Falun Gong in the media: What can we believe? - Massey University

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ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place, Wellington, July 2008 advertised in New Zealand, I approached them. Practitioners expect researchers to experience their spiritual path before they make judgement on it; therefore I used a methodology drawn from Robert Bellah’s (1970) ideas about symbolic realism, of shifting into the person’s religious reality for fieldwork purposes. For over a year I met with Falun Gong members in New Zealand, outdoors between 6 and 7.30 am every morning to do Falun Gong exercises. I also attended weekly demonstration meetings to which the public were invited. The participants – all Chinese – welcomed and encouraged me: they told me that they were used to outsiders because before the Government crackdown in China, undercover spies sometimes attended meetings – often for several years. Initially I did not intend to focus my research on the media, but I soon discovered that this was highly important to members, as they expressed disappointment that the Western media had not been uniformly supportive of them. From their conversations and literature I got the impression that Falun Gong had high expectations of the Western media, anticipating that the press would take a stance and assume a moral role in restoring members’ religious rights in China. This view is highlighted by one of Li’s speeches in which he rails against the media for “keeping silent while crimes and sins are committed” (Li, 2005a, p. 2). At the morning meetings nobody spoke, we took a place in a circle, closed our eyes, did the exercises, and usually left without saying goodbye to each other. There was slightly more interaction at other meetings, and I was careful not to direct the conversation as I wanted to see what issues were important to the participants. I did not ask set questions as I was aware that practitioners had standard answers to particular lines of enquiry (Frank, 2004), and I focused on ensuring that I understood their perspectives correctly. However, as I do not speak Chinese and could not claim any experience of being persecuted or tortured, I was never fully part of the group. Also, many of the members were biologically related to each other (most came to the movement through a family member). With the exception of two spokespeople, I do not know the names of the participants. Once, when I asked the name of a woman with whom I had met every day for over a year, I was told to call her “the woman”. ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 4
ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place, Wellington, July 2008 The cultural barrier also meant that I sometimes did not fully understand how participants interpreted events. For example, on one occasion a practitioner had been practising alone in her front yard when – according to her account – she saw me standing next to her doing the exercises, although I was, in fact, over two kilometres away at the time. Over the next week members looked in my direction, whispered in Chinese and giggled. I am not sure how they interpreted the event, although the incident did not impede our relationship. Over the year, I immersed myself in Falun Gong material – Li’s speeches, videos, books, and Falun Gong publications. Li’s coercive and inflated style (which Dean Peerman describes as “gaseous-cosmic” [2004, p. 30]) contrasted with the polite and humble nature of the participants. More significantly, Li’s speeches repeatedly contradicted both what Falun Gong members were telling me and what they were telling the media. I had hoped that my research would help Falun Gong, but I became increasingly aware that this would be unlikely. While my fieldwork was in New Zealand, this paper focuses more broadly on the international media. Although my location is a limitation (especially as there are only approximately 100 Falun Gong members in New Zealand), Falun Gong practices are the same throughout the world. There are no variations of the teachings because Li threatens that if anyone inadvertently alters the teachings when speaking to outsiders, they will be attacked by demons and die (Li, 1998b). Therefore my general experiences tally with overseas accounts of Falun Gong practice (for example, Burgdoff, 2003; Frank, 2004; Porter, 2003). However, my conclusions are less favourable to Falun Gong than previous researchers, who were writing at a time when some of Falun Gong’s more extreme political writings had not been published. Sources For both the Chinese and Western media, I retrieved articles from Factiva database by typing Falun Gong and its alternative name Falun Dafa into the search engine. For the Chinese press reports I read all accounts disseminated by Xinhua. Xinhua is China’s principal news agency, controlled by the state-run Department of Propaganda. Their material is difficult to verify as original sources are usually inaccessible to Westerners. ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 5
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Falun Gong in the media: What can we believe? - Massey University

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