brittle regimes

the mystique of the CCP

We both love being on the water, especially on a hot New York afternoon. We hadn’t done the Circle Line around Manhattan Island tour for several years so the heat and desire to check out the skyline led us to taking the 2 and a half hour cruise from Pier 80 on the Hudson River side.

We walked up towards the West Side Highway discussing whether it was still elevated or at street level at that location when I noticed a lot of people wearing yellow standing on the other side of hte street. It took me a moment to focus on the banner.

Falun Gong.

This group, always wearing yellow to denote their faith, blends traditional Chinese concepts like gong, or essence, with western ideas of eternal life as best I understand them. They are sometimes known as the biggest promoters of qigong, or vital breath.

The Falun Gong are de facto banned on the mainland because early on 25 April 1999, literally twenty thousand adherents stood quietly outside the CCP leadership compound at Zhongnanhai in their tennis shoes. They were not demanding or communicating verbally but their unforeseen presence unnerved the Party which prides itself on infiltrating any groups to prevent potential anger directed at the countries leaders (read: CCP). The 1999 Falun Gong were engaging in a silent protest that their spiritual leader, Li Hongzhi, was no longer welcomed in his homeland after he decamped to upstate New York earlier that decade to avoid CCP pressure towards conformity with state-tolerated groups. In other words, this group long pushed limits of the Party’s tolerance for non-conformity.

CCP response to the April 1999 incident was swift and decisive, banning this group. Panic resulted from the group’s insularity which allowed them to bring so many people together without the authorities having an inkling these largely older folks in tennis shoes were coming.

In the nearly quarter century following that incident, Falun Gong appears in the United States in airports in their yellow outfits to promote anti-CCP messages or in supporting the traveling circus called Shen Yun which is billed as ‘China before Communism’. Invariably any events associated with Falun Gong stress the religious intolerance of the CCP versus Taiwan’s more open society, although the group is not tethered exclusively to that island itself.

As soon as I realised who had the banner, I began looking around to figure where their target really was. Across 42nd Street, an innocuous highrise had a small sign out saying Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China. Harassing the PRC CG in was their intended target, although certainly after more than two decades the Falun Gong recognise that China is no more likely to abandon its determination to prevent their message on the mainland than the religious group is to abandon their desire for freedom to practice their rather beliefs. Both sides figure they have a role to play in promoting their cause so the harassment and banning continue.

But as true with so much relating to the PRC these days, the act of messaging is the objective as much as anything can be. I doubt the PRC truly fears the 2 to 60 million members of the faith (determining a census of most things is tough in China where reluctance to answer honestly prevades society for various reasons) but what the Party desperately seeks to prevent is any manifestation of weakness that adversaries of any kind could exploit. This is an authoritarian bunch who fear that weakness will equate to their downfall. The responses are sometimes as weird as Putin’s flimsy explanations of the Wagner escapade last month.

At the same time, Xi Jinping reiterates repeatedly the need for the people of his nation to stay away from corrupting western influences obviously bent on destroying the Party and China, as he sees it. Falun Gong words on a banner just might get someone’s support which could be problematic for the CCP and Xi, long term. Absolutely anything in any manner linked with western freedom of religion is going to be proscribed at this point.

The most brittle a regime becomes, the more it propagates seemingly ‘pure’ or absolutist visions of itself and its idealised, simplistic remedies for society. These are concepts rather like apple pie and mom: who could not accept those same things with Chinese characteristics?

Falun Gong says they won’t accept anything with Chinese Communist Party characteristics which is why they work unceasingly to destroy the Party’s rule. Their newspaper, Epoch Times, fiercely attacks U.S. ties with the mainland, advocating many steps to scale back bilateral relations. In an era of greater generalised skepticism about China’s ambitions and trustworthiness, this view continues to thrive in many quarters. Nuance on the benefits and dangers of the ties invariably vanish in Epoch Times assessments.

I am confident the Falun Gong actions will never close the Consulate but it will continue pressuring Beijing on religion. As Xi’s anxiety about China’s economic, population, trade, debt, gender, and other imbalances grows, the Falun Gong will be one more factor he blames as a western (Americans in most eyes) desire to hold China back, to humiliate them.

Please please please do not misunderstand me. Yes, China is stronger militarily than it was in 1999; absolutely no question about that. Yes, China is more engaged in much of the world than it ever was before. But these are not factors without trade offs involved. And it’s a regime that acts terrified of its own people.

I doubt too many senior policy leaders really know anything about this group nor does it make an impact on decision-makers. I suspect the Falun Gong criticisms coincide with rather than drive any skeptics It continues as a voice criticising a competitor/adversary. I am sure that will continue as it seems that criticism has become an end rather than a means on China policy.

The cruise was lovely. Seeing the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the massive growth occurring in the post-Pandemic Manhattan and Brooklyn, the 20 bridges between the Five Buroughs, and the concentration of people in this single city was again truly fascinating: I recommend it because of how much it does and does not represent the rest of us in this country. No two areas of this vast country are precisely the same.

On that point, I am confident as of now that we are not nearly as brittle as Xi Jinping’s China but I hate seeing us travel down paths that risk that. It is absolutely vital that, no matter how we dislike someone’s views, we not personalise those views into hatred for individuals as it will end our country and the strengths we do indeed still have.

Have a great weekend.