Pagoda of Light: A Falun Gong Story from Today's China.

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Ten years after the Chinese government began jailing Falun Gong practitioners—a practice many observers argue has resulted in tens of thousands of imprisonments and several thousand deaths—human rights advocates have turned their attention elsewhere.

Beijing’s hard-line approach to the mystical Buddhist sect crushed its leadership, thinned its membership, and persuaded most Chinese that the Falun Gong was a subversive populist organization. During 2008 alone, nearly 9,000 practitioners were arrested, and as many as 100 died in custody. Others received lengthy prison sentences. The sustained campaign against the group shows how tenaciously Falun Gong believers hold to their faith, as well as revealing how an authoritarian state with overwhelming control responds to internal threats.

From its creation in the early 1990s, Falun Gong claimed millions of followers across China and argued its goal was not political influence but simply legal recognition—and protection. What frightened Party leaders was not the group’s qigong-like exercises and popular Buddhist teachings, but its obvious appeal that cut across age, income, and education groups. What forced Beijing to ban the group was the April 1999 demonstration by Falun Gong members in that city. There, nearly 10,000 practitioners organized a silent protest at Zhongnanhai, the Party’s leadership compound, to protest what Falun Gong practitioners considered lies about the group printed in State-run newspapers. The scale and cohesion of the protest convinced Beijing that Falun Gong threatened China’s national security.

Long Tu and Yuan Meng, both Canadian-based Falun Gong practitioners, show how this persecution impacted the Bai family in Pagoda of Light. The Bai brothers—Xiaojun, who died in custody, and Shaohua who is still persecuted—joined the group in the early 1990s and participated in its growth and popularity up to the Zhongnanhai demonstration in 1999. Long and Yuan’s narrative, based on reports and recollections from the Bai brothers and their family and friends is, by turns, over-dramatic and repetitive. Unlike the large emerging literature of Cultural Revolution memoirs whose authors juxtapose national policy and local implementation, Long and Yuan offer little to explain why Beijing regards the Falun Gong as toxic.