Was Falun Gong in the 90's in China bad enough to be banned, but that has changed today / outside China?

[cirosantilli]

https://twitter.com/chenyangtc/status/618468379486220288

[GilbertGeliba]

Hi, I just noticed you from Stack Overflow. I really appreciate your concern of freedom of speech, human rights in China. Talking about Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi(李洪志), founder of Falun Gong, is really a scammer. Here is one of his earlier video that, in this video, he was telling a story about he cured a man with kyphosis just by patting his back. There are more about his scams on YouTube. Chinese people were very lack of common sense back in 90's. Falun Gong was one of many Qigong exercises. But Li exaggerated its effect on health, he even claimed that people didn't have to go to hospital when they were ill. Qigong practice was so popular in the years, and it seemed that Falun Gong was the best. More and more people started practicing Falun Gong. Li was getting rich. And it all started with an incident. A scholar of Tianjin university published an article. In the article, he discouraged youth from practicing Falun Gong. This hurt many Falun Gong practitioner's hearts. They gathered at the university and wanted the scholar to reclaim the article, but the result was not satisfied. So thousands of practitioner gathered at Zhong Nan Hai(中南海) . Zhong Nan Hai is like the head quarter in China. For the Chinese dictatorship government, this was getting too political. And since the Tienanmen incident, Chinese government has been very sensitive about such event. I think you would already know what happened next. I can't tell that was Falun Gong political in 90's, but for sure that Falun Gong is political now. I think it is an anti-Chinese-communist-party organization. It claims itself a religion of blablabla (see wikipidia). That is just its mask. I am not saying Chinese communist party is good, but for the moment, myself as a Chinese, I am really linked tightly with the party. Anything going wrong with the party would influence China and her people and it is the fact. I think many of the western people would say dictatorship is bad and evil, however, to me and more people should realize, that it is like an algorithm that is currently the most suitable for China.

[cirosantilli]

Thanks for dropping in!

I agree with almost everything that you said. FLG is likely a "scam" like all religions, and has political power like all religions.

And to me, like most religions, the cost of trying to suppress is is larger than that of letting it be (of course, no one can decide this for sure).

If dictatorship is good or bad for China now, that no one can answer.

Other interesting questions are: can the dictatorship coexist with freedom of speech, and provide better human rights, which are things which some Chinese want?

[GilbertGeliba]

@cirosantilli I don't know if you would be surprised that movies like "Dictatorship", "Interview" are not actually banned in China. I laughed my ass off by watching them. And I guess that is the typical dictatorship that western people have in their minds. According to Wikipedia, Dictatorship is a form of government where political authority is monopolized by a person or political entity. So for China, it is clearly that CCP is the political entity that monopolizing political authority. Look into the party, they elect the president out of the party's members. See, it is not that dictatorship, isn't it? However, it is still a game of few's. Westerns have a long history of democracy. It is in their blood for thousands of years. They are good at it. Even democracy has different forms such as Presidential system, Parliamentary system. So, I think it is only matter of suitability, there is no bad or good between dictatorship and democracy. For example, I think democracy is not working very well for India. What really matters is the economy. If dictatorship is such a bad thing, why America supports such countries. Only if China's economy power has grown to certain level, all these will not be problem any more. And actually, freedom of speech is like a big circle to me, Chinese people do have freedom of speech. Maybe the circle is smaller that what you have in countries like American, France. But it is continuously expanding. The same applies to human rights. Maybe I am brainwashed and I don't realize it, but people believe they want to believe you know.The coexisting is definitely possible for me. Sorry for my poor English.

[cirosantilli]

@GilbertGeliba your English is not poor.

If dictatorship is better for China or any other country not is impossible to decide because it is too broad a question. No one knows and we just argue on gut feeling.

I prefer to focus on more specific questions like freedom of speech and human rights.

I do hope that you are right and that they are improving.

Even measuring their improvement is hard, but it would be cool to have statistics on metrics about those points. Let me know if you find any.

[GilbertGeliba]

@cirosantilli Thanks.

If dictatorship is better for China or any other country not is impossible to decide because it is too broad a question.

Let's be realistic, China is already a dictatorship country. For the moment, it's not about deciding which one, democracy or dictatorship, works better for China. China or any other country in the world is like a sophisticated system.Even the word dictatorship(or democracy) is too simple for describing such complex system. Take a look at Singapore, there is only one party has political authority, which is The People's Action Party. However the president is elected by the people. So what would you call Singapore, democracy or dictatorship? Let's back to China, there is a group of people called 人大代表(means representative of the people) who are elected by the people to represent their interest and will. These representatives are responsible for electing the China's president. See, isn't it democratic? I know the election is not how it appears superficially, and every presidential election is a political show. I always stay optimistic about China. At least there IS a seemingly democratic system in China. In the lowest level regions of China, village headman is 100% elected directly by the people of the village. It means exercising of democracy is taken place in China, although it is still experimental and in lowest level of the government. When talking about democracy in China, I consider my self a realist. No sudden changes, just gradually and slowly, step by steps.

I prefer to focus on more specific questions like freedom of speech and human rights.

I admit that, currently, China no doubt has problems with freedom and rights. But, is it really that serious? I feel like China has been the central of human rights and freedom issues. Consequently, every(or mostly) human rights violation happened in China is likely because it is in China. Under the pressure, CCP drew a line between defense of human rights and politics. On the right side, you can defend your rights by seeking legal help, but if you cross the line, which some human rights activists prefer to do, seeking help from foreign organization such as American embassy(There are some immigrated to America for protection, it is like a trend in past decades), then you are becoming political and considered as threatening national security. I don't deny that keep your position on the right side of the line is not always the best choice because of probably corruption and inefficiency of government, but I don't really sympathize the people who crossed the line. Not surprisingly, many anti-CCP organization is founded by those Chinese people, like FLG.
I read the tweet, and I'm sorry about what happened to your mother-in-law. If the same happened to my family, I would really upset and angry as well. Many Chinese are intolerant and not civilized, even worse, lack of legal consciousness. Some of them consider themselves as defenders of morality and ethics, and they are proud of it. Sometime, they take anything to defend morality, thinking they have rights to do so and are doing the right thing. So something like brutally beat up a thief to death would happen in China, and it did happen several times. Inefficiency of governmental administration is also a big problem in China. Sometimes people could feel helpless and look for a way-out which I mentioned earlier. All these together caused your family's misfortune.
Sorry, this might be going a wrong direction from what you want to focus on. Can you be more specific about "more specific questions like freedom of speech and human rights" ?

Even measuring their improvement is hard, but it would be cool to have statistics on metrics about those points. Let me know if you find any.

There ARE statistics, here. You will notice that score of press freedom(smaller the better) has been decreasing from 97 in 2002 to 72.91 in 2014. I don't buy the rankings, it is relative and the ranking was 138 when the score is 97 which is much higher than the score in 2014. Here is another interesting web site http://reliefweb.int/. And here , quoting "Discriminatory and abusive working conditions for many migrant workers have severely impacted the score for Qatar (98th overall). This future site of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, fell from 63rd in 2012 to 32nd 2014 in the Working Conditions Index – one of Maplecroft’s 31 human rights risk indices. Notable exceptions to these trends include China (15th overall) and Thailand (48th overall), both of which have improved their rankings in this index from most at risk in 2008 to 37th in 2014 and from 40th to 77th respectively, due to government efforts to improve protections for workers’ rights. Maplecroft forecasts the reform process in China will result in continued improvements of labour protections and labour stability, unlike competitor sourcing destinations such as Vietnam and Bangladesh." .

This is as far I found from the Internet, actually, I didn't really give too much effort. There should be more, and from different respective and conclusion either positive or negative. But I will keep staying positive about the situation. I wrote too long I guess, Thanks for your patient.