Falun Gong Outside Mainland China - Demographics

Demographics

Falun Gong is believed to be practiced by hundreds of thousands of people outside China, with the largest communities found in Taiwan and in North American cities with large Chinese populations, such as New York and Toronto. Demographic surveys by sociologist Susan Palmer and David Ownby in North American communities found that 90% of practitioners were ethnic Chinese (in Europe, there are proportionally more Caucasians). The average age was approximately 42. Among survey respondents, 56% were female and 44% male; 80% were married. The surveys found the respondents to be highly educated: 9% held PhDs, 34% had Masters degrees, and 24% had a bachelors degree.

Most of the Falun Gong practitioners in North America were among the Chinese students who emigrated in the 1980s and 1990s. In Craig Burgdoff's ethnographic research of Ohio practitioners, he found that 85-90% were Chinese graduate students or their family members. Similar results for North American practitioners were borne out by Scott Lowe, a professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In a 2003 Internet survey, Lowe found that the Chinese respondents living in Western nations were "uniformly well educated, clearly representing the expatriate elite", with all respondents holding a masters degree or higher. Respondents from Singapore and Malaysia had a more mixed educational profile, with a minority holding university degrees.

The preponderance of North American adherents learned Falun Gong after leaving China. Ownby says evidence suggests that Falun Gong appealed to a broad spectrum of social groups, "including university professors and students, high party and government officials, well-educated cadres and members of the comfortable middle class, and the old, the infirm, the unemployed, and the desperate." In contrast to the typical Mainland Chinese practitioner, who is likely to be a female retiree, Ownby's survey at practitioners' conferences in Montreal, Toronto, and Boston between 1999 and 2002 found the average Chinese practitioner in North America to be "young, urban, dynamic". Non-Chinese adherents of Falun Gong tend to fit the profile of non-conformists and "spiritual seekers" — people who had tried a variety of qigong, yoga, or religious practices before finding Falun Gong. This stands in contrast to the standard profile of Chinese, whom Ownby described as "the straightest of straight arrows".