Crackdown Time :Why Beijing fears the Falun Gong.

Could these gentle and silent people, going about their morning exercises, be the scourge of the Chinese government? About 20 have gathered at a park in New York's Chinatown. They are practicing Falun Gong, a quasi-religion that blends traditional breathing techniques, mysticism, and ethical instruction. Most of them stand on mats, without shoes, executing very slow movements. They have their eyes closed. Many in the group are elderly. They seem in no position to convulse a major power; nor do they seem so disposed. But they and their like have the regime in Beijing trembling.

Falun Gong came to the world's notice on April 25. On that day, something strange and historic occurred in the Chinese capital: Ten thousand people, appearing out of nowhere, surrounded the Zhongnanhai, the former royal palace where the Communist leadership lives and works. This sort of thing simply never happens there. Ever. Martians might as well have descended, without the least warning.

The 10,000 did not shout or pump their fists or jostle. They just stood there, wordlessly. Some meditated. They did not look like the typical mass of demonstrators: Few among them were students, intellectuals, or activists of any kind; rather, they were housewives, retirees, government bureaucrats--ordinary folk. All they wanted was official recognition of their movement, Falun Gong. Without the blessing of the government, no group in China can long function before it encounters various forms of harassment.

Eventually, no less than the prime minister, Zhu Rongji, emerged to speak with the Falun Gongers. He was astonished to see among them a number of his fellow party officials. He did not give the people what they wanted, but he listened to them, and they dispersed as quietly as they had arrived. What they had done is stage the largest demonstration in Beijing since the Tiananmen Square massacre ten years before. And they had given the Communist regime an awful fright, whose repercussions are still being felt.

After April 25, the government went into a panic. As Robert Thurman, the renowned Buddhism scholar at Columbia University, says, Falun Gong had "scared the hell out of them." So the regime "went nuts," revealing its weakness and self-doubt for all the world to see. According to reports, President Jiang Zemin in particular is worried about Falun Gong, even obsessed with it. On the fateful day, he asked to be driven around the Zhongnanhai in his limousine, to stare at the throng through tinted windows. That night, seemingly in the grip of a spiritual crisis, he wrote to the Politburo: "I believe Marxism can triumph over Falun Gong." He mutters incessantly to Western envoys about the troublesome movement.

The regime quickly labeled Falun Gong a "massive threat." It charged that the Falun Gongers had tried to "overthrow the government"--a laughable claim to make against these dreamy and pacifistic meditators, but no light thing in the PRC. It rounded up thousands of the group and herded them into stadiums, where they were held in abhorrent conditions. It seized some 2 million Falun Gong books and instructional tapes, piling them up in public squares and shredding them or crushing them with bulldozers. It issued a warrant for the arrest of the movement's founder and leader, Li Hongzhi, who lives in Queens. It offered money on his head. When it sought the help of Interpol, the agency, quite properly, told it to get lost.

Above all, the regime was alarmed by the popularity of Falun Gong within its very bosom--the ranks of the Communist party and the People's Liberation Army. It arrested thousands of such people and sent them to reeducation camps, to confess seditious intentions and renounce their beliefs. Many Falun Gongers will soon be prosecuted and imprisoned, with life sentences. The government is doing all it can to nip the movement in the bud--but it is almost certainly too late: Falun Gong has blossomed all over China, and among Chinese throughout the world.

Li Hongzhi seems an unlikely figure to haunt the sleep of Jiang Zemin. Described by nearly every interviewer as "baby-faced," he is by all evidence a peaceable man who wishes only to promote his theories and preside over his flock. The regime, pro forma, has denounced him as a CIA agent. It has even issued a series of comic books--comic books--designed to defame and discredit him. The first in the series is titled Li Hongzhi: The Man and His Evil Deeds. The books accuse Falun Gong of such crimes as "creating social terror."

Although his movement is huge and sprawling, Li denies that he has a formal organization or political agenda. He does so plausibly. He marvels that the regime should want to alienate his followers, who desire only to improve themselves and become healthier, happier, more productive members of society. What truly bothers Beijing, he contends, is that Falun Gong has more members than the Communist party. The party has about 60 million (in a nation of 1.2 billion), while Falun Gong boasts as many as 100 million. Whatever its numbers, it is by far the largest spiritual or ideological group in the country. Until the recent campaign against them, Falun Gongers could be found in almost every park and on almost every street corner. When the regime accused him of organizing the April 25 demonstration, Li answered, somewhat mischievously, "If it had been organized, there would not have been thousands of people out there; there would have been tens of millions!"

Harry Wu, the famed dissident, agrees that Beijing cannot swallow Falun Gong's numerical superiority to the Communists: "You would think that a one-party dictatorship could do better!" The regime is so feeble, says Wu, that "they do not want people organized for anything, for any purpose, no matter how benign." Say, continues Wu, that a Chinese person has an interest in matchboxes. He meets with a neighbor who also likes matchboxes. Then the two of them contact a collector in another town. And "that is when the government gets worried. Today, you are a matchbox organization. But tomorrow, you may turn your group to another purpose." This the government cannot tolerate. "The Falun Gong may say that they are not involved in politics," observes Wu, "but politics has come to them. And they will have to face the consequences."

As a body of thought and practice, Falun Gong would strike the average Westerner as outlandish. (Indeed, it might strike the average East Asian the same way.) It is a variant of qi gong, the ancient prescription for physical and mental fitness. Li has professed a belief in the presence of extraterrestrials among men. He claims to plant a wheel, or falun, in the abdomen of every follower, which, as a movement text has it, "rotates incessantly" and "collects energy," or gong, "from the cosmos." Li also encourages what might be summed up as good citizenship and warns against drinking and smoking. His leading principles are zhen-shan-ren, meaning "truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance." Beijing has given its stamp of approval to certain qi gong organizations, just as it has to a few toady churches; but Falun Gong, for its immense popularity, is anathema.

Justin Yu, a Chinese journalist working in New York, notes that Falun Gong "fills a vacuum that the Chinese Communists have left in people's hearts." Falun Gongers may appear harmless, but Yu recalls an old saying: "You see a rope and fear it is a snake." The regime has jumped frantically at the rope that is Falun Gong. And "if the wind blows," says Yu, "they imagine that a whole army is coming to destroy them. That is how paranoid and nervous they have become." Beijing has cracked down not only on Falun Gong, but on the Catholic Church and the Protestant "home churches" that lack official recognition. Anything that may excite interest or allegiance outside itself, the regime is working to obliterate. The government cracks down in order to avoid cracking up.

"The bottom line," says Robert Thurman, "is that the Chinese government is very fragile, in spite of all their claims to be powerful. China may be a police state, but it is a fragile one. The Communists feel that, since Tiananmen Square, the people are really tired of them." The party has "deprived the people of every other spiritual outlet" and "no longer has an audience that believes in the Communist myth." Whereas the Communists were once religious mobilizers of a kind--Marxism-Leninism being their creed--they are now nothing but empty materialists, threatened by any glint of a higher aspiration. Xiao Qiang, of the New York-based Human Rights in China, argues that the campaign against Falun Gong has shown the totality of the regime's opposition to its people: "They are suppressing the rights of everyone in China--not just the so-called dissidents who publicly advocate and agitate, but everyone."

Falun Gong was outlawed in China on July 22. Many of its adherents will languish in jail. But this is not the sort of thing that can be banished with the wave of a hand, or even a determined assault. Falun Gong will probably grow even stronger in coming months and years; persecution has been known to do that to a group. Amazing that these gentle breathers and meditators and stretchers and wheel-harborers in their stocking feet should cause so much upset inside the Zhongnanhai. But they have. And the regime acts as though a couple of more puffs will blow it down.