Falun Gong Outside Mainland China - International Reception and Response

International Reception and Response

Western governments and human rights organizations have expressed condemnation for the suppression in China and sympathized with Falun Gong's plight. Since 1999, members of the United States Congress have made public pronouncements and introduced several resolutions in support of Falun Gong. In 2010, House Resolution 605 described Falun Gong as a set of "spiritual, religious, and moral teachings for daily life, meditation, and exercise, based upon the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance," called for "an immediate end to the campaign to persecute, intimidate, imprison, and torture Falun Gong practitioners," condemned the Chinese authorities' efforts to distribute "false propaganda" about the practice worldwide, and expressed sympathy to persecuted Falun Gong practitioners and their families.

United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Torture, Extrajudicial executions, Violence against Women and Freedom of Religion or Belief have issued numerous reports condemning the persecution of Falun Gong in China, and relayed hundreds of cases of concern to Chinese authorities. In 2003, for instance, The Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings wrote that reports from China "describe harrowing scenes in which detainees, many of whom are followers of the Falun Gong movement, die as a result of severe ill-treatment, neglect or medical attention. The cruelty and brutality of these alleged acts of torture defy description." In 2010, the special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief condemned the defamation against minority religious groups, singling out the governments of Iran and China for their treatment of the Bahá'í Faith and Falun Gong, respectively. "Small communities, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Baha'is, Ahmadis, Falun Gong and others are sometimes stigmatized as 'cults' and frequently meet with societal prejudices which may escalate into fully fledged conspiracy theories," said the rapporteur at the UN general assembly.

Although the suppression of Falun Gong has drawn considerable condemnation outside China, some observers note that Falun Gong has failed to attract the level of sympathy and sustained attention afforded to other Chinese dissident groups, such as Tibetans, democracy activists or house Christians.

From 1999–2001, Western media reports on Falun Gong—and in particular, the mistreatment of practitioners—were frequent, if mixed. By the latter half of 2001, however, the volume of media reports declined precipitously, and by 2002, coverage of Falun Gong by major news organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post had almost completely ceased, particularly from within China. In a study of media discourse on Falun Gong, researcher Leeshai Lemish found that Western news organizations also became less balanced, and more likely to uncritically present the narratives of the Communist Party, rather than those of Falun Gong or human rights groups.

Adam Frank writes that foreign media adopted a variety of frames in reporting on Falun Gong, including linking Falun Gong to historical antecedents in China, reporting on human rights violations against the group, and practice-based reporting on the experience of Falun Gong. Ultimately, Frank writes that in reporting on the Falun Gong, the Western tradition of casting the Chinese as "exotic" took dominance, and that "the facts were generally correct, but the normalcy that millions of Chinese practitioners associated with the practice had all but disappeared." David Ownby observes that sympathy for Falun Gong is further undermined by the impact of the "cult" label applied to the practice by the Chinese authorities, which never entirely went away in the minds of some Westerners, and the stigma of which still plays a role in wary public perceptions of Falun Gong.

Ethan Gutmann, a journalist reporting on China since the early 1990s, has attempted to explain the apparent dearth of public sympathy for Falun Gong as stemming, in part, from the group's shortcomings in public relations. Unlike the democracy activists or Tibetans, who have found a comfortable place in Western perceptions, "Falun Gong marched to a distinctly Chinese drum," Gutmann writes. Moreover, practitioners' attempts at getting their message across carried some of the uncouthness of Communist party culture, including a perception that practitioners tended to exaggerate, create "torture tableaux straight out of a Cultural Revolution opera," or "spout slogans rather than facts." This is coupled with a general doubtfulness in the West of persecuted refugees.

Gutmann observes that Falun Gong also lacks robust backing from the American constituencies that usually support religious freedom: liberals are wary of Falun Gong's conservative teachings (such as its views on homosexuality and promiscuity as immoral), while Christian conservatives don't accord the practice the same space as persecuted Christians. The American political center does not want to push the human rights issue so hard that it would disrupt commercial and political engagement with China. Thus, Falun Gong practitioners have largely had to rely on their own resources in responding to suppression.