In part 3 of this expose on Falun Gong, I will talk about the phenomenal growth of FLG in the 1990s and it’s early symbiotic relationship with the CCP. FLG and would later become an international right wing anti-CCP disinformation machine and as a former long time practitioner turned disaffected dissident I am using Blind to share my info anonymously. Li Hongzhi joined the tail end of the Qigong craze in May 1992 when he held his first class in a middle school in his hometown of Changchun in northeast China. The next month he was lecturing in Beijing and soon he was touring all over the country. His initial lectures focused on the exercises, stories about prehistoric civilizations, unusual archaeological finds that suggest previous cycles of human civilization had been destroyed, and the importantance of cultivating a good character in order to rise one’s level. He did not get too religious at this time. Though Li Hongzhi did not collect high fees from his students, he was trying to make money. Within a few years, Li Hongzhi amassed millions and bought multiple homes in expensive parts of Beijing. To grow his practice, he deliberately sought out people with government ties so that he could get use them to get more practitioners (eg organize lectures in government venues, get positive press coverage, get govenrment to help spread his teachings). FLG had a particular appeal because it was easy to understand (unlike the obtuse scriptures of Buddhism and Daoism), seemed believable because if tied in its supernatural claims to elements of science which had grains of truth, encouraged people to have a high moral standard, and promised to cure disease. Due to mass layoffs and poverty, many people sought FLG as a cheap cure. The Chinese government also loved FLG because it helped alleviate the major public issue of healthcare. Many CCP officials are superstitious and practiced FLG or other forms of Qigong as well including Deng Xiaoping in his final years. A small but significant number of Chinese intellectuals were drawn to both FLG moral message and its veneer of scientific justification for supernatural beliefs. The key here is that many intellectuals know only a smattering of advanced physics so they can’t tell that Li Hongzhi’s invocations of physics don’t hold up but they know just enough so that the ideas that he presented seemed to make sense. For example, FLG claimed that many of the elements of Buddhism that couldn’t be seen in fact existed in other dimensions. So karma for example is supposedly a real substance in another dimension. Quarks which are the building blocks of atomic particles are supposedly composed of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, which is FLG’s central tenet and supposedly the key value of the universe. As a result, FLG enjoyed enough state support that the Chinese govenrment in 1995 helped FLG expand overseas by including FLG in its overseas exhibitions on Chinese culture. Li Hongzhi also held lectures in Chinese embassy buildings in Switzerland. By 1996, FLG had close to a million practitioners.
I thought FLG stands for fb, LinkedIn and Google at the very first glance