Why Did Liberal Elites Ignore a 21st-Century Genocide?
For many elite institutions, victims only matter when they’re useful
In the world’s most populous country, over a million members of a religious minority have been detained without trial in reeducation camps. When they’re not performing forced labor and making goods for export, they are tortured, beaten, shocked with electric batons, and put through coercive ideological “transformation.” Authorities have been told to use any means necessary to make their victims recant their faith in a world-transcendent order, and swear fealty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Both inside and outside detention camps, their biometric data is catalogued and their movements tracked. In the state-run press they have been described as vermin, a “poisonous tumor,” and as an existential threat that must be “completely eradicated” if China is to prosper. Although information about the group’s plight is hermetically censored, there is evidence of widespread killings in custody. Prominent international jurists say that crimes against humanity have occurred.
If you guessed that this was a description of the Uyghurs, you could hardly be blamed. The predominantly Muslim minority in China’s northwest Xinjiang province is the target of an expansive campaign meant to purge their language, religion, and ethnic identity. The widespread practice of forced sterilizations, in particular, recently led the U.S. government to declare the persecution of Uyghurs a genocide. But the above description applies more accurately to another group: Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa.
An esoteric Buddhist discipline, Falun Gong enjoyed a meteoric rise to popularity in the 1990s in China. By 1998, government estimates put the number of adherents in the range of 40–70 million people, rivaling membership in the Communist Party itself. In a country that does not tolerate large, independent civil society groups, this fact alone might have been sufficient grounds for suppression. But the threat posed by Falun Gong went deeper: it represented a comprehensive moral challenge to the entire secular-scientistic worldview from which China’s rulers derive their legitimacy.
Where the Communist Party glorified wealth and power, Falun Gong enjoined its followers to live in conformity with the Tao, and cultivate the virtues of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. They practiced quietude and meditation, approached suffering as an opportunity for moral improvement, and sought to disentangle themselves from worldly desires and attachments.
Although the practice was both peaceful and avowedly non-political, its size, open embrace of theism, and independence from state control made a crackdown inevitable.
It began in the early morning hours of July 20, 1999, when thousands of Falun Gong devotees were taken from their beds and sent to detention centers. Two days later, the Ministry of State Security issued an official directive banning the practice of Falun Gong meditation, and forbidding any attempts to oppose the ban. An extrajudicial security force called the “610 Office” was established with the mandate of eradicating the group. Lawyers were barred from taking Falun Gong adherents as clients. Book burnings were held in cities across China, accompanied by a propaganda blitz to turn public opinion against the group.
The Communist Party made no bones about the fact that the conflict with Falun Gong was fundamentally theological. Mandatory study sessions were convened in state-owned enterprises, schools, and government offices to stress Falun Gong’s incompatibility with Marxism. “Marxist dialectic materialism and historical materialism … should form the spiritual pillar of communists,” said one editorial in the state-run Xinhua News Agency. “The so-called ‘truth, kindness, and tolerance’ principle preached [by Falun Gong] has nothing in common with the socialist ethical and cultural progress we are striving to achieve.”
Other Communist Party documents took aim at the belief in divine agency. Falun Dafa “preaches that social development was arranged by god,” wrote Xinhua News Agency. “If a party member believes in [these] fallacies and has faith in Falun Dafa, he will surely betray Marxism.” To the communist, all developments must be understood to be a product of human will; the very idea of God must be interpreted as a human creation, and not the other way around. A representative editorial published in the People’s Daily thus declared: “Idealism advocates theism and attributes the development of the objective world to supernatural forces, thus creating gods … [but] the so-called ‘god’s will’ is in fact the will of man.” Falun Gong’s belief in divine sovereignty was therefore “absolutely contradictory to the fundamental theories and principles of Marxism.”
Falun Gong also came under fire for challenging the narrative of emancipation through economic reform. By the 1990s, the Communist Party’s legitimacy was increasingly tied to its economic performance, and to the degree of scientific and technological sophistication that China achieved under its rule. But Falun Gong argued that the material gains wrought by China’s market reforms coincided with spiritual impoverishment: they led to environmental degradation, growing selfishness, vulgarization in the arts, and estrangement from the Tao.
These critiques of modernity were not intended to be political, but they were, in that they represented a direct challenge to the ideological foundations of the governing party. State media organ The People’s Daily accused Falun Gong of “fundamentally denying the progressive tendency of human history, denying the tremendous accomplishments China has attained in the two decades of reform and opening-up, and denying the significant changes and progress of the Chinese people’s ideological and mental outlook.” Another editorial warned that “if Falun Gong’s heretical theories spread, the party’s foundation will be shaken, and the great cause will be undermined.”
In short, the Communist Party saw Falun Gong as an expression of idealism and theism, which stood in the way of the modernizing forces of materialism and atheism. Destroying it — including through torture, forced conversion, and killings — was a progressive (Marxist) imperative.
The persecution of Falun Gong was the largest political, security, and propaganda mobilization since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and the most significant instance of religious persecution since the Cultural Revolution. It reversed budding legal reforms, catalyzed a massive expansion of the domestic security apparatus, drove the development of China’s internet censorship and surveillance regime, and established a playbook for later instances of mass repression and forced conversion campaigns, such as what is now occurring in Xinjiang. It also produced an underground resistance movement whose resilience and longevity is unrivaled in 70 years of Communist Party rule.
Yet even as the persecution campaign is ongoing, it has been almost entirely memory-holed in the West. As recently as 2015, Freedom House reported that Falun Gong adherents comprised a majority of China’s prisoners of conscience, likely numbering over a hundred thousand at any given time. Yet major news outlets have gone decades without writing a single story on the repression in China.
When critics of China’s Communist regime enumerate its human rights abuses, the plight of Falun Gong rarely even makes the list. There is now abundant evidence that China’s organ transplant industry has been supplied, in part, by the on-demand killing of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. This evidence has been assiduously ignored by a number of Western NGOs and media conglomerates.
As if to justify their neglect of the Falun Gong issue, many who study and opine about contemporary China will claim, incorrectly, that the spiritual group was vanquished in the Chinese mainland long ago, and is therefore not deserving of ongoing attention. (Chinese government documents tell a very different story.)
Buried by The Times
Why is it that some victim groups capture the imagination and the sympathy of the West, while others do not? Why are some minority identities legitimated and protected, while others are regarded with ambivalence, suspicion, or worse?
The peculiar amnesia surrounding Falun Gong points to the limits of our empathy, and reveals the hypocrisy of an elite culture that claims solidarity with victims and marginalized minorities. As it turns out, that solidarity is strictly selective, and is largely contingent on whether a victim group is useful in advancing the social status or the ideological commitments of their prospective allies — typically the cultural elites of the dominant society. Who receives sympathy is also matter of particular, often arbitrary historical contingencies. Luck, in other words. And Falun Gong was not lucky.
At the time when the suppression began in 1999, the group was almost entirely unknown in the West. This gave the Chinese Communist Party an opportunity to define Falun Gong for Western audiences before the group had the chance to define themselves. There was no natural constituency to whom they could appeal for support, their cause never attracted celebrity attention, and they had little social capital to draw on. A plurality of Falun Gong adherents in North America held advanced degrees, but almost all in the hard sciences. Hobbled by linguistic and cultural barriers, their outreach efforts were often amateur and unsophisticated: they had the feel of propaganda, so that even if their claims were true, they could be ignored without consequence.
The timing of the suppression was also inopportune. When it began in 1999, Western governments and corporate leaders were looking to deepen economic and diplomatic ties to the one-party state. Over the decade that followed, China saw unprecedented capital inflows, and a generation of scholars, journalists, and policymakers learned to tell the story of a modernizing, reforming country. Trade with China would lead to democratization, they insisted, as tech giants sold surveillance technology to Chinese security agencies, and as labor camp products flooded supply chains. Revelations of the systematic persecution, torture, and killings of an indigenous religious minority simply weren’t good for business.
The disappearance of the Falun Gong story is also a testament to the Communist Party’s success in suppressing and managing global discourse on “sensitive” subjects. Journalists who attempted to report on the persecution of Falun Gong within China faced harassment by state agents, and were threatened with the loss of visas and press credentials. Whole news organizations risked being shut out of the Chinese market for reporting on the issue, and Chinese authorities have leveraged diplomatic and commercial clout to quash critical reporting.
In 2001, TIME magazine was pulled from every shelf in China after it published an article about Falun Gong’s presence in Hong Kong. In 2007, Canada’s national public broadcaster, the CBC, canceled a scheduled documentary about Falun Gong after coming under pressure from the Chinese embassy (CBC held the broadcasting rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympics). In 2010, The Washington Post killed a feature article about Falun Gong after the Chinese embassy made a call to the paper’s executive editor. The reporter, who had spent a year researching the piece, was told that the paper couldn’t afford to run an article about the marginalized faith community. In 2014, a fictional story in the Australian edition of Reader’s Digest featured a Falun Gong refugee as a secondary character. The Chinese printing firm refused to print the magazine until it censored the story, which it did.
It wasn’t always this way: Western news agencies did report on the Falun Gong repression regularly from 1999 until 2001. Many foreign correspondents struggled to accurately describe the belief system, and their stories relied heavily on Chinese government sources. But they did sometimes succeed in cutting through official controls to shed light on human rights abuses against the group (The Wall Street Journal, notably, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the torture deaths of Falun Gong adherents). The resulting international scrutiny appeared to have restrained the worst excesses of the persecution.
Then, in 2001, coverage of the issue from inside China flat-lined. The New York Times led the way: the paper ran 17 articles with Chinese datelines about Falun Gong in the first half of 2001. In the second half of the year there were seven articles, several of which uncritically advanced Communist Party narratives that Falun Gong was dangerous, that it had already been crushed, and that its adherents benefited from ideological reprogramming in labor camps (“the re-education center is more comfortable than my home … police in the center are very polite and kind’’). By 2002, the paper’s China bureau ran five articles on Falun Gong, and in the 18 years since, only five. Perhaps significantly, this collapse in coverage began in August 2001 — the same month that The New York Times’s senior editorial staff convened a meeting with the Communist Party leader, where they negotiated the unblocking of the newspaper’s website in China.
Over a decade later, in 2015, a Beijing-based correspondent for The New York Times found evidence that prisoners of conscience (likely including Falun Gong faithful) were being killed to supply a lucrative trade in human organs. Chinese transplant surgeons had spoken about it in her presence. Her editors told her not to pursue the story.
Scholars of contemporary China are likewise hesitant to conduct research on the issue, as doing so carries a significant risk of blacklisting. As a graduate student, I was asked by a prospective advisor not to undertake research on Falun Gong, lest he (the advisor) lose access to sources in the Chinese government. Arthur Waldron, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Pennsylvania, described the risk this way: “Falun Gong is not simply on Beijing’s blacklist. Its name is recorded in the blackest of black letters, for the Chinese authorities have undertaken to crush it.” As a result, two decades worth of scholarship about the persecution was simply never produced, and the self-censorship played in the Communist Party’s favor.
Western governments have made some symbolic shows of solidarity towards Falun Gong, including by issuing proclamations and non-binding resolutions, but few have even attempted more concrete measures, such as Magnitsky sanctions to punish the perpetrators of human rights abuses. Even some human rights organizations have been reluctant to devote resources or political capital to the Falun Gong cause. Human Rights Watch is perhaps the worst offender. The NGO published a compelling and well-researched study on the group’s suppression in 2002. Three years later, in 2005, it issued a report on the imprisonment of petitioners in China that included this brief, but chilling, reference to Falun Gong:
Several petitioners reported that the longest sentences and worst treatment were meted out to members of the banned meditation group, Falungong. […] Kang reported that of the roughly one thousand detainees in her labor camp in Jilin, most were Falungong practitioners. The government’s campaign against the group has been so thorough that even long-time Chinese activists are afraid to say the group’s name aloud. One Beijing petitioner said: “Petitioners are usually locked up directly. But the worst is [she whispers] Falungong. They have terrible treatment, not like the others…”
One would hope that such accounts would have provoked a sense of urgency and led to further investigation. But in the years since, Human Rights Watch has routinely omitted even token references to Falun Gong in its China reporting.
The selective concern of human rights groups manifests most conspicuously in their lack of curiosity about state-sanctioned organ harvesting of Falun Gong detainees. These allegations are backed by a significant body of evidence: an independent tribunal of experts, headed by United Nations war crimes prosecutor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, recently found beyond a reasonable doubt that forced organ harvesting has occurred on a substantial scale — likely peaking at tens of thousands of victims per year — with the knowledge and endorsement of Chinese state actors. If the tribunal’s judgement is correct, this constitutes one of the graver human rights crises of the early 21st century. But when questioned by journalists, Human Rights Watch punts on the topic. Amnesty International agrees the allegations ought to be investigated, though apparently not by Amnesty International. A decade ago, when discussing evidence that Falun Gong prisoners of conscience have been killed to supply the organ trade, a researcher at one of these human rights organizations looked over their shoulder before whispering: “I believe it.” But neither organization will say so publicly.
At the same time that Beijing works to suppress sympathetic coverage or research on Falun Gong, the Communist Party has gone on the offensive to promote its own talking points about the group, including through disinformation campaigns and “black” (unattributed or falsely attributed) propaganda. In recent years, the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department has become more ambitious in its efforts to co-opt Western academics, journalists, and social media influencers for these purposes. In exchange for payment and other benefits, individuals are asked to promote the claim that Falun Gong is an “evil cult” whose followers are undeserving of respect or sympathy.
High Strangeness
Falun Gong adherents can sometimes seem like their own worst enemy when attempting to make their case in the public sphere. It doesn’t help that most of its devotees in the West are first-generation immigrants: having been socialized in a communist state, they were not well attuned to the aesthetic or cultural sensibilities of Western audiences. “Heaven destroys the CCP” reads typical banner held by middle-aged Chinese Falun Gong protesters on a sidewalk in Sydney. The approach is searingly earnest and unpretentious, but association with such a brand is unlikely to confer much social prestige. (It is a rare person who considers principle, rather than prestige, when deciding which social causes to champion).
Moreover, the Falun Dafa belief system can appear strange and inaccessible, particularly when it is de-historicized and divorced from its broader religious and cultural context. With roots in the bio-spiritual cultivation practices of Buddhism and Taoism, its teachings include talk of miracles, reincarnation, demonological possession, and a pantheon of supernatural agents and deities. The reality observable to the human senses is understood to be incomplete and potentially misleading, while the boundary separating the corporeal from the spiritual realm is porous, at best. Falun Gong’s radical core is the promise of transcendence via meditation, introspection, and moral discipline. Its cosmology is elaborate, recondite, and, to the average Western observer, utterly foreign — though perhaps no more than any religion when seen from within a secular framework. Survey the biographies of eminent Taoists and Buddhist monks, and they are all liable to sound a bit mad: immortals disappear into gourds, Buddhist monks auto-combust as they reach enlightenment, Taoists fake their own death by transforming into broomsticks, and far beyond.
Despite the ostensible strangeness, Falun Gong does not satisfy the criteria for what is commonly regarded as a “cult”: it has virtually no formal organization, rules, or procedures. Among the few rules it does have is a prohibition on the collection of funds or charging of fees. There is no system of membership, no hierarchy, and no mechanism for intervention into the personal lives of adherents. It is tolerant of other faiths and belief systems, and practitioners of Falun Gong do not leave the world: they hold regular jobs, marry outside the faith, and have widely varying views on political and social issues. But while the “cult” label does not accurately describe the practice, it has done tremendous work in casting suspicion over it, and giving moral cover to institutions that, for self-interested reasons, have ignored the brutalization, torture, and extrajudicial killing of believers.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Having been abandoned by much of the cultural and media elite, Falun Gong adherents in the West took their fate into their own hands. In response to China’s internet censorship, they created censorship-circumvention tools that are now used by millions around the world. To counter propaganda in the state-controlled press, they started their own newspaper and satellite television stations — first in Chinese, and then in a dozen other languages. The Epoch Times, a conservative U.S. newspaper founded by Chinese émigré Falun Gong adherents, now competes in online page views with a number of legacy media organizations.
Believing that their persecution was made possible by the Communist Party’s destruction of China’s traditional moral and spiritual culture, they created classical performing arts companies that aim to revive that culture (Shen Yun, a dance company established by Falun Gong adherents, today deals in ticket sales and advertising budgets in the tens of millions of dollars). Inside China, meanwhile, they operate Samizdat-like networks of underground printing houses, facing constant threats of arrest as they churn out banned religious texts and critiques of communist rule.
These efforts began with virtually no funding and with no centralized organization behind them. They relied on volunteers, many of them first-generation immigrants and refugees who had experienced severe trauma and who faced ongoing threats of retribution from the Chinese party-state. In a parallel universe, these initiatives might be regarded as heroic feats of non-violent resistance against tyrannical colonialist (communist) oppression. Yet by refusing to claim the mantle of perpetual victimhood, and by circumventing established institutions and creating their own counter-public, Falun Gong practitioners deprived would-be supporters of the opportunity to play the savior. Their fledgling success in finding an audience has also come with a cruelly ironic twist: now Falun Gong is seen as too powerful, too well organized — they need to be taken down a notch.
A number of the media institutions that for decades ignored and provided cover for the mass imprisonment, torture, and killing of Falun Gong adherents in China have taken a renewed interest in the faith system, but only to scrutinize it. Progressive commentators, in particular, have accused Falun Gong believers of being mistrustful of the press, and therefore “secretive.” The New York Times frames reports of abductions, torture, and forced conversion in China as being part of a “public relations” campaign, and suggests that the victims of these abuses are probably exaggerating. Canada’s CBC accuses Chinese Falun Gong refugees of being “racist” against Chinese people—because they criticize China’s authoritarian government. The Epoch Times was easily ignored when it was merely reporting on organ transplant abuse and torture in Chinese labor camps. But once it began offering sympathetic coverage of the Trump administration (including, more recently, by giving unfortunate play to unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud), it became a target of regular take-downs by progressive journalists, who mock members of the Falun Gong faith community for being “obsessed” with the threat of communism (for “unspecified reasons,” as one stunningly obtuse New York Times reporter put it).
In a study of transnational human rights advocacy, sociologist Andrew Junker summarized Falun Gong’s unfortunate predicament this way: “Woe be to any people who dare to both reject the hegemonic vision of the CCP and the liberal West’s progressive alternative, for that group faces the relentless defamation and violence of the first and the cruel apathy of the second.”
All Conflict is Theological
There is another reason why the treatment of Falun Gong specifically, and religious persecution generally, is often met with indifference from the increasingly progressive cultural institutions in the West. Simply, theistic faiths do not typically align with liberal-progressive notions of social progress.
For the same reasons Falun Dafa was seen as antithetical to Marxist-materialism in China, its cosmology and traditionalist moral teachings must be viewed as deviant according to the secular, modernizing aims of progressivism. As Eric Voegelin, the scholar of totalitarianism and refugee from Nazism observed, “the true dividing line in the contemporary crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side, and the liberal and totalitarian immanentist sectarians on the other side.”
This insight may seem counterintuitive to those who consider communism and liberalism to be opposites: one is authoritarian and demands crushing conformity, and the other champions individual autonomy. But despite obvious differences, these two ideologies share some critical assumptions. Both hold that history follows a progressive course: the past is imagined as dark, irrational, and oppressive, while the always-imminent future holds a promise of emancipation. Both posit that liberation requires casting off inherited customs and traditions. Once freed from prejudice and religious superstitions, society can at last be rationally ordered based on the correct principles. Both ideologies are, if not hostile, then at least indifferent to spiritual claims of a divine or a transcendent reality; their field of vision is confined entirely to this immanent, material world. Both ideologies espouse a seemingly limitless faith in the ability of science to solve the problems of suffering and inequity, and both seek mastery of nature through the application of human will, knowledge, and ingenuity.
The Chinese Communist Party understood, correctly, that Falun Gong’s belief system rejects these suppositions. While liberalism and communism seek to unshackle man from the constraints of nature or custom, Falun Gong teaches that freedom comes from the exercise of virtue and inner discipline in accord with nature; a person is free when he wants little, and when his desires don’t overstep the boundaries of right. Rather than viewing history as an upward linear slope that points towards perfect reason and emancipation, it views history as cyclical, with our current era being imagined as one of atrophy and moral decline (the period of “Dharma’s end,” in Buddhist parlance). It considers ignorance and suffering to be more or less permanent features of the human condition, owing to man’s propensity for selfishness.
Falun Gong’s teachings further argue that the perennial problems of human existence cannot be solved through political or social engineering: neither human nature nor human societies can be perfected by human means, as both communist and progressive ideologues imagine. Instead, the path to salvation is believed to be a personal one, achievable only in the hereafter, and only through the improvement of the soul.
To the Chinese Communist Party, these ideas are heresy. As Xinhua News Agency wrote, by encouraging people to seek salvation beyond this world, Falun Gong was “militating against the building of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and so had to be crushed.
One wonders if a similar logic is not sometimes at play among progressive liberals in the West. In 2006, for instance San Francisco’s city council issued a resolution expressing solidarity with Falun Gong victims of torture. The resolution was nearly rescinded under pressure from a progressive journalist, who was scandalized to discover that the Chinese Buddhist group has conservative teachings on sexuality. It did not matter that Falun Gong practitioners never attempted to impose their views on anyone, or that its teachings on sexuality are virtually indistinguishable from those of most world religions. The message was unmistakable: if you do not affirmatively support a progressive social agenda, then perhaps you deserve to be in the gulag.
There are of course many people — liberals and progressives among them — who will defend freedom of conscience and belief even for their opponents, approach differences of opinion with tolerance and humility, and who will oppose the torture and killing of innocents wherever it occurs. But to a person in thrall to ideology, right and wrong may cease to have any fixed meaning: freedom of conscience should be defended, but only for my side. Hurtful stereotyping of minorities is contemptible, unless they’re religious conservatives. Believe victims! — but if they complain of persecution by a communist regime, they’re probably exaggerating. We should promote diversity, tolerance, and inclusion, but not for the out-group. All standards become fungible, to the point that even genocide is excusable if it brings us closer to a terrestrial paradise. As Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Soviet apologist, put it, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
This marks the final point of departure. In contrast to the relativism of the communist and progressive activists, Falun Gong maintains that there is an objective moral standard, which exists above time or human opinion. What is true remains true, even when it is ignored. The good is still good, even when it is persecuted, scorned, or called vice. And those who persist in seeking these virtues will have their reward, if not in this life then in the next.
For the sake of those who languish still in China’s labor camps, or who have been killed as the world averted its gaze, we might hope they are right.
Caylan Ford is a documentary filmmaker and former policy advisor at the Canadian foreign ministry. Some research in this essay originally appeared as a chapter in Eric Voegelin’s Asian Political Thought.
