by Ian Buruma
The great thing about the late Qing period, he said, was that everyone believed in another world then, an invisible world, no matter what it was—ghosts, or spirits, or gods. And the biggest problem with China now, Wang continued, was the lack of faith in anything. Wang used to be like that himself, an unbeliever. The invisible world did not exist for him until he was sent to the countryside after the Cultural Revolution. There, he heard stories about ghosts and other supernatural happenings. The villagers had retained their beliefs, but Wang was still a listener, not a believer, except perhaps, back then, in “scientific socialism.” Gradually, his interest took a more serious turn. In the 1970s, when others were beginning to question Maoist dogmas and the Democracy Wall kindled faint hopes of more political freedom, Wang spent his time studying Buddhism, as well as Christianity. He was deeply moved by the Bible.
Wang had had an unhappy family life. There was violence at home, which he wouldn’t specify. His father drank heavily; his mother was depressed. Wang hinted at suicide attempts, but did not wish to go into detail—the memory still distressed him. But he did mention that his parents’ unhappiness was linked to a deep but unexpressed feeling of betrayed idealism. Both his parents had been army officers and good Communists. But the Party dealt carelessly with people who were no longer useful. In retirement, Wang’s parents were left with nothing. After all the sacrifices and violence of the Maoist years, they saw everything they had stood for turn to dust in the new age of “To Get Rich Is Glorious.” I asked Wang whether his parents still had faith in communism. He giggled, as though it were a joke. “I don’t really know,” he replied. “I’m fairly sure my mother doesn’t. Probably my father doesn’t anymore, either. You know, nobody in China really believes in communism.”
People like Wang’s parents, elderly, disillusioned former Communists, often poor and without proper medical insurance, fitted the mold of typical Falun Gong followers. After years of Marxist indoctrination, a new faith shows a way back to a more familiar, more Chinese world. In this case, however, it was not the parents but the son who took that route. As is true of so many religious conversions, Wang’s came after a depression, which lasted for two years. The failure of the student movement in 1989 had left him in despair. He had lost all hope for China. All that was left now was to cultivate oneself and find one’s own little paradise. But the way to go about this was revealed to him only later, when a friend introduced him to Master Li’s teachings. Wang began to read the Zhuan Falun every day, and felt his depression lift. He gave up drinking. He meditated in the prescribed fashion, a kind of mixture of yoga and Zen, and at last he felt that his mind was at peace. Because the Master says you must not be involved or even interested in politics, he tried to be detached from public affairs. This, he admitted, was not easy.
We left Frank’s Place together, and Wang politely walked me to the taxi stand. He was trying to say something, but I had trouble hearing what it was, for there was a clamor of rock music and building construction going on across the road. I asked him to repeat. He came closer. “Things are very tense now,” he half whispered. “The government is frightened of us, because Falun Gong is so big and so many members are Party cadres and army officers. They fear the numbers and the organization. In fact, there is hardly any organization. It’s all very informal, really. You just turn up in the park and do exercises together, that is all.” I suspected there was a bit more to it than that, but didn’t challenge him.
I said I would call again. Wang said that would be fine as long as I didn’t mention Falun Gong on the phone, for “anything might happen now.” He laughed, then shrugged: “Politics is hopeless in China anyway. China is too big, too complicated.” I left with a sense of sadness, but not because I could have known that tens of thousands of people like Wang would be thrown into jail just one month later, in July. I couldn’t have. I later heard Wang had gone underground. What filled me with melancholy was the sense of waste, the desiccation of energy and talent. For here was yet one more intelligent Chinese who had been forced to withdraw, with a nervous giggle, into his own private garden.
Neither a history of peasant messiahs nor the scale and efficiency of the Falun Gong organization entirely explains the panicked reaction of the Chinese government in 1999. It is something more like the paranoia of seventeenth-century Japanese shoguns, or that of the current Chinese government, for that matter, about Christianity. What people think or say in private is one thing, but religious or political organizations are forbidden. Falun Gong and Christianity are seen as particular threats, not just because they offer alternative dogmas and moral codes, as well as spiritual leaders. Their potent appeal is in some ways similar to that of communism. They too come at a time of rampant corruption, when a few are making dishonest fortunes while many feel left behind.
Much is made in Falun Gong and Christianity of egalitarianism. Master Li, like the Catholic popes, may be revered as a superior human being, but he preaches that with sufficient “cultivation” we all have an equal chance of salvation. We are all sinners, but as one Chinese testified in English on a Falun Gong website, “Falun Gong possesses such magic powers. It can correct people’s heart. I cannot face up to [the Falun Gong believers] anymore. Their heart is so decent and noble while mine is so dirty in comparison. . . . What we have been doing is irrational, full of sin, unforgivable and against the wishes of the people.”
The person who ostensibly (one can never be sure on the Internet) posted this message was a policeman in the Public Security Bureau, a benighted servant of state oppression. His testimony was a moral confession with political overtones: “. . . the wishes of the people.” He was worried about the crime rate and the lack of trust among Chinese citizens and the fact that the law does not rule, for “laws cannot bind people’s heart.” It is precisely because the official Party dogma no longer binds people’s hearts that a large number of disillusioned Communists seek refuge in Falun Gong, or in the arms of Christ. And because the Party knows this, it feels the need to stamp out those alternatives. Sadly, however, those alternatives are as unlikely as communism to put China firmly on the road to Mr. Democracy.
It is telling that Falun Gong shares with communism a touching faith in Mr. Science, but it is a science of a peculiar sort—alternative. Master Li challenges “empirical science,” and speaks vaguely of invisible energies and dimensions. We must “break through” our “energy levels” to touch “other dimensions.” Here is a testimony—in English—on a Falun Gong website from a Chinese scientist working in the United States: “Though the purpose of Falun Dafa is not for the development of the science of mankind, it will in effect enable man’s science to take a great leap forward, because it is the science at a much higher level. If the scientific community can appreciate that Falun Dafa is the most profound and supernormal science of all, the science in the future will be able to study the universe from a different angle.”
I like the “great leap forward,” a probably wholly unconscious echo of another scientific experiment, one carried out by Mao more than forty years ago. Mao, like Master Li, believed that the human spirit could, through collective willpower, overcome mere material obstacles; inspired by crackpot scientific theories of the Stalin era, he ordered all the people in China to melt down iron pots in their backyards and plant crops where they couldn’t grow, and “overtake” the British economy in ten years. Mao had behaved like a pseudoscientific peasant messiah, and caused more than 30 million deaths.
The reaction of Mao’s successors to those who believe that Master Li holds the key to their good health revealed a peculiar dilemma. Falun Gong was attacked not only for being an “evil cult” but also for being a “sham science,” spread by alien conspirators (since the Master lives abroad) to “confuse the minds of the Chinese people.” And the official antidote to this latest manifestation of a Chinese folk tradition? People were ordered to redouble their efforts to study scientific socialism, atheism, and dialectical materialism. Some science. Some alien c
onspiracy.
In Shenzhen, there are as many cults and religious groups as there are discos. They range from the purely private—lone seekers of some sacred way or other—to official, state-sponsored churches. Predictable explanations are given for the religious boom: the “spiritual vacuum” in the wake of Maoism, search for meaning in a materialist world, and so forth. And with increased economic and social freedoms comes a greater sense of individualism. In Shenzhen and the rest of China, personal belief is an escape from the group-think imposed by official dogma. Folkish cults such as Falun Gong, with Buddhist or Taoist trappings, hark back to older traditions; they make people feel more “Chinese.” Religion, along with good food, was the first thing to revive from the Maoist demolition of Chinese civilization.
In the autumn of 1999, a few months after the July crackdown on Falun Gong followers, I was in Shenzhen to see a friend, who was studying religions in China. She told me to meet her at a Buddhist restaurant. There was some confusion, since the place had been obliged to change its name. Formerly, it had included Dafa, an ancient Buddhist term, meaning Great Law, that was also adopted by the Falun Gong—which was enough to attract unwelcome attention from agents of the Public Security Bureau, who are no experts in Buddhist terminology. My friend was waiting, together with a young woman dressed in elegant charcoal-gray designer jeans. The young woman, whom I shall call Zhang, had graduated from the University of Science and Technology in Hefei and was now in the business of exporting artificial Christmas trees to the United States. She was also a Buddhist, and her guru was in jail on suspicion of being connected to Falun Gong. His organization, the Life Science Institute in Beijing, had been closed down. In fact, according to Ms. Zhang, it was all a gross slander. Her “Master” had nothing to do with Falun Gong. But he was a remarkable figure. Ms. Zhang, who spoke in a slightly hectoring manner, at great length, as though to a crowd, and always with a tolerant smile for the unenlightened, recounted some of his miracles. For one thing, he could fly. And he performed more useful feats, too. One day in Shenzhen, she was robbed of her wallet. So she called the Master in Beijing. The wallet was returned to her the next day. Then she lost her registration card, without which you cannot move in China. This time, despite his physical absence, the Master managed to conjure it up from a glass of water. I said nothing but must have registered some skepticism. She beamed at me in silence, through clenched teeth.
It was, however, Ms. Zhang’s attitude to religious persecution that surprised me. You would have thought that she might have had some sympathy with Falun Gong followers, especially since her own Master had been arrested. But no, she approved of the crackdown. It was a good thing. This time I must have looked dismayed. Still beaming, she said: “You see, this Li fellow teaches superstition. He is very bad. I saw it myself on television. His followers are dying because they believe in miracle cures. They must be stopped.”
I asked her whether she believed in the principle of religious freedom. She looked around the table, and we became a crowd again. She repeated the evils attributed to Falun Gong. I tried her a few more times on the principle of freedom but never got a satisfactory answer. I recalled stories I had read about the 1950s and 1960s, when writers commonly denounced each other even though they all had been victims of official purges.
It is hard to say how many Christians there are in China, since most of them do not belong to officially registered “patriotic” churches. People all over the country gather in private homes, or “house churches,” to pray and preach and generally share in various hybrid forms of folk Christianity. Like Falun Gong, these are often classified as “evil cults” by the government, and believers are regularly arrested. A friend from Beijing once told me that clandestine Christians were the toughest dissidents, because of their willingness to die for their faith. I wanted to meet some of them, but this was not simple to arrange. It was easier to see the official “patriotic” believers first.
The patriotic Catholic church in Nantou, a small typically Cantonese town north of Shenzhen, is housed in an old, rather dilapidated orphanage, a gray-brick building about a century old. Outside is a Chinese-style rock garden, with tiny Chinese temples set in the miniature landscape. A stone Virgin Mary peeps out daintily from a rocky grotto. Mass is celebrated in the old school hall. Illustrated biblical scenes, cut from an old children’s book, hang on the peeling, white walls. Although the church is nominally Catholic, it cannot defer to the spiritual leadership of Rome, for the spiritual leadership of all Chinese is supposed to be in Beijing.
The priest was a young man from Hebei, with gapped teeth and a prominent jaw, which gave the impression less of manly strength than of a mild deformity. My first question immediately caused a mutual misunderstanding. He had been explaining that the most sensitive topics in China were religion and the ethnic problem. Perhaps it was his Hebei accent, perhaps I had misheard the tones, but I thought he had referred to the democratic problem. So I asked his opinion about something I had often heard, namely that China needed Christianity as a step toward democracy.
He said it was impossible to be a Christian as well as a member of the Communist Party. Since atheism was the basic doctrine of the Communist Party, a Christian had to choose Christianity or communism. You couldn’t be both, for in fact atheism, and indeed communism, were also religions. Yes, I thought, that made sense. But then he said something that puzzled me deeply. “It is different for the Muslims, since they are an ethnic minority. They can be Communists as well as Muslims.” The logic of this escaped me at first, but then I realized the nature of our misunderstanding. Minju and minzhu, the words for “democracy” and “ethnic group,” sound almost the same, especially in a regional accent. It was, in any case, still a peculiar thing to say. Not all Muslims belonged to ethnic minorities, and, surely if one monotheistic religion was incompatible with communism, then so was another.
So what about the Falun Gong?
“Oh,” he said. “The government is quite right to crack down on them. They treat their leader as God. And that is of course absurd, for there is only one God and He cannot be human. So Falun Gong is a cult, and cults are dangerous in China, for they cause great disorder. Just remember the Taiping rebellion in the nineteenth century. No, the government is quite right to preserve order.”
Yes, but what about religious freedom?
“Falun Gong is not a religion but an evil cult.”
I was not really surprised to hear this. Many Catholics in China don’t belong to the official patriotic Church. But the Catholic Church always knew how to take care of itself by staying on the right side of authority, and this is particularly true of the patriotic Church in China. As I walked out the front gate, my eye fell on a sign posted outside the old orphanage. It read, in large red Chinese characters: LOVE GOD. LOVE OUR MOTHERLAND. There were almost the same words that I had seen at the Hong Kong border, amid the commercials for dot-com companies and massage parlors.
It was high time to talk to Chinese who were neither urban intellectuals nor official patriots. My chance to meet “house Christians” came through a lucky introduction. A friend of a friend had a Christian mother who lived in a remote village in Sichuan and had recently been taken in for questioning by the police. I was told to give the friend of the friend a call. Her name was Ping, but she liked to be called Cindy. She asked me to meet her in the lobby of a certain hotel in Shenzhen. After that, she said, we might go to the beach for a swim. At night? Yes, she said. Everyone went to the beach at night. I could buy some swimming trunks on the way.
Cindy had been described to me as small, thin, with short hair. I waited. She was late. But finally there she was, just as she had been described, except that she wore unusually heavy makeup. I introduced myself, she smiled, we walked out of the hotel, and I suggested we buy a pair of swimming trunks. She looked at me, shrugged, and said something like, “Well, whatever you fancy.” Then she asked me what my name was and which hotel I was staying at. Suddenly I realized my mistake. It
had been a typically Shenzhen encounter, which I decided to abort. She took it well, offered me a stick of chewing gum, and returned to the hotel to find another customer.
The real Cindy was not a prostitute but was, at first, a bit coy about the precise nature of her living arrangements. Her comfortable apartment in the center of town was far more expensive than what most women of her age could afford. In the apartment was a large computer, which Cindy used to send e-mails and to log on to various English-language chat rooms. Learning English was her passion. Like many young people in Shenzhen, Cindy dreamed of going abroad. She had a vague plan to go to Israel, where she had a contact, another friend of a friend.
I heard the story of Cindy’s life bit by bit: a drunken father, who beat his wife and died young after a severe depression; an elder brother, who beat Cindy before moving to Guangzhou, where he worked in a restaurant; an uncle back in Sichuan, who demanded a regular cut from Cindy’s earnings and got testy when transfers were late. In fact, one of the few men whom Cindy didn’t curse was the wealthy Hong Kong businessman who kept her as a mistress in Shenzhen. She referred to him sometimes as her boyfriend and sometimes as her uncle. Although he seemed not to be excessively demanding, sex with him was no pleasure. But at least Cindy was spared from having to work in a factory for pitiful wages. The “uncle” in Hong Kong was her potential ticket out of China. She had not done badly for a village girl whose formal education had ended after four years of primary school.
A plan was made. Cindy had some business with her uncle in Sichuan, who as the current head of the family had to help her get permission from the local authorities to apply for an exit visa, without which she could not go to Israel. Her mother’s village was not far from the county town where the uncle lived. So we would fly to Chongqing, the wartime capital of China, to see her cousin, who was studying there, then go on by train to a small provincial town and from there, by bus, to her mother’s home, where we would stay for a day or two.
