February 19, 2021 • 65 mins
The movement known as Falun Dafa or Falun Gong began in China in the 1990s, and today people across the planet consider themselves practitioners. Adherents claim this combination of meditation, breathing exercises, mindfulness and moral philosophy is a path to enlightenment -- but the government of China disagrees. For decades Chinese authorities have considered Falun Gong a dangerous, subversive element. Since 1999 the government has made concerted efforts to suppress this spiritual practice -- but why? Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Brady. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is Nold. Nick called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul mission controlled decans. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. We started a weird but very human
direction here. Who hasn't amongst us in the audience today
(00:48):
felt lost at one point or another. Think about it,
washing the dishes, you're working, maybe on a repetitive job,
or you're stuck in traffic, heard the same song three times,
You're walking up the street, the same path you always taken.
It hits you all the suddenly. What does it all mean?
Why are we even here? What's the point? Is existence?
Just like a check mark participation grade? All of those? Okay, great,
(01:15):
me too? Bleak? Oh no, you haven't hit that yet?
Oh god, yes, are you kidding me? I think I
use my GPS when I go down the street to
the store. I mean, okay, that's a different kind of lass,
but absolutely, of course, I think we've all been there,
and this existential crisis is one of the great unifiers,
I would argue of the human species. It draws a
(01:38):
lot of people to structure belief systems, religions of any time,
humanitarian work, you know, secular stuff too, even self improvement
on a small scale, like hey, I'm gonna exercise more,
I'm gonna take up meditation, I might get a new hobby. Heck,
I'll take that improv class. These are all answers to,
you know, the scary questions of more reality and meaning.
(02:01):
And there is no shortage of individuals or organizations that
are more than willing to give the lost and the
troubled a feeling of serenity, fulfillment, and purpose. This brings
us to today's episode, the winding mysterious and at times
troubling story of something known as the Following Gong In English,
(02:22):
this literal translation would be something like law wheel practice.
But but it's a tricky thing to translate into English,
So for now we're just gonna say following Gong, So
breathe deep. Here are the facts. So Following Gong is
also known as following data, and if you look at
some of the official websites you will see following data
(02:43):
a lot. It describes itself as a spiritual practice as
many has been just described earlier. It's rooted in Buddhist tradition,
and it consists of two primary components that feel pretty good.
The first one is self improvement through the study of teachings,
(03:04):
and like many organizations, UH, Fallen Gong or Fallendofa has
its own set of books and writings and teachings, and
these are mainly about the qualities of the universe, the
underlying stuff, the stuff that is that makes up existence,
you and me, in the connection to everything, Truth, compassion,
(03:25):
and forbearance. If you go on their website, it says
very specifically truth, compassion, forbearance. The second component is going
to be pretty uh, I would say pretty familiar to
a lot of us, and that is gentle exercise and meditation.
By gentle exercise we mean what is sometimes called low
(03:46):
impact exercise. So this is not cross fit push yourself
past your limits stuff. This is this is stretchy, this
is slow, This is meditative. Uh. This is not meant
to break your bones. According to all the sources, you
can look at, including official Following Gong sources. It was
developed by a guy named Lie Hong Shi Uh. He
(04:10):
says that he was the recipient of teachings from more
than twenty masters, Buddhism and Chee Gong, from which Following
Gong is descended. Uh he tested this. According to him,
he tested this practice this system out with several followers
(04:30):
a K disciples first and then eventually brought it public
in May of two. So this is already we know.
This is a very new religion, even if the claims
about its ancient roots are true. Uh, Chee Gong is.
We we talked about this earlier, I think in an
episode called what is Cheap? But Chee Gong Is is
(04:53):
primarily composed of these frankly amazing breathing exercises. But but
Lee added something else to the mix. He added stories
in here, accounts, anecdotes, a world full of fantastical things,
and a world with hints of a forthcoming apocalypse, and
(05:16):
his books became best sellers. I don't want to I
don't want to poison the well here, but some of
this path has you know, not for nothing have outside
observers said this bears some similarities with other leaders of
movements like l Ron Hubbard, who also also wrote extensively.
(05:37):
But this was accepted by the government of China. It
was accepted by the Chee Gong bodies, right, because there
are many Cheegong movements, so the Chinese National Chee Gong
Scientific Research Association in that same time period of nineteen two,
they also said, Okay, yeah, we dig it. Following all
(06:00):
you know what I mean, full speed ahead, Ben, Ben,
Can we just really quickly hit on those two books? Yeah, totally. Uh.
The first two were Schwan Falon and Falon Gong. Uh.
These are kind of primers to the philosophy. Here is
what we're doing based on what I learned. Here is
(06:20):
the goal of what we're doing, you know what I mean?
Filled with again, filled with stories that did not ordinarily
occur in previous previous traditions of this sort. Oh yeah,
and I just want to go back to your l
Ron Hubbard comparison here. It's interesting because in in l
Aron's writings, he kind of held off on the aliens
(06:43):
and the stuff that went beyond some of the self.
Heally that when you paid your way in far enough, Yeah.
But but in these books it's just right there in
front of you as soon as you start getting into
the materials. I'm just I found to be interesting. Yeah, yeah,
there's I guess you would say a little more transparency
(07:05):
in that regard. But whatever you feel about those things,
we want to be very clear here, we ourselves are
not following going practitioners. Uh, although I think all of
us have done things like meditation and mindful breathing in yoga. Uh.
This this is a different thing. And no matter how
you feel about the claims that Lee makes, no matter
(07:28):
how you feel about the practices of the organization, in
terms of that exercise and philosophy, there's no arguing this.
Those books were instant bestsellers, and people across the country
of China loved this idea, loved this concept, and Lee
started making public demonstrations of his um of his perceived abilities,
(07:51):
which also ties in a little bit to our episodes
on faith healing and laying on of hands. Okay, so
back to the timeline. In December, Lee Hans did his
very first public demonstration of his abilities UH at Oriental
Health Expo in Beijing. Apparently, he caused a paralyzed and
(08:12):
wheelchair bound man to walk, destroyed gall and kidney stones
within another individual, and cured difficult quote difficult and complex
illnesses of all kinds. So needless just say he made
quite a splash. And the director of the fair declared,
it's like you you won the fair. Uh declared that
Fallon Gong was the star cultivation system. Wow, what does
(08:37):
that even mean? Like cultivating like the stars from the
unit from the Galaxy. I took it as a best
in show, best in show, but still that's I love
the turn of phrase. Let's leave it there. And to me,
it really is like you're, you know, the brightest shining
boy in the room. Well, as Ben said, they're the
laying on of hands episode that we did. I think
(08:58):
everyone can hear the similarities there. And you know we
we weren't there in nineteen ninety two. We can't tell
you exactly what happened, you know, or if if there
were any plants in the audience, But if those things
were true, they would be miracles. Well I was you know,
(09:19):
you guys know my schedule. I was busy. I didn't
get over there, but I heard good things. Yeah, I
was I was nine, I think, and uh doing something
with a Nintendo pretty sure. I don't think I should
say where I was. In December of at this at Xpo,
(09:39):
uh Lee was given to awards and this is, you know,
the second iteration of his appearance there. He got the
award for Advancing Boundary Science and the Chee Goong Master
most Acclaimed by the masses. So that's like the no,
and I am not just missing this at all, just
for uh an analog or in comparison, this is a
(10:02):
lot like saying, uh, you got the Audience Appreciation Award. Yes,
you know what I mean. People like you the most.
So he started giving classes all over the country in
the ways of this philosophy throughout the early to mid nineties,
and for a while, as we mentioned, this enjoyed a
(10:23):
great deal of domestic fame as well as what appeared
to be somewhere between the open support of the Chinese
government to the tacit support to with the very least
toleration of it. Right, like, they're not hurting anyone, they're
not violating our our unwritten law, don't mess with the money.
(10:46):
Let him go stretch in the park exactly, And in
a way it's kind of a nice little cultural at
least information export right, it's an interesting thing. It's a
it's a cool little piece that we can share and wow,
we've got this. Uh, I don't know. I want to
say miracle worker, but who We've got someone with essentially
(11:07):
supernatural powers, fit practices in China, cool, enjoy, be healthy? Okay? Yeah, uh,
this goes this goes international soon after. Like when you
think about the spread of this movement, you have to
see it's it's impressive. You know a few decades later
(11:28):
people would call this kind of growth viral instead of exponential. Uh. Yeah.
By nineteen or so, Leah spreading his message past the
borders of China. He's lecturing in Paris and Stockholm. He's
lecturing in Sydney, in Houston, Texas, which seemed a weird draw.
(11:48):
But these are the facts, and New York City in
But while he's out speaking abroad and spending less and
less time in China, Uh, things aren't going so well
on the home front, are they. No, the tide was
turning inside of China while he was gone, because the
(12:11):
organization fell in Gong left. The one that had it
had originally joined the Key Goong Scientific Research Association, which
you know could or could not be a big deal.
But it does mean they're going independent, right, means they're
they're gaining power in some way. And the Chinese government
started to see them as essentially a threat. And it's
(12:34):
really because they were growing so exponentially and so quickly,
and the some of the spiritual beliefs, the religious teachings
that were in those books, they were going a little
bit against what would be considered traditional or at least
the party line of what the party wanted its citizens
to be thinking about believing in. And ultimately they feared
(12:58):
that this thing would grow so big it would be
a threat because it was independent of a lot of
those internal institutions. Yeah, and you know this doesn't come
from nowhere are necessarily uninformed paranoia. There is a long
history in this area of the world, going back to
the dynasty days in China, of the governing bodies having
(13:20):
to actively and aggressively work against the possibility of domestic
descent the in a way. In a way, the government
at the time was reacting to what they saw the
precedent as the precedent set by earlier domestic unrest. What
is it you think about this religion and this movement
that caused it to catch on so much. It's just
(13:41):
very appealing. I think if you look on the face
of it, it's extremely appealing. You don't have to work
too hard. It's mostly meditative, and it seems to have
a kindness on the front. And we're gonna talk a
little bit more about some of the ways, some of
the ways the ideas are spread and why they seem,
(14:01):
especially when you bring in the persecution angle that we're
going to get to, why it seems like something you'd
want to join to fight for. And the majority of
from what we understand, the majority of Following Going members
are recruited by members of their biological families. So there
is a furthering and a deepening of the sense of
community in in this endeavor, and community, from what I understand,
(14:26):
is the thing that people like. It's true, people dig it.
So as as you said, the tides turning, the tides
turning against the practitioners of Following Gong because it's seen
as a threat to the status quo. We know that
(14:46):
sometime in this somewhere in this time period, UH members
of Following Gong started becoming active online. There were early
adopters of the Internet, but it's difficult to know exactly what.
And this occurred because like the ratars in Neil Stevenson's
and athem, they spend a lot of time changing the
(15:08):
past or they A more diplomatic way would be to say,
and I mean both the Chinese government and some factions
of following Going they carefully edit and curate old material
from their websites, so it's tough to know some of
the specifics of timelines here. But they didn't take this
line down. They got mad, and the practitioners started protesting
(15:33):
outside of various media outlets in China that they if
they felt those outlets were misrepresenting the goals of following
Gong and the lives and aims of the practitioners. Basically say,
you know, stop being evil. That's it that that's not
like on the face of it, that's that's a cool thing.
(15:55):
Not to be be evil. Google once did that, um
and longer does I remember those days. It's no longer
their motto, right, But also, don't be evil's way different
from be good? Very we thought that was a weird one.
Was it like sort of like a guiding principle, sort
of a reminder to themselves to like, do a good
(16:15):
job with the power that you've been you've given yourselves.
That's a weird one. I always thought that was very strange.
So this is we've led it up to, right, that's
when they're doing the protesting. Then the next year, as
pressure is mounting from the party within China, Lee he
(16:35):
ends up getting out of China. And where does he head?
New York City? Okay, yeah, because it wasn't he wasn't.
It wasn't he beginning to be branded as a dissident already. Yeah?
Uh yeah, I was. He gonna says, you know, just
picture Lee somewhere. He's been to New York before at
(16:56):
this point, and he says, hey kid, you can make
it here, you can bake it anywhere. And then he
has that whole sitcom moment. Uh yeah, he does. He
does go to New York. You know, something's in the wind,
I would imagine. And let's pause here. We've got one.
We're waiting for the other shoe to drop. So let's
(17:16):
let's hear from our sponsors who may not be fell
Hong Kong today. Um, maybe we don't know it's it's
probably not Fellong, but it is. Uh. Spoilers we'll be
back to watch the hammer fall. Fast forward. There is
(17:42):
a massive protest against the government of China on the
part of the Bottom Kong. Shortly after that protest, the
PRC begins a nationwide crackdown and they go ham there's
this huge propaganda push. They're a is to eradicate the
following Gong. How serious are they about this? Well, they
(18:05):
make a new security agency whose entire job is to
eliminate Following Gong. It's called the six ten Office started
in June of uh to to describe some of the
stuff that the government was doing against this organization, they
like they were bulldozing educational tapes, you know what I mean.
(18:29):
They were pulling all this stuff they could off the
internet if possible. Uh. They were publicly denouncing any members
if it got to the point where like, depending on
your job, it might be dangerous for your first year
employment status to UH to be a member of Folloon Gong,
and then soon after it may be dangerous for your
(18:51):
personal freedom. They also blocked, Oh, they didn't just block
following going websites, they blocked websites from other places. And
there were a few other countries that mentioned Foulongong. They're like, sorry,
I know your blog is mainly about your backpacking travels
through Southeast Asia, but you mentioned the wrong organization. So
(19:12):
now your whole website is shut down from one point
three billion people. Wow. So imagine you started an exercise
group and the next thing you know, you're in a
full on information war with one of the world's most
powerful countries, a country that's also becoming one of the
world's leaders in this kind of asymmetrical warfare gets David
(19:33):
and Goliath pretty quickly. If the story so far is true,
and this is a good time to bring this up.
Maybe been in our research for this episode. Uh, and
then you pointed this out and I also noticed it,
and I'm no, I'm sure you did too. Really, what
you find on the internet, save for a few mostly
objective writers, is information that is extremely profile Andong or
(19:57):
extremely anti Folagong. Right. Well, even the American media for
quite some time was very pro Folloonong, it would seem,
because they sort of acted as this like buffer against
like the you know, the distrustfulness that is pretty common
around like Chinese information control, and they sort of represented
(20:17):
almost this like you know, example of the heavy handedness
of the Chinese government. In fact, there's an interview with
the founder of Follongong in Time magazine. In so I mean,
in general, the American press was pretty pretty kind to
them as an organization. The US would enter this information
war later for motivations of its own. I suspect motivations
(20:40):
of its own, but maybe it's being a jerk. So
back in same year as that Time interview, following Gong
becomes illegal in China. However, the horse of dissidents has
left the proverbial bar. The followers are widespread and another
a thing that maybe the PRC didn't count on. These
(21:02):
followers are tremendously media savvy. Remember I said they were
earlier adopters of things like the Internet and emergent technology.
So in the years since being declared quote heretical organization
that threatens social stability, they have dispatched thousands upon thousands
of press releases, these staged live events and protests, things
(21:27):
that are purposefully and beautifully designed to gather headlines to
get international eyes on the story. UH. They've also kept
a very strong Internet presence. You can check out some
of their official UH official territories online now UH They
also became increasingly litigious, and they would slap people with
(21:50):
a defamation lawsuit if they published something saying um, saying
stuff that to us might even seem monocuous. You know,
there was still there was still try to bring the
hammer down the way that the Chinese government was bringing
the hammer down on them. And like we like we
alluded to just a few minutes ago, Following Gong adherents
(22:12):
for a very long time, we're treated um in an
extraordinarily kind way by the Western press. They love this
David and Goliath story. They also sometimes supported the groups
religious or political agendas. As you can imagine, Following Gong
becomes very strongly anti Chinese government. And when it broke
(22:35):
in the West, when the US and the in Europe
started entering this, you would see a lot of reports
from politicians and journalists who are ridiculing the Chinese government
and they were saying, Wow, these communists leaders are so
paranoid a k A. They know their ideas are so
bad that they're going to treat this group of quote
(22:57):
exercising Granny's like counter arrist And they all had a
good laugh about that right in the in the news
cycle of the time, and they got some facts wrong
while they were doing it. They got like they got
one big fact very much wrong. That's right. Um. Western
sources originally had claimed that the PRC was reacting to
(23:19):
popularity alone. UH. They argued that the Communist Party had
sixty seventy million members, but Fellonong had a hundred million
UH and this did not seem to be the case.
Multiple scholars agreed that the Fellonong only had about two
to ten million practitioners at that time. Also, why weren't
other Remember this is all a product of a larger movement,
(23:42):
the Key Goong movement. Why weren't other practitioners of of
those UH techniques band right? There? Again, there are multiple
There are multiple groups that are that are descended from
this ancient tradition of mindfulness and exercise and metatation. And
they seem to be just fine. Nothing wrong with those folks. Sadly,
(24:06):
as any long time listener this show knows, it is
the opposite of unusual for world governments to repress movements
they see is dangerous to the status quo at so
many levels. There there there there's an abundance, a plethora
using the work correctly of ridiculous examples of this. But
if you, if you dive into this, upon closer examination,
(24:28):
we see the Fune Gong looks a lot different from
the casual Chi Gong group or even like a cross
fit club. And while we were prepping for this, folks,
it became increasingly difficult for us not to continually ask
ourselves about cross fit, which got out of hand for
(24:48):
a second. There, I think we can agree cross we
got a little out of hand. Yeah, oh it did.
And I for one promise that I will hunt down
the cross fit demons and aliens that exist in the
originating book somewhere that I've just never seen more writ Yeah.
I did cross fit for a little while years ago.
I had like a like a trainer situation. I can
tell you from firsthand experience, the demons and aliens live
(25:11):
in those T ninety X stretchy bands. That's where that's where,
that's where that comes from. Nine Glemado, clamado. But it
was they do sneak the Christian stuff in very subtly,
right when you're getting the most swollen, and then all
of a sudden they sort of whisper some scripture in
(25:31):
wait wait, wait, wait, wait, maybe I just have no idea.
Is CrossFit like a religious organization or are? Yeah? Maybe
it depends on the trainer too. I've always heard that
cross Fit has sort of some kind of religious undertones.
I was being completely I was joking about hunting that down,
(25:54):
but now I'm serious. Maybe I'm overthinking it too. There
are definitely Christian us fits uh organizations, and like, here's
an article here how turning cross Fit into a religion
made its atheist founder Greg Glassman rich. Oh interesting, Okay,
huh So cross Fit itself is the religion not necessarily
(26:15):
a front for religion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we
go back to che Gong and following Gong, what we
see is that it isn't the same in many, many,
many ways. And this is something that practitioners a following
Gong would agree with. There is a web of conspiracy here.
(26:35):
It's tough to suss out the strings of truth right
in this morass. Uh. There are allegations of everything from
Oregon harvesting to colts to even front groups for intelligence agencies.
So let's dive in deep breath. Here's where it gets crazy. Yeah.
(26:56):
China's state run media outlet Shenha had a completely different
take on why Folon Goong was being banned. They claimed
that the West was attempting to make China look bad.
They believed and argued accordingly, that the Chinese government banned
Follonong because Lee had broken numerous laws, was responsible for
(27:18):
over a thousand deaths, mainly from essentially coercing members into
committing suicide or by not seeking medical treatment, which is
a part of this whole you know, belief system that
we'll get into, was threatening public safety. Um. And because
members had infiltrated the Communist Party in order to overthrow
the government. Uh, that's a lot and it sounds, you know,
(27:42):
like the kind of high level conspiracies. That's like we
live for things like operations snow White. Uh sounds a
lot less like you know, just doing uh tai chi
in the park on a Sunday afternoon. Right, And and
anyone listening may remember operations Snow White wherein the Church
of Scientology or members a few members of the Church
(28:04):
of Scientology attempted some infiltration. All right, So now I
can feel the shadow of our legal team. Okay, so
let me look, how did it's very careful with the
writing on that one The official position of the Church
of Scientology is that Operations Snow White was not sanctioned
(28:26):
by their organization as a way to massively infiltrate the
I R S and then blackmail the government in a
crazy financial scheme. Several people disagree with that official position,
including the U S. Supreme Court. That right, like, that's
what we could say. We said that earlier. Right, there
(28:49):
are people who disagree. Uh so we have Mike Renderon.
I mean, our ship is sailed in that regard. But
but there is one thing, you know that that they said,
it's really interesting here and all the idea of infiltration
of the government that was true. The Chinese government was
telling the truth about this when following Gong was all
(29:13):
up in the state's military and the security apparatus and
the media educational establishments as much as possible. It's explicitly
mentioned in one of Lee's books Following Gong. He talks
about putting focus on getting support from state government leaders
(29:33):
like from these officials, And interestingly enough, if you read
the English and French translations of these books, those specific
mentions have been cut from the text. The past is changing,
but in all fairness to lead all fairness to the
practitioners of following Gong, we have to point out seeking
(29:56):
powerful friends is not the same thing as plan a coup.
You want to get like a member of the high
ranking member of the Communist Party on board with Falong Gong, Well,
then maybe first it's because you think it's good for them,
you know, on a on a purely physical level. And
then maybe secondly you're like, hey, this person could help
(30:18):
us out with a jam, especially if we're being misrepresented.
We have a someone on our side who can say
here's the truth, and this is not propaganda. So it's
not the same thing as it sounds a lot like
the family to me. Another episode we covered We're Evangelical
Christianity was at least making those friends right in high
(30:38):
places and actively working to increase just influence within those realms,
not necessarily causing a coup. Is that the episode where
we got a little bit lost trying to figure out
what the menu for the prayer breakfast was. I was
just thinking, I was like, well, I don't know why
am I thinking about eggs right now? That's right. There
(30:59):
was that massive prayer breakfast that was such a like
an influencer kind of closed door situation that they essentially started. Correct,
it's always pancakes, guys. Yeah, I just I don't like
all right. I I feel like a pancake breakfast is
of something that's cooler as a phrase than actual thing,
(31:21):
Like what what makes it a pancake breakfast instead of
just like pancakes and o J is there? Baby? Maybe
eat two pancakes, you know what I mean? Like I
I need a variety. I want like some sausage and
some bacon, and I'm not a huge pancakes. It feels
so much like dessert to me. Look very heavy. You guys,
when you're a tax exempt organization, you gotta keep costs
(31:42):
super low, and pancake batter is the way to go.
It's true. It is the people's the people's food. You're
gonna call it the people's cake. Also te uh yeah yeah,
pancake opinions aside. I just think I don't know. Also
portions in the US or so cartoon large if you
go eat somewhere. I mean, I'm with you, guys in
(32:03):
two or three silver dollar pancakes, like I have some
other stuff going on in the plate. Uh. But this
is not this is not something that Sina or the
PRC was I astart of talking about too much. Uh,
they were, they were concerned, you know, and they thought
Western media was in Western governments were being complicit in
(32:25):
supporting what they saw as an increasingly subversive and perhaps
even separatist organization. Today, the members of Following Kong or
the practitioners of I think I think the members of
the organization prefer the term practitioners. The practitioners are often
overtly political and overtly anti China. They want the demise,
(32:47):
if not of the government of China, they want the
demise of the Communist Party. And if we're being completely
objective here, you can see a couple of different reasons
for this. The Chinese government may argue that they're political
beliefs are the reason this movement was banned. But we
also have to ask, if we're being fair, are the
(33:07):
people who are being overtly political here are they just
reacting in an entirely reasonable way to some extreme state
level persecution? You know? Is this an exercise group or
a cult. That's a question that we're going to try
to explore together. After a word from our sponsor and
(33:35):
we're back, okay, So before the break, we posed the
question what really is this? Is a lot of divisive
talk surrounding the Fallon Gong, So what is it is?
It is a kind of a nocuous mindfulness meditative exercise group,
or some sort of nefarious cult, or perhaps something in between. Um.
While the again state sponsored Chinese media calls Falangog occult,
(34:00):
Western media seemed very hesitant to do so. In fact, really,
like we talked about that time interview, did give them
a platform and treated them almost with a lot of deference,
and we got to ask ourselves why. Uh. Some scholars
argue that it was because of pressure from Folloing Goong itself,
perhaps that lititiousness we talked about. Um. Still, there are
(34:22):
some accounts and evidence showing recruitment tactics that could be
described as pretty sketchy at the very least, cult like
at the most, as Heather Caven rights in Fallonong and
the media, what can we believe? The exercises quickly begin
to take a back seat to larger ideologically driven belief systems. UM.
(34:46):
Here's a quote on newcomers second or third visits, they
are given scriptures showing Lee's rejection of those who simply
do the exercise part and not you know, the the
other stuff which we'll get into. Um. When six months
into the field work, remember told me that Fallon Goong
was not about doing the exercises at all. And I
(35:08):
was not surprised. Yeah. So, uh, Heather Kavan wrote this
awesome paper where did this ethnographics study? I believe in
New Zealand? And she was she was meeting up with
members of Following Calling every day for a time and
doing these exercises in the morning. Uh. And she got
(35:31):
they were very welcoming, and she got an increasingly intimate
perspective of the day to day actions of practitioners as
well as you know, some of the larger things that
they believed to be true. And this got into ideas
of like having visions visions are very big, and following
(35:51):
Gong having clairvoyance moments or moments by location. Uh. And
then also there were sketchy things where she would add
like she did this for pretty more than a year
I think, And there was somebody she was meeting every
day and she said, hey, what do I call that
woman that had been meeting with every day? And somebody
(36:12):
just looked at her and was like just call her
the woman, which is kind of a sketchy thing to say.
I don't know, I don't know. I'm an outsider, but
this told her that there was a maybe to your point,
in a little bit of bait and switch, kind of
like you're come for the exercises, stay for the truth
about the universe. And I'm not being dismissive. I mean
(36:32):
that's that's kind of the process. And those for people
who continue deeper into the belief system X fallon Gong
practitioners say that the the beliefs and values are what
might be called surprisingly conservative, the forbidding of interracial marriage,
the condemnation of homosexuality, and to our earlier point, discouraging
(36:54):
the use of modern medicine. For their part, Following Going
officially denies that this is true. So again we're in
one side said this, one side said that situation. But
if this is if we were to define this as
a cult, which Following Gong emphatically says it is not,
(37:14):
then we would naturally find ourselves with a couple of
questions off the bat. The first is this this observation
cults need leaders, So people are critics of this organization.
Those who accuse follon Gong of being a cult. Say,
they do have a leader in that role is played
by the founder, Lee Hong Shi. So weird thing about
(37:36):
Lee Honks is that we have conflicting stories about him,
his life, his current beliefs, his aims for the organization
or aims for the movement. And the even weirder thing
about this is to Matt's earlier point about information war, Uh,
some of these reports are coming from people who would
be totally happy if he never existed a k. The
(37:59):
Chinese government. Some of these reports are coming from his disciples,
and then some of his conflicting reports are coming straight
from him at different times when he's talking to different people,
like he's he's not a Western audience, right, he say like,
I'm not a god, don't try to make me a god.
And then he's talking to a domestic audience and he's say,
(38:20):
my true spiritual form is so huge that if I
came down here, you know, in my true form, you
would be standing like standing trying to gaze up past
my big toe. Totally a god a K. Yeah. Interesting,
It's it's very weird, I mean, and and he in
the past hasn't Lee said that he's like of Jesus
(38:42):
or a savior or the person who is going to yeah,
save humanity. Yeah, he said that. Um, he's compared himself
at times in speeches to the biblical Jesus Christ, where
he said that, you know lines like, uh, Christ has
(39:03):
a sixteen carrot gold path. I have a twenty four
or twenty something carrot gold path. Uh. You know, we
have to admit maybe we're maybe we're losing some context
in translation, but these like there's a repeated pattern of
this stuff. He also says things will be familiar to
(39:23):
people who have had experience with exclusionary organizations. Says that
if you're a member of Following Going, you're superior to
ordinary people, and this might be familiar to longtime listeners.
Also says you need to relinquish affection for kinsfolk, love
between a man and a woman, and affection for parents,
(39:44):
feelings and friendship. You need to focus on the path. Uh.
What was that guy we did episode on Benhit though,
Wasn't he like in like Sedona or something like that.
He was in somewhere somewhere in like New Mexico and
he had this whole like kind of sweat lodge tech
(40:06):
bro cult situation. Careful, Yeah, I I still get his newsletters.
Oh boy, interesting, Well, no, you're right, Ben, and and
and and it gets weirder like and he's he'sn't he's
not shy about this, and it's it's even a little inconsistent,
(40:26):
right like when he's gonna go big and talk about
the big toe, you know, god situation or downplay and say,
oh no, no, I'm just a but a humble meditation instructor.
I'm I'm exaggerating a little bit. But in that Time
article he talks a lot about being able to teach
people to levitate off of the ground. Um, And then
(40:48):
also he talks about how you shouldn't ever show these
abilities to outsiders. The Time Reporters is in your book
Zon Faloon, you talk about people levitating off the ground,
but you say that they should not show other people.
Why is that? And he Lee says it is the
same principle that Western gods in paradise should not be
seen by ordinary mortals because they cannot understand its meaning.
(41:11):
And then Time asks have you seen human beings levitate
off the ground? And he responds, I have known too many.
Can you describe any that you have known, to which
Lee responds, David Copperfield, he can levitate, and he did
it during the performances. Uh. I'm not trying to rag
on the guy too hard, but very mixed messages here
he's saying, you know you, I can teach people to
(41:34):
do it. Uh, It's something that's inherent in this belief system. Also,
I don't like the idea of them showing anybody but
the one he cites as an American illusionist where everyone
knows that he's not really levitating, very unusual. They have
just been a joke, you know, some a form of
a joke. Who knows. Yeah. Maybe. And then also this
(41:55):
is this is interesting because again we go back to
the question of not just context, but the question of
motivation of the sources. Like the thing about there's an
interesting example. So we talked a little bit about, um,
how there might have been pressure from following Gong that
influenced Western media's portrayal of the group Originally. It reminds
(42:19):
me a lot of Reverend Moon and the Washington Times,
when when the Mooney's owned that there were clear conflicts
of interest that would come up over time, just like
obviously see has conflicts of interest because it's state media,
just like multiple organizations do. It's more unusual to be
(42:40):
like a pro publica without as much of an editorial bias.
So we I think we've built an okay case to
to show that. First off, a lot of statements from
this guy have been conflicting over time with earlier statements
he's made, or with statements he goes on to make afterwards.
A Secondly, there are some claim Chief's made that seemed
(43:01):
pretty extraordinary and that don't seem all two out of
the realm of cult leader. But we're we're just we're
telling you why. Some people have argued that the other
thing that keeps us so we're kind of pingponging back
and forth across what's happening here. Here's another thing that's happening.
Following Gong practitioners have for years and years and years
(43:24):
alleged that since uh gosh Win in two decades now,
that since maybe even a little before, they were being
persecuted and are being persecuted by the Chinese government. That
is true. That's the thing. That's no one they're not
making that up. After the band, tens of thousands of
(43:45):
people were arrested, they were sent to labor camps without
a trial, and many of these people who have survived,
who came out of these said that they were tortured. Again,
the numbers may be exaggerated. It's tough to get transparent
numbers and incarceration from the Chinese government, and it's tough
to really UM and this is not adeing on them,
(44:09):
it's it's tough to understand the credibility of numbers offered
by an organization like this on its own membership rates
on on who have what happened to whom and when,
just because they might not. I'm not saying there's any
necessarily an ulterior motive here. They may not have the
capacity to to keep that kind of accounting, but the
(44:32):
detainment was definitely real. Yeah. So in the Wall Street
Journal UM, a journalist named Ian Johnson documented his investigation
into the repression that we're talking about and a series
that he wrote which he received a Pulitzer price for
part of UM. And there's definitely something strange going on
sinoa UM and pretty stark, if not very surprising, as
(44:56):
we discussed. Contrast depicted the prisoners as be being happy
playing basketball. We're talked about this in the past episodes
as well, eating amazing you know, platters of food and
all of that, with local police stations acting as UM
centers for them to receive counseling to help these poor,
you know, brainwashed souls essentially get an education and become
(45:21):
I guess more acclimated or reintroduced into traditional civilized Chinese society.
UM in this, you know, really support of the narrative
of the government was pushing of this being a dangerous
separatist cult. However, practitioners of Follonong described members being treated
much much differently, described them being hung by their ankles
(45:46):
upside down for long periods of time, hit with like
cattle prod type implements or stunned guns UH actually cuts
or pierced with bamboo sticks, beaten and raped, and kept
in tiny, tiny spaces where they can't even move for
days at a time. UM prohibited from using the restroom
facilities for long periods of time, UH showing brutal imagery
(46:10):
displayed throughout these facilities, things like police brutality, and often
in some of these public demonstrations that they would do,
they would re enact historical torture scenes UH in alarming
and disturbing ways. Theater as a weapon. Right, it's a
it's a it's a real thing, and it can be
a powerful thing. There's an interesting and somewhat troubling interpretation
(46:38):
of this persecution. This persecution is to a degree um aspirational,
as much as I hate to say it. Within the movement,
there's this one speech where Lee talks about stepping forward.
Stepping forward is a euphemism referring to a series of
tests that practitioners must asks to gain entry into his
(47:02):
version or his realization of heaven or paradise or enlightenment.
Going up the ladder, crossing the bridge, stepping forward. Okay,
do you want to get a seed? Uh simens reference
so so yeah. That Here's how he explained it. He
said he had only planned enlightenment for a limited number
(47:23):
of following glowing members, but with the increasing amount of
practitioners again, they might be inflating the numbers here, and
with of course the eminent end of the world, he
had to start weeding people out quick fast and in
a hurry. And so he said that if you defend
the following long to the point where you are imprisoned,
(47:45):
you are detained, you are tortured, then your bad karma
is burned off, and this assures you a space in paradise.
Practitioners must not recant their faith, even if their retract
chin is insincere, even if, like we proved in earlier
episodes on torture, you're just saying whatever you think people
(48:06):
want to hear, so that I will stop pulling out
your fingernails or shocking your testicles or what have you. Uh.
He says, Look, even if you fake recanting, foul them gong,
you're a terrible person. And then he goes on, think
about this, he goes one step further and and heavily
implies that he purposefully orchestrated the torture, that it was
(48:29):
all under his control the whole time, because he needed
to expose these weak willed folks. And he refers to
these folks who were can't under torture as quote malignant tumors.
The torture is real, but the interpretation of it and
the degree to which it's real is still up for
debate because there's just not a unbiased source here, really,
(48:50):
um and and it's tough, you know, like these are
Wall Street journal these are top notch journalists. And they're
having they're having a tough time get cutting through the
propaganda and cutting through the purposeful, the purposely deceptive tactics
of the government. And we have to go to one
other thing, which is probably the thing people a lot
(49:13):
of people in the West probably first heard of Follongong
because of this, and we've covered it in both video
and audio in the past. Organ harvesting, the quote unquote
red market. Yeah, and this is again, as you said, Ben,
this is one of the things that brings a lot
of people into the conversation because it's such a sensational
concept that the Chinese government is somehow or for some
(49:37):
reason harvesting organs directly from Falloon Goong practitioners. Um. And
this is this is something that is alleged um And
it's it's usually it's usually organs being taken from detainees,
people who are already detained by the government. At least
that's what's said in an expert panel of independent researchers
said they heard clear evidence that organ harvesting had taken
(50:00):
place over at least twenty years um wow, directly tied
when they were declared illegal. If you look at the timeline, Uh,
questions about the bias of this tribunal, the China Tribunal.
He was set up by a group called the International
(50:23):
Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China. So it definitely
starts from assuming it's this is happening and they just
want to prove it's there. H This panel said it
was beyond a doubt a fact that there had been
forced our organ harvesting, not just because of one like
crooked doctor or one crooked warden, which this is very important,
(50:46):
but they said it was happening on a systemic scale.
States supported. And here's the worst part. Beijing has repeatedly
denied these accusations. They did not start with following gold.
To be very clear, as we talked about earlier, this
is an ongoing thing, uh or this was an ongoing
thing at the time. But I wouldn't draw a special
(51:08):
attention to their reasoning here, their support of their their
claim that they didn't do this. They you guys, they
literally said no, we don't forcibly take organs from people
as a bunch of Western propaganda, you know, I mean,
for Pete's sake, fellow humans, we stopped taking organs from
(51:32):
executed prisoners way back in and that was like four
years ago. You guys are living in the past. Come on,
that's just like okay, Like imagine, I'm not gonna say
somebody burned a barn, but but imagine like I was
standing right next to just like the old Aminem song,
(51:55):
I'm standing right next to uh burning barn in this instance,
and I've got a got a handful of matches he
carefully gas. People are like, hey, dude, did you burn
this barn? I'm like, what, that's crazy. I haven't burned
barns for funds since you guys are wild and that's unfair.
(52:16):
But like you see what I'm saying. I'm saying it's
right to be suspicious. It is right to be suspicious.
And it's also just something to point out here. We
talked about the demonstrations the felon going practitioners have done
with showing the police brutality of the torture. One of
the things that they harp on, or at least have
in the past is this bread market and like they
(52:38):
will go through the motions of having a detainee like
not really but having their organs ripped out in a
very gory fashion in a demonstration in front of a building,
a government building or something. And then this leads us
to maybe one of the biggest things we need to
note here. The information war that started in the nineties continues.
(53:00):
It's been going on for decades. Uh, there's something we
mentioned a little earlier. We've talked a lot about this
office preparation for this episode. In the US, there's this
amazing traveling show called Shan Yutt. We talked. We talked
about this, I think last week or so, like we
always wanted to go. I definitely always wanted to go.
(53:22):
Felt the tickets were a little pricey, but it is
in fact associated with and backed by Fallingong. Visually, it's
a stunning show. It's the kind of thing too where
it's like, I don't know where this budget is coming from.
With the marketing blitz behind this show is out of control.
A lot of it's just kind of like street team
type situations where you'll see, you know, fires for it
(53:43):
at every restaurant and coffee shop and you know, juice
juice bar in town, but they have billboards everywhere, and
like in New York City especially, a friend of mine
UM was saying how he ended up in a cab
or a lift or something that was driven by very
clearly foulonong uh, you know, kind of hardliner um. And
(54:04):
there were even shen Yuan advertisements within the cab, and
he had like stacks of Fallonang pamphlets as well. It's
almost like a modern day Harry Christna thing. Remember how
he used to see the Harri Krishnas at the airport
passing out their pamphlets and stuff. This is sort of
like that to me. Oh yeah, it makes itself known.
So let's talk about exactly what we're seeing here in
(54:25):
this beautifully chore choreographed dance, interpretive dance and cultural exchange
at shen Yun. What do you see? Yeah, so you
see it's it's heavily rooted in traditional Chinese culture. So
we'll see you'll see songs, You'll see intricate choreography and
dance numbers. You'll also see a admittedly transparent narrative and
(54:51):
overall message which includes the reenactment of some of those uh.
Some of those acts of persecution also include duds, you know,
very pro Follongong, pro shen Yon message. Uh. And it
talks about the evils of persecution like it's clearly it's
clearly a show with something to say beyond witness Uh
(55:15):
this ancient tradition of Chinese dance. Uh. And you can
read a lot about shen Yun. One thing you can
you can hear about at least is the Upstate New
York training facility where shen Yun I guess pelone going
practitioners or just shen Yun dancers and performers go and
learn really interesting stuff. And I mean to me, it's
(55:39):
it's like it has to have a massive base of operations, right,
because I mean it's got to be hundreds and hundreds
of of individuals that are performing in these various iterations
of this show, right, I mean like and like that's
what you're saying. There's a training facility almost like you
think of for circl. Yeah, it's it is called the
Phacian Academy, and it's in Middleton or Middletown, New York.
(56:04):
And uh, you know, post pandemic, if you depend on
where you live, it's pretty easy for you to see
this show when it comes into town because it's you know, uh,
it used to travel a lot before before COVID locked
us down. One thing I noticed is it seemed like
any young show was always on the way, just left.
(56:25):
It's definitely a business and just quick shout out to
The New Yorker and Gia Tolentino, I think that's her name.
Article you can read called stepping into the Uncanny, unsettling
world of shen yuon just it's it describes to you
exactly what you see. And let's stick with the New
York Times. Let's also stick with allegations of front companies,
(56:47):
because Follongong has a success story that may be familiar
to a lot of people in the US, though you
may not know the full story. It's a big conspiratorial
great journalists over at New York Times named Kevin Rose
had wrote this piece on a newspaper called The Epoch
Times E. P O. C H. That sounds so familiar, Okay, alright,
(57:10):
So for years the Epoch Times was a kind of small,
low budget newspaper that was against the government of China.
And you would if you're walking around the corners of
some New York neighborhoods, you would you would have this
thing handed out for free to you. People like free stuff.
It's a smart strategy. But in around or so the
(57:34):
paper made a couple of changes that turned it into
one of the country's most powerful digital platforms, most powerful
digital publishers. I should say they became a world class
source of right wing information by betting the farm on Facebook.
I don't know why I have so many farm analogies today, guys, sorry,
(57:55):
but so they like when when um, the Donald Trump
came forward to to become president, to become a presidential candidate,
all this stuff, they got super on board and they
embraced the Trump presidency most likely, if you had to guess,
because of his strong anti China stance at the time.
More than anything else. It was just like an enemy
(58:18):
of my enemy kind of thing. Um, I guess, how
of my pigament, chicken whatever. So the the coverage that
they had of US politics beforehand, it was very much
like neutral. Also ran straight up reporting right like this
bill passes, this bill doesn't pass. This person is blah
blah blah of New York. But then it became superpartisan
(58:40):
and in This article was written in November. Rose reports
that the Epic Times and its affiliates are a force
and right wing media, with tens of millions of social
media followers spread across dozens of pages, and they have
an online audience that rivals the audiences of The Daily
Call and Breitbart. Uh. Since two thousand and seventeen, they
(59:05):
had been running some pretty interesting experiments. And you can
also get a taste of the kind of stuff they cover.
They cover real world events, they cover um international news
with an anti China slant. But then they also you know,
when they're on social media, which a very adept at uh.
According to Rose, they're posting stuff about like anti vaccine
(59:29):
screen screeds. Uh. Where where did the coronavirus really come from?
And why doesn't the PRC want you to know? It
was made to lab on purpose by them? Because they're evil?
That's the whole headline. Why is Bill Gates directing the pandemic?
What's up with this Jewish mob that controls the world? Like,
that's the kind of stuff they're writing, And if you
(59:49):
listen to those headlines and those topics, it sounds very
similar to the stuff you've probably seen floating around on Facebook.
And I think this is an important thing. It's it's
a very strange turn of events. This has started as
like a spiritual movement or an exercise group. How did
it become a media powerhouse. How did it become, you know,
(01:00:10):
associated with this, with this traveling show that we want
to see that almost weaponizes theater. What what's the true
story of Lie Hong Xi? And at the very end
of the day show we have to advanced the even
crazier stuff. I'm sure I can't be the only person
wondering is following along an asset of a foreign intelligence agency.
(01:00:32):
It's not out of the question. It's a that's the
thing that no hard proof of this has come to light.
Please send us some if you have some. But of
course people are wondering, is the CIA involved? Because this
is this is like textbook c I A. You get
a you get a dissident group that may be disruptive
to the status quo, and boom, you got some independent
(01:00:54):
freedom fighters. You got a bunch of college students who
just happened to to overthrow a government because they believe
in for U, in these very US friendly ideals, and
they just somehow got some guns. Like that's that's the thing. Uh,
that's why people are asking this and following Gong has
not done like some kind of armed attack on a
(01:01:15):
Chinese building at this point. But but people are asking
these questions primarily because the West has such a terrible
track record and terrible precedent for interfering interfering fares this way.
And also these are human beings, Polone Gong people are
human beings. Um. I hope it's not a hot take
that human beings shouldn't be tortured and kidnapped. Nope, that
(01:01:36):
is a very cool take. Great thanks man, cool takes. Come.
Come for the hot ones, stay for the cool and stuff.
I want you to know. But there's one there's another point.
I think one of us mentioned this earlier. There's another
big mystery. Where is all the money coming from that's
powering these initiatives? Is this really all coming from like
(01:01:58):
subscriptions to things owned the up Up Media Group or SES.
I mean, I don't know. This is this is big. Um.
We wanna we wanna know what you guys think. Yeah,
if you have any information on the tithing process or
like donation process or membership that you know, whatever it
takes to stay within the organization, If you have info
(01:02:21):
on that, we'd love to hear it, because it's difficult
to find anything transparent coming out of the organization or
anything that you could believe coming out of an opposition writer. Um,
so yeah, please write to us about that. Yeah, I
just keep like a matching. You're you're trying to decide
if you should eat a sandwich, and there's one person
(01:02:41):
left saying this is the best sandwich ever. If you
don't eat it, you're going to die. And then then
there's a person on the other side of table saying
this is the worst. It doesn't even qualify as food.
If you do eat it, you'll die in a slow,
agonizing way in a Chinese prison like this is very
intense and it's it's tough to figure out the truth.
And I think there's I'm gonna say, I think there's
(01:03:02):
some sketchy stuff going on. No matter how you slice it,
there's something there. There's something they don't want you to know. Uh,
multiple instances of it. Please let us know if you
have experience, Please let us know what you think the
future of this organization or these kinds of organizations will
(01:03:23):
be and what it can tell us about the world today.
We try to be easy to find on the internet. Yeah,
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(01:03:43):
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(01:04:05):
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(01:04:48):
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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production of I Heart Brady. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is Nold. Nick called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul mission controlled decans. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. We started a weird but very human
direction here. Who hasn't amongst us in the audience today
(00:48):
felt lost at one point or another. Think about it,
washing the dishes, you're working, maybe on a repetitive job,
or you're stuck in traffic, heard the same song three times,
You're walking up the street, the same path you always taken.
It hits you all the suddenly. What does it all mean?
Why are we even here? What's the point? Is existence?
Just like a check mark participation grade? All of those? Okay, great,
(01:15):
me too? Bleak? Oh no, you haven't hit that yet?
Oh god, yes, are you kidding me? I think I
use my GPS when I go down the street to
the store. I mean, okay, that's a different kind of lass,
but absolutely, of course, I think we've all been there,
and this existential crisis is one of the great unifiers,
I would argue of the human species. It draws a
(01:38):
lot of people to structure belief systems, religions of any time,
humanitarian work, you know, secular stuff too, even self improvement
on a small scale, like hey, I'm gonna exercise more,
I'm gonna take up meditation, I might get a new hobby. Heck,
I'll take that improv class. These are all answers to,
you know, the scary questions of more reality and meaning.
(02:01):
And there is no shortage of individuals or organizations that
are more than willing to give the lost and the
troubled a feeling of serenity, fulfillment, and purpose. This brings
us to today's episode, the winding mysterious and at times
troubling story of something known as the Following Gong In English,
(02:22):
this literal translation would be something like law wheel practice.
But but it's a tricky thing to translate into English,
So for now we're just gonna say following Gong, So
breathe deep. Here are the facts. So Following Gong is
also known as following data, and if you look at
some of the official websites you will see following data
(02:43):
a lot. It describes itself as a spiritual practice as
many has been just described earlier. It's rooted in Buddhist tradition,
and it consists of two primary components that feel pretty good.
The first one is self improvement through the study of teachings,
(03:04):
and like many organizations, UH, Fallen Gong or Fallendofa has
its own set of books and writings and teachings, and
these are mainly about the qualities of the universe, the
underlying stuff, the stuff that is that makes up existence,
you and me, in the connection to everything, Truth, compassion,
(03:25):
and forbearance. If you go on their website, it says
very specifically truth, compassion, forbearance. The second component is going
to be pretty uh, I would say pretty familiar to
a lot of us, and that is gentle exercise and meditation.
By gentle exercise we mean what is sometimes called low
(03:46):
impact exercise. So this is not cross fit push yourself
past your limits stuff. This is this is stretchy, this
is slow, This is meditative. Uh. This is not meant
to break your bones. According to all the sources, you
can look at, including official Following Gong sources. It was
developed by a guy named Lie Hong Shi Uh. He
(04:10):
says that he was the recipient of teachings from more
than twenty masters, Buddhism and Chee Gong, from which Following
Gong is descended. Uh he tested this. According to him,
he tested this practice this system out with several followers
(04:30):
a K disciples first and then eventually brought it public
in May of two. So this is already we know.
This is a very new religion, even if the claims
about its ancient roots are true. Uh, Chee Gong is.
We we talked about this earlier, I think in an
episode called what is Cheap? But Chee Gong Is is
(04:53):
primarily composed of these frankly amazing breathing exercises. But but
Lee added something else to the mix. He added stories
in here, accounts, anecdotes, a world full of fantastical things,
and a world with hints of a forthcoming apocalypse, and
(05:16):
his books became best sellers. I don't want to I
don't want to poison the well here, but some of
this path has you know, not for nothing have outside
observers said this bears some similarities with other leaders of
movements like l Ron Hubbard, who also also wrote extensively.
(05:37):
But this was accepted by the government of China. It
was accepted by the Chee Gong bodies, right, because there
are many Cheegong movements, so the Chinese National Chee Gong
Scientific Research Association in that same time period of nineteen two,
they also said, Okay, yeah, we dig it. Following all
(06:00):
you know what I mean, full speed ahead, Ben, Ben,
Can we just really quickly hit on those two books? Yeah, totally. Uh.
The first two were Schwan Falon and Falon Gong. Uh.
These are kind of primers to the philosophy. Here is
what we're doing based on what I learned. Here is
(06:20):
the goal of what we're doing, you know what I mean?
Filled with again, filled with stories that did not ordinarily
occur in previous previous traditions of this sort. Oh yeah,
and I just want to go back to your l
Ron Hubbard comparison here. It's interesting because in in l
Aron's writings, he kind of held off on the aliens
(06:43):
and the stuff that went beyond some of the self.
Heally that when you paid your way in far enough, Yeah.
But but in these books it's just right there in
front of you as soon as you start getting into
the materials. I'm just I found to be interesting. Yeah, yeah,
there's I guess you would say a little more transparency
(07:05):
in that regard. But whatever you feel about those things,
we want to be very clear here, we ourselves are
not following going practitioners. Uh, although I think all of
us have done things like meditation and mindful breathing in yoga. Uh.
This this is a different thing. And no matter how
you feel about the claims that Lee makes, no matter
(07:28):
how you feel about the practices of the organization, in
terms of that exercise and philosophy, there's no arguing this.
Those books were instant bestsellers, and people across the country
of China loved this idea, loved this concept, and Lee
started making public demonstrations of his um of his perceived abilities,
(07:51):
which also ties in a little bit to our episodes
on faith healing and laying on of hands. Okay, so
back to the timeline. In December, Lee Hans did his
very first public demonstration of his abilities UH at Oriental
Health Expo in Beijing. Apparently, he caused a paralyzed and
(08:12):
wheelchair bound man to walk, destroyed gall and kidney stones
within another individual, and cured difficult quote difficult and complex
illnesses of all kinds. So needless just say he made
quite a splash. And the director of the fair declared,
it's like you you won the fair. Uh declared that
Fallon Gong was the star cultivation system. Wow, what does
(08:37):
that even mean? Like cultivating like the stars from the
unit from the Galaxy. I took it as a best
in show, best in show, but still that's I love
the turn of phrase. Let's leave it there. And to me,
it really is like you're, you know, the brightest shining
boy in the room. Well, as Ben said, they're the
laying on of hands episode that we did. I think
(08:58):
everyone can hear the similarities there. And you know we
we weren't there in nineteen ninety two. We can't tell
you exactly what happened, you know, or if if there
were any plants in the audience, But if those things
were true, they would be miracles. Well I was you know,
(09:19):
you guys know my schedule. I was busy. I didn't
get over there, but I heard good things. Yeah, I
was I was nine, I think, and uh doing something
with a Nintendo pretty sure. I don't think I should
say where I was. In December of at this at Xpo,
(09:39):
uh Lee was given to awards and this is, you know,
the second iteration of his appearance there. He got the
award for Advancing Boundary Science and the Chee Goong Master
most Acclaimed by the masses. So that's like the no,
and I am not just missing this at all, just
for uh an analog or in comparison, this is a
(10:02):
lot like saying, uh, you got the Audience Appreciation Award. Yes,
you know what I mean. People like you the most.
So he started giving classes all over the country in
the ways of this philosophy throughout the early to mid nineties,
and for a while, as we mentioned, this enjoyed a
(10:23):
great deal of domestic fame as well as what appeared
to be somewhere between the open support of the Chinese
government to the tacit support to with the very least
toleration of it. Right, like, they're not hurting anyone, they're
not violating our our unwritten law, don't mess with the money.
(10:46):
Let him go stretch in the park exactly, And in
a way it's kind of a nice little cultural at
least information export right, it's an interesting thing. It's a
it's a cool little piece that we can share and wow,
we've got this. Uh, I don't know. I want to
say miracle worker, but who We've got someone with essentially
(11:07):
supernatural powers, fit practices in China, cool, enjoy, be healthy? Okay? Yeah, uh,
this goes this goes international soon after. Like when you
think about the spread of this movement, you have to
see it's it's impressive. You know a few decades later
(11:28):
people would call this kind of growth viral instead of exponential. Uh. Yeah.
By nineteen or so, Leah spreading his message past the
borders of China. He's lecturing in Paris and Stockholm. He's
lecturing in Sydney, in Houston, Texas, which seemed a weird draw.
(11:48):
But these are the facts, and New York City in
But while he's out speaking abroad and spending less and
less time in China, Uh, things aren't going so well
on the home front, are they. No, the tide was
turning inside of China while he was gone, because the
(12:11):
organization fell in Gong left. The one that had it
had originally joined the Key Goong Scientific Research Association, which
you know could or could not be a big deal.
But it does mean they're going independent, right, means they're
they're gaining power in some way. And the Chinese government
started to see them as essentially a threat. And it's
(12:34):
really because they were growing so exponentially and so quickly,
and the some of the spiritual beliefs, the religious teachings
that were in those books, they were going a little
bit against what would be considered traditional or at least
the party line of what the party wanted its citizens
to be thinking about believing in. And ultimately they feared
(12:58):
that this thing would grow so big it would be
a threat because it was independent of a lot of
those internal institutions. Yeah, and you know this doesn't come
from nowhere are necessarily uninformed paranoia. There is a long
history in this area of the world, going back to
the dynasty days in China, of the governing bodies having
(13:20):
to actively and aggressively work against the possibility of domestic
descent the in a way. In a way, the government
at the time was reacting to what they saw the
precedent as the precedent set by earlier domestic unrest. What
is it you think about this religion and this movement
that caused it to catch on so much. It's just
(13:41):
very appealing. I think if you look on the face
of it, it's extremely appealing. You don't have to work
too hard. It's mostly meditative, and it seems to have
a kindness on the front. And we're gonna talk a
little bit more about some of the ways, some of
the ways the ideas are spread and why they seem,
(14:01):
especially when you bring in the persecution angle that we're
going to get to, why it seems like something you'd
want to join to fight for. And the majority of
from what we understand, the majority of Following Going members
are recruited by members of their biological families. So there
is a furthering and a deepening of the sense of
community in in this endeavor, and community, from what I understand,
(14:26):
is the thing that people like. It's true, people dig it.
So as as you said, the tides turning, the tides
turning against the practitioners of Following Gong because it's seen
as a threat to the status quo. We know that
(14:46):
sometime in this somewhere in this time period, UH members
of Following Gong started becoming active online. There were early
adopters of the Internet, but it's difficult to know exactly what.
And this occurred because like the ratars in Neil Stevenson's
and athem, they spend a lot of time changing the
(15:08):
past or they A more diplomatic way would be to say,
and I mean both the Chinese government and some factions
of following Going they carefully edit and curate old material
from their websites, so it's tough to know some of
the specifics of timelines here. But they didn't take this
line down. They got mad, and the practitioners started protesting
(15:33):
outside of various media outlets in China that they if
they felt those outlets were misrepresenting the goals of following
Gong and the lives and aims of the practitioners. Basically say,
you know, stop being evil. That's it that that's not
like on the face of it, that's that's a cool thing.
(15:55):
Not to be be evil. Google once did that, um
and longer does I remember those days. It's no longer
their motto, right, But also, don't be evil's way different
from be good? Very we thought that was a weird one.
Was it like sort of like a guiding principle, sort
of a reminder to themselves to like, do a good
(16:15):
job with the power that you've been you've given yourselves.
That's a weird one. I always thought that was very strange.
So this is we've led it up to, right, that's
when they're doing the protesting. Then the next year, as
pressure is mounting from the party within China, Lee he
(16:35):
ends up getting out of China. And where does he head?
New York City? Okay, yeah, because it wasn't he wasn't.
It wasn't he beginning to be branded as a dissident already. Yeah?
Uh yeah, I was. He gonna says, you know, just
picture Lee somewhere. He's been to New York before at
(16:56):
this point, and he says, hey kid, you can make
it here, you can bake it anywhere. And then he
has that whole sitcom moment. Uh yeah, he does. He
does go to New York. You know, something's in the wind,
I would imagine. And let's pause here. We've got one.
We're waiting for the other shoe to drop. So let's
(17:16):
let's hear from our sponsors who may not be fell
Hong Kong today. Um, maybe we don't know it's it's
probably not Fellong, but it is. Uh. Spoilers we'll be
back to watch the hammer fall. Fast forward. There is
(17:42):
a massive protest against the government of China on the
part of the Bottom Kong. Shortly after that protest, the
PRC begins a nationwide crackdown and they go ham there's
this huge propaganda push. They're a is to eradicate the
following Gong. How serious are they about this? Well, they
(18:05):
make a new security agency whose entire job is to
eliminate Following Gong. It's called the six ten Office started
in June of uh to to describe some of the
stuff that the government was doing against this organization, they
like they were bulldozing educational tapes, you know what I mean.
(18:29):
They were pulling all this stuff they could off the
internet if possible. Uh. They were publicly denouncing any members
if it got to the point where like, depending on
your job, it might be dangerous for your first year
employment status to UH to be a member of Folloon Gong,
and then soon after it may be dangerous for your
(18:51):
personal freedom. They also blocked, Oh, they didn't just block
following going websites, they blocked websites from other places. And
there were a few other countries that mentioned Foulongong. They're like, sorry,
I know your blog is mainly about your backpacking travels
through Southeast Asia, but you mentioned the wrong organization. So
(19:12):
now your whole website is shut down from one point
three billion people. Wow. So imagine you started an exercise
group and the next thing you know, you're in a
full on information war with one of the world's most
powerful countries, a country that's also becoming one of the
world's leaders in this kind of asymmetrical warfare gets David
(19:33):
and Goliath pretty quickly. If the story so far is true,
and this is a good time to bring this up.
Maybe been in our research for this episode. Uh, and
then you pointed this out and I also noticed it,
and I'm no, I'm sure you did too. Really, what
you find on the internet, save for a few mostly
objective writers, is information that is extremely profile Andong or
(19:57):
extremely anti Folagong. Right. Well, even the American media for
quite some time was very pro Folloonong, it would seem,
because they sort of acted as this like buffer against
like the you know, the distrustfulness that is pretty common
around like Chinese information control, and they sort of represented
(20:17):
almost this like you know, example of the heavy handedness
of the Chinese government. In fact, there's an interview with
the founder of Follongong in Time magazine. In so I mean,
in general, the American press was pretty pretty kind to
them as an organization. The US would enter this information
war later for motivations of its own. I suspect motivations
(20:40):
of its own, but maybe it's being a jerk. So
back in same year as that Time interview, following Gong
becomes illegal in China. However, the horse of dissidents has
left the proverbial bar. The followers are widespread and another
a thing that maybe the PRC didn't count on. These
(21:02):
followers are tremendously media savvy. Remember I said they were
earlier adopters of things like the Internet and emergent technology.
So in the years since being declared quote heretical organization
that threatens social stability, they have dispatched thousands upon thousands
of press releases, these staged live events and protests, things
(21:27):
that are purposefully and beautifully designed to gather headlines to
get international eyes on the story. UH. They've also kept
a very strong Internet presence. You can check out some
of their official UH official territories online now UH They
also became increasingly litigious, and they would slap people with
(21:50):
a defamation lawsuit if they published something saying um, saying
stuff that to us might even seem monocuous. You know,
there was still there was still try to bring the
hammer down the way that the Chinese government was bringing
the hammer down on them. And like we like we
alluded to just a few minutes ago, Following Gong adherents
(22:12):
for a very long time, we're treated um in an
extraordinarily kind way by the Western press. They love this
David and Goliath story. They also sometimes supported the groups
religious or political agendas. As you can imagine, Following Gong
becomes very strongly anti Chinese government. And when it broke
(22:35):
in the West, when the US and the in Europe
started entering this, you would see a lot of reports
from politicians and journalists who are ridiculing the Chinese government
and they were saying, Wow, these communists leaders are so
paranoid a k A. They know their ideas are so
bad that they're going to treat this group of quote
(22:57):
exercising Granny's like counter arrist And they all had a
good laugh about that right in the in the news
cycle of the time, and they got some facts wrong
while they were doing it. They got like they got
one big fact very much wrong. That's right. Um. Western
sources originally had claimed that the PRC was reacting to
(23:19):
popularity alone. UH. They argued that the Communist Party had
sixty seventy million members, but Fellonong had a hundred million
UH and this did not seem to be the case.
Multiple scholars agreed that the Fellonong only had about two
to ten million practitioners at that time. Also, why weren't
other Remember this is all a product of a larger movement,
(23:42):
the Key Goong movement. Why weren't other practitioners of of
those UH techniques band right? There? Again, there are multiple
There are multiple groups that are that are descended from
this ancient tradition of mindfulness and exercise and metatation. And
they seem to be just fine. Nothing wrong with those folks. Sadly,
(24:06):
as any long time listener this show knows, it is
the opposite of unusual for world governments to repress movements
they see is dangerous to the status quo at so
many levels. There there there there's an abundance, a plethora
using the work correctly of ridiculous examples of this. But
if you, if you dive into this, upon closer examination,
(24:28):
we see the Fune Gong looks a lot different from
the casual Chi Gong group or even like a cross
fit club. And while we were prepping for this, folks,
it became increasingly difficult for us not to continually ask
ourselves about cross fit, which got out of hand for
(24:48):
a second. There, I think we can agree cross we
got a little out of hand. Yeah, oh it did.
And I for one promise that I will hunt down
the cross fit demons and aliens that exist in the
originating book somewhere that I've just never seen more writ Yeah.
I did cross fit for a little while years ago.
I had like a like a trainer situation. I can
tell you from firsthand experience, the demons and aliens live
(25:11):
in those T ninety X stretchy bands. That's where that's where,
that's where that comes from. Nine Glemado, clamado. But it
was they do sneak the Christian stuff in very subtly,
right when you're getting the most swollen, and then all
of a sudden they sort of whisper some scripture in
(25:31):
wait wait, wait, wait, wait, maybe I just have no idea.
Is CrossFit like a religious organization or are? Yeah? Maybe
it depends on the trainer too. I've always heard that
cross Fit has sort of some kind of religious undertones.
I was being completely I was joking about hunting that down,
(25:54):
but now I'm serious. Maybe I'm overthinking it too. There
are definitely Christian us fits uh organizations, and like, here's
an article here how turning cross Fit into a religion
made its atheist founder Greg Glassman rich. Oh interesting, Okay,
huh So cross Fit itself is the religion not necessarily
(26:15):
a front for religion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we
go back to che Gong and following Gong, what we
see is that it isn't the same in many, many,
many ways. And this is something that practitioners a following
Gong would agree with. There is a web of conspiracy here.
(26:35):
It's tough to suss out the strings of truth right
in this morass. Uh. There are allegations of everything from
Oregon harvesting to colts to even front groups for intelligence agencies.
So let's dive in deep breath. Here's where it gets crazy. Yeah.
(26:56):
China's state run media outlet Shenha had a completely different
take on why Folon Goong was being banned. They claimed
that the West was attempting to make China look bad.
They believed and argued accordingly, that the Chinese government banned
Follonong because Lee had broken numerous laws, was responsible for
(27:18):
over a thousand deaths, mainly from essentially coercing members into
committing suicide or by not seeking medical treatment, which is
a part of this whole you know, belief system that
we'll get into, was threatening public safety. Um. And because
members had infiltrated the Communist Party in order to overthrow
the government. Uh, that's a lot and it sounds, you know,
(27:42):
like the kind of high level conspiracies. That's like we
live for things like operations snow White. Uh sounds a
lot less like you know, just doing uh tai chi
in the park on a Sunday afternoon. Right, And and
anyone listening may remember operations Snow White wherein the Church
of Scientology or members a few members of the Church
(28:04):
of Scientology attempted some infiltration. All right, So now I
can feel the shadow of our legal team. Okay, so
let me look, how did it's very careful with the
writing on that one The official position of the Church
of Scientology is that Operations Snow White was not sanctioned
(28:26):
by their organization as a way to massively infiltrate the
I R S and then blackmail the government in a
crazy financial scheme. Several people disagree with that official position,
including the U S. Supreme Court. That right, like, that's
what we could say. We said that earlier. Right, there
(28:49):
are people who disagree. Uh so we have Mike Renderon.
I mean, our ship is sailed in that regard. But
but there is one thing, you know that that they said,
it's really interesting here and all the idea of infiltration
of the government that was true. The Chinese government was
telling the truth about this when following Gong was all
(29:13):
up in the state's military and the security apparatus and
the media educational establishments as much as possible. It's explicitly
mentioned in one of Lee's books Following Gong. He talks
about putting focus on getting support from state government leaders
(29:33):
like from these officials, And interestingly enough, if you read
the English and French translations of these books, those specific
mentions have been cut from the text. The past is changing,
but in all fairness to lead all fairness to the
practitioners of following Gong, we have to point out seeking
(29:56):
powerful friends is not the same thing as plan a coup.
You want to get like a member of the high
ranking member of the Communist Party on board with Falong Gong, Well,
then maybe first it's because you think it's good for them,
you know, on a on a purely physical level. And
then maybe secondly you're like, hey, this person could help
(30:18):
us out with a jam, especially if we're being misrepresented.
We have a someone on our side who can say
here's the truth, and this is not propaganda. So it's
not the same thing as it sounds a lot like
the family to me. Another episode we covered We're Evangelical
Christianity was at least making those friends right in high
(30:38):
places and actively working to increase just influence within those realms,
not necessarily causing a coup. Is that the episode where
we got a little bit lost trying to figure out
what the menu for the prayer breakfast was. I was
just thinking, I was like, well, I don't know why
am I thinking about eggs right now? That's right. There
(30:59):
was that massive prayer breakfast that was such a like
an influencer kind of closed door situation that they essentially started. Correct,
it's always pancakes, guys. Yeah, I just I don't like
all right. I I feel like a pancake breakfast is
of something that's cooler as a phrase than actual thing,
(31:21):
Like what what makes it a pancake breakfast instead of
just like pancakes and o J is there? Baby? Maybe
eat two pancakes, you know what I mean? Like I
I need a variety. I want like some sausage and
some bacon, and I'm not a huge pancakes. It feels
so much like dessert to me. Look very heavy. You guys,
when you're a tax exempt organization, you gotta keep costs
(31:42):
super low, and pancake batter is the way to go.
It's true. It is the people's the people's food. You're
gonna call it the people's cake. Also te uh yeah yeah,
pancake opinions aside. I just think I don't know. Also
portions in the US or so cartoon large if you
go eat somewhere. I mean, I'm with you, guys in
(32:03):
two or three silver dollar pancakes, like I have some
other stuff going on in the plate. Uh. But this
is not this is not something that Sina or the
PRC was I astart of talking about too much. Uh,
they were, they were concerned, you know, and they thought
Western media was in Western governments were being complicit in
(32:25):
supporting what they saw as an increasingly subversive and perhaps
even separatist organization. Today, the members of Following Kong or
the practitioners of I think I think the members of
the organization prefer the term practitioners. The practitioners are often
overtly political and overtly anti China. They want the demise,
(32:47):
if not of the government of China, they want the
demise of the Communist Party. And if we're being completely
objective here, you can see a couple of different reasons
for this. The Chinese government may argue that they're political
beliefs are the reason this movement was banned. But we
also have to ask, if we're being fair, are the
(33:07):
people who are being overtly political here are they just
reacting in an entirely reasonable way to some extreme state
level persecution? You know? Is this an exercise group or
a cult. That's a question that we're going to try
to explore together. After a word from our sponsor and
(33:35):
we're back, okay, So before the break, we posed the
question what really is this? Is a lot of divisive
talk surrounding the Fallon Gong, So what is it is?
It is a kind of a nocuous mindfulness meditative exercise group,
or some sort of nefarious cult, or perhaps something in between. Um.
While the again state sponsored Chinese media calls Falangog occult,
(34:00):
Western media seemed very hesitant to do so. In fact, really,
like we talked about that time interview, did give them
a platform and treated them almost with a lot of deference,
and we got to ask ourselves why. Uh. Some scholars
argue that it was because of pressure from Folloing Goong itself,
perhaps that lititiousness we talked about. Um. Still, there are
(34:22):
some accounts and evidence showing recruitment tactics that could be
described as pretty sketchy at the very least, cult like
at the most, as Heather Caven rights in Fallonong and
the media, what can we believe? The exercises quickly begin
to take a back seat to larger ideologically driven belief systems. UM.
(34:46):
Here's a quote on newcomers second or third visits, they
are given scriptures showing Lee's rejection of those who simply
do the exercise part and not you know, the the
other stuff which we'll get into. Um. When six months
into the field work, remember told me that Fallon Goong
was not about doing the exercises at all. And I
(35:08):
was not surprised. Yeah. So, uh, Heather Kavan wrote this
awesome paper where did this ethnographics study? I believe in
New Zealand? And she was she was meeting up with
members of Following Calling every day for a time and
doing these exercises in the morning. Uh. And she got
(35:31):
they were very welcoming, and she got an increasingly intimate
perspective of the day to day actions of practitioners as
well as you know, some of the larger things that
they believed to be true. And this got into ideas
of like having visions visions are very big, and following
(35:51):
Gong having clairvoyance moments or moments by location. Uh. And
then also there were sketchy things where she would add
like she did this for pretty more than a year
I think, And there was somebody she was meeting every
day and she said, hey, what do I call that
woman that had been meeting with every day? And somebody
(36:12):
just looked at her and was like just call her
the woman, which is kind of a sketchy thing to say.
I don't know, I don't know. I'm an outsider, but
this told her that there was a maybe to your point,
in a little bit of bait and switch, kind of
like you're come for the exercises, stay for the truth
about the universe. And I'm not being dismissive. I mean
(36:32):
that's that's kind of the process. And those for people
who continue deeper into the belief system X fallon Gong
practitioners say that the the beliefs and values are what
might be called surprisingly conservative, the forbidding of interracial marriage,
the condemnation of homosexuality, and to our earlier point, discouraging
(36:54):
the use of modern medicine. For their part, Following Going
officially denies that this is true. So again we're in
one side said this, one side said that situation. But
if this is if we were to define this as
a cult, which Following Gong emphatically says it is not,
(37:14):
then we would naturally find ourselves with a couple of
questions off the bat. The first is this this observation
cults need leaders, So people are critics of this organization.
Those who accuse follon Gong of being a cult. Say,
they do have a leader in that role is played
by the founder, Lee Hong Shi. So weird thing about
(37:36):
Lee Honks is that we have conflicting stories about him,
his life, his current beliefs, his aims for the organization
or aims for the movement. And the even weirder thing
about this is to Matt's earlier point about information war, Uh,
some of these reports are coming from people who would
be totally happy if he never existed a k. The
(37:59):
Chinese government. Some of these reports are coming from his disciples,
and then some of his conflicting reports are coming straight
from him at different times when he's talking to different people,
like he's he's not a Western audience, right, he say like,
I'm not a god, don't try to make me a god.
And then he's talking to a domestic audience and he's say,
(38:20):
my true spiritual form is so huge that if I
came down here, you know, in my true form, you
would be standing like standing trying to gaze up past
my big toe. Totally a god a K. Yeah. Interesting,
It's it's very weird, I mean, and and he in
the past hasn't Lee said that he's like of Jesus
(38:42):
or a savior or the person who is going to yeah,
save humanity. Yeah, he said that. Um, he's compared himself
at times in speeches to the biblical Jesus Christ, where
he said that, you know lines like, uh, Christ has
(39:03):
a sixteen carrot gold path. I have a twenty four
or twenty something carrot gold path. Uh. You know, we
have to admit maybe we're maybe we're losing some context
in translation, but these like there's a repeated pattern of
this stuff. He also says things will be familiar to
(39:23):
people who have had experience with exclusionary organizations. Says that
if you're a member of Following Going, you're superior to
ordinary people, and this might be familiar to longtime listeners.
Also says you need to relinquish affection for kinsfolk, love
between a man and a woman, and affection for parents,
(39:44):
feelings and friendship. You need to focus on the path. Uh.
What was that guy we did episode on Benhit though,
Wasn't he like in like Sedona or something like that.
He was in somewhere somewhere in like New Mexico and
he had this whole like kind of sweat lodge tech
(40:06):
bro cult situation. Careful, Yeah, I I still get his newsletters.
Oh boy, interesting, Well, no, you're right, Ben, and and
and and it gets weirder like and he's he'sn't he's
not shy about this, and it's it's even a little inconsistent,
(40:26):
right like when he's gonna go big and talk about
the big toe, you know, god situation or downplay and say,
oh no, no, I'm just a but a humble meditation instructor.
I'm I'm exaggerating a little bit. But in that Time
article he talks a lot about being able to teach
people to levitate off of the ground. Um, And then
(40:48):
also he talks about how you shouldn't ever show these
abilities to outsiders. The Time Reporters is in your book
Zon Faloon, you talk about people levitating off the ground,
but you say that they should not show other people.
Why is that? And he Lee says it is the
same principle that Western gods in paradise should not be
seen by ordinary mortals because they cannot understand its meaning.
(41:11):
And then Time asks have you seen human beings levitate
off the ground? And he responds, I have known too many.
Can you describe any that you have known, to which
Lee responds, David Copperfield, he can levitate, and he did
it during the performances. Uh. I'm not trying to rag
on the guy too hard, but very mixed messages here
he's saying, you know you, I can teach people to
(41:34):
do it. Uh, It's something that's inherent in this belief system. Also,
I don't like the idea of them showing anybody but
the one he cites as an American illusionist where everyone
knows that he's not really levitating, very unusual. They have
just been a joke, you know, some a form of
a joke. Who knows. Yeah. Maybe. And then also this
(41:55):
is this is interesting because again we go back to
the question of not just context, but the question of
motivation of the sources. Like the thing about there's an
interesting example. So we talked a little bit about, um,
how there might have been pressure from following Gong that
influenced Western media's portrayal of the group Originally. It reminds
(42:19):
me a lot of Reverend Moon and the Washington Times,
when when the Mooney's owned that there were clear conflicts
of interest that would come up over time, just like
obviously see has conflicts of interest because it's state media,
just like multiple organizations do. It's more unusual to be
(42:40):
like a pro publica without as much of an editorial bias.
So we I think we've built an okay case to
to show that. First off, a lot of statements from
this guy have been conflicting over time with earlier statements
he's made, or with statements he goes on to make afterwards.
A Secondly, there are some claim Chief's made that seemed
(43:01):
pretty extraordinary and that don't seem all two out of
the realm of cult leader. But we're we're just we're
telling you why. Some people have argued that the other
thing that keeps us so we're kind of pingponging back
and forth across what's happening here. Here's another thing that's happening.
Following Gong practitioners have for years and years and years
(43:24):
alleged that since uh gosh Win in two decades now,
that since maybe even a little before, they were being
persecuted and are being persecuted by the Chinese government. That
is true. That's the thing. That's no one they're not
making that up. After the band, tens of thousands of
(43:45):
people were arrested, they were sent to labor camps without
a trial, and many of these people who have survived,
who came out of these said that they were tortured. Again,
the numbers may be exaggerated. It's tough to get transparent
numbers and incarceration from the Chinese government, and it's tough
to really UM and this is not adeing on them,
(44:09):
it's it's tough to understand the credibility of numbers offered
by an organization like this on its own membership rates
on on who have what happened to whom and when,
just because they might not. I'm not saying there's any
necessarily an ulterior motive here. They may not have the
capacity to to keep that kind of accounting, but the
(44:32):
detainment was definitely real. Yeah. So in the Wall Street
Journal UM, a journalist named Ian Johnson documented his investigation
into the repression that we're talking about and a series
that he wrote which he received a Pulitzer price for
part of UM. And there's definitely something strange going on
sinoa UM and pretty stark, if not very surprising, as
(44:56):
we discussed. Contrast depicted the prisoners as be being happy
playing basketball. We're talked about this in the past episodes
as well, eating amazing you know, platters of food and
all of that, with local police stations acting as UM
centers for them to receive counseling to help these poor,
you know, brainwashed souls essentially get an education and become
(45:21):
I guess more acclimated or reintroduced into traditional civilized Chinese society.
UM in this, you know, really support of the narrative
of the government was pushing of this being a dangerous
separatist cult. However, practitioners of Follonong described members being treated
much much differently, described them being hung by their ankles
(45:46):
upside down for long periods of time, hit with like
cattle prod type implements or stunned guns UH actually cuts
or pierced with bamboo sticks, beaten and raped, and kept
in tiny, tiny spaces where they can't even move for
days at a time. UM prohibited from using the restroom
facilities for long periods of time, UH showing brutal imagery
(46:10):
displayed throughout these facilities, things like police brutality, and often
in some of these public demonstrations that they would do,
they would re enact historical torture scenes UH in alarming
and disturbing ways. Theater as a weapon. Right, it's a
it's a it's a real thing, and it can be
a powerful thing. There's an interesting and somewhat troubling interpretation
(46:38):
of this persecution. This persecution is to a degree um aspirational,
as much as I hate to say it. Within the movement,
there's this one speech where Lee talks about stepping forward.
Stepping forward is a euphemism referring to a series of
tests that practitioners must asks to gain entry into his
(47:02):
version or his realization of heaven or paradise or enlightenment.
Going up the ladder, crossing the bridge, stepping forward. Okay,
do you want to get a seed? Uh simens reference
so so yeah. That Here's how he explained it. He
said he had only planned enlightenment for a limited number
(47:23):
of following glowing members, but with the increasing amount of
practitioners again, they might be inflating the numbers here, and
with of course the eminent end of the world, he
had to start weeding people out quick fast and in
a hurry. And so he said that if you defend
the following long to the point where you are imprisoned,
(47:45):
you are detained, you are tortured, then your bad karma
is burned off, and this assures you a space in paradise.
Practitioners must not recant their faith, even if their retract
chin is insincere, even if, like we proved in earlier
episodes on torture, you're just saying whatever you think people
(48:06):
want to hear, so that I will stop pulling out
your fingernails or shocking your testicles or what have you. Uh.
He says, Look, even if you fake recanting, foul them gong,
you're a terrible person. And then he goes on, think
about this, he goes one step further and and heavily
implies that he purposefully orchestrated the torture, that it was
(48:29):
all under his control the whole time, because he needed
to expose these weak willed folks. And he refers to
these folks who were can't under torture as quote malignant tumors.
The torture is real, but the interpretation of it and
the degree to which it's real is still up for
debate because there's just not a unbiased source here, really,
(48:50):
um and and it's tough, you know, like these are
Wall Street journal these are top notch journalists. And they're
having they're having a tough time get cutting through the
propaganda and cutting through the purposeful, the purposely deceptive tactics
of the government. And we have to go to one
other thing, which is probably the thing people a lot
(49:13):
of people in the West probably first heard of Follongong
because of this, and we've covered it in both video
and audio in the past. Organ harvesting, the quote unquote
red market. Yeah, and this is again, as you said, Ben,
this is one of the things that brings a lot
of people into the conversation because it's such a sensational
concept that the Chinese government is somehow or for some
(49:37):
reason harvesting organs directly from Falloon Goong practitioners. Um. And
this is this is something that is alleged um And
it's it's usually it's usually organs being taken from detainees,
people who are already detained by the government. At least
that's what's said in an expert panel of independent researchers
said they heard clear evidence that organ harvesting had taken
(50:00):
place over at least twenty years um wow, directly tied
when they were declared illegal. If you look at the timeline, Uh,
questions about the bias of this tribunal, the China Tribunal.
He was set up by a group called the International
(50:23):
Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China. So it definitely
starts from assuming it's this is happening and they just
want to prove it's there. H This panel said it
was beyond a doubt a fact that there had been
forced our organ harvesting, not just because of one like
crooked doctor or one crooked warden, which this is very important,
(50:46):
but they said it was happening on a systemic scale.
States supported. And here's the worst part. Beijing has repeatedly
denied these accusations. They did not start with following gold.
To be very clear, as we talked about earlier, this
is an ongoing thing, uh or this was an ongoing
thing at the time. But I wouldn't draw a special
(51:08):
attention to their reasoning here, their support of their their
claim that they didn't do this. They you guys, they
literally said no, we don't forcibly take organs from people
as a bunch of Western propaganda, you know, I mean,
for Pete's sake, fellow humans, we stopped taking organs from
(51:32):
executed prisoners way back in and that was like four
years ago. You guys are living in the past. Come on,
that's just like okay, Like imagine, I'm not gonna say
somebody burned a barn, but but imagine like I was
standing right next to just like the old Aminem song,
(51:55):
I'm standing right next to uh burning barn in this instance,
and I've got a got a handful of matches he
carefully gas. People are like, hey, dude, did you burn
this barn? I'm like, what, that's crazy. I haven't burned
barns for funds since you guys are wild and that's unfair.
(52:16):
But like you see what I'm saying. I'm saying it's
right to be suspicious. It is right to be suspicious.
And it's also just something to point out here. We
talked about the demonstrations the felon going practitioners have done
with showing the police brutality of the torture. One of
the things that they harp on, or at least have
in the past is this bread market and like they
(52:38):
will go through the motions of having a detainee like
not really but having their organs ripped out in a
very gory fashion in a demonstration in front of a building,
a government building or something. And then this leads us
to maybe one of the biggest things we need to
note here. The information war that started in the nineties continues.
(53:00):
It's been going on for decades. Uh, there's something we
mentioned a little earlier. We've talked a lot about this
office preparation for this episode. In the US, there's this
amazing traveling show called Shan Yutt. We talked. We talked
about this, I think last week or so, like we
always wanted to go. I definitely always wanted to go.
(53:22):
Felt the tickets were a little pricey, but it is
in fact associated with and backed by Fallingong. Visually, it's
a stunning show. It's the kind of thing too where
it's like, I don't know where this budget is coming from.
With the marketing blitz behind this show is out of control.
A lot of it's just kind of like street team
type situations where you'll see, you know, fires for it
(53:43):
at every restaurant and coffee shop and you know, juice
juice bar in town, but they have billboards everywhere, and
like in New York City especially, a friend of mine
UM was saying how he ended up in a cab
or a lift or something that was driven by very
clearly foulonong uh, you know, kind of hardliner um. And
(54:04):
there were even shen Yuan advertisements within the cab, and
he had like stacks of Fallonang pamphlets as well. It's
almost like a modern day Harry Christna thing. Remember how
he used to see the Harri Krishnas at the airport
passing out their pamphlets and stuff. This is sort of
like that to me. Oh yeah, it makes itself known.
So let's talk about exactly what we're seeing here in
(54:25):
this beautifully chore choreographed dance, interpretive dance and cultural exchange
at shen Yun. What do you see? Yeah, so you
see it's it's heavily rooted in traditional Chinese culture. So
we'll see you'll see songs, You'll see intricate choreography and
dance numbers. You'll also see a admittedly transparent narrative and
(54:51):
overall message which includes the reenactment of some of those uh.
Some of those acts of persecution also include duds, you know,
very pro Follongong, pro shen Yon message. Uh. And it
talks about the evils of persecution like it's clearly it's
clearly a show with something to say beyond witness Uh
(55:15):
this ancient tradition of Chinese dance. Uh. And you can
read a lot about shen Yun. One thing you can
you can hear about at least is the Upstate New
York training facility where shen Yun I guess pelone going
practitioners or just shen Yun dancers and performers go and
learn really interesting stuff. And I mean to me, it's
(55:39):
it's like it has to have a massive base of operations, right,
because I mean it's got to be hundreds and hundreds
of of individuals that are performing in these various iterations
of this show, right, I mean like and like that's
what you're saying. There's a training facility almost like you
think of for circl. Yeah, it's it is called the
Phacian Academy, and it's in Middleton or Middletown, New York.
(56:04):
And uh, you know, post pandemic, if you depend on
where you live, it's pretty easy for you to see
this show when it comes into town because it's you know, uh,
it used to travel a lot before before COVID locked
us down. One thing I noticed is it seemed like
any young show was always on the way, just left.
(56:25):
It's definitely a business and just quick shout out to
The New Yorker and Gia Tolentino, I think that's her name.
Article you can read called stepping into the Uncanny, unsettling
world of shen yuon just it's it describes to you
exactly what you see. And let's stick with the New
York Times. Let's also stick with allegations of front companies,
(56:47):
because Follongong has a success story that may be familiar
to a lot of people in the US, though you
may not know the full story. It's a big conspiratorial
great journalists over at New York Times named Kevin Rose
had wrote this piece on a newspaper called The Epoch
Times E. P O. C H. That sounds so familiar, Okay, alright,
(57:10):
So for years the Epoch Times was a kind of small,
low budget newspaper that was against the government of China.
And you would if you're walking around the corners of
some New York neighborhoods, you would you would have this
thing handed out for free to you. People like free stuff.
It's a smart strategy. But in around or so the
(57:34):
paper made a couple of changes that turned it into
one of the country's most powerful digital platforms, most powerful
digital publishers. I should say they became a world class
source of right wing information by betting the farm on Facebook.
I don't know why I have so many farm analogies today, guys, sorry,
(57:55):
but so they like when when um, the Donald Trump
came forward to to become president, to become a presidential candidate,
all this stuff, they got super on board and they
embraced the Trump presidency most likely, if you had to guess,
because of his strong anti China stance at the time.
More than anything else. It was just like an enemy
(58:18):
of my enemy kind of thing. Um, I guess, how
of my pigament, chicken whatever. So the the coverage that
they had of US politics beforehand, it was very much
like neutral. Also ran straight up reporting right like this
bill passes, this bill doesn't pass. This person is blah
blah blah of New York. But then it became superpartisan
(58:40):
and in This article was written in November. Rose reports
that the Epic Times and its affiliates are a force
and right wing media, with tens of millions of social
media followers spread across dozens of pages, and they have
an online audience that rivals the audiences of The Daily
Call and Breitbart. Uh. Since two thousand and seventeen, they
(59:05):
had been running some pretty interesting experiments. And you can
also get a taste of the kind of stuff they cover.
They cover real world events, they cover um international news
with an anti China slant. But then they also you know,
when they're on social media, which a very adept at uh.
According to Rose, they're posting stuff about like anti vaccine
(59:29):
screen screeds. Uh. Where where did the coronavirus really come from?
And why doesn't the PRC want you to know? It
was made to lab on purpose by them? Because they're evil?
That's the whole headline. Why is Bill Gates directing the pandemic?
What's up with this Jewish mob that controls the world? Like,
that's the kind of stuff they're writing, And if you
(59:49):
listen to those headlines and those topics, it sounds very
similar to the stuff you've probably seen floating around on Facebook.
And I think this is an important thing. It's it's
a very strange turn of events. This has started as
like a spiritual movement or an exercise group. How did
it become a media powerhouse. How did it become, you know,
(01:00:10):
associated with this, with this traveling show that we want
to see that almost weaponizes theater. What what's the true
story of Lie Hong Xi? And at the very end
of the day show we have to advanced the even
crazier stuff. I'm sure I can't be the only person
wondering is following along an asset of a foreign intelligence agency.
(01:00:32):
It's not out of the question. It's a that's the
thing that no hard proof of this has come to light.
Please send us some if you have some. But of
course people are wondering, is the CIA involved? Because this
is this is like textbook c I A. You get
a you get a dissident group that may be disruptive
to the status quo, and boom, you got some independent
(01:00:54):
freedom fighters. You got a bunch of college students who
just happened to to overthrow a government because they believe
in for U, in these very US friendly ideals, and
they just somehow got some guns. Like that's that's the thing. Uh,
that's why people are asking this and following Gong has
not done like some kind of armed attack on a
(01:01:15):
Chinese building at this point. But but people are asking
these questions primarily because the West has such a terrible
track record and terrible precedent for interfering interfering fares this way.
And also these are human beings, Polone Gong people are
human beings. Um. I hope it's not a hot take
that human beings shouldn't be tortured and kidnapped. Nope, that
(01:01:36):
is a very cool take. Great thanks man, cool takes. Come.
Come for the hot ones, stay for the cool and stuff.
I want you to know. But there's one there's another point.
I think one of us mentioned this earlier. There's another
big mystery. Where is all the money coming from that's
powering these initiatives? Is this really all coming from like
(01:01:58):
subscriptions to things owned the up Up Media Group or SES.
I mean, I don't know. This is this is big. Um.
We wanna we wanna know what you guys think. Yeah,
if you have any information on the tithing process or
like donation process or membership that you know, whatever it
takes to stay within the organization, If you have info
(01:02:21):
on that, we'd love to hear it, because it's difficult
to find anything transparent coming out of the organization or
anything that you could believe coming out of an opposition writer. Um,
so yeah, please write to us about that. Yeah, I
just keep like a matching. You're you're trying to decide
if you should eat a sandwich, and there's one person
(01:02:41):
left saying this is the best sandwich ever. If you
don't eat it, you're going to die. And then then
there's a person on the other side of table saying
this is the worst. It doesn't even qualify as food.
If you do eat it, you'll die in a slow,
agonizing way in a Chinese prison like this is very
intense and it's it's tough to figure out the truth.
And I think there's I'm gonna say, I think there's
(01:03:02):
some sketchy stuff going on. No matter how you slice it,
there's something there. There's something they don't want you to know. Uh,
multiple instances of it. Please let us know if you
have experience, Please let us know what you think the
future of this organization or these kinds of organizations will
(01:03:23):
be and what it can tell us about the world today.
We try to be easy to find on the internet. Yeah,
you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. We are
conspiracy stuff on Instagram or conspiracy stuff show if you
do use Facebook, head on over to Here's where it
gets Crazy. That is the page where you can hang
out with all the other conspiracy realists who are listening
(01:03:43):
right now who want to talk with you and comment
and be nice, and they will be nice, and they'll
be cool or else are awesome. Mods will take care
of them. You can also find us all over the
internet in other places if the usual Facebook spots where
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You can also give us a telephone call at one
(01:04:05):
S td W I t K. Once you hear the
sound of Ben's chime like vocal intonations, leave a voicemail.
Try to keep it three minutes. They cut off at three.
Do us a solid don't like spam us with like
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Should the spirit move you. So, if none of that
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looking for, there's one other way to reach out to us.
You can email us directly where we are conspiracy at
(01:04:48):
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