China’s Spiritual Revival and the Rise (and Fall) of Falun Gong — with Ian Johnson
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So when Falun Gong came along, a lot of people frankly bought the government description of it as a cult. I knew from religious studies that cult itself is just a derogatory term. It doesn't mean anything. You can't define a cult in any meaningful way. Hi listeners, welcome to Peking Hotel. I'm your host Leo. Hope you had a good Lunar New Year with friends and families.

Now, have you ever wondered how a journalist wins the Pulitzer Prize or the original story of Falun Gong in China? Well, if you have, then today's episode is for you. Ian Johnson is an award-winning journalist and writer. He has written for the Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Review of Books, and is the author of several major non-fictions on Chinese religion and civil society, including Wild Grasp,

Souls of China and Sparks. Ian is also the founder of the Unofficial China Archive, an online repository of underground magazines, books and films about China. He's currently writing a new book on religion in China, so stay tuned.

Now, in 2001, Ian won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of Falun Gong. And today's episode is about that story, the story of Falun Gong, the rise and fall of the movement, the revival of spiritual life in China post-Mao, and how you win a Pulitzer Prize. Falun Gong has been in the news lately, so I thought it's a good timing to add some richness to the discussion. And hope you enjoy.

This was a time when

I think Chinese people were really searching for something else. These are eternal questions that everybody faces in life. Why are we here? What's the origin of life? And religions have been dealing with these questions for centuries or millennia.

So they have answers. It doesn't answer everybody. I mean, in some ways, a lot of religious ideas, a lot of religious explanations don't actually answer the question. They're somewhat teleological. But still, it's a way of thinking about reality. And I think the problem for a lot of people in China was that the Mao era was a failure, obviously. I say obviously because...

at least for a lot of people, it was a failure because it had not brought prosperity. China was as poor in the late 1970s as it had been 30 years earlier. And Maoism was sort of discredited. Mao had died. All of these magical things didn't happen. The Great Leap Forward didn't lead to great industrial output and just led to famine.

So anybody who experienced that period, I think, would have been sort of let down. And then the party, the overall ideal of communism was kind of just discredited because

They had flip-flopped. So obviously, you know, Mao was a great guy. And then maybe for some people it started even before his death with the death of Lin Biao, his hand-picked successor, because this was a shock. This was the guy that Mao had picked. And now it turns out he's a bad guy, that he's a traitor. And he fled to Russia, to the Soviet Union and all that sort of stuff. Unbelievable. Makes you doubt Mao.

And certainly by the time, you know, the problem of course with Mao is as a godlike figure is he dies, right? So this is the problem of any sort of godlike living figure. We were talking before about cults and how cults can sometimes have a problem when they have a living savior. And when the savior dies, then it kind of calls into question all these things. That was also true, I think, for Maoism and for communism. And then they did a 180 degree turn on all these economic policies and embraced a really...

no-holds-barred form of capitalism that was really harsh on a lot of people. It wasn't socialism, because socialism would have some kind of a safety net. It would have some kind of help for the industrial workers who were losing their jobs in the 1990s. It would have given some sort of safety net for farmers. Don't forget, later the party has put money into rural areas, but back then there was really nothing. There were almost no rural clinics. A lot of that stuff that

even though rudimentary had existed in the now era, all collapsed in the 80s and 90s. The communes and the infrastructure around that collapsed. So I think a lot of people felt if they weren't part of the beneficiaries, that they probably felt that they were sufferers of this new era. And that also probably drove them to religious feelings and religiosity. You know, it wasn't just...

Because also you can see in places like Henan, there was a huge revival of underground Christian sects like the Shouters. This was a group that stemmed from this guy called Watchman Nee, who was a big pre-1949 religious figure in the Republican era. He was basically imprisoned and died in prison in the Mao era.

But these groups have came back, versions of them came back, very similar to Falun Gong in that they were syncretic. They took a little bit of, you know, they took, borrowed heavily from one faith, in this case Christianity, but then they added a lot of folk belief and charisma and stuff like that. So...

This was kind of an interesting free-for-all time in China because the Party's credibility had suffered and it was trying to rebuild itself. And one of these constant themes the Party said over and over again is party building, jian dang, we've got to rebuild the Party, rebuild the Party. And back then they really had to rebuild the Party because the Party had been kind of destroyed by the Mao era.

And so it wasn't offering a lot. It was not very present and people were doing a lot of interesting slash crazy things like, you know, Chi Gong. So I think it was a time, even though Tiananmen had happened and it was clear there was going to be no political reform, a lot of other things in society were allowed, were tolerated by the government. Right.

And obviously you're well known for reporting on Falun Gong. How did you first become interested in Chinese religions? I've always been interested in religion. And when I was in the 1990s, I thought I was going to write a book on Daoism in China because I was really interested in Daojiao. Yeah, you're going to all these underground Daoist temples back in your first trip to China. And I thought Daoism is the only indigenous religion in China.

I thought it'd be really cool. I had these mistaken ideas about Taoism, but I thought of it like the Rosetta Stone for Chinese culture because all of these things like the Wu Xing, the five elements, and the Taiji, the Yin Yang, all this sort of comes from Taoism. But that actually is not exactly accurate. What it did do is I knew a lot of religious scholars. So the 1990s, the Association of Asian Studies would have this big conference every year. In fact, I just came from it yesterday in Seattle this past weekend.

Back then in the 1990s, I was a member of the Association of Asian Studies. Get a copy of the catalog of all the panels sent to me in Beijing. I would go through it and see what people had presented on it and I would mark it. Then I'd say, aha, so there's this professor doing stuff on Daoism or rural taxation, right? There might be a panel on that. And then I was using email, which was relatively new at the time, and emailing back to these people. I had a membership directory.

And so I could email back to them, "Can I have a copy of your paper?" So they would send me their paper and then I would interview them on the phone. And so I had a lot of knowledge of the cutting edge academic work being done on this. When Falun Gong came along, a lot of people frankly bought the government description of it as a cult.

I knew from religious studies that cult itself is just a derogatory term. It doesn't mean anything. You can't define a cult in any meaningful way. And the government was just using this as a way to attack Falun Gong. When you look at Falun Gong, it's a very typical folk religion in China that takes elements of Buddhism and Taoism and other stuff and mixes it all together into this mishmash. And that's what Falun Gong really is. And so I was talking to people

Like David Ownby, who now is better known for his translation work, but back then was a scholar of Chinese cults. He wrote a book on Falun Gong, on Chinese cults. Minjian Xinyang, folk belief, folk religion. And Baran Terhaar, a Dutch professor who was in Leiden at the time.

So I think that really informed my understanding of Falun Gong. So I was probably in some ways be more sympathetic to Falun Gong because I thought no matter how nutty they are, they're not that unusual in Chinese history and they certainly don't deserve to be attacked by the police. And Falun Gong came up during a period of spiritual revival in China. I mean, Taoist temples came back, Buddhist temples came back, Christianity and Islam, they all came back from the ruins of Chinese communism.

Did you personally notice any changes to people's spiritual lives? What I didn't realize in the 1980s was that there was a spiritual revival underway. It seemed to me that visiting a Taoist temple, at the time Beijing had one Taoist temple, I think two Buddhist temples, two Protestant churches,

a couple of mosques. Official ones. Official ones. But this is all you could see, right? You could go to Niujie to see the Ox Street to see the mosque. You could go to Baiyunguan to see the Taoist temple, et cetera, et cetera. So it seemed like a museum to these dead religions. What I didn't realize is that there was this religious revival already taking place at that time and that the government had actually kind of given it a bit of a blessing by issuing this document in 1982 called Document 82 or 81 called Document 19, which, um,

explicitly allowed unofficial religious sites and practitioners to thrive. And I also didn't, well it wasn't apparent then, the big Qigong movement that was taking off at the time. That was still in the late 80s when I was not in China.

But by the 1990s, it was hard to miss it. And I did a story for the Baltimore Sun on Qigong and Qigong practitioners. And I met these people who, you know, could take a book like this. And I said, I'm going to read my book, the book with my ear. And I'm going to like, now I can tell you everything that's in the book. And it was like this total bullshit. But they were like, I'll tell you, it's the Analects of Confucius. And of course, they just, you know, had probably read it ahead of time or something like that.

Or they would have these things where they could stick their finger in an electrical socket and conduct electricity. It was like really crazy stuff. And these other people who could do these things and these tricks. I met this woman who I wrote a profile of her for the Baltimore Sun at this temple in Beijing. And she could do all kinds of things. She had a big following of people. So it was clear that there were people searching for things. I think what really got me...

even more aware was that I encountered this crazy, another crazy person, but really, I say this, he's a very nice guy, still a good friend of mine, Brock Silvers, who's this business person in China at the time. He now lives in Hong Kong and he started this US registered charity called the Taoist Restoration Society, the Gu Guang She, and he had me travel around China

Well, when I was traveling around China for the Baltimore Sun or the Wall Street Journal, he had me do some reconnaissance work for him. So he wanted to find worthy temples to support, to help rebuild. Because Taoism is China's indigenous religion, but it's also the weakest and the temples are the most destroyed in the Mao era.

And so I did this work for him and I got to see that there were a lot of these temples were being rebuilt already. And that actually the amount of money that Brock had at his disposal was tens of thousands of dollars, which initially seemed like a lot of money in China. Wow, you know, 10,000 US dollars, like that's a lot of money. Later, by the end of the 90s, that's like, who the hell cares? It's like nothing. Because Chinese entrepreneurs had so much money and they were pumping it into these temples. And you could see this stuff being rebuilt.

and that there was a spiritual revival that was going on in China. And the spiritual revival was not just grassroots. It was also official. I mean, the Communist Party seemed to embrace it as some sort of part of their patriotic education campaign to say, oh, this is Chinese. This is Chinese way of spiritual enlightenment and Chinese way of science. I think that's often...

how it was described as a form of Chinese medicine, Qigong and other supernatural therapy. And at one point, I think you interviewed this female fortune teller who was also doing Qigong therapy to top Chinese communist cadres like Hua Guofeng and Nian Rongzhen and a bunch of others. So it seemed the party also embraced that for a long time.

Yes, I think that this is something people nowadays forget, that senior leaders, and not just senior leaders, but very influential people like Chen Shuesan, the sort of father of China's rocket program, the Silk War missile, and all that, that he was a big supporter of Qigong, and explicitly, I mean, in his writings. And this was considered a kind of Chinese science. I think China...

under the CCP, I don't know if it goes deeper than that, but there's often been this search for shortcuts to modernization. And in some ways, the Great Leap Forward was like that. If we all just do this crazy thing, we'll catch up with England and surpass England and catch up with the United States in 20 years. And we don't have to do the hard work of modernizing and doing it the way other countries have done. So

This was a similar thing that Qigong could be some magical thing that there'd be even some force that you could send out. It was studied at Tsinghua University. They had research projects into it trying to find out if qi could be emitted and shot across the room and stuff like that out of your hand. Do you remember when you first encountered Qigong? It must have been around that time, '95, something like that. Was there anyone in particular that introduced you to it?

I mean it's difficult to not pick it up since it's talked about all the time I suppose. Yeah, I'm not sure who exactly introduced it to me. I think there was a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Science who gave me some tips. And of course the issue of Falun Gong. How did you first notice Falun Gong? Falun Gong I saw in parks, that they were one of these Qigong groups in parks.

When I did that article for the Baltimore Sun, they weren't really that big. It was right around then when they kind of took off, actually, I think. And the funny thing was that I was very interested in the group, but at that time I was already working at the Wall Street Journal. And the Wall Street Journal had a correspondent who had interviewed Lee Hong-jeol.

and was planning a cover story for the Wall Street Journal. At the time, the Wall Street Journal had a couple of big magazine-style articles that ran on the front of the newspaper every day. And the news was on the inside of the newspapers, kind of a very contrarian newspaper. And this is Craig Smith, and he had interviewed Lee Hong-jeol when the protests started. So he quickly wrote the article and all that. But then Craig left the paper to go to the New York Times.

And in that year, and so I immediately said, well, I really want to work on the story because, you know, this is something I've been following and blah, blah, blah. And they said, okay, you can have it. It seemed like at that time that maybe the story was over. They had their protests. They had been sort of crushed. They had been banned and that there wouldn't be too much more to it. But what happened was the...

the protests just continued for month after month. It was, I mean, day after day, week after week. And in some ways, they were much more impressive than Tiananmen, because Tiananmen was crushed in just a couple of months. But these guys continued on for more than a year. Not with hundreds of thousands of people or something like that, but they kept coming back and back and back. So I wrote about that and began to investigate what had happened and then looked back at the history of Qigong and how...

Falun Gong had grown out of that. Yeah. One thing I noticed about your stories of Falun Gong, I read them not just in Wildgrass, but also your reporting of it at the time with Wall Street Journal, is how clearly

how in action the article has appeared. I mean, I read it, I thought, oh, I'm in the scene, right? You're following this intermediary, Li Ge, who's connecting all the other Falun Gong members around China. And when they come to Beijing, or they would duck at his friend's house and they will find a public telephone to call when the beeper calls.

And so it's a lot of those granular interactions that really moved me. And I wonder how did you get into that sort of momentum? Was it difficult to get blended into the group and start reporting? Well, there I'd have to say is to back up a second that working at the Wall Street Journal at that time was a...

huge part of my journalistic formation and training because at the time, unfortunately it's no longer the case, but the Wall Street Journal had, as I said, this unusual format where they ran two long pieces off the front page every day. They had a page one editing staff of five or six people

And they were rigorous in that you could not report, they would never put anything on the front page that had run anywhere else. So you could be 90% of the way finished on, say, this guy Lee Go, you mentioned Brother Lee. And if the New York Times came out with even just a crappy version of 750 words about something like that, they would kill the story. And they also insisted that you have live interviews

action in the story. You had to follow the best practices of narrative nonfiction.

At the time, they had very, very good writers and editors like Tony Horowitz, people who went on to really make a name for themselves as well-known writers of narrative nonfiction. So this is a big trend in the United States, narrative nonfiction. So it's nonfiction. It's all 100% factual, but you can try to use some of the techniques of fiction in the sense of scenes, scenes.

characters and things like that. So rather the typical way of writing in journalism is that you would say you would have a quote by somebody by Mr. X, comma, who then you have like this little bit of color who was wearing a green tie and a blue jacket while fiddling on his phone. Often it's a pointless color, like who cares what color his tie is, who cares what color his jacket is, who cares whether he's on his phone or not.

what they would want to know in the Wall Street Journal is they want you to kind of set it up like set up the scene this guy's on his phone why does that matter da da da da he's on his bicycle and here's what it's almost like writing a novel it's a bit like writing a novel it's kind of like what say Joan Didion and other people like that did so it's magazine writing essentially it's what magazine writing does

So they had an editing staff that insisted you write like that. And so you got familiar with it. They even had internal memos and training sessions on how to do this. They got rid of all of that after Murdoch took over the paper in the late 2000s. But at the time, they had a huge, hugely ambitious staff to do that. And I got to also say, at the same time,

and maybe this is getting too much off topic, but I should probably mention that I had a research assistant at the Wall Street Journal who was Peter Hessler, who was the later, like one of the foremost, I would say the foremost narrative nonfiction writer on China.

So Peter was my news assistant who clipped newspapers. Back in the day we would take a newspaper and clip it into... Or the bad stuff, nothing about good stuff. Well, you know, he'd clip the article. If you were interested in an article on desertification, he'd clip it and put it in the file on desertification.

And he did stuff like that. And he was also freelancing. But he was a student of John McPhee at Princeton, who is like the guru of narrative nonfiction writing. And so through Peter, I got to know about McPhee and read his books. And we talked a lot about how to write and structure art.

And one day, just before I was setting off to go back to the United States on a trip, he said, oh, I've written a memoir about being in China. And I'm like, oh, God. Everybody's writing books on China. Even my stupid news assistant has written a book on China. So he sent me the manuscript. I took the manuscript with me on the airplane. And I'm reading it. This is Rivertown.

which is probably the best-selling non-fiction book on China. I mean, it's so famous. Everyone reads it. I'm reading it like, holy shit, this is really good. And so then I said to him, do you have an agent? He said, oh yeah, I have a contract with HarperCollins. I'm like, oh, wow. So through him... When was this? This must be in the 90s. This was, right, so this was 99, 2000. And he became probably my best editor and probably my...

Most important mentor for writing along with the editing staff at the Wall Street Journal and my editor Marcus Brockley who was a very charismatic Editor a very inspiring editor Who got us helped us he'll run interference do all deal with all the crap back in New York he was on the late-night calls and just made us focus on our work and

And when the whole Falun Gong thing hit, especially in 2000, when I found the story of the woman whose mother had been killed in police custody, the foreign editor at the time, John Bussey, was really a good editor. He said, "Just don't worry about anything else. Just focus on doing this. And think of other stories you want to write. And what do you want to write on?" And I said, "Well, I'd like to know how they get organized. I'd like to know

how did the police kill these people? What are the problems of civil society in China? These are all issues that interest me a lot. And through that, I structured a series of five or six long articles that I wrote throughout the year and then wrote other shorter pieces whenever news happened about Falun Gong during the year. But those five or six pieces became the main articles that we submitted for the Pulitzer. So we kind of thought, I sort of thought thematically about what Falun Gong meant and so on.

And what did it mean? Well, I mean, I think it showed a few different things. One is that there were these civil society structures in China, but they were not properly developed.

There were a lot of people who objected to Falun Gong. There were people who were critical of Falun Gong. There were all kinds. There were atheists. Atheists or even Buddhists. The Buddhist associations. Scientists perhaps weren't the best fans. Right. They thought this was hocus-pocus. And these people were not allowed to talk about it because it was banned, because it was too sensitive. So they...

The necessary public discussion of Falun Gong never took place in China. The government just did what it does with a lot of sensitive issues. It just bans the discussion of it. And then only when it explodes, then they deal with it. And this is something that the CCP has done consistently in its history. And I think this was a good case study of that. That's why I did that one article profiling the atheist scientists and the Buddhists who both objected to Falun Gong but were not allowed to talk about it.

But also how these groups tried to organize, like through the Brother Li story. And then how police violence can happen in China. This method of pushing responsibility down to the lower level, where the official government line is stop the protests.

And then basically they get all the people in a room and they just tell everybody, your province is sending too many protesters, fix it. And then they get back to Shandong province and Jinan and they have a meeting of all the counties. Stop it. Why are so many people coming from your counties? And then their solution is to set up these black jails where they beat people.

And it's not just fix it, it's you know, you fix it or your salary gets deducted for every single Falun Gong member that goes to Beijing. Right, right. So it's a clearly destructive system without sort of looking at why the people might have objected or finding some sort of a solution. So I think that was what I tried to do. I think in hindsight, the story I missed was I could have been harder on Falun Gong, on Li Hongzhi.

I think what I didn't quite realize at the time was, or what I didn't really emphasize was Lee Hong-joo's culpability in pushing the people, not pushing, but not discouraging the people from protesting. I mean, on the one hand, you could say, well, it's not his responsibility because he's not beating people to death. At the end of the day, it's the Communist Party that is beating people to death, right? But I think in that situation, he could have told his followers, right,

You don't need to go protest. You can stay at home. It's okay. Don't get yourself in trouble. Don't feel the obligation to go to Tiananmen Square. But he never issued anything like that. So I think that's something, when I reflect on it later, I didn't write about enough. Did you ever meet Li Hongzhi in person? No. He never agreed to an interview.

And this is even though at the time I was writing a lot about Falun Gong victims and the Falun Gong people were saying, oh, he really will meet you. He'll definitely meet you. And they kept saying stuff like, oh, go to New Jersey and he'll have an event maybe in New York or in Boston. You go there and follow. It was like, I'm supposed to follow this guy around North America. Maybe one day he'll meet me. So I was like, waste my time doing stuff like that. And...

Could you take us through the process of writing a story like that? I mean, pick any story you want from the Falun Gong story. How would you start and how would you finish and what were the steps in between that led in the end to the article? Well, let me think. Initially, I wanted to find Falun Gong victims because clearly these people were people who had been victims in the sense of people who were being arrested. I don't think we knew very much about people being beaten to death.

There was this Falun Gong information center and some people who were active in Hong Kong and elsewhere. So through them, I got a hold of people back in China who could put me in touch. There was one guy at Tsinghua University who, Yu Chao, I think was his name. In fact, I know that was his name. And he...

It's okay to say his name because he's now living in the United States. He later went to jail for nearly 10 years for his activism. He set up encrypted email that we used. So encrypted email PGP called Pretty Good Privacy, which at the time was, despite the kind of funny name, was actually a really good privacy program that you could send encrypted emails to people.

And that's how you could find out about people who were in different provinces who you could go talk to and things like that. And then there was this report of a woman who got beaten to death that I got from one of the practitioners, a very detailed, long letter that had been written about the case. And then I was able to independently talk to other people who'd been in the prison cell with her who had been

Talked to her some some well about four or five different people some knew her directly someone heard about her But it was clear that she had been beaten to death. I think that was without a doubt and talking to her the audience John's Mother right? Yeah, miss Chen Chen. Yeah, Chen Zixiang. She's there. Yeah, so she was clearly beaten to death and

The thing is that these were often older people because a lot of the people who were Falun Gong adherents, you had a range of people. But overall, the profile, again, I'm generalizing a lot, but the profile would be a poorly educated person, maybe with just a middle school education, who had lost their job because of the economic reforms.

and who needed something to cling on to and maybe also because of this situation didn't have good medical coverage or something like that. And they saw in Falun Gong a variety of things, maybe free medical care, but also a sense of camaraderie that they had lost when they were lost, left their Danwei job and other people saw some moral certainties. Yeah, like spiritual orientation, especially after communism was dead. Yeah. What we're supposed to believe in. Yeah.

So for Variety, I was able to talk to people who were familiar with the case, who didn't know each other, who I wasn't being referred to by one person. So if one person tells you go see ABC, you don't want to just rely on that because then that person can have influenced those people, right? So...

So I think I feel pretty confident that these reports were accurate and they were independently verified. But without the police reports and without seeing inside the police, you know, the government files, we'll never probably know 100 percent for sure what exactly happened. But yeah, so...

And then talking to the daughter, she had a lot of details about that. And then I was able to recount what had happened. And what's the writing process? Yes, you did interviews, you tried to verify the facts, you used secure communication methods. And so you gathered all that information. Yeah. And then how do you make it into a feature story? I have to go back and reread it exactly. I can't remember exactly how I structured it, but...

You want to keep a focus on the person. So it has to usually, you want to start out with her and then back off a little bit and give the background to why it matters and what happened and so on and so forth. I think the bigger context was this is a sustained, a surprisingly sustained protest movement that was supposed to die out, but somehow has continued. And why are these people going there?

Are they all fanatical, brainwashed zombies or something like the government sort of? Or is there some reason why they're going there? And I think I was, if you want to say sympathetic, you could say I was empathetic to them because I feel like other religious groups, other faiths have similar histories of...

you know, protesting. And if you think of the history of almost any major religious group, there are histories of persecution. And so the government kept trying to say this was a cult and this was an evil cult, a xie jiao. But there was no evidence that it was a cult, except for the fact that Li Hongzhi...

was still alive. Perhaps that made it a cult in the sense that he was a quasi-religious figure who still existed as opposed to a religious figure who was dead like Jesus or Muhammad or something like that. But I didn't think that that made it any worse. He wasn't telling people to commit suicide. Again, the responsibility, there was some responsibility that he bore.

But it wasn't like he was Jim Jones telling people to drink cyanide out of paper cups and they all died or the sarin gas group in Tokyo or something like that. So they weren't... Well, not like Trump telling supporters to drink bleach. That's also true. I mean, you know, he wasn't telling them... What they were doing was something they... Peacefully protesting, right? It wasn't anything that was crazy. They weren't...

A couple of them committed suicide. Or like Mao asking people to shoot all the birds. Right, so that was crazy stuff. So I think I was empathetic to the fact that they were a quasi-religious group that was trying to exercise its rights. I think maybe what separated me from some of the people and why I was somewhat sympathetic or empathetic at least was

that because I was familiar with Taoism and folk religion and folk religious practices, I could see in Falun Gong very clearly parallels to religious movements in China in the past. So Falun Gong might come across as a little bit crazy if you're not familiar with Chinese religious life, but actually throughout Chinese history,

In fact, the story of Chinese religion, if it's anything, is a syncretic religion. Most folk religion, which is certainly what most people practiced in traditional China, was an amalgam of Buddhism, Taoism and local practices and so on and so forth. So there was really nothing in Falun Gong that was so unusual.

And they borrowed from Buddhism. The whole Falun is the Dharma wheel, the wheel of Dharma, the wheel of law, which is an absolutely crucial part of Buddhism. Of course, the Buddhists hated it because, that's ours, you're stealing it from us. But, you know, sorry, that's the way a lot of new religions happen. They steal stuff from other religions. And the meditation practices were very clearly based on some Taoist teachings.

internal alchemy practices and these visualization techniques that they did and so on. I thought it was actually, if anything, I would say it was a simplified, stripped down, almost bastardized version of these much more complex versions of meditation. But I can understand. I mean, not everybody can be a Taoist adept who lives in a cave and meditates for years on end. A lot of people need sort of

digestible stuff. I think one thing that I found quite interesting about Falun Gong is how they were trying, they were, either they themselves or the party was trying to twist, to pivot Falun Gong

position from a religion into a scientific method of scientific practice and saying how Qigong was just a form of science and in that way Falun Gong survived not as one of the major religions but as a scientific practice and they could hold gatherings in huge stadiums in a way that official religions couldn't and they got away with it because they weren't

Officially a religion. No, exactly. I think this was what the situation about with religions in China was that there were only five official religions. So there's Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and then Christianity for administrative purposes is considered two religions. Catholic and Protestant. Those are the five groups. Anything else is illegal. Anything else is illegal or Daoist.

Well, I suppose you could say, but Taoism existed. But even Judaism or Hinduism is not legally allowed to be practiced in China. So if you wanted to start a new spiritual movement, it was completely taboo. So these groups, and they probably just, the mentality of these people growing up in China was that they probably never even conceived of starting a new religion because it was so impossible. So instead, when they started practicing,

it started as a martial arts kind of group. Qigong was one of the

kinds of Chinese medicine that was approved along with acupuncture, tui na, herbal medicine. There was also qigong. So qigong existed. The term itself was a neologism that was founded, started in the 1940s by the party, by party people who had seen the ability of qigong to cure soldiers at the front. This is all very well recounted by David Palmer in his book, Qigong Fever.

And so Qigong was then just in the Mao era, it existed for a little while, but it then became sort of feudal superstition and it was banned. And then it came back in the 1980s, not as a Chinese medical practice,

which it had been in hospitals, offered in hospitals, but as a kind of a folk religion where it was practiced out in parks with groups of people. And as you said, because it was not a religion, they could practice in a park. They could hand out flyers to people and they can have a big banner and stuff like that. They can hand out...

Well, they didn't have DVDs back then, but they can hand out VCDs and these also video cassettes and stuff of Master Li teaching stuff and sell it and stuff like that. It would be impossible for a Buddhist to go to a park and say, hey, do Buddhist meditation. No, you wouldn't be allowed. That was Buddhism. You can't proselytize. Same with Christianity or Islam. But Qigong and especially Falun Gong is the best organized. Because don't forget, there are a lot of Qigong groups.

There were scores of them. And Falun Gong was just the best organized. So they were able to push all this stuff. And that's why when I was reporting on it, I didn't think that this was some kind of a weird cult. It was just something that the government had actually tolerated for years. And you could kind of see why...

Falun Gong did what it did. It thought like the Communist Party, right? It realized it was potentially in a life and death struggle. The reason they protested, that crazy protest in 1999, was because in their understanding, once you're criticized in the media, you are dead.

So there was a criticism of them. I think I mentioned this in my articles in Beijing television, BTV. And so they went and protested outside of BTV. And then BTV editors came out and apologized. Sorry, sorry, sorry. We'll never show that thing again. And here's some boxed lunches for everybody. Please go home. So, okay, thanks.

And then there was another criticism by this one guy who was in Tianjin University. What's the university there? The elite university? Was it Tianjin University or Tianjin Normal University? No, it was Nankai University Alumni Association. He gave an interview and he criticized Falun Gong. They went there and criticized him, but then he convinced them, don't buy.

buckle in, don't. So they then they went to Beijing and protest. But this is the kind of like mentality of Falun Gong. It's very much like the CCP. It's very hierarchical. It's very kind of secretive. It believes that, you know, you can't have any criticism at all. Any criticism, you have to fight to the death.

So it then launched this protest movement and so on and so forth. Do you have regrets on your reporting of Falun Gong? Do you wish to have included more positive trends that was happening at the time in China's religious movements? Yeah, I think at that time, my reporting wasn't that sophisticated. I mean, I think I was pretty much...

I was reporting on, even though I was able to report on trends and features and stuff like that, but in terms of religiosity, I think I just, that particular, when I was reporting on Falun Gong, I was doing what a newspaper journalist is supposed to do and report on grave violations of human rights that I was able to document. So in that sense, but, you know, it's hard if you're writing for the media to

You can write occasionally about church services and stuff like that, Christmas or Easter or something like that. But how many times are they going to want that article? They're going to want that article. When your correspondent, typical correspondent is in a country for three to five years and then they leave, you can write one article about that in your time there. But you're not going to write that every month or something like that. They're going to think you're sort of crazy. So it is hard sometimes.

In some ways, the media is not... I've written about this a lot. I wrote an essay about this in the New York Review of Books about a decade ago, that the media is not an ideal way to exclusively understand a country. If you understand the role of the media and what the media is supposed to do, it's great, but the problem is that the media does focus on bad news. And yet countries around the world...

Have have not only experienced bad things. There's a sort of this book that came out by Steven Pinker, right? I think like a couple of years ago where he sort of argues that he's like a wait a minute You know if you look at the past half century life expectancy is higher than ever Nutritional levels are higher than ever Fewer people are dying in war on average than than ever of course this year is pretty bad with a lot of people dying in war but

You know, it could sound a little Pollyannaish, but there are billions of people have been lifted out of poverty around the world in the past decades, not just China, but in other countries also.

And as many challenges still face the world, there have been some positive trends, but you don't get that in the media. You only get the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine and climate change disaster, a tree species being obliterated in Europe or whatever. But, you know, you can't expect the media to do everything. And people have to look for different sources of information.

or broader sources of information, I think. I'm not sure how that would be or how that should function. But yeah.

It's not like journalists can't also become ethnographers. You can't expect a commercial newspaper to make money if it prints a 5,000-word ethnographic article on the rise of Daoism. People are going to be like, what the hell is this? And throw the newspaper away. Where are the comics? Where's the sports?

You have to be kind of realistic when you're trying to inform people about other parts of the world. Most people don't give a shit about anything, right? Most people only care about their family stuff. Most people don't read anything. They don't inform themselves. Most people, you look at their bookshelves, it's the same books. It's like their college reading list bookshelf. You know, like, oh, I've gone, whatever, you know, Hard Times by Dickens or something like that. And that's like, they haven't read a serious book, you know, since college, I guess is my point. And, um...

In the past, even when they subscribed to newspapers and even when newspapers like the Baltimore Sun had foreign correspondents, we know from surveys that they didn't read a lot of those articles.

So now that everything is so fragmented, people can really just focus on the amateur basketball league in Oklahoma or something like that. That's what they want to read. There's bloggers. There's all kinds of crap being produced endlessly, sports especially. Even the New York Times, the great New York Times, just bought this website called The Athletic. And The Athletic is just full of bullshit like this. They had some...

some like 3,000 word article, I'm not exaggerating, a 3,000 word article about some, and I follow ice hockey, so Chris, on some ice hockey player who, you know, might have some troubling background, I can't remember what it was, some problem, but it's like this investigation into whether he had hazed some other ice hockey players. They,

the resources that went into that article, you know, it could be used to describe a serious issue around the world. But people will pay for that, but they won't pay for the other things. So I guess, yeah, when you're trying to describe China to outsiders, you know you're probably only reaching a small fragment of the population and that you're using imperfect tools like the media, like newspapers, to get to it. So you do the best you can, but you have to be humble. For a second, I...

I had this weird

experience as you spoke. You seem, you know, you're a veteran journalist from Wall Street Journal and New York Times and Baltimore Sun and a bunch of other renowned publications. You seem to be in agreement with the Chinese Communist Party. The Western media report on China is biased. Well, yeah. Well,

Well, I mean, listen, I like newspapers and I think the work they do, they have a certain role in society. They can't be expected to do more. It's like you have a truck that does its work carrying stuff back and forth. You can't also expect it to be a luxury car or you can't expect it to be an economy car or whatever you need. You can't expect it to be to do everything. And so it does what it does, but it can't do other things.

And this is why, in fact, I quit daily journalism in 2010. So I quit. This is maybe jumping ahead of us, but I quit because as much as I liked it, as much as I learned from it, there are limitations to it in terms of also writing. I think it does not help your writing. It doesn't help your ability to conceive of stories, to conceive of books, to conceive of things, to be stuck in the media all the time. The media, there's a...

course I took on nonfiction writing, this guy Mark Kramer, he's written many books on nonfiction writing, and he says the media is like the old town crier who would, you know, in an old, say, medieval city, would stand up on the city wall and go, there's a fire over there, there's a fire, everybody...

Go and, you know, there's a fire. And that's what they do, right? They tell you there's a problem here. There's a problem there. It's not like they're supposed to give you some sophisticated nuanced analysis of stuff. They do increasingly. They do some pretty good stuff for sure. And especially when they're motivated, like in the case of Falun Gong, let's face it, the Wall Street Journal gave me so much space because they could smell a Pulitzer. Because in April, I wrote the story on Chen Zixiao's

and they know how the Pulitzer game is played and they could say, "This is enough time in the year. It has to be in a calendar year. We've still got eight months left for Ian to do a bunch of stories." If I had written a "Changes the Show" story in December,

then they would have said, "Oh, good story, but you know, never mind." And if I went back in January and said, "Let me do the Brother Li story. Let me do the Weifang story. Let me do..." They probably would have said, "Ah, maybe not." Or, you know, "Maybe you do something else or something." They might have done it, but they might not have. But they knew at that point, they cut me free and they poured resources, essentially poured resources by allowing me to do what I wanted to do for the rest of the year by just focusing on that story. Other people did other stuff. I was no longer the macroeconomic correspondent.

So that's the media when they have certain things like the big prize packages, they'll pour a ton of resources into something, but a lot of the time they don't.

And how did the Pulitzer work? How did you get it? Fantastic reporting on a great issue. No, I'm just kidding. Just bribe the right people. Well, I think... So here's how the Pulitzer typically works, okay? So the Pulitzer is a prize which is in some ways totally overrated because the Pulitzer is the best article as judged by the jury, right?

in US media. And somehow it's got this outsized role as if it's an international award, but it's not. So it's in US media, but when you look at the reality, if you're covering China, there's only a few newspapers that cover the world seriously. So if you're working overseas, there's only a few newspapers that are going to win Pulitzer's every year in international reporting. And I was at one of them, which was the Wall Street Journal. Basically, the only newspapers, even back when these regional newspapers had

had foreign bureaus, you only have a few that can put the resources into a big story. You know, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, that's about it. And even nowadays, the LA Times, Washington Post don't have the resources anymore to really compete. So it's kind of... Anyway, what they want to see is they want to see an article that was ideally organically researched. So it wasn't like

a ginned up sort of project like let's do a story on water in China and then you know you have like five big articles that appear through the year it should be sort of based on news ideally you can win a Pulitzer like that Joe Kahn and Jim Yardley

did a series every year they did like a big series on like rule of law in China and the environment in China and something else in China until they finally won a Pulitzer Prize like in 07 but it was clearly the Times was just gunning for a Pulitzer with that they don't like to see stories that all like appear in the second half of December because that's when they know like oh we're crashing all this stuff out before the end of the year so we can get to the Pulitzer so this was the genius the luck not the genius but the luck of this appearing in April

And it was an organic story. It was a story I just got, right? It was a story that I had reported and then I had months to work on it. And then what the Pulitzer also wants to see, not so much for international reporting, but still ideally, is some international impact. Not international, but just some impact. Like you wrote the article and then something changed.

And then they want to see, you know, great daily news reporting, but they also want to see some step back feature things and analyze what's going on. So mine sort of had that. I had people dying, daily news articles, people dying, and some of them they sort of step back, these five big articles that I wrote that analyzed the broader trends. So that's what happens. My year, 2000, was fortunate for me, was not a big news year.

And in fact, what happened next year was 9-11, right? And if I had done my thing in 2001, I would never have won because, of course, the Pulitzer that year went to something related to 9-11. I can't remember what. So that's sort of how the Pulitzers win. So it was nice recognition for work that I'm still proud of and happy of. But you have to be realistic about why you won and what it means and stuff like that.

I would never have thought I would win a Pulitzer Prize because

I was never interested in covering wars and conflict. Or mainstream events. Yeah, or mainstream events like that. I never wanted to go out of the Middle East and cover a war. That's where a lot of Pulitzers are from. Those kind of conflicts. Some major conflagration. But I was never interested in that kind of thing. And I'm not saying that's bad work. I mean, that's excellent work that people do on that, but it's not my thing.

And I thought China would never be that hot of a topic. But the following decade, China became super hot. That was when another Pulitzer was indeed won by the New York Times that was based, a couple of Pulitzers were won, one by the Times, one by the Wall Street Journal, simply based on the fact that China was a hot story, was the hottest story in the 2000s. I don't know, maybe that's another topic. Maybe that's a good place to go now. I'm not sure, but.

Well, you can if you want to. Well, it's ironic because I missed it. I missed that year. I missed the Zhongguo Ru, you know, the China fever year. So that was, I left in 01. I left even before I won the Pulitzer. I was going to leave anyway. People thought I was expelled because of my Falun Gong coverage. It's not true. I left, I had a farewell lunch from the foreign ministry and which they used to give correspondents at the time.

With that, this is the end of our conversation. I hope you liked what you just heard and I put our Substack link in the description for anyone who want to check it out and yeah, I'll talk to you next time.