Framing Falun Gong: Xinhua news agency's coverage of the new religious movement in China

Abstract

Falun Gong caught the eyes of the Beijing leadership when more than 10,000 of its practitioners gathered at the Zhongnanhai government compound in Beijing on April 25, 1999. It attracted the attention of the world when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started cracking down on the group three months later, claiming this to be the most serious political incident since the student uprising at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Scholars have attempted to contextualize the cultural, political, and economic climate in contemporary China that allowed this group to rise in a relatively short period and to assess the causes of the CCP's nationwide campaign oppressing the group. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to exploring the media's role in supporting the government's cause in this campaign. This study examines journalistic narrative and framing of Falun Gong as a social threat in one news organization's attempt to legitimize the government's crackdown against the group. Although the economic reforms and political relaxation since the 1980s might have expanded the media's latitude, the press, especially state-owned media outlets, still functions as an agent for the Beijing regime in important political and social issues. This paper shows how journalists, through news frames, construct particular parameters within which to assess the ‘reality’ about Falun Gong.

Notes

Falun Gong is also called Falun Dafa, meaning Great Law of the Wheel.

This figure, according to Schechter (2000), originally came from the Chinese government, but it abandoned its original estimate after the crackdown began, stating that there were only 20 million Falun Gong practitioners in China.

This number includes 18 million Muslims, 10 million Protestants, and four million Catholics, with the rest being predominantly Buddhists and Taoists (Wong, 1999).

The category of ‘experts’ includes professors/academics, with 41 citations; legal professionals, 29; scientists, 24; medical professionals, nine; astronomers, seven; psychiatrists, four; athletes, three; qigong master, one; unspecified expert, one.

A breakdown of this category is: the People's Daily, 37; Xinhua News Agency, 13; books, 13; individual journalists/editors, nine; other newspapers, eight; Truth Seeking magazine, seven; the Central China TV, two; websites, one.

In an interview with New York based journalist Danny Schechter (2000: 33), Li Hongzhi denied making any apocalyptic predictions: ‘I can proclaim here to everyone in all earnestness that all of those so-called catastrophes of the earth or of the universe and things of this kind in the year 1999 simply do not exist’. Schechter claims that Li's followers in New York say that Li often discourages doomsday theories.

In comparing the Chinese government's and Falun Gong's accounts of the group's finances, Tong (2002) believes that while Li and Falun Gong headquarters and local stations appear to enjoy ample financial resources, CCP charges of extravagance are greatly overblown.

Li changed his birthday from July 7, 1952 to May 13, 1951. He explains that the government recorded his birthday wrong during the Cultural Revolution and he simply changed it back to the right date. This does not solve the question, of course; however, without proper birth certification system, misreporting or misrecording of birthdays was not uncommon in China. From the literature and news coverage I have encountered, neither the Chinese government nor Li himself cites Li's family, close neighbors, or friends to verify his birthday.

Li denies the charge, claiming that his stay in China was just en route to Australia and he neither knew about nor planned the sit-in.

Powers and Lee (2002: 269) argue that particularly memorable formulas repeated over and over (such as ‘inciting and creating disturbances’) serve as guides for popular thought that already contain an ideological judgment.

Based on information on Falun Gong websites and interviews with Falun Gong practitioners, Tong (2002) points out that at the time of its suppression in July 1999, Falun Gong claimed that they had no national organizational structure, address, authority arrangement, stated organizational goals, regulations or by-laws. It insists that there was no initiating ceremony to join the group; its practitioners were free to come and go, were not bound by any obligations and duties and were not listed on any Falun Gong rosters.

Abraham Halpern, a former civil rights activist and professor emeritus of psychiatry at New York Medical College, contests such reports in an interview with journalist Danny Schechter (2000: 63): ‘The Chinese government needs to hospitalize, wrongfully, non-mentally ill dissidents because this will help them in their effort to paint the Falun Gong practitioners as not being against government policy, but as being mentally ill. So even if they were to hospitalize a small number, word would soon spread that Falun Gong practitioners are crazy’.

Xinhua reported that up to July 28, 1999, 743 people had died as a result of practicing Falun Gong. In late October of the same year, Chinese president Jiang Zemin told a French newspaper, La Figaro, that the number had exceeded 1,400 (‘Jiang comments’, October 25, 1999). Such reports present an irony. Perry (2001) argues that the harm Falun Gong brings through suicide, starvation, and mental illness can hardly compare to the devastation of land reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and even the 1989 June Fourth massacre mobilized by the Chinese government itself.

Schechter (2001) argues that despite the fact that Falun Gong is different in various aspects from the ‘cults’ the government identifies (i.e. neither possessing weapons nor victimizing innocents), the CCP and Chinese media wrongfully associate Falun Gong with these groups. He claims that the purpose of such ‘misleading parallels’ is to ‘stigmatize’ Falun Gong and to justify the crackdown against the group.

Unlike other organizations that voiced their support for the government immediately after the ban, the attitude of religious organizations in China was not reported until August 2 (‘Chinese religious’, August 2, 1999; ‘Tibetan living’, August 2, 1999). The reason for this was not clear from Xinhua articles or any literature that I have found to this point. I am interested in knowing whether there were negotiations between the government and religious groups during this time. The fact that all five officially recognized religions in China agreed to voice support together for the government's suppression of Falun Gong points to the relationship between the church and the state in China. As mentioned earlier, although the Chinese constitution protects religious freedom, the government tightly controls religious groups and requires religious doctrines to be in harmony with Communist ideology. It is thus not very surprising that the government eventually gained support from the lawful religious groups. Moreover, as also indicated earlier, the spiritual vacuum resulting from people increasingly ignoring political ideology and from economic reform has created a religious boom in China. As religious organizations view China a field ready to harvest, competition among religious denominations for believers is probably unavoidable. The dramatic growth of Falun Gong might have aroused some jealousy from other religious groups. Therefore, it is possible that the five religions came together to condemn the ‘heretical’ Falun Gong as contrasting with the ‘orthodoxy’ they themselves espouse.

By September 2001, the death toll of practitioners under police custody, according to Schechter (2001), had reached 270.

Just as the government and state-owned media allegations against Falun Gong were not verified by an independent third party, Falun Gong's claims also beg for closer scrutiny.

D'Angelo (2002) points out that each of the processes has its own merit and is worthy of independent research.