Falun Gong: The End of Days [Hardcover]

Ms. Maria Hsia Chang (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300102275 | ISBN-13: 978-0300102277 | Publication Date: April 10, 2004

The world first took notice of a religious group called Falun Gong on April 25, 1999, when more than 10,000 of its followers protested before the Chinese Communist headquarters in Beijing. Falun Gong investigates events in the wake of the demonstration: Beijing's condemnation of the group as a Western, anti-Chinese force and doomsday cult, the sect's continued defiance, and the nationwide campaign that resulted in the incarceration and torture of many Falun Gong faithful. Maria Hsia Chang discusses the Falun Gong's beliefs, including their ideas on cosmology, humanity's origin, karma, reincarnation, UFOs, and the coming apocalypse. She balances an account of the Chinese government's case against the sect with an evaluation of the credibility of those accusations. Describing China's long history of secret societies that initiated powerful uprisings and sometimes overthrew dynasties, she explains the Chinese government's brutal treatment of the sect. And she concludes with a chronicle of the ongoing persecution of religious groups in China, of which Falun Gong is only one of many, and the social conditions that breed the popular discontent and alienation that spawn religious millenarianism.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is an objective and scholarly account of one of the most challenging mass phenomena to emerge from China in recent years. Falun Gong ("Law Wheel Cultivation"), founded in 1992, had attracted millions of practitioners in China and worldwide by the time the Chinese banned it as an "evil cult" in 1999. Chang, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, presents a highly readable account of the origins and beliefs of the group. Although Falun Gong's practices are rooted in traditional Chinese qigong, which involves meditation to cultivate qi (life force), Falun Gong has broader goals of moral salvation, drawing on concepts from China's traditional religions, including Buddhism and Taoism. Since the group's founder and leader, Li Hongzhi, fled China to become a resident in the United States in 1998, he has become increasingly critical of the Chinese government. He encourages his followers to stand up for Falun Gong, despite fierce Chinese government repression, even at the risk of their lives. Chang is unsparing in detailing the illegal and deceptive methods the Chinese government has used to repress Falun Gong. At the same time, she explains why the authorities fear such a movement, situating the repression of Falun Gong in the broader context of China's persecution of certain other religious faiths and its history of revolts led by millenarian movements. The author relates how rapid change, disillusionment with the increasingly irrelevant official Marxist ideology, and growing corruption in China have made many people feel anxious for some moral and spiritual anchor.
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From Booklist

Political scientist Chang provides a brief and accessible introduction to Falun Gong that places the movement in political and historical context, and she offers a critique of the Chinese government's policy toward religion that raises important questions about relations between quasi-religious groups such as Falun Gong and modern states. Though Chang is most concerned with criticizing the practice of "socialism with Chinese characteristics," many of the questions she raises are relevant beyond China and beyond single-party states. Her overview of religious and millenarian movements in Chinese history makes it clear that ostensibly apolitical groups have had profoundly political impacts, and this lends credence to at least one rationale for the Chinese government's hostile reaction to Falun Gong. At the same time, her analysis of the extent to which hostile government reaction has transformed religious and quasi-religious groups into revolutionary political movements amounts to a cautionary tale for modern states and a compelling argument for a practice of religious freedom that extends beyond mainstream and established religions. Steven Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300102275
• ISBN-13: 978-0300102277
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #177,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good idea, shoddy execution, May 6, 2006

By 

Gao Gu (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Falun Gong: The End of Days (Hardcover)

I wanted to like Chang's book, really. If I had high hopes they were not without justification: a number of journalists are citing Chang in articles on Falungong, and it is published by an academic press. Moreover the topic is an important one, what with millions of Falungong adherents being assaulted by the state in China and few of us in the West knowing what they're about.

But Chang's book disappoints on several accounts; at worst, I would wager, it sets back scholarship and discussion of the group. Her scholarship is badly outdated (circa. 1999), she has not done any fieldwork or interviews with adherents, and somehow she hasn't availed herself of any of the scholarly literature on Falungong, of which there is much. She neither engages questions and issues others raise, nor builds on previous findings. This is really as inexcusable as it is baffling. Professor Berend ter Haar's website on the Falungong thus remains a much better point of entry to researching the group and its suppression. David Ownby's forthcoming book should be much more helpful as well. The book by Danny Schechter is more reliable, even (though he is a journalist, not a scholar), as he does not take claims by China's state-run press at face value, as Chang does often (e.g., on the alleged self-immolations), and distinguishes better his own engagement of the Falungong's doctrine from that of its adherents.

Which leads me to the first serious, though perhaps not obvious, problem with Chang's book. Namely, her rather clumsy portrayal of the Falungong's beliefs. Her depiction borders at times on comical for its misreadings. Humorous, that is, not for what it tells about the group, but for what it suggests of Chang's narrow training in the study of religion; to use the words of one of my advisors, she suffers from "religious illiteracy." (She is, to be fair, a political scientist.) The most obvious dimension to this is her failing to discern which beliefs are central to the practice and which are peripheral. This makes an enormous difference in how we're to conceptualize the group: do they gather to talk about aliens and the end of the world (the latter notion seeming to have captivated Chang's attention, though I believe it to again be a misreading), or about moral self-cultivation and living out the practice's ideals of compassion, tolerance, etc.? My own research and that of most others suggests the latter. If Chang had done some fieldwork (or even interviews) I suspect she would have come to different conclusions. Unless, that is, she is trying to be sensational. One gets this feeling at several points (take for example the book's unlikely subtitle). Similarly, and again owing to the armchair-approach to her study, Chang doesn't engage the question of what real, living followers of the Falungong think, believe, hope, worry over, or even, notably, do. In the section on "beliefs and practices" she somehow forgets to discuss the Falungong's trademark exercises. This is rather incredible. Imagine a book purporting to describe Yoga in its entirety only to overlook its very much central, bodily discipline of posture, breathing, stretching, etc. It seems Chang simply grabbed a few of Falungong's books off the internet and felt she had the group figured out. What needs to be, and remains to be, asked is how followers themselves interpret the doctrine, not Chang. We want to know what 70-100 million believers in China think, not what one Maria Chang in Nevada thinks. Nor does one get any sense for what gave the practice such remarkable appeal in China; her rather poorly sketched history of Chinese sectarian religion reveals little.

The second biggest failing of the book is its analysis of the persecution. Chang's interpretation seems built of press clippings and newswire feeds, and somehow does not engage the vast, and insightful, body of scholarship from the past five years on Falungong and the PRC crackdown. Her thesis -- that the regime was overwhelmed by a collective "fear" that is based on historical precedents -- would have been fine in late 1999 when we knew little of the situation, but research since then has problematized badly such a simple take. For example, there were very divergent -- even polarized -- views among members of China's Politburo Standing Committee as to what to do with the Falungong, and by no means did members all fear with communal dread, much less wish to take down, the group. (Moreover, she offers not evidence to support her claim that "the leadership" was in fear of history repeating itself. She is panning a hypothesis as a conclusion.) Chang misses this point as well as the complex, important political infighting surrounding the banning of Falungong, forgoing nuance in favor of simple, smooth narrative.

This is not to say Chang doesn't have her moments. Her depiction of the CCP and its despotism, its contradictions, and the veneer of legality with which it bullies its own citizens are useful passages. (Most soft-pedal on these issues.) Her observations on China's self-proclaimed "rule of law" are poignant and helpful, though not new. For this reason I grant the book two stars, not one.

I am left to conclude Yale was hurrying this one off to press. If its scholarship wasn't enough to give one pause, its brevity (only 150 pages of text?), its layout (is that triple-spacing they used?), and the long, baffling tangents Chang goes off on (25 pages on terribly irrelevant past sects?) lead one to conclude that Yale saw a market for the book and didn't want to lose time.

Indeed, there is a need for a good full length monograph on the Falungong, but Chang's book leaves much, regrettably, to be desired.

39 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not good if you actually want to know what the group is like, September 24, 2004

By 

Cullum (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Falun Gong: The End of Days (Hardcover)

The book is alright. A lot of the content I feel is probably quite accurate, except for the description of the group, which was a serious fault on the part of the author in my opinion. Having studied the group and read much of their teachings myself (including Zhuan Falun, Falun Gong, essentials for further advancement, and others) I feel they are much misunderstood.

For some reason it seems that people love to find ways to make a spiritual practice look weird, I guess it makes it more interesting, but Falun Gong isn't really weird at all (not unless you consider all Christians, Buddhists, and Daoists to be weirdos as well). I think that by quoting any of these religions texts out of context they can look pretty weird too (ever read the book or revelations?), however if you actually make an effort to understand the unusual aspects of a spirituality (ex. "three flowers gathering above the head" in Falun Gong) from within the context that it is written and by looking at the spirituality as whole, you will find that it really isn't that weird. What the author does is exactly this. She doesn't give you the whole picture of the group and is overly skeptical. Aspects of the teachings are taken out of context and used to make the group look weird.

In addition to taking things out of context, I believe that this author uses sources from the CCP's propaganda to describe Falun Gong. For instance she talks about how Li Hongzhi was challenged to a supernormal ability competition and that he couldn't compete so in frustration he placed a law wheel in the guys abdomen and spun it the wrong way....What?! That's ridiculous. I consider myself an expert on this movement and have studied it a lot, but I have never come across anything like that, nor have I ever been led to believe that Li Hongzhi would ever do such a thing. However, having studied a lot of the CCP's articles, statements, and stories about Falun Gong (enough to understand that you can't possible take them seriously), I wouldn't be at all surprised if this came from them. It's exactly the type of story that would be run in some state-run magazine or "newspaper" and I highly doubt there is any truth to it at all. As a political scientist the author should know that she can't use a source like this to provide a valid description of the group or the teacher. Just for your reference I recall something Mr. Li once wrote discussing how bad it is that some qigong masters actually participate in these "supernormal ability competitions," and that this is among the aspects that indicate that a qigong master has gone awry (or something to that extent). Put simply: it's very unlikely that he would participate in something like that, let alone become angry and take revenge. In my opinion, I truly think that Mr. Li is an honest and kind man, and I really feel bad that he has become a target for slander like this.

Ms. Chang's book is fine if you want to know more about today's CCP and the current situation in China, but if you actually want to know what Falun Gong is (rather than hearing Ms. Chang's or my own biased opinion), then read Zhuan Falun and contact a local practitioner. Get it from the source.

21 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a Fair and Objective Book!, August 17, 2004

By 

Edward Tsai (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Falun Gong: The End of Days (Hardcover)

This book is currently, to my knowledge, the only objective study of Falun Gong in its current historical and social context. The author admirably takes no sides and pulls no punches, whether on covering Falun Gong or the Chinese government's behavior in response to it.

The book does a good job of concisely explaining the rather convoluted cosmology of Falun Dafa, which was admittedly very hard for me to swallow (note that the cosmology is central to Falun Dafa and that the exercises (i.e., Falun Gong) are just the outward display of the precepts of Falun Dafa). But it does so in the context of describing the history and tradition China's millenarian movements, which have been many, fairly extraordinary and often the foundation of rebellions against the state. The book also surveys contemporary religious sects that have also been persecuted by the Chinese state. This last bit is particularly helpful for viewing the Falun Gong phenomenon in the appropriate context. Due to extreme economic and social dislocation, messianic, apocalyptic and millenarian faiths created by charismatic leaders have proliferated and attracted huge numbers of people in China (numbering in the thousands and millions). I was amazed at the number of followers of multitude of Christian-based faiths that had sprung up in China where the leader claimed him or herself to be the second coming of Christ or even God himself (which, if you look back to the Taiping Rebellion, could almost be considered a Chinese tradition!).

The book also goes into detail about the Chinese governments crackdown on the practitioners, examining their justifications and discussing the reasons for it. Basically, the author sees the Chinese Communist Party's ("CCP") campaign against Falun Gong and other religions as counterproductive to its attempt to hold on to power. The paranoia of the CCP that would drive it to stamp out any alternative and potentially competing form of social organization (even ones with whacky far-out ideas) is based on a fundamental and deep-rooted insecurity about (and actual frailty of) its own legitimacy and authority over the people for whom it claims to act as the "vanguard." The irony is that in this instance the CCP is creating its own enemies where none had existed before. These groups had typically originated as apolitical religious organizations targeting personalized spirituality, but through persecution, they and their leaders become politicized and actively begin to challenge the power of the state by resisting its persecution. I suppose this is all a manifestation of the aphorism that power both corrupts and blinds, and absolute power corrupts absolutely and blinds absolutely (sic, I sort of made up the last bit ad hoc). Nonetheless, if you ignore the efficacy of the liberal idea of the separation of church and state as instrumental in creating peace and social harmony and instead focus myopically on Chinese history of secret societies fomenting rebellion, you might be able to understand why the CCP acts the way it does (not to justify its actions in any way, though).

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants an objective account of the Falun Gong situation in China and a better understanding of some of the social issues currently confronting the Chinese people. A book of this kind has been long overdue.