This religious group wants to bring down China's Communist Party -

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Marchers, dressed all in yellow, carried purple lotus vegetation, yin-yang symbols, and different conventional Buddhist icons. But it was their big banners, held aloft or mounted on small floats, that indicated this was not only a religious rally.

“Keep away from the Chinese Communist Party. Stop the persecution of Falun Gong.”

A religious motion that emerged in China within the mid-1990s, Falun Gong surged in recognition nationwide earlier than it was banned and brutally suppressed on the mainland in 1999. But it continues to function in Hong Kong thanks to the territory’s higher human rights protections.

A woman watches as supporters of the Falun Gong spiritual group, banned in mainland China, take part in a march in Hong Kong on April 27, 2019, to observe the 20th anniversary of a large demonstration in Beijing which led to a crackdown against the movement.

Crossing the border by bus from China and seeing Falun Gong practitioners handing out anti-Communist Party leaflets was as soon as one of the vital seen indicators of Hong Kong’s relative autonomy from Beijing.

All that would quickly be deemed unlawful below a sweeping new security law passed by China for Hong Kong last month that criminalized “acts of secession, subversion of state power, terrorist activities, and collusion with foreign or external forces to endanger national security.”

Similar legal guidelines in China have been used to go after Falun Gong practitioners, which Beijing denounces as an “evil cult” that “preaches heretical fallacies that are anti-humanity and anti-science” by way of the management of individuals’s minds.

Falun Gong practitioners reject these expenses and preserve they’ve been unfairly focused and suppressed by the Chinese authorities. Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners are believed to be held “at various prisons and extralegal detention centers” in mainland China, according to Washington-based rights group Freedom House — an accusation Beijing additionally denies.

“The new National Security Law will act like a sharp knife hanging over the (association) and the heads of every Falun Gong practitioner in Hong Kong,” mentioned Ingrid Wu, spokeswoman for the Hong Kong Falun Dafa Association. “We are very concerned.”

Hong Kong officers have claimed the brand new regulation is critical and can solely have an effect on a handful of people. In early July, Chief Executive Carrie Lam pushed again towards the suggestion the regulation would undermine individuals’s freedoms.

“The legal principles that we attach a lot of importance to, like presumption of innocence and no retrospective effect and so on, are being upheld,” she mentioned. “Instead of spreading fear, the law will actually remove fear and let Hong Kong people return to a normal, peaceful life.”

A authorities spokeswoman didn’t reply to emailed questions on considerations concerning religious freedom below the regulation.

Hong Kong has lengthy been a protected haven for entities which may by no means function in China, from banned religious actions and labor rights NGOs, to large tech companies blocked by the Great Firewall. The destiny of teams like Falun Gong — fierce opponents of Beijing who, whereas not the quick targets of the regulation nonetheless come inside its broad remit — will check these assurances to the hilt.

Falun Gong practitioners have long been a vocal and organized part of Hong Kong's broader anti-government movement.

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New age faith

Founded by Li Hongzhi in northeastern China within the early 1990s, Falun Gong blends conventional Chinese qigong practices and new age beliefs. It was once promoted by the Chinese authorities and state media as a part of a nationwide qigong craze, however as Falun Gong grew in measurement, attracting thousands and thousands of followers, the authorities turned on the group.

Li inspired a blistering public relations technique in a bid to win over the critics, and between 1996 and 1999, the group staged some 300 protests and demonstrations, historian David Ownby writes in “Falun Gong and the Future of China.”

This culminated in an audacious, and strategically disastrous, demonstration round central authorities headquarters in Beijing involving round 10,000 practitioners. It was the largest protest the capital had seen for the reason that 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, and was the start of the top for Falun Gong in China.

The protesters in Beijing have been calling for the removing of restrictions positioned on the religion, however the Chinese authorities responded with an enormous crackdown and large propaganda push demonizing Falun Gong.

“I was shocked,” mentioned Rose, a Hong Kong-based Falun Gong practitioner. “I had friends who were traveling between Hong Kong and Beijing, they told me a crackdown was about to take place, but I said this was impossible, Falun Gong was just a belief, nothing political.”

Originally from mainland China, Rose started practising Falun Gong after transferring to Hong Kong within the late 1990s. CNN is withholding her full title due to fears of prosecution below the brand new safety regulation.

Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi seen in New York in 1999. He left China several years before the group was banned there.

After Falun Gong was banned, Rose’s husband and several other of her shut associates urged her to maintain a low profile, to simply do her workout routines and readings at house. But she was positive there had been some kind of mistake, and so, simply has her fellow practitioners had finished in Beijing, she sought to enchantment to the federal government, to make the case for Falun Gong.

“A group of us went to the Liaison Office,” she mentioned. “But no one came out, we stayed there for 24 hours.”

The Liaison Office is the Chinese authorities’s Hong Kong headquarters, lengthy a logo of Beijing’s affect over town.

Days became weeks, then months. Every day, Rose and a small group of fellow practitioners gathered outdoors the workplace on 160 Connaught Road to try to have their message heard.

One day the protesters have been joined by a group of Swiss practitioners who had initially hoped to journey to Beijing to protest however have been denied visas. Police tried to take away the group, which, in accordance to courtroom paperwork by no means numbered greater than 16, and was “peaceful and largely static.”

Police moved to clear the protest, nonetheless, and charged the Falun Gong protesters with obstruction, amongst different offenses. The case ultimately wound up on the Court of Final Appeals, the place Hong Kong’s prime justices dominated strongly in favor of the precise to protest and use “reasonable force to resist being subjected to unlawful detention.”

The case was a serious victory not only for Falun Gong however for anti-government protesters on the whole, securing — till final 12 months’s anti-government protests — the precise to stage protests outdoors the Liaison Office.

A woman adjusts banners in support of Falun Gong in Tung Chung, an area popular with tourists from the mainland, in Hong Kong on April 25, 2019.

New restrictions

While Falun Gong practitioners should not the first goal of the brand new safety regulation — which is at instances clearly designed to criminalize acts seen throughout final 12 months’s anti-government protests — they and different teams like them may nonetheless fall foul of its broad remit.

In specific, the brand new offense of subversion makes it unlawful in lots of circumstances to advocate “overthrowing the body of central power of the People’s Republic of China.” Given that the PRC authorities is indelibly intertwined with the Communist Party, Falun Gong efforts to get individuals to stop the Communist Party in protest, or in any other case hurt its actions, could possibly be deemed felony.

The new crime of “collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security” is also used to goal Falun Gong. While not a top-down faith just like the Catholic Church or different related faiths with giant numbers of followers in Hong Kong, Falun Gong is headquartered within the United States, the place Li Hongzhi has lived since 1996, and that is the place the group’s most important media and lobbying arms are additionally situated.

Under Article 29 of the brand new regulation, anybody who “conspires with a foreign country or an institution, organization or individual outside (China), or directly or indirectly receives instructions, control, funding or other kinds of support” from such organizations, could possibly be prosecuted if they’re discovered to be “provoking by unlawful means hatred among Hong Kong residents towards the Central People’s Government or the Government of the Region, which is likely to cause serious consequences.”

Pedestrians walk past banners criticising the Falun Gong spiritual movement displayed along a pavement in Causeway Bay, a popular shopping district, in Hong Kong on April 25, 2019.

With preliminary prosecutions below the safety regulation all associated to latest protests, Falun Gong practitioners may discover themselves — if the regulation’s critics are right — being a check case of one other kind, an growth of the regulation’s remit to ban actions which have lengthy been verboten on the mainland.

“How the situation of Falun Gong practitioners in Hong Kong evolves in the coming months and how much of the repression leaks over from the mainland is a very important space to watch,” mentioned Sarah Cook, a senior analysis analyst at Freedom House and writer of “The Battle for China’s Spirit: Religious Revival, Repression, and Resistance under Xi Jinping.”

Outside of the protest motion, Falun Gong is among the many most vocal and visual opposition to the Communist Party, in each Hong Kong and elsewhere around the globe. While the group is considerably indifferent from the mainstream opposition in Hong Kong due to its conservative religious beliefs, this has not stopped its presence within the metropolis being symbolic, and plenty of followers take a kind of delight that even Falun Gong can function in Hong Kong, given the large antipathy Beijing has in the direction of the group.

“The ability of people in Hong Kong to practice Falun Gong legally and openly is important both symbolically and practically,” mentioned Erping Zhang, a US-based spokesman for the group.

Zhang mentioned that in addition to the brand new crimes created below the regulation, he was involved concerning the broad rights it provides Chinese safety companies to function in Hong Kong, even extending Chinese jurisdiction over sure instances and permitting individuals to be taken for trial on the mainland.

“It could truly take a horrific toll on Falun Gong practitioners in Hong Kong and create huge losses for those who have benefited from the practice and activists’ awareness raising activities,” he mentioned.

Cook, the Freedom House researcher, mentioned that any curtailment of Falun Gong within the metropolis “would be a bad sign and a potentially worrying precursor to a crackdown on the broader religious community in Hong Kong.”

“Within China we’ve sign time and again since 1999 how the rules, tactics, and even security forces initially created to persecute Falun Gong are then expanded to other targets,” she added. “It may only be a matter of time before we see that in Hong Kong too, unfortunately.”

But not all religious teams are alarmed. In a letter to the religious newspaper Church Times this month, Paul Kwong, Archbishop of Hong Kong, praised the brand new safety regulation and pushed again towards criticism from figures together with Cardinal Maung Bo, president of the Asian Bishops’ Conferences.

“Many critics do not accept the fact that we are part of China,” Kwong mentioned. “They only emphasize two systems, not one country. I cherish our Hong Kong freedoms — in particular the freedom of religion and way of life — as much as anyone, and I don’t think this law will change any of that. I am also proud to be living in China.”

A Falun Gong activist (left) holds a sign next to men from a mailand Chinese tour group in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong on January 6, 2019.

Freedom of speech

Numerous considerations have been raised concerning the new regulation’s potential results on freedom of speech in Hong Kong, with individuals already transferring to scrub their social media and take away posters and pamphlets criticizing the federal government from retailers and eating places.

Media teams have expressed alarm concerning the regulation, with the Foreign Correspondents’ Club writing to the city’s leader Lam “seeking clarity on specific areas where the new law is vague and where terms are undefined, particularly regarding the press and freedom of speech.”

Lam beforehand mentioned “the law has clearly defined the four types of acts and activities which we need to prevent, curb and punish in accordance with the law.”

“If the Foreign Correspondents’ Club or all reporters in Hong Kong can give me a 100% guarantee that they will not commit any offenses under this piece of national legislation, then I can do the same,” she added.

Here once more, Falun Gong could discover themselves on the inadvertent frontlines of Hong Kong’s battle for civil liberties. During a latest protest towards the regulation on July 1, Falun Gong practitioners could possibly be seen handing out flyers saying “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communist Party” in addition to copies of Epoch Times. The newspaper, which was based by Falun Gong practitioners and stays intently linked to the group, is without doubt one of the most vocally anti-government publications within the metropolis.

Its Chinese version refers to the coronavirus because the “Chinese Communist Party virus,” has known as on the West to “fight back” towards the Party, and often publishes stinging critiques of Beijing.

Representatives for Epoch Times in Hong Kong and New York didn’t reply to a request for remark.

Like Apple Daily, a pro-democracy tabloid owned by tycoon Jimmy Lai, at the moment dealing with expenses associated to last year’s protests, Epoch Times could possibly be a canary within the coal mine for Hong Kong’s media freedoms. Both papers have cultivated affect in Washington — one thing that would each assist or hurt them, main to politicians talking out of their protection, but additionally Beijing casting them as colluding with international forces.

Lai has lengthy been shut to Republican Party politicians, main to claims of his being a international agent in Chinese state media, whereas the English version of the Epoch Times since 2016 has aggressively focused Trump voters, with opinion content material taking over an more and more right-wing stance.

In 2019, the paper was barred by Facebook from operating advertisements on its platform, after discovering it violated the company’s policies with pro-Trump campaigns.

Falun Gong members meditate as policemen watch demonstrators during a pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong on May 18, 2016.

Uncertain future

Hong Kong and Beijing officers have repeatedly claimed that the safety regulation is each crucial and restrained, and can solely have an effect on a tiny handful of people within the metropolis, primarily violent separatists.

Paraphrasing former Chinese chief Deng Xiaoping to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about Hong Kong’s success after China took management, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said this week that below the brand new regulation “horses will run faster, stocks will be more sizzling, and dancers will dance more happily.”

But with moves to ban books and expand police powers of surveillance and censorship, the scope of the regulation would seem to be increasing.

Falun Gong practitioners, in addition to many different teams in Hong Kong opposed to Beijing, could not instantly really feel the sting of the brand new rules, however they have been poised for the more serious. After years of suppression in China, nonetheless, the group is healthier ready than most for a way to operate behind the scenes, even when that can require an entire overhaul of its Hong Kong operation.

Zhang, the US-based spokesman, mentioned that inside China nonetheless, individuals “continue to practice Falun Gong in private and many go out and discretely disseminate information to help other Chinese see through the CCP’s lies and cover-ups.”

Many practitioners in Hong Kong are within the metropolis as a result of they fled China, and Wu, the native spokeswoman mentioned some could select to go abroad ought to the regulation goal them.

“The Falun Gong community is diverse; each person makes their own decision based on their family and other situations,” she mentioned. “But most of Falun Gong practitioners that I know plan to stay in Hong Kong. We feel it is our responsibility to continue our peaceful efforts of raising awareness of the persecution and calling for justice, and tell the world what is happening in Hong Kong.”

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