar opposite—Falun Dafa’s principles of “Truthfulness, Benevolence, Forbearance”; and the very nature of communism, which to sustain itself requires periodically labeling a small segment of the population as the “class enemy” to “struggle” against. Learn more on faluninfo.net.
